DREAM FOURTEEN - Julian Simmons and Sarah Lucas by Colin Glen
Paul Stolper Gallery – 15 October – 20 November 2021
Standing holding the DREAM FOURTEEN catalogue at Paul Stolper Gallery, just a stone’s throw from the potent artefacts of the British Museum, I mused, head-tilted at the array of Julian Simmons’ black and white photographs describing Sarah Lucas’ plaster cast bodies truncated from the waist-down; all bearing the quizzical protrusion of unlit cigarettes and cropped from a golden egg-yellow ground, filling both the gatefold publication and the gallery walls. The tautology of witnessing documentation images in reproduction and in the flesh prompted a disembodied sensation of vertigo, as the photographs articulated, with a range of camera angles and scale, the puncturing bawdiness and brutal simplicity of the sculptures whose apparent austerity belied a deepening richness of reference below each rutted surface. Reaching for a stable place to gather my fragmenting thoughts I found an inviting white smooth-sided 60’s chair with its little felt-textured egg-yellow cushion, only to be wrong-footed by the jarring realisation that this was an artwork, which nonetheless performed the metaphorical function of stabilising structure, a nod to the Kantian notion of a “thing itself”. This sense of groundless suspension was an echo of the liminal hanging presence of what Lucas terms her “cast of characters”, her “muses”, circling the room and spread across the publication. Like “floating islands” standing proud of the green screen of yellow, a universal backdrop colour which at the Venice Biennale where the pieces were shown in 2015, evoked antique gold, function here as Modernist colour field, a depthless zone from whose flatness the figures are clinically incised with seductive precision. A compelling effect of this sharp photographic cropping was the inversion of the convention of the classical bust, just head and shoulders indicating grandeur, status and hierarchy, the cerebral over the material. The “muses” were now flipped above the navel to give primacy to the lower/nether regions, connoting an earthbound nature more in accord with the circle of nine ancient inspirational figures whose incantations were accompanied by pouring milk into the earth, rather than in ascendant hymn of praise to Olympian goddesses and gods on high. The irreverent addition of the mechanically phallic straight-line perfection of Lucas’ trademark camel cigarettes pricked into action the impulsive role of the imagination, magnified exponentially through the lens of photography the conflation of the bodily orifices, groins transfigured into faces, in a collapse of Freud’s five stages of psychosexual development. I began to sense that the revelatory nature of this conversation between Julian Simmons and Sarah Lucas was suggesting a neat autopsy of creative dialogue, dissecting the exchange of mutually respectful artists through discussions around photographic documentation and the transformative role of the imagination in the translation from object to image. The sometime thorny issue in the history of artists’ relationship with the documentation of their work is a rising spectre that haunts the “Modernist Myth” of the unalloyed relationship between the original artwork and its copy.
Photography Julian Simmons. DREAM FOURTEEN © Julian Simmons and Sarah Lucas, courtesy the artist and Paul Stolper Gallery London
The function of photography as a recorder of truth comes from its status as an indexical sign defined by Pragmatic Philosopher C.S. Peirce as having an existential connection to reality – like the way “the footprint in the sand” indicates the presence of the person by its cavity of absence. What makes photographs compelling evidence for Peirce is that “they were physically forced to correspond point to point to nature” - performing an inextricable bond, a reciprocal relationship with each dependent on the other for its existence. However, a photograph may retain, as Rosalind Krauss points out in “Notes on the Index: Part 2” from 1977, her seminal exploration of the role of the indexical, contrasting the work of Lucio Pozzi and Ellsworth Kelly, the status of the two other elements of Peirce’s tripartite sign system; the icon, the likeness of the object, and the symbol, the final meaningful representation in the mind of the viewer. Mulling over some of these thought fragments from my time at art school, I was drawn towards the far end of the space with a sense of becoming part of a group conversation - by the monumental scale of wallpapered images of plaster cast soles whose terrain of signature whorls bear witness to the specific individual’s footprint. The classical solidity of such sheer scale magnified my awareness of the fragile reality of the living body and roused a memory of Laura Mulvey presenting research just up the road from Paul Stolper Gallery at Birkbeck College 20-odd years ago, on the subject of the indexical nature of still and moving images in cinema for her book Death 24x a Second - to be published in 2006. Her particular attention was given to the reanimation of “calci” figures at Herculaneum, plaster figures cast from the spaces left by bodies burnt instantaneously by the ash of Mount Vesuvius, in Roberto Rosellini’s 1953 film, Journey to Italy. Following Raymond Bellour, she sees the plaster figures “formed from the imprint left by an original object…like photographs, indexical images” watched in their first remoulding by the film’s protagonists Alex and Katherine, as “a picture appears in the developer…a photograph formed from the real itself.”
For Mulvey, “the photograph cannot generalise”, in its “mechanical animation of the inanimate”, it binds the specific object to reality where each metonymic rutted surface articulates the uniqueness of each figure “caught in the moment of transition between life and death”. This compelling texture of momentary contact rhymes with the pitted skin on the surface of each of Lucas’ muses as revealed by shallow photographic depth of field in Simmons’s images. Our attention is repeatedly drawn towards each cigarette, whose hermetic generic perfection stands in stark contrast to the raw openness of the casts, and on to each cigarette tip - a blank entry point like the camera aperture - a point of space that obscures then performs the role of the bodily orifice from which it projects. Each of these points in succession around the space behave as a focus of attention in the way Roland Barthes’s “punctum” works, which he explores in Camera Lucida, 1980, that foreshadowing of mortality. Mulvey takes up this element of a photograph, as with Freudian “Uncanny”, when “the distinction between the imagination and reality is suddenly effaced”. Counterpoised by the “studium”, the decipherable code of social and cultural meanings of the image, the “punctum” “pricks” the viewer’s attention in a manner Barthes’ aligns with Jacques Lacan’s “Tuché”, the “prick/ wound/ bruise/ stain” - the Real as “the aspect of human experience that lies outside of language”, or the void of Buddhism. It is simply the pointed finger, like the child’s “look”, but just that action and nothing else. In DREAM FOURTEEN, Simmon’s photographic insistence on pulling our visual attention to the tip of each cigarette lends them the function of the pointed finger with the internally uttered phrase “look” … “look there’s nothing”. Like Beckett’s Godot eternally off-scene, the more you look the more nothing there is.
The uncanniness of this form of indexical pointer - for Peirce embodied in the weathervane - is also the “repoussoir” trope of classical painting - a dog’s gaze, for instance, leading the viewer’s vision off-tableau. This led my train of thought to realise the truncated lower half of each character repeats the same phrase “look”, yet here the imagination creates the upper torso, ineluctably compelled to form the person in front of your eyes. Like Rossellini’s’ lovers whose union is pricked into animation by witnessing the forever-frozen lovers’ embrace, coupled with the spectral vision of the characters as in life, you see the figure from beyond your mind’s eye into reality - because to have no resolved figure would be unmanageable in the traumatic extreme. The light touch of this gesture articulates the intricate sophistication of Simmons and Lucas’ discussion. Yet the phantom figure you see, the projected memory, is not a smoothed-off generic ideal like Gustave Courbet’s Beginning of the World, but an actual imprint like Duchamp’s Étant Donnés - a specific person tethered (Lucas’ titles are the subjects’ names) to the everyday by unique and unreproducible metonymic details. Like the rent in the cloth of Daniel Boudinet’s “Polaroid” - the frontispiece image of Barthes’s Camera Lucida, the gaps in meaning invite dialectic entry as when the quotidian fragment of an old polaroid snapshot not only records an instant in time, but actually behaves as a piece of time reified. In the suspended animation of Simmons and Lucas’ ‘instant’ images, your eye explores idiosyncratic details of that texture of the skin, those elliptic swirling footprint wrinkles like bark and rings of a tree. In this context, the playful jape of butting fags is like a traffic cone on the head of a statue. Cynic, not cynical, puncturing like Diogenes, that grounds the work in reality and connects with the still life tradition of Chardin and Morandi whose spare muted tones convey elegiac beauty.
Turning and looking back down the funnel of the gallery’s main space that bore neatly curated groupings of black and white images I sensed an alignment with a theory suggested by some practitioners that one should gorge then purge on art history to get back to “the thing itself” - a continuity surpassing the footholds of art historical reference, such as Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion or Ellsworth Kelly’s incised and butted Colour Field works, returning instead to the concatenated set of reversals like that of mould and cast between catalogue and prints. Rather than exhibiting ever-lessening echoes of real figures - the images function more like a revived memory of the initial casting events held in their home-as-studio that Simmons and Lucas recall in the catalogue conversation. The photographically edited removal of contexts other than objects which have near contact with the figures - the chair, loo, table, plinth or fridge - reanimates for our imaginations the uniqueness of the individual’s gesture and emphasise the particularity of their form. The process of repetition of figures in the photographic series such as CONFRONTATIONAL MICHELE MAKING A FACE, articulate a visual play with the truncated limbs (LEVEL) and evoke a painted-out image, yet reveal in (HIGH) to be an intrinsic characteristic of the sculpture. The same happens with MARGOT IN LANDSCAPE FORMAT MOTHER EARTH-LIKE (LEVEL) and MARGOT IN LANDSCAPE FORMAT MOTHER-EARTH LIKE (HIGH) where flatness juxtaposes bodily topography connoting the interplay of idea and form. Sealed solidity in the former, which employs foreground space to centre the eye on the flat plaster surface composing an image of discrete symbolic wholeness, in the latter an elevated camera angle reveals a near-comic scene of disembodied legs lying atop a fridge. The plaster seams creating a neat geometric figure that keeps the eye in constant motion to be jolted only by the reminder that this was a person who moved into position at a particular time and in a particular place.
CONFRONTATIONAL MICHELE MAKING A FACE (HIGH), 2021
Inkjet on Hahnemuelhe photo rag 308 gsm, 104.3 x 78cm. Photography Julian Simmons. DREAM FOURTEEN © Julian Simmons and Sarah Lucas, courtesy the artist and Paul Stolper Gallery London
MARGOT IN LANDSCAPE FORMAT MOTHER-EARTH LIKE (HIGH), 2021
Inkjet on Hahnemuelhe photo rag 308 gsm, 104.3 x 78cm. Photography Julian Simmons. DREAM FOURTEEN © Julian Simmons and Sarah Lucas, courtesy the artist and Paul Stolper Gallery London
MARGOT IN LANDSCAPE FORMAT MOTHER-EARTH LIKE (LEVEL), 2021
Inkjet on Hahnemuelhe photo rag 308 gsm, 78 x 104.3cm. Image courtesy of Paul Stolper Gallery, Julian Simmons and Sarah Lucas
Simmons’ dynamic camera positions relate to Mulvey’s dialectic of presence and absence, creating a dialogue between image and form which rouses in the viewer a play of the imagination. This attribute is particularly evident in the work SADIE LOOKING LIKE BRITANNIA, whose incised forms cropped from the yellow ground flip between abstract pattern and the delicate grace of sensitive flesh and present a momentary interaction of surreal suggestibility that in reality took an hour of casting in plaster bandages with its accompanying mess. Indeed, it is the only image with both shadow and reflection of the sculpture present on the yellow ground of the image, signifying both the solidity of the sculpture and by implication, the presence of the photographer. Moreover, it is the repose of YOKO SMOKING THROUGH HER BELLY BUTTON (LOW) and YOKO SMOKING THROUGH HER BELLY-BUTTON (HIGH) sitting askance the chair that suggests a fleeting conversational attitude reanimated through photography, whose fluid role in this process eludes to the convention of “fixing cast shadows” but engages as a group member of the “cast of characters”. By extension, this positioning of the witnessing role of the photographer as active delegate extends out to engage us as viewers to be present within the circle of the performative elements of the work.
SADIE LOOKING LIKE BRITANNIA, 2021
Inkjet on Hahnemuelhe photo rag 308 gsm, 104.3 x 78cm. Photography Julian Simmons. DREAM FOURTEEN © Julian Simmons and Sarah Lucas, courtesy the artist and Paul Stolper Gallery London
YOKO SMOKING THROUGH HER BELLY-BUTTON EYE (HIGH), 2021
Inkjet on Hahnemuelhe photo rag 308 gsm, 104.3 x 78cm. Photography Julian Simmons. DREAM FOURTEEN © Julian Simmons and Sarah Lucas, courtesy the artist and Paul Stolper Gallery London
YOKO SMOKING THROUGH HER BELLY-BUTTON EYE (LOW), 2021
Inkjet on Hahnemuelhe photo rag 308 gsm, 104.3 x 78cm. Photography Julian Simmons. DREAM FOURTEEN © Julian Simmons and Sarah Lucas, courtesy the artist and Paul Stolper Gallery London