Absent Authors: Essay by Sacha Craddock

Fascinated by Isabelle Graw, who writes of the imagined relation between the purchaser of an artwork and the artist themselves, Fitzmaurice plays with the way in which a generally inanimate object is still, in some way, seen as part of the artist. The artists in this exhibition, however, have not been chosen because of where they are from or what they have been through, but mostly for the way their work remains complex, with identity, association, intention, and expectation layered between a broken, sometimes fused, rationale. Without forcing links between language, existence and method, the exhibition hopes to protect and inhabit the space between who an artist may be and what they do.

The fact that each artist was invited to respond to the theme on their own terms encourages a sense of individual as well as collective control, an approach also reflected by the contributions to the exhibition dossier. When KV Duong starts to perform he needs to inhabit something other as well as himself. In all cases, the way work functions is different, with body painting onto paper, then removed, burnt and placed back again. Kelly Sweeney’s large bright canvasses and sculptures present witches and scallywags that construct a presence as well as a record of existence. In a glass topped table, the delicate charcoal graphite drawings by Kit Yan Chong take a more museological account with double-sided signage functioning like a flag. When Guler Ates photographs the gold draped figure passing through generic grandiosity, the sense of what the work ‘means’ is encouraged by a speedy clash of imagery, and cultural expectation. Kirsty Harris’s large painting of a nuclear explosion, attached delicately to the wall, accompanied by the image of sailors observing perhaps that same explosion, shows the ghost of the artist elsewhere in the power to shift, move, impress and transform. Madi Acharya-Baskerville’s assemblage sculpture made up of stuff from beaches and general detritus, makes jokey, quasi-sexualised figures on plinths, while the digitalised, breathing paintings on two monitors, by Alison Goodyear carries a three dimensional logic, with elements broken and space entered, in a slowed down rendition of paint. 

The perhaps autonomous identity behind all this work does a great job, yet the relationship between place, history and cultural cross pollination carries far greater suggestive powers than can consciously be imagined. Perhaps there is also a sense that the artist, through real existence, brings scale and scope, extended touch and influence, like nothing else? Robert Fitzmaurice’s recent paintings inhabited themselves, apparently, by animated elements, breathe a sense of life into an established language.

Good art can provide a sense of a change, possibility, and hope to a language apparently known and understood. But still, to what extent is the relationship between artist and artwork visible? Presumptions crowd from opposite directions, to swing between seeing the artwork as an extension of an artist’s life, and the perhaps more Modernist sense of a work that acts and affects independently of the author. Over time perhaps the autonomous artwork, combined with copious amounts of information about the author and the artwork, has solidified. Perhaps the perceived gap between production and comprehension has narrowed. From thinking that the work could function on its own, once the artist had left the studio, gallery or room, to believing that the thing has just arrived, coming perhaps from the artist acting as medium.

With the anti-autobiographical stance of the 1970s and early 1980s, language was expected to be seen as collective, even sometimes international. ‘International’ tended to mean a sort of neutral language coming out of mainstream assumptions about power race, class and audience. From a more general political response to AIDS, the success of sculpture, at one time, through to the loss of painted imagery, or image, qualities shifted.  

But still, the apparent narrative of the personal, the era of ‘love me, love my art’ had yet to arrive. A personalisation of art, with the artist as character, propped up more by popular expectation than the artists themselves, meant that the artwork, no longer separate and independent, could start to be considered as a souvenir of the artist.

Reading or expecting clear links between an artist’s life and the work they make is part of understanding but by no means all. An artist’s identity is apparently the subject of their work. Artists were expected to do what was expected in order to give the world what it imagined that might mean. 

Young, or not so young, people at art school, unsure what to make work about are told to start with where they come from, in every sense, in order to get started. But this can often be the same story, and perhaps of little interest. That, and the familiar experience of the female student encouraged by a male tutor to make diaristic art, only to then be ignored. The ability to talk cleverly and obliquely, is seriously challenged by easy assumption and comprehension, but never talking about personal things, or money, in terms of work, meant that when, and if, success did arrive, it was seen as separate from the individual artist’s past, work, and financial background.  

Words cannot make something exist, In the same way that an artwork is never the equivalent of existence. A room full of objects, books and found furniture might indicate who the person might be but never account for a life lived. A problem lies when personalising the general, funnelling down past the collective and political to the obviously personal language. Of course an artwork, even when manufactured, carries a trace of the creator. The shadow is also an idea. But with the ghost of a presence, each artist here, uses a sleight of hand, and language, a real obsession with perversity, to fight ease and peace and make work that is more difficult in order for it to function better. 

Sacha Craddock, June 2021

Sacha Craddock is an art critic, writer, mentor and curator based in London. She is co-founder of Artschool Palestine, co-founder of the Contemporary Art Award at the British School at Rome and Abbey Council member, Trustee of the Shelagh Cluett Trust, Joint President of the International Association of Art Critics AICA UK and co-founder of the SPECTRUM Art Award. She has also been Chair of the Board of New Contemporaries and selection process since 1996.

Text copyright Sacha Craddock, June 2021