Rob Kennedy / acts of dis play

The background and architecture suggest meanings and possibly moral lessons.  The building in the foreground is ambiguous, appearing at first solid but in fact not forming a full enclosure.  Are we inside or outside? 

The window above opens to the exterior, the shaft of light that enters suggesting something being revealed.  Below this window we can just make out the sign of a cross, made by the cracks between the boards.  On the far left, against the wall of the enclosure, we find two abandoned panels leaning.  The adjoining wall of rough boards, where the dark-clad character appears (urinating, simulating the act of urinating or unintentionally standing in a way that evokes urinating) seems to be either a partial ruin of a building or a weathered piece of construction on which virtually no progress has been made in a very long time. Just to the right of centre, the sharp trunk of a birch tree sits on the painted extremities of the scene.

A chimney smokes as someone inside prepares a meal. A place of order and harmonious living earned through honest work. Indeed at first, Peasants Playing Bowls (mid 1630s) by David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690) appears as a straightforward, light-hearted scene of peasant life. But it contains within it a number of systems of order: juxtapositions of healthy, balanced living contrast with idleness and dissipation; order with chaos and ruin; life with death and decay. 

Taking their eyes from the painting the curator shoots the artist a look. “There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder” – the words come as a surprise. They aren’t even their words, but the words of Mary Douglas as written in her famous analysis, Purity and Danger.

With a mechanical memory, perhaps, the curator might have continued, “If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread of holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behaviour in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment.” Looking at the splayed detritus and box mounds they could have further cited the anthropologist, “I have tried to show that rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience… By their means, symbolic patterns are worked out and publicly displayed. Within these patterns disparate elements are related and disparate experience is given meaning.” So deranged they might have eventually arrived at a passage from page 37 on Secular Defilement, “Perceiving is not a matter of passively allowing an organ – say of sight or hearing – to receive a ready-made impression from without… It is generally agreed that our impressions are schematically determined from the start…in perceiving we are building, taking some cues and rejecting others. The most acceptable cues are those which fit most easily in to the pattern that is being built up.”

Are we inside or outside indeed?

Continuing this game we might imagine that citation after citation the curator and artist would stand, not in dialogue as such, as dialogue requires an attunement and responsiveness, but like two parallel texts. “Few people realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings,” the artist, suddenly proffering sections from Joseph Conrad’s An Outpost of Progress, “their courage, their composure, their confidence; their emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd…”.

 

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Speaking even for eternity they would never be able to make knowledge ‘present’; their exchange so devoid of understanding. And applying etymology, the study of the origins of words and the way their meaning changes, another one of the pair’s oddities, they would only achieve a verbal enactment of an endless network of fluctuating reference points.

Consciousness is transient. Memory and communication are founded upon loss and absence. But perhaps you will forget this part.

In the 17th century, Dutch artists like Teniers were committed to reflecting their country’s Golden Age: the young independent nation’s incredible scientific and economic achievements, its prowess at sea and – in contrast to the classical leanings of the Renaissance – the everyday quality of the modern world. They strove to paint ‘what they could see’, defining reality as the absence of idealism. Dutch genre paintings, with their emphasis on quotidian family life in the domestic sphere are a light-hearted counterpoint to the Italianate ‘heroic’ tradition of figural art.  And in their wake, the labour, leisure and foibles of ‘ordinary’ people developed an appealing resonance.

"Sliding one foot past the other never knowing where they carry the body.

The absurd march across a context in search of… something. Silence? La petite mort?

Living in the Self, sitting atop the machine of skin and tissue; wheeling the weight of life, dispatching packages of memory as you go."

The curator cites this poetic description of work included in the exhibition by its maker, Tony Maas, as if it were an aside.

Outside there is a vehicle tethered to a pillar. It suggests some kind of itinerant search for things to do around here. A life tethered to things, things tethered to time. A collation of cast offs including kindling and till receipts is drawn together to impinge on and re-animate each other’s histories.  These are not so innocent, these things, and by seeking attention they drag the temporality of material life squarely into view.

 

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Peasants Playing Bowls represents a favourite genre of painting for the aristocracy and wealthy merchant class whom Teniers cultivated as his clientele. And these scenes of peasant life earned Teniers the attention and favour of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, for whom he was eventually appointed court painter.  So we may speculate as to whether in this context such a scene was a moral judgment on the life and everyday activities of the peasant, representative of a pejorative view held by the upper class.

“There is no doubt that the progress of reason and the extinction of illusions produce barbarism…”, the artist begins again, “The greatest enemy of barbarism is not reason but nature. Nature (if properly followed, however) provides us with illusions that, in their right place, make a people truly civilized… Illusions are natural, inherent to the system of the world. When they are removed completely or almost completely, man is denatured, and every denatured people is barbarous… And reason, by making us naturally inclined to pursue our own advantage, and removing the illusions that bind us to one another, dissolves society absolutely and turns people to savagery.” Giacomo Leopardi, the 19th century Italian poet, philosopher, essayist and philologist this time. Suddenly appearing waxy, perhaps from the strain of carrying another’s words, the artist quickly pulls up an object to sit upon, in the process changing a sculpture into a chair.

Multiple versions of Peasants Playing Bowls were made, by Teniers, derivative versions by other artists and even replicas. A French copy of this particular version, made in the second half of the 18th century, is almost identical excepting the omission of the tree, the smoke and the mysterious cloaked figure.

The game of bowls, popular in 17th century Flanders, is not terribly strenuous, but does involve a certain level of skill and coordination, and a keen eye. One can imagine the game becoming increasingly challenging, and amusing, with the effects of alcohol under a hot afternoon sun. The peasants appear almost squat in stature, the rustic clothes obscuring the anatomy and rendering the physiognomy to generic types; the gestures and poses are mundane and even graceless, indicating the influence of the Brueghel family as well as Adriaen Brouwer, who is frequently cited as Teniers’ greatest influence.

Game playing was key to the development of acts of dis play. An email sent by the artist at the very outset stated that, “space (both geographical and temporal) has to be marked out, segmented from other life in order to play. Rules are as necessary, if not more so, in play as they are in work. Playing involves the taking on of a role and these roles are specific, meaning that a choice has to be made as to who plays and who doesn't. Play acts as a metaphor for the rest of life's relationships. The rules of a game. The rules of work. Playing at working. Working at playing.” 

The artist and curator invited people to take part in games. They filled the room with boxes and invited specialists to describe to a group their understanding of a facet of the world. A game was implemented in which players would transform the boxes by enacting what that understanding seemed to reveal to them. The facets to be contended with included: the properties of glass, the way that a sheep sees the world, how digital currencies work, rhythm-analysis, the ethics of implants and prosthetics, education outside institutional frameworks, translation and the square root of 2. In the process, the players became part of something ‘other’, often moving inside and outside various partitions, zones, areas, costumes, moods and perceptual frameworks, looking to connect with another system.

Otherness, attentiveness; a channelling into the things around and at hand. Playtime is less about ‘being’, a thing present because it is defined through representation, but more about living out a series of relationships.

The curator cites another anthropologist, Tim Ingold, “It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents. Life, in short, is a movement of opening, not of closure.”

The artist, now standing again to relieve a chair from the burden of its designated function, responds, “To hear people talk you would think that climaxes were very common, that in fact everything had a climax. It is wishful thinking. People would like something to come to a resounding conclusion and remove them hence forward from the awful continuity of time. It is part of the death-wish.” The British novelist, poet, diarist and BBC radio producer Rayner Heppenstall doesn’t hear these words because he climaxed in 1981.

“A blonde, a brunette, and a red headed mother are talking about their daughters. The brunette tells them, ‘I found cigarettes in my daughter's room, I can't believe she smokes!’ The red head said ‘I know, I found some beer in my daughter's room. I can't believe she drinks!’ The blonde says, ‘That's nothing! I found condoms in my daughter's room. I never knew she had a penis!’”

Conor Kelly’s painting shows us what appears on first glance to be a chimp. In fact, the painting portrays a black-headed spider monkey (Ateles fusciceps). The choice of species was less important to Kelly than need for a black monkey for a dark painting. Only its mouth, which appears oddly cast within its otherwise level head, is clearly visible against the blackness.  Yet there is just enough of a silhouette of its body to imply an awkward anthropomorphism – the ‘monkey’ is denied its natural movement. This might be a human figure ‘dressed up’ by the painting.

The work points to a reciprocal relationship, as we work out how the figure connects to the marking out of our own species. Perhaps the shadowy figure in Teniers’ painting was removed in other versions because it was deemed to transgress too many humanist boundaries. Now, becoming a live agent in the exhibition, removed from the painting, the character transgresses the painted representation to come alive to the existential forces that act on things in the world. Perhaps recalling all roles that viewers have afforded it down the years its release might allow it to play out some of these roles, intentionally or by chance, as well as allowing it to occupy a body and become subject to boredom, ambiguity, strain, distraction, fatigue etc.

The etymology of the word species reveals a former string of meanings, “a sight, look, view, appearance”, therefore by connection, “a spectacle; mental appearance, idea, notion; a look; a pretext; a resemblance; a show or display”. The mechanisms of an exhibition are – it seems – intimately connected to our sense of who we are and where we come from. When manipulated in a certain way, can these mechanisms change or offset our sense of what ‘species’ of thing we are?

“With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs... Civilisation consists of giving something a name that doesn't belong to it and then dreaming over the result.” Says the artist citing Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet.

 

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As play continued the artist became interested in instances where the parameters of a game unexpectedly changed, generating a kind of heightened experience. The audience who began to throw chairs into a space whilst waiting for a game of darts to begin, becoming a hungry white organism emerging into the flat plane of the video. The wild virtual beast that when killed rose into the air, its physical body melded to its soul, careering up to eventually coil against the ceiling of the sky. The glitch that meant that when dynamite was exploded next to a gate, the gate remained standing whilst the expanse of fence around it fell down.

Puff…

Smoke recurs as a motif in the paintings of Merlin James and Julian Kildear. In the former work it emerges into what appears as a flat abstraction, a bodiless form that introduces a complex, non-geometric space. James has made various works featuring a campfire or a small conflagration, with smoke rising from it. Sometimes he literally burns the surface of paintings too, or burns holes through them. Negotiating a complex iconography to avoid obvious symbolism, James still recognises recurrent notions of energy, transformation, sublimation, purification, transience, passion etc. In the latter work smoke coils like a spirit from the mouth of tempestuous golfer ‘Long’ John Daly. This photo-realistic depiction of a celebrity, known for his lurid fluorescent golfing attire, erratic form and heavy drinking and smoking habits, seems oddly calm and melancholy.

"I found cigarettes in my daughter's room, I can't believe she smokes!" The curator repeats the joke again. Neither the curator nor artist laugh. Humour, or lack of it, deconstructs the spurious dialogue more pointedly than the lost silence after each statement.

Drinking and smoking, while not necessarily frowned upon in themselves in Dutch and Flemish society, were often presented as favourite pastimes that could lead to moral decay.  Smoking, long held to have negative effects on sexual function, was nonetheless considered to be an aphrodisiac, and when represented in painting suggested both temptation and lasciviousness.

The curator and artist attempt to find a unity of experience. They look about for a point of entry. None are apparent. So they look to the word about, thinking that there is nothing simpler than asking what something is about in order to ‘get it’. To ‘get in’ perhaps. But etymology shows that the Old English Abutan means, “on the outside of”.  Ymbutan, which it gradually forced out meant, “in the neighbourhood of”. So to say what something is about can only be to circumnavigate, to move towards something but always remain ‘outside’ it.  

“True life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever,” the curator and artist whisper in unison, the words of Don DeLillo, “True life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, those sub-microscopic moments.”

The window above opens to the exterior, the shaft of light that enters suggesting something being revealed.  Below this window we can just make out the sign of a cross, made by the cracks between the boards.  On the far left, against the wall of the enclosure, we find two abandoned boards leaning.  The adjoining wall of rough panels, where the dark-clad character appears (urinating, simulating the act of urinating or unintentionally standing in a way that evokes urinating) seems to be either a partial ruin of a building or a weathered piece of construction on which virtually no progress has been made in a very long time. Just to the right of centre, the sharp trunk of a birch tree sits on the painted extremities of the scene.

The background and architecture suggest meanings and possibly moral lessons.  The building in the foreground is ambiguous, appearing at first solid but in fact not forming a full enclosure.  Are we inside or outside?

 

Performers embodying the character will endure the exhibition every Saturday.