Another Year...

Given the recent lull in proceedings, what seems, alas, to have become a familiar ‘seasonally-affected disorder’ slowing down the drawing & blogging process at this time of year, it doesn’t seem necessarily to be appropriate to celebrate, but at least one might acknowledge the fact that today marks the fifth anniversary of contributing, through the medium of this particular resource, more unsolicited, unedited stuff & gubbins & general inconsequentiality to the vast caverns of cyberspace.

In the spirit of such occasions, it just so happens, by way of another of those serendipitous circularities, those hauntological ‘having-been-here-befores’, which seem to be something of a house speciality (& to an increasing extent) hereabouts at TOoT, that we’re able to affect a reminiscent return to the very first post & a particular aspect of the eclectic range of its content, in the form of another encounter, at Liverpool’s fine Walker Art Gallery, with the work of The Little Artists, or at least a pair of examples of, which, for whatever reason, were/are included amongst the work & supporting archive material (fascinating photographs from the 50s & 60s of selection panels & openings, for example) in the ‘historical’ exhibition accompanying the main John Moores Painting Prize 2010 show.

Here, as mentioned previously back in those fresh-faced, pioneering days, are The Little Artists’ witty Lego representations of Tracey Emin’s (in)famous bed & Damien Hirst’s vitrined shark, pictured together & then in a little more individual detail: what larks, Pip - that also, of course, transport one further back in time, to memories of one’s own childhood creative investigations into the potential of those inspirational plastic bricks.




This being the second occasion upon which tentative mention has been made of the 2010 Moores but with the intended extended musing-upon destined once again not to materialize yet (well, we still have until the new year whilst the exhibition remains current), it might be appropriate to mention, at least, the first-prize-winning-worthiness of Keith Coventry’s ‘Spectrum Christ’, an object that extends the possibilities of painting & certainly achieves its stated aim of slowing down the viewing process, the ‘consumption’ of the image.
Housed within a glass-fronted simple box frame, this reflective surface &, obviously, the manner in which it is lit, provides a significant amount of ‘interference’ between the spectator & their reception of the image, the icon, which only gradually & with no little effort reveals itself to be a lusciously oil-painted blue monochrome of a heavy-lidded & pensive, melancholic Christ (which the website & catalogue reproduction - thus a poor substitute for the actual empirical experience - shows clearly, instantly): before one sees this, one is confronted by one’s own image reflected in the glass, superimposed upon the elusive subject beneath, & then observes the activity of other gallery-goers & the space itself, the vaulted ceiling of which might suggest something ecclesiastical in architectural terms & also subsequently creates a visual dialogue, through the ages, with the interior space depicted within such an historical painting as Hendrik Cornelisz van Vliet’s ‘The New Church at Delft’, as may be observed in one of the galleries leading off from the main Moores exhibition space.
Further & more localized dialogue exists with other of the Moores’ exhibits displaying reflective surfaces (a minor sub-theme), but, of all such examples, Coventry’s provides the most complex & compelling perceptual experience through its successful resolution of a painting-as-image/object strategy.