TEXTS FROM CATALOGUES

 

BY

 

MARJORIE ALLTHORPE-GUYTON

Head of Visual Arts, Arts Council of Great Britain

 

ADRIAN SEARLE

Art Critic , The Guardian Newspaper

 

ANDREW BRIGHTON

Head of Education , The Tate Gallery.

 

RICHARD WOLLHEIM

Chair in Philosophy , Berkeley University. CA

 

DONALD KUSPIT

Art Critic, writer,

Professor of Art History and Philosophy NYU

MARJORIE ALLTHORPE-GUYTON

 

 

 

PICTURE THIS

 

These are tough paintings which show up the extreme fragility of narrative painting, in particular the disjunction between the meaning of the work and its significance for the viewer. Colin Smith's paintings are seemingly ‘realistic’ in execution and image, logical in the familiar rendering of a ‘scene’ – a man and a woman in a car, two men side by side on an escalator, heads in front of keyboards – but the whole picture never adds up. Unless you, the spectator, concoct a story, adding not only the final clue but the plot as well. What we see in the image is just the threshold of the struggle that ensues: to take an active part in shaping the image to correspond to the world we experience. The more difficult the task the more vivid the aesthetic experience of the work.

 

Smith is a painter who makes the familiar strange, which brings his strategy close to that of radical film and photography with its pirating of mass media imagery, its capacity to create havoc with the theoretical concerns of art or at least to confuse the issues further. Claustrophobic space, the dark and lengthening shadow, the back turned, the head and face obscured; paint blue, brown and earthy, its surface dragged, thick and heavy on the white. The atmosphere is one of unease and menace, that of night and the darkness inside: the psychological mire of Oshima's scorching film In the Realm of the Senses, of the savagely simple short story by Alberto Moravia. These works perpetually disrupt the ‘readerly’ narrative of the classic text (film, novel or painting) by specifying the sensory base of process. And it is this thwarting of explanation which takes Colin Smith's painting beyond realism, bringing it in line not only with the film noir but also the cinema of écriture with its focus on the materiality of practice. Smith attempts to play with codes of representation, of voyeurism and sexuality while not turning his back on the history of his chosen medium and the complexity of problems it embraces. The difference between him and many British figurative contemporary artists is that he is the artist as subject not hero. His iconography is inevitably drawn not only from art but from other experiences which have had as a profound an influence on his thinking: living in New York in the early eighties, American film and new writing, and the theatre, especially Beckett.

 

‘Love in a space capsule, Thurman called it, hate in Houdini’s trunk. But there was the windshield and the continual movie past the glass. It was good driving into the movie, good the way the weather changed, the way night and day traded off’' Fast Lanes, Jayne Anne Phillips.[1]

 

In Picture This a man and a woman stand by a saloon car, the open door cutting the space between them as cleanly as a knife. And it is this space which interests us, not the surroundings which are ambiguous but necessary fields of murky colour, bedding the figures in a space which is more psychic than physical, teasing our minds to the extent of its depth and complexity. Just as the female figure bears a strength and autonomy which deflects the voyeurism of the spectator, so the automobile stands as much more than the contemporary commodity sine qua non; it holds the promise of transcendence, of escape and fulfilment. Though locked in its urbanity, it spins dreams in a comfortless world. While the power of its image is more commonly exploited in film. Smith conflates this code with an older and still resonant convention of painting. The car becomes a ubiquitous surrogate for intimations of the sublime which in the nineteenth century landscapes of Friedrich, Courbet and Munch is expressed in the still vastness of land, sky and water which dwarf the human figure, shown solitary or in pairs and invariably with the back turned from the gaze of the spectator. There is no little irony, recalling Friedrich's magisterial image of Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, in Smith’s painting Considering the City, where a lone male figure in shirtsleeves, his back towards the viewer, stares silently from the goldfish bowl security of some corporate building to the seductive yet chilling panorama of the night city.

 

While Smith cloaks the fin de siécle anxieties of the late twentieth century in the banal imagery of urban culture, he does not veil the affinity between a so-called romantic age and a post-industrial: the loss of stability, the fear of change. But he chooses to underscore the threat to identity, to the autonomy of the body, not by appropriating technological weaponry to turn it against itself, but by sticking to a practice which demands not only the working of hand, limb and eye, but an affinity with the stuff of canvas, pigment and varnish. It is no surprise that his paintings are body size. The recent series Wardrobe 1-4 are not only essays in colour and texture, but like the still life genre to which they relate, are contemporary vanitas meditations on transience and mortality. Their dark, slightly lurid colour at the same time brings to mind the ambivalent sexual voyeurism of the films of David Lynch, and recent Peter Greenaway, notably his most complex to date – The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover which raised more than a few hackles for its seeming complicity with the male gaze. It is in this respect that Colin Smith's painting departs from film: he recognises and exploits painting’s powers of understatement. His works speak through silence, economy of image and of reference; their only luxury the flow of paint whose interference with the sotto voce of a possible narrative tends to defer the exhaustion soon felt with the brat pack adolescent titillation of Eric Fischl or the clever, elaborate pornographic montaging of David Salle. For naked is not all; we recall that Goya painted the Maya clothed as well as unclothed.

 

 

© MARJORIE ALLTHORPE-GUYTON

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ADRIAN SEARLE

 

 

THE ARRESTED IMAGE

 

Colin Smith is a painter of private moments in public places, and of private places exposed to public view. He is a painter of modern moments, depicting a life both lived and filtered through the thousands of hours spent watching movies and TV, of long waits in the no-zones of airport lounges and hotel lobbies.

 

The world Smith paints is largely urban, and made up of invented moments in which insignificant details assume an uncanny significance. Often, it seems, we are trailing his subjects: his viewers become private dicks, all of us up on a case.

 

People get in and out of parked cars, wait under streetlights with the engine running, make their assignations. They hang around poolsides, sit in chairs in anonymous interiors, work at computer terminals; they make long distance calls from public phone booths. They step onto elevators and make their way out of the picture. We seem close to them, but cannot hear a word they say. They are oblivious to our presence. Unseen, we keep his subjects under a silent and watchful surveillance.

 

Mostly, Smith's characters are in transit, on the way from one place to another, trying to make connections. Often, they are waiting, doing nothing, waiting for nothing, going nowhere, stalled. Their lives, as much as we can tell of them - which isn't much - are both purposeful and empty. Smith paints, I believe, a kind of poignant futility. But it is worth keeping in mind that rather than real people, or characters in a movie, these figures, and the situations and objects Smith records, are painted, fictions in paint. They are cast in painted light, invented out of the painter's materials. These are things made and unmade by the painter's brush; they have no inner lives.

 

Although Smith paints in series, returning to the same subjects and the same motifs again and again (even repainting the same painting over itself, again and again, sometimes even after a gap of years, on a canvas he has already apparently finished) we should not look for a narrative in his work. His paintings are both unfinished stories and stories barely begun. Smith tries to achieve, I think, a kind of impenetrable presence.

 

The artist, as much as the viewer, is an outsider. Nowhere is this made more clear than in his paintings of open wardrobes, of women's closets filled with racks of clothes. On one level these are pure invention, and Smith has used the bunched and hanging garments, with their stripes and flowery patterns, their designer colourways, flounces and drapes, as an excuse for a florid and exuberant abstraction. These are exercises in painterliness, derived as much from Delacroix and Manet as from Hopper, as much from Post-Impressionism as from Abstract Expressionism. But, inescapably, these are a male's view of the interior of women's wardrobes - although, as the artist warned me on the phone today, they might be wardrobes belonging to a male afficionado of women's clothes, the closets of a transvestite. He wants us to be wary of our interpretations.

 

At a certain point, the painter relinquishes control, lets the image go. He does not pretend to possess all its meanings. Instead, he leaves us haunted by our own imaginations, and his, of course, is a kind of trap. The paintings might suggest a narrative, but there is none. They suggest instead the weight of things, the indifference of the world, its ambiguities and resistance to our gaze.

 

Modern life is a long wait, in which we view one another from a distance, imagining the lives other people lead, picking up clues from their gestures, the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, their public postures. And we none of us know any more exactly where the line is drawn between what we have seen and heard for ourselves, what we ourselves have experienced, and what we have been told, or seen in films, read in a book somewhere.

 

Colin Smith's paintings remind me as much of movies and novels and of other paintings as of life itself. The territory he paints is somewhere between Edward Hopper's United States and the Europe of Wim Wenders' early movies. His paintings sometimes have the feel of Nicholson Baker's novella Mezzanine, Tom Wolf's Bonfire of the Vanities, Kafka's Amerika, and close-ups from Wender's Alice In The Cities (which takes us from New York to Wuppertal), or Hitchcock's Rear Window. Smith brings out the voyeur in us. Voyeurism is curiosity which has lost its innocence, and the painter puts us in its thrall.

 

 

©ADRIAN SEARLE

 

Adrian Searle is an artist, art critic and curator. He currently works as the art critic for "The Guardian" national newspaper.

ANDREW BRIGHTON

 

 

Consciousness is knitted from the threads of other people's words and we have learnt to dream like films. Each moment is framed and structured by other real or imagined moments. We live in an echoing forest of resemblances. I enjoy Colin Smith as a painter of resonant images, of pictures that manipulate echoes.

 

There are plenty of painters who paint as if photography and television had never happened. Their work seems informed by painting alone. There is no harm in that, we have the choice. Others paint as if they had only seen photographs. Paint thin and immaculate aspiring to the state of emulsion.

 

Smith's pictures, his placing of figures, their postures, gestures and stance, the environment in which they stand and move, is not photographic but it is cinematic. However, his way of painting, the way he puts the stuff on, owes little to the mechanical means of representation, to photography or film, it owes much to the painterly tradition of Hals, Velazquez of Goya and Manet and to Smith's old teacher in Cornwall Karl Weschke. He sweeps a highlight across dark wet paint, its movement describes a fold of a shirt or a skirt and thereby serves to suggest the form of a body or a limb. Like Hals or Manet there is a painterly sensuality, an enjoyment of bravura handling.

 

In what ways like cinema? In this exhibition there are four paintings of people telephoning. In three of the pictures that make up the tryptic Parallel Lines the figures have their backs to us. We cannot see the phone, nor their faces. This is not the stuff of which memorable photographs are made. But in a film the actors may turn away from the camera as we listen to a telephone conversation, their movement and actions confirming, contradicting or hiding the import of what we hear. We watch in the knowledge of what has happened and expectations for the rest of the narrative. We know what is happening.

 

Something seems to be happening in Smith's pictures, there appears to be necessity in what the figures are doing, but its nature is never resolved into a certain narrative. What one glimpses, however, in some of the paintings is the machinery of power, the pictures imply a political paranoia. The most obvious example in this exhibition is The Administration of Information. The uniformity of the figures lined up behind VDUs  denies critical conscience; nothing about these people suggests they might ever say 'No' to the system. Sight of what is on the VDUs is denied us. They are ordering our world of appearances, hidden from us is reality and that reality is power and its machinery of illusion.

 

In this paranoid reading of Smith's work the cars in the Dark Car paintings become the transport of the agents of power. We are well prepared for such an attribution by the modern corporate gangster's limo in a thousand and one movies. This helps to describe the knife edge on which Smith's paintings work. They must resist being read unambiguously as scenes from real or imagined movies. They could be like favourite cinematic moments and feelings recalled like the kind nostalgic kitsch that infects television retrospective accounts of film and pop music.

 

It is a common place of the popular movie to portray our social order as ruled by a conspiracy of corrupt people. However, this paranoid vision is made meaningless by being structured by demands of conventional narrative. We know that expectations will be set up and resolved according to the familiar laws of entertainment The conspiracy will be overcome. The true, the young and good-looking triumph. But remove and deny the narrative, as in Smith's pictures, and the conspiracy vision is disturbingly convincing as a picture of our social order.

 

As a student Smith once heard and was much taken by a talk by the late B.S. Johnson. He gave me a text by Johnson to read, it begins:

 

"It is a fact of crucial significance in the history of the novel this century that James Joyce opened the first cinema in Dublin in 1909. Joyce saw very early on that film must usurp some of the perogatives which until then had belonged almost exclusively to the novelist"

 

Johnson mentions later in his preface to Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs his own use of cinema-like editing "to evoke what the reader knows as film technique". But cinema-like techniques evoke more than just the formal experience of film. As Smith's work shows they evoke the imaginative worlds that cinema has created.

 

The professionalisation of culture since 1945, its division into specialist communities has led to an art separated from imaginative high culture. Much painting and sculpture is trapped in its own administrative discourse, it acts out the logic of art's institutions. Smith belongs to what seems to me to be an increasing number of artists whose work is informed by cinema, by novels and by poetry.

 

In this exhibition the most obvious example of the latter, a painting informed by poetry in This Red Rock. We look down on a group of figures in a crowd. How we read the image and its qualities is given direction if we know the picture's tide This Red Rock and where it comes from.

 

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

 

Later in the poem we get these lines:

 

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

 

These lines from 'Burial of the Dead', part 1 of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, suggest a reading of Smith's painting as a vision of administered existence as a kind of death. The poet and the image maker reflect on and thus transcend the crowd. They are alienated by imaginative art, by the reflective consciousness elaborated in their work. They offer a vision of a moment without future or past, it casts no shadow. The crowd is like dust, it is made of inconsequential differences for consciousness is knitted from the threads of other people's words and we have learnt to dream like films.

 

 

©ANDREW BRIGHTON

RICHARD WOLLHEIM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COLIN SMITH’S PAINTINGS

 

When we first confront Colin Smith's large paintings, two questions are likely to occur to us simultaneously. The first is, What do representations of events only partly narrated, of clothes hanging in cupboards, and of figures seen from behind or above, have in common? The second is, Is the subject-matter of these paintings, and its identification, something on which we should spend much time?

 

A likely contemporary reaction is that the second question puts the first in its place. For, once we have been alerted to what we are doing, we shall not want to go on doing it, because, with these paintings, as with paintings in general, their subject-matter does not take us very deep into them. However I am inclined to think that the truth is the other way round. The first question, once it is seriously attended to, takes the sting out of the second. For anyone who looks at these paintings and still tries to doubt the significance of their subject-matter can do so only by taking a very simple-minded view of what subject-matter is, and the odd, nervy range of things that Smith has decided to paint ought to innoculate us against the idea that an artist's subject-matter is ever something that can be identified in a facile way.

 

Indeed, if we look at Smith's paintings for what we can learn from them - and we do well to remember, in the face of recent conceptual tendencies, that looking at paintings for what they have to tell, as opposed to what they have to show, is only one, and certainly not the most profound, way of engaging with them - this is the lesson that they have to teach us. Subject-matter is complex.

 

Smith regularly paints things to which there is more than meets the eye: though the eye, the eye of someone who has lived in the world, knows what this something extra is.

 

The following are everyday, every minute, experiences: We see a man walking towards us: we know that he has a back, furthermore a fully clothed back, though the eye registers only his front. We see a woman bend down to pick up a scarf: we know that, a second before, she dropped her scarf, though we were not on the scene to observe the event. It is around such simple experiential truths, and their proper expansion, that Smith constructs his art.

 

But it is important to recognize, if we are to understand this art, that these truths have been underdescribed. There is a further fact to them. For it is not enough to say that we 'know' that the man has a back, or that we 'know' that the woman has just dropped her scarf. For what, in each case, is crucial to the experience, the perception, that we have is that this knowledge penetrates it. It fuses with the experience, and then goes on to structure it.

 

Some philosophers have called this process whereby recollections from the past form a kind of aura around present experience 'imagination'. Preserving this terminology, we may say that Smith's art is, in the first instance, an art of the imagination. For what he does is that, in the course of representing objects, he uses paint to stand in for what, in the perception of objects, is achieved by the imagination, or by the aura that surrounds them. It is this trick of substitution that turns what might otherwise seem a paradox in Smith's art - that, though the invisible is its major theme, the art itself is as visual as any produced to-day - into the most natural thing in the world. The interest of this art is to grasp how the trick is brought off.

 

In the first place, the cases that I have cited - the man who walks towards us, the woman who picks up her scarf - are not, for all their accessibility, those most strictly relevant to an understanding of the paintings in this exhibition.

 

For, in the examples that I have used, we are dealing with the very possibility of experience. In other words, we would be completely unable to see the man as having a front if we didn't allow the imagination to supply us with an experience of his back. It would be impossible for us to see the woman as picking up the scarf if we didn't allow the imagination to supply us with an experience of her dropping it.

 

But Smith's pictorial concerns are less metaphysical. Throughout his work, he has tried to recreate those cases of perceptual experience where it is the associations of life, and not the very structure of the mind, that provide the aura of the experience, the halo, the penumbra that surrounds it.

 

We see a safari shirt on its hanger, and we sense, not just the back of the shirt, but also the man who, with two fingers, takes a pack of cigarettes out of the breast pocket and casually flips one into his mouth. We see the garish clothes in the cupboard, and we sense, not just the process by which they got there, but also the dyed blonde, who, returning from a rendezvous, lets her dress fall to the ground, and kicks herself free of it.

 

Staying with the word 'imagination' for a moment, we may return the word to its ordinary sense, and say that it is the very specificity of Smith's imagination that fashions these paintings. It is not just the world that he conjures up: it is a world. It is the very particular world deplored, in many passages of prose and poetry, by the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, for whom it becomes a leitmotif that we no longer live amongst 'things', amongst objects often humble in nature but made with skill and invested with sentiment.

 

Smith's paintings, for all their empty spaces, are full of suggestions about what has taken their place. These overlifesize paintings provide us, not directly, but indirectly, with the answer to the question raised ironically in the title of one of the most famous prints of the 1950s: Richard Hamilton's Just what is it that makes to-day's home so different, so appealing? Sparing us a direct confrontation with the clutter of modern life. Smith instead gets us to fall victim to a trick of scale. For the very largeness of the pictures - or rather their largeness in relation to the size of the objects they represent - serves as an invitation to the senses other than that of sight to move into the pictorial space, and to start to occupy it. We begin to hallucinate what we cannot, what we are not allowed to, see. We hear the rustle of man-made fabrics. We catch the smell of tobacco, deodorant, plywood, synthetic carpet. The absent starts to suffocate us.

 

In the creation of this pictorial world, one trick is the trick of scale. Another trick is the trick of light.

 

In nearly all the paintings, the represented objects are polarized between heavy shadows and opalescent highlights, with a broad middle ground taken up by passages of stark, intermediate tones. But there is generally no observable source of illumination to which these effects of light could be ascribed. Nor does the light pass beyond the objects. The background is unaffected: either it is given over to unredeemed darkness, or it emits a kind of neon-like phosphoresence.

 

The objects that we are allowed to see lie, it seems, in a thin slice of existence, cut off alike from anything in front of them and from anything behind them. Once again, the overall effect is unmistakeable. These objects are as effectively dematerialized as those which we merely hear or smell. Their interest has to depend, like the immediacy of experience, upon something outside themselves, and the challenge - or so it might seem - is to set off and try to track down what this something might be.

 

But Smith has three tricks in all: a trick of scale, a trick of light, and the trick of paint. And the third trick helps us, in some measure, to overcome what the first two have put within our grasp.

 

Smith, I have suggested, uses paint to record an effect. He uses it to indicate what the eye draws upon when the world is seen. But he also uses it more directly. He uses it to create a world that encapsulates that which we see.

 

I have quoted Rilke, and we must observe that the more Rilke became convinced of the extinction of a world to which the things that it contained gave value, the more he felt the value of creating works of art that were themselves such things: Dinggedichte. I believe that there is a similar motivation - though to very different effect, for Smith is not interested in the jewelled, or the rarefied - in the paintings before us. They have been planned as things that fill the very vacuum that they display.

 

 

© ESTATE OF RICHARD WOLLHEIM

Chair in Philosophy, University of California at Berkeley