Cause and Effect by Amie Corry
Scene 1: Glen Pudvine, ‘Mug’, Matt Carey-Williams, London.
‘Magic implies the intertwining of causality and illusion, otherwise known in Norse-derived languages as weirdness. Weird means strange of appearance, and it also means having to do with fate.’ So says Timothy Morton in a 2015 essay on object-oriented ontology, a school of thought that (broadly speaking) claims that everything, including everyone, is an autonomous and equal object.[1] Art, Morton suggests, is a sort of ‘charisma’, which emanates from objects regardless of human perception.
Object-oriented ontology (OOO) relegates the subject in favour of the object. It was all the rage in art circles about a decade ago and it has its faults, namely that it risks erasing intentionality, consciousness and identity-formation from human history (as Maria Walsh puts it: ‘this uncritical resort to mythical thinking forgets that it was superstitious belief in demons that kept the feudal overlords in place.’[2]) But on viewing the weirdness at work in Glen Pudvine’s paintings, which play on the gap, or lack thereof, between mark and symbol, icon and ordinary, I found myself returning to OOO’s ideas. In ‘Mug’, the first ‘Scene’ presented at Matt Carey-Williams’ new, light-filled London space, everything is an object. Or maybe everything is an object made subject? I can’t decide and maybe it doesn’t matter. They’re weird in a good way.
Glen Pudvine, He’s Listening, 2022, Oil and grit on linen, 101.5 x 91.5 cm. (40x 36 in.)
The subject/object tension is best explained by way of Pudvine’s eponymous mugs. It’s a word with many meanings, but in these paintings, mugs primarily operate literally, as rounds to frame or demarcate other objects in the compositions. In He’s Listening (2022) the near-foetal face of the artist’s newborn nephew is cropped and reproduced on a classic white coffee mug. The background is a mass of gritty digital interference. In the aperture of the handle, the face of a youngish[3] Frasier Crane – the sitcom favoured by the artist and his father – appears, ears pricked, ready for your troubles. The ceramic of the mug in Hands (2023), meanwhile, forms a barrier between the much fetishised flesh of a marble thigh under a rapist’s hand, taken from Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina (1621–22), and a mass of earthy hands visible through the window of a hand-held phone screen. The hands visible via the screen’s portal are also famous, deriving from the walls of Argentina’s Río Pinturas caves, executed between 13,000 and 9,500 years ago.
Glen Pudvine, Hands, 2023, Oil on linen, 80 x 100 cm. (31 1/2 x 39 3/8 in.)
Glen Pudvine, Hands (detail), 2023, Oil on linen
Mugs are big business. The mug market was valued at $21.39 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $44.21 billion by 2029. This leap is striking – are they gaining in popularity, their materials and manufacture increasing in price, are they more readily smashed or disposed of? Are there more offices to fill with office mugs and mug-shaped leaving gifts? More mouths to supply and thirsts to quench? In reality, the increase must be largely, and somewhat ironically, made up of reusable cups (lest we forget the woman in North Carolina with her collection of 103 Stanley cups…). But I digress, which is relevant I promise, because the paintings are full of skilfully wrought digressions, which fizz in the mind and probe the relationality of things. The mug is presumably chosen for its etymological flexibility as well as its aesthetic suitability to the task at hand – it holds and curves and gapes pleasingly. But it also flattens: Bernini’s marble, a fresh baby and the primordial mysteries of cave art are all subjects/points in time worthy of attachment, of illustration on this everyday object.
OOO posits that objects are autonomous from one another. Relationality is a mode of thinking about the world that centres humans, and therefore has no place in an object-oriented view. But networks of relationality are arguably unavoidable because of our reliance on language, which is a key medium for Pudvine – word play abounds. One of the few paintings that does not feature a drinking mug sees an oval self-portrait of the artist’s face floating at the bottom of a toilet bowl (Good Morning, 2023). While the curves of the toilet emulate those of the mug, it is the human face that is the obvious stand-in for the carrier. Staring out from the depths of the toilet, the artist’s face prompts existential confusion – we look down into the bowl and find him looking down at us, the softer flesh of the face sagging slightly with the gravitational pull. What sort of feedback loop is this? (Throughout the show, there is a play on technology and communication, suggesting a world partially restructured through tech’s social relations, in which the IRL is impossible to separate from the so-called ‘real’.)
Glen Pudvine, Present, 2023, Oil and sand on linen, 92 x 72 cm. (36 1/4 x 28 3/8 in.)
The engorged, sparring cocks of Pudvine’s earlier paintings are absent here. The artist seems more absorbed with mortality than postures of masculinity. We find numerous skulls and, in Present (2023), a naked torso proffers three flat stones, ripe for skimming, via an outstretched hand. It’s a tender gesture – an offering or perhaps an invitation to choose or accept a direction.
Morton’s version of OOO argues that, ‘the world is dreamed into existence and that causality is a kind of dreaming; which is to say, a kind of art.’[4] The objects in these paintings are rendered with equal curiosity – for their origins and whereabouts and shapes. They present an unusual degree of autonomy, and yet we also find their relationships to one another dreamed into existence.
[1] Morton, Timothy, ‘What If Art Were a Kind of Magic?’ ArtReview (10 December 2015). It should be noted that there is a wide gamut of thoughts and object-oriented ontologists feel differently about a lot of things.
[2] Walsh, Maria, ‘I Object’, Art Monthly 371 (November 2013)
[3] The age is relevant because, for this viewer at least, it delineates the character from Kelsey Grammer’s latter day admittance of Trump support!
[4] Morton, ‘What If Art Were a Kind of Magic?’