Longevity, or The Length of Things
1999 Stanley Picker Fellows Show Essay
Knights Park Gallery, Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, UK
October 7th - October 23rd 1999
Programming Note: I’d been an admirer of Matt White’s work ever since I met him when he was in the third year, and I was in the first on the BA(Hons) Fine Art course at Kingston University. I was fortunate enough to be invited to write an introductory essay for his Stanley Picker Fellows Show at The Knights Park Gallery in 1999, not long after I had returned from my studies in Holland, and it was great to be able to give back to my old art college. Matt now lives and works in Bristol and is senior lecturer in Photography at the University of South Wales. You can read more about Matt on his website.
What is the length of things? How long do things last, or even, what lengths do things go to? These are some of the questions posed by artists Matt White, James Peel, and Ania Grzesik. Of course, what the 'things' are and how length is interpreted varies from artist to artist, yet a curious fascination with longevity permeates the work of all three. That, coupled with a sense of misadventure, quite literally in the ship-wreck-inspired archives of James Peel, through the thwarted and unrequitedly amorous Villeneuve canvases by Ania Grzesik, to the more subtle technological misadventure of Matt White's ever slowing Pacemaker. It is as if these artists have read Dr. Frankenstein's manuals, but are left with an ambivalence to the worldly existence of their work. What seems most important is the journey by which the work is but a temporary stop on an expedition of uncertain length.
White's humorous and playfully ironic work concentrates upon the use of the human body, and its existence within the wide open term of 'space', it also makes sculptural use of technology, both on and off the surface of the screen. His projection work Pacemaker (1999) for example, toys with the absurd notion of length at its most fundamentally biological level, through slowly adjusting the speed at which the video playback of an open-heart operation is depicted. Many elements used here represent a familiar trait of White's work, with the constituent parts involved referring inwards upon each other, as if mutually dependent. The viewer, (one of the integral parts) experiences a sense of detachment from the video, as if what is seen is but an amalgam of fleshy tissue, without realizing that the ever slowing, pounding sound- track is in itself having an effect upon his or her own breathing. It is perhaps the notion of detachment which enables the viewer to avoid being completely encompassed by the work, to render what they are seeing as 'virtual', and pure simulation. The title works in a descriptive manner, referring to the speed at which the beats are controlled (right down to near-death). However, White also suggests that Pacemaker may have athletic implications - mirroring the artist as the person who attempts to control the pace of the event, yet who seems fated never to complete it: the video loop runs endlessly.
White's second work, Revolution (1999) depicts a human figure rotating within a darkened space. This work relates to White's fascination with the role of technology, particularly to longevity and the archiving of material. In an ironic gesture, White poses himself in a parody of an excavated prehistoric man, spinning artificially for the camera, as if to stun archaeologists from the future when they uncover a video of an archaic human: a challenge to the idea of the longevity of the work perhaps. Such an outcome is unlikely due to the fragility of videotape, and to examine longevity in an artistic context, seems futile but also deeply amusing. One only has to look at a Mondrian 'in the paint' to realize that even the freshest of clinically executed works are often damaged within their own lifespans.
A proposed work exhibits White's fascination with the body still further, freeing the artist to use 'the body' without any discussion of gender, class, color or sexuality, free from the visual restrictions imposed by these matters, yet fundamentally involved with their misuse.
White is currently working on a piece utilizing internet sex chatrooms, which will consist initially of two touching monitors displaying closeups of fingers. Here, the artist is able to mutate, chameleon-like, into the person he wishes, testing the reactions of others. It's like being the invisible man for the price of a local phone call. White's work hides an ironic ambivalence towards the technology used to produce it, whilst retaining the fragility of the 'fleshiness' still so vital in sustaining it for the millennium to come.
