Paint
Tin Fantasias |
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Can’t
live, if living is without you… Has no one cleaned up? Did I miss the show? Could these paint tins be Lily Hibberd’s exhibition? Domestic paint tins sit, open and used on the gallery floor. Their neatness, despite the paint that has oozed artistically down the can, signals a purpose. These are not forgotten goods. Presumably the tins have a purpose in this setting. Are they conceptual containers, vessels for meaning? Alerted (but not alarmed) and now moving closer, I wonder whether the Paint Tin Fantasias will be another dose of ‘reality’, examples of hardware from the everyday inserted within the soft, notional space of the gallery? Is Hibberd obsessed with colour, paint and painting, or could this be the finale in a chemical phantasy? Is Hibberd’s work a contemplation on the nature of the anti-aesthetic tradition or a project looking anew at beauty? Might we find a work comprising ideas and practice in equal parts, creativity which we do not yet have the language to define? Having reached the tins, I see their contents. Images. Jewel-like compositions play where the surface of the paint should be, suggesting they were created by the fortuitous mixing of tints. Here are chance encounters, like the heart appearing atop the froth of a latte or the scenes Leonardo da Vinci envisioned within stains on a wall. Icons to St. Dulux. The coalescing of material and image would be uncanny if the images were not intentionally painted, and surreal if there was not a familiarity in Hibberd’s depictions. The Paint Tin Fantasias contain a set of painted reproductions of film stills; grabs from Adaptation, Taxi Driver and The Big Lebowski amongst others. Mirages of wonder given three dimensional form. In addition, these tins are interfaces; between the disciplines of film and painting, between matter and image, representation and content. Painting is the subject and the tins are painting’s epidermis, filtering relations between representational media. Both film and painting present things, people and events but only film is both a record and a simulacrum. Hibberd choses to be gripped by certain types of films, narratives of otherworldly experiences (Bladerunner, The Matrix) or fabulous truth (Dressed to Kill, Basic Instinct, The Truman Show, American Beauty), films with contrasting content, embedded within their own history and discourse. These Fantasias span several genres, from sci-fi to gritty reality to historic portraiture but all are haunted by a sense of deception, the human capacity to delude and to be susceptible to illusion, that result in misperceptions and altered subjectivities, often attended by unfortunate consequences. The Paint Tin Fantasias provide a typology, not only of a cinematic trope but also of human behaviour. Beyond the tins’ vocabulary (a colour coded legend?) of themes the work reflects painting’s larger cultural operation. Hence, its ability to trigger personal experiences and memories and to energise existing communal mythology. When we look into Hibberd’s paint tins, a raft of other images and issues look back, as occurs with any painting or image. Ghostly scenes from advertising, entertainment or the well of art history lurk in the shadows, circulating with global mobility and, as Hibberd is not the first to realise, are susceptible to colonisation. Images are within and surrounded by relations in the cultural and social maelstrom, connected by way of power, property, control or distribution and, not least, the viewers’ personal projections. Hibberd may question the credibility of painting’s illusionism but illusion is one of the qualities enabling painting to attract the field of vision and, in holding attention, instigate meaning. Paint tins aren’t just containers of paint; they are the genie’s lamp – blatantly promising to deliver the viewer’s desire. ‘You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.’ 1 If film has the ability to show the world in real time, once removed, it simultaneously enhances awareness of painting as a third order, perpetually historical and imitative, a spectre of something other. But in a way, aren’t all these elements part of how we understand being in the world, the way we locate beliefs and construct ideologies or embed thought in systems. Hibberd’s images are communal property, sourced from known sources and offering both shared and individual resonances. Duchamp’s distain for archaic media does experience and its origins a disservice. As life is a combination of sensing, feeling and thinking, so we live visually through television, movies, the internet and other forms of communication, such as painting, which stimulates body and mind, in combination and synthesis. Hibberd’s questioning of the relevance of painting is answered by its ontological necessity alongside digital and other media. Moreover, the phantasm that haunts the Paint Tin Fantasias is not that we cannot forget the beginnings or essence of painting but their reminder of exactly what is unique to painting, why painting still stalks artists and viewers. Only in the shadows lies the question of what experience will be in the future, once paint's illusion fails? ©Zara Stanhope 2004 1. Marcel Duchamp, in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz, quoted in Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge, Mass.: 1993, p. 92. |
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