Understanding the Emptiness of the Womb
Whilst the work I have put on show today relates to cultural issues on a world scale, it is also very meaningful to me personally. I would like to explain my working process by drawing on the research and experiences that have led me to make these pieces.

Philosophy
Running in the back of my mind when I was in the print room producing these images, were memories of my days as a philosopher. I studied for a BA Degree in Philosophy at Warwick University 15 years ago. At the time when I studied, the Department was a dynamic and exciting environment. Feminist philosophy was pretty current, and people would say things like “The future is Female”. There were some strong women philosophers in the Department but still, like every Philosophy Department, the environment was very male. I did not really get on with the extremely conceptual way of understanding, what seemed to me, real things. Amongst those real things was Woman.

There was a discrepancy between how I understood things and how the other philosophers understood. At the time, I found this very isolating. I did not know how to go forward and develop my understanding better. I wanted to argue, but I needed the tools of understanding and the vocabulary in order to get anywhere with my arguments. This would mean lots of reading and study. I found reading difficult to the point where it sent me to sleep. I was battling with myself to learn the way I was clearly meant to, but I was losing the battle. At the end of my degree, I left with an intuitive understanding of many interesting philosophical issues, and some surface level knowledge.

When I started studying Art, I became interested in many of these issues again. They came up in lectures, and when researching artists I was interested in. At this point in my life, I felt more confident to begin to investigate. I no longer worried about learning the right way. I took on board that I was dyslexic and got support to come to terms with this dyslexia (from Oliver West). Through this support and through taking on new ways of looking at working via the tutors on the course, I developed my own way of learning which included the visual. I began to understand my working process in terms of sketching, which mainly meant getting ideas out of my head and putting them to the test in the world – medium: irrelevant. Here, my ideas could be built upon and develop in unexpected ways.

Nietzsche
At Warwick, I had learnt about Nietzsche. I found his concepts intuitively interesting but my understanding remained vague. The most relevant of Nietzsche’s concepts to this project is: “Truth is a woman”. The idea is that truth is a metaphor. In order to unveil truth, you a peel off layer after layer of apparent truth and look behind, but when the last layer is peeled off there is revealed: Nothing. Behind the veils of Truth, nothing is left behind. There is no truth. So behind the mystery and beauty of Truth (i.e., ‘woman’), you will find no substance. My work uses overlay based on this concept. It creates a built up picture of reality that, as I will proceed to explain, has no truth at its core.

To give an idea of the confusing overlap between conceptual and real Woman, we will see in the following quote how Nietzsche grounded the concept of Woman very firmly in reality:

But she does not want truth: What is truth to a woman! From the very first nothing has been more alien, repugnant, inimical to woman than truth- her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance and beauty. Let us confess it, we men: it is precisely this art and this instinct in woman which we love and honour: we who have a hard time and for our refreshment like to associate with creatures under whose hands, glances and tender follies our seriousness, our gravity and profundity appear to us almost as folly. Finally, I pose the question: has any woman ever conceded profundity to a woman’s mind or justice to a woman’s heart? And is it not true that on the whole ‘woman’ has hitherto been slighted most by woman herself- and not at all by us? (NIETZSCHE 1966: 165)

Irigary
Another philosopher relevant to this project that I came across at Warwick was Irigary. She said that the fear of man for woman is “the horror of nothing to see”.

within this logic ... [woman's] sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see. A defect in this systematics of representation and desire. A 'hole' in its scoptophilic lens. It is already evident in Greek statuary that this horror of nothing to see has to be excluded, rejected, from such a scene of representation (IRIGARY 1985: 26)

Woman in a Man’s world
At the time I was studying, I was interested in Woman in a philosophical, conceptual way, but I found the concepts too complex and did not come to any real understanding of the issues. Perhaps because of this lack of understanding, I could not relate to the issues. Or perhaps there was something I could add to the concepts to make them more understandable. Already I was confused about the way forward. To add to this confusion, there seemed to be such a lot of misogyny in the world of philosophy and it made me feel personally defensive, not least because it was totally denied by the men of the department. Marilyn Monroe is famously quoted as saying “I don’t mind being part of a man’s world, so long as I can be a woman”. Well, to be myself, a woman, in the academic philosophy environment was simply not possible. Though I felt I was welcome to join as an honorary man, any time I chose, I would have to give up some part of myself that was not welcome. You simply needed to play the game, or you were spoiling it for everyone. And the rules for the game were most definitely made up by the men.

Political woman
Years later, I found I could be interested in research about women from another perspective, one that seemed more ‘real’ – at least it made less utility of Woman as a conceptual metaphor. The new perspective was from Germaine Greer’s books The Female Eunuch and The Whole Woman. Reading The Female Eunuch, I was genuinely shocked about how relevant the book still was, though it had been written when I was a baby. After The Whole Woman, I mentally filed an observation which continues to resonate with me to this day, and which became a central part of The Emptiness of the Womb project. Greer observed that modern day people have been educated to visualise the womb as an empty space when, in reality, the womb has no more ‘space’ than any other part of our body.

The word ‘Womb’ originally meant any hollow space and by extension came to mean ‘belly’ or ‘abdomen’. The use of the word in modern times exclusively to signify the organ of gestation demonstrates our inability to think of the womb as anything but a passive receptacle, a pocket inside a person rather than the person herself…. But the term is misleading; there is no more a void inside of a woman than there is inside a man. The unpregnant womb is not a space, but closed upon itself. The womb is not a sinus or a sac. The image of the uterus as a void waiting to be filled is an artifact derived from billions of lying diagrams that represent the fabulous baroque biochemistry of the womb as if it were the pocket of a billiard table. (GREER 1999: 48)

I found this observation very noteworthy and significant. I began to notice that this ‘emptiness’ is very important philosophically. I thought more and more about this. See the following quote from Kelly Oliver, talking about Nietzsche:

She is hollow like a womb. She is the space, the womb, from which everything originates. This space is distance: the affirming woman is not an object in the distance: rather she is distance. Her power is distance. As distance, as space – pure womb – she does not exist. Just as there is no woman, there is no truth. (OLIVER 1984: 196)

My mind has been working quietly on these ideas, slowly digesting. Over the duration of my Foundation Course, I have started thinking again about some of the ideas I never really understood when I was studying philosophy. I have found it a massive undertaking even to uncover the issues at stake, let alone to understand them. It feels like I have embarked on a lifetime’s study. It started long ago but is now picking up pace.

Becoming woman
To continue with my story…. I was used to putting my femininity aside in order to succeed in the Man’s World I had been brought up in, I really only began to engage with being a woman when, aged 29, I became pregnant. During late pregnancy and a terribly hot London summer, I used to swim at the Hampstead Heath female bathing pond. I had never before entered an all-female space in such a relaxed way. My only previous experience would have been female public toilets or changing rooms. Here were women of all different shapes and sizes, and they all seemed so relaxed and free. It felt like heaven: I felt at home and safe. I felt, for the first time, how different women could be without the presence of men, and without the gaze of men. I felt how different I could be. I felt the admiration of women when a couple of women admired my beautiful pregnant body in the showers. I felt admitted into the world of women.

Up until then, I realise, I had internalised the misogyny of our culture, and felt like a failed man. I guess I was a female-misogynist and could not identify with other women, and did not want to be like them. Basically, I was living as a man, trying to succeed living and working in a man’s world, without ever admitting any difference, or making any allowances for myself. What a relief. I had made a fundamental admittance: I was a woman, I was one of these real women I saw around me at the pond.

Overcoming prejudice
I have managed to mentally overcome this internalised misogyny. To write about these issues and to put up work relating to them means to overcome a certain amount of intimidation and fear of criticism from the misogyny that is still so prevalent in our thinking. I am aware of how easy it is to be labeled and dismissed as a ‘Feminist’. I have already had a response to this piece of writing from a man that “it sounds like [I am] a man-hating lesbian’. It is very easy for a man or a woman to stop listening and apply strongly repressing labels. In Modern Britain, it is still unacceptable to be a feminist – which I define as giving women the same rights to humanity as a man: the right to be treated as a human being. The history of the oppression of women runs back for thousands of years, and continues to this day. To give an idea of how shocking it is to criticise a woman for engaging in the history of her sex, imagine the same resentment being applied to a Black person investigating the history of slavery and apartheid: would you automatically question their sexuality and called them a white-hater? No one would find it easy to dismiss me as “Nazi-hating Jew-fetishist” if I was a Jew interested in the history of anti-semitism, and telling cautionary tales about the holocaust*. The fact that my sexuality, and indirectly, my attractiveness as a woman, is called into question (as every woman who has been labeled a ‘feminist’ knows can all too easily happen) is certainly an unnecessary repression designed to shut me up. Why? When this is my history, and our shared history of humanity?
*Thanks to Minko for this helpful comparison.

Cultural assumptions
As a woman, I want to investigate the concepts that strange assumptions such as the emptiness of the womb rest upon, and the consequences of these assumptions. How do we proceed with reality hand in hand with such fantastic ideas? What is at stake when our culture feeds us mystery instead of physical reality? (When I say physical reality, I mean as close an approximity to it as we can get. Medical science, as Greer points out, provides us with accurate diagrams of the heart, for example.)

Woman philosophically: empty, different and thus ‘other’.
What is it to be a woman? The reality of being a woman seems (to me) to contradict the concept ‘Woman’ which is constantly put to use in, for example, philosophy and advertising. I mentioned above the philosophical importance of keeping emptiness at the heart of the conceptual woman. According to Derrida, it provides Man with an idea of who he is as defined by his difference to her. Given this, I am interested in what it is to be a woman. The deep realisation that I am a woman has made me question what it means to be a woman. I have finally emerged from what feels like a prolonged childhood innocence to confront the fact that, as a woman, I am not seen for what I am, but there is a whole lot of baggage attached. I am not simply the human being that I subjectively feel myself to be.

Rather than pretend this isn’t happening, I want to investigate and understand.

My way of working
Now, reaching the end of my Foundation Course, I have brought art and philosophy together. For me, now, visual work goes hand in hand with research and writing – a three pronged attack at understanding. Working visually allows me time and space to mull ideas over and allow thoughts and connections to emerge. I sketch out ideas visually and produce visually provocative work. I research when necessary, and turn to writing to sketch out and formulate my ideas more clearly. I have come to this point of understanding in my work: Knowing my interests run deeper than the aesthetic gives me both confidence to pursue, and confidence to show my work. My interest in my work is like a rich seam to be mined. At no point do I consider my work to be arbitrary or that I could as easily be applying myself in a different direction. The work on show today is simply a window into my studies to date.

The work

The image printed on paper I have put on the wall is beautiful. But it steals its beauty. We approach such images of women with a pre-defined idea of their beauty prescribed to us by our culture and reinforced by advertising and the media. This image emerged after working with magazines - cutting out and layering images of the models - and is inspired by the work of “Young British Artist” Angus Fairhurst I saw at his retrospective exhibition (Arnofini, Bristol, 31 January – 29 March 2009). At the same time, I became interested in the work of John Stezaker and the Czech collage artist Jiri Kojar. (At this time, my work also spread onto the internet and I created a web space for Voyd Verneinte, a Facebook sypher, whose profile is still active.)

The image printed on silk in the window is an abstract amalgamation of many familiar images of women (see image above left, the compiled image I used to create my stencils. Above right is a close up image of the work). I found images of tribal African mothers, Ethiopian starving mothers with children, screaming mothers of Gaza mourning their dead, the Virgin Mary, Mary with the dead Christ, Mary with the infant Christ, images of Queen Elizabeth I, and countless others. I did not include sexy or pornographic images. I wanted to concentrate on being born with a womb as the definition of Woman, rather than having a pair of breasts and female genitalia. In the centre of the image is a British Medical Institute (BMI) diagram of the womb, an image we are all familiar with, but which bares no resemblance to an actual womb. I purposefully kept this space white: empty space, for the reasons I highlight above.

I wanted the piece to evoke the electrical lose connection buzzing noise used by film makers, for example David Lynch and Catherine Breillat. The jarring, buzzing and vibrating in these films is both suggestion and reminder that something isn’t right. I feel the light breaking through my image is like a light bulb pulsing on and off with an electrical lose connection. The light emerging breaks down the edges of the stencil, with strong emergent contrast, and is unexpected. It causes you to look again. This is the pulsing.

The work wants to say: what a strange idea we have of the female body, and of the female….

All work © Ruth Baigent 2010
ruthbaigent at y@h00 dot c0m

Send me your comments and I will put them up and answer them here

Bibliography, etc

ALDORT, Naomi. 2005. Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves. USA: Book Publishers Network
BELSEY, Catherine. 2002. Poststructuralism : a very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press
BOYER, Marie-France. 2000. The Cult of the Virgin. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd
BREILLAT, Catherine. 1999. Romance. [Video: Video]
CRADDOCK, Sacha with CAHILL, James. 2009. Angus Fairhurst. London: Philip Wilson Publishers
GREER, Germaine. 1993. The Female Eunuch. London: Flamingo
GREER, Germaine. 1999. The Whole Woman. Great Britain: Doubleday
HEARTNEY, Catherine. 2001. Postmodernism. London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd
IRIGARY, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press
KOLAR, Jiri. 1990. The End of Words. London: ICA
LYNCH, David. 1976. Eraserhead. [Video: DVD]
MACLEOD, Sheila. 1981. The Art of Starvation. London: Virago Ltd
NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. 1966. Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Random House
OLIVER, Kelly. 1984. ‘Woman as truth in Nietzsche’s writing’, Social Theory and Practice 10(2): 185-99
OLIVER, Kelly. 1988. ‘Nietzsche's 'Woman': The Poststructuralist Attempt to Do Away with Women’, Radical Philosophy 48 (Spring): 25-9
PATTON, Paul. 1993. Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory. London: Routledge
SHELLEY, Rosemary. 2005. Anorexics on Anorexia. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
WARNER, Marina. 1976. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Knopf
WEST, Oliver. 2007. In Search of Words: Footnotes Visual Thinking Techniques UK: Oliver P B West
WOLF, Naomi. 1990. The Beauty Myth. London: Vintage

COMMENTS

My reactions:

1, "There was a discrepancy between how I understood things and how the other philosophers understood." MY dear, I hope you are not referring to me!

2. "Surface knowledge". I hear that. I can hardly remember a thing. But at least continental philosophy really gave my mind a proper going over, and, while I cant really remember the content, Im sure I still benefit from it today.

3. "Oliver West". Who's he?

4. Yes, the medium is irrelevant. How funny it is that we're so much more confident these days! Thats age, I suppose. Although Im the first to admit that Im not re-reading philosophy anymore, much as I know how useful it once was...

5. "Though I felt I was welcome to join as an honorary man, any time I chose, I would have to give up some part of myself that was not welcome. You simply needed to play the game, or you were spoiling it for everyone. And the rules for the game were most definitely made up by the men." My god, we've really been living parallel lives. You have just described what it can be to work in a firm where people are not remotely interested in human rights/environmental issues, dont understand people who dont particularly want to be rich and teetotallers who prefer to go to lectures/conferences/seminars instead of getting drunk. The only difference is that both males and females made these rules. In fact, I have to say the same can sometimes be said of a lot of situations I have found myself in...No wonder Im a nomad.

6. Hampstead Heath female bathing pond". What?! I didnt even know there was one. Cant swim though (i tried a few weeks ago, and I no longer have the body of my 9 yr old self - which could swim). Just as well then!

7. “it sounds like [I am] a man-hating lesbian’." Who said that? Maybe he was a failed (hu)man. Isnt that where misogyny always comes from?

8. Black History. Jewish History. Yes, a good point well made. I do remember having to tell a friend (who is now an ex friend!), that all feminism was, was "human rights for women", and he was like, "Ohhhhhh". He GENUINELY DIDNT KNOW. And we were in our mid 20s. Evidently, he had picked up the Daily Mail/Loaded definition along the way, and I thought, hang on, how many other people think like this - because on the face of it, he was a decent guy (if you know what I mean)...The one thing I would say to those who challenge those of us who are asking questions and looking into history, is just why it is that they think an investigation into the history of woman is so different to that of the history of other oppressed groups. I just dont think any of them could ever give a proper answer. and whatever answer they gave would (hopefully) be revealing as to just what kind of misunderstandings they carry in their minds. We might then be in an position to understand just how these misunderstandings have arisen.

9. "Facebook sypher". Im sorry, what is a Facebook sypher?! I dont do facebook and dont really understand IT terms...

10. Why on earth does the BMI diagram bear no resemblance to an actual womb?

11. Without meaning to take you into territories that you may not wish to go (genitalia). Do you recall, at sometime in the late 90s/early 2000s, a female anatomist did an autopsy of a woman and then found that the clitoris was the size of a human fist. I remember reading about this in the Independent and Ms Greer commenting on this on newsnight saying, "I cannot believe that this isnt front page news". She was right, I certainly didnt come across it on the front page. The point was, that female pleasure has been denied as a "normal" thing for eons. And here we were with the scientific evidence of this absolutely MASSIVE organ. The other point was that because autopsies that gave rise to medical understanding had always been done on men, this was actually the FIRST TIME anyone had BOTHERED to do any work on the clitoris. It was the flippin late 90s!!! Which is ridiculous from a scientific POV. That woman's work pretty much disappeared from view. No one refers to her discovery - for that read "media" and "advertising". Every now and a gain I think who the hell was that woman?! I google. Nothing. Point is, even if it was a hoax, we dont even hear about it - its that frightening as a concept, presumably, not just the size but the fact of an in-built female organ that exist for no other reason than to deliver pleasure irrespective of the presence of other humans, male or female....There is, of course, another reason one could suggest for its existence, which is simply to provide some sort of release from pain - a concept I'd rather not think about for too long.

On that rather depressing note!

Cheerio,

ANON

REPLY

1) But of course not, my dear!

3) Oliver West I put a link into the text now. Amongst other things, he provides support for people with dyslexia using visual thinking methods.

6) You can still go to the pond even if you don't want to swim, there is a field in the same enclosure which was full of women sunbathing. Incredible.

7) It was my boyfriend. I don't really know what comment to make except to liken my relationships with men to my relationship to food and say it is bulimic, and I'm working on it.

8) Thank you. Totally.
I need to credit my friend Minko for this excellent comparison which she came up with when we were talking about this piece of writing in draft form.

9) It's not a technical term, I just made it up. I basically made a blank facebook profile, a perfect profile or a Void. I wrote about it in the previous upload on this blog, my essay about Angus Fairhurst.

10) Spatially, it bares no comparison. It is not representative, it's completely abstract.

11) I really didn't know anything about this; how interesting.

_________

I was really fascinated by your background, and how art was now helping to bring you some resolution. It was a joy to read about swimming while preganant and the atonement (at one ment) that you felt being with and among women after your experiences with the course.

You ask about my work - two dyptychs and two triptychs willl be in Truro Cathedral at the end of August and into September, I will e-mail you with the correct details when I have them. In the meantime The website is under construction, although it is viewable, but still has much to be done, the images are great though, the text crap! But hey- thats why I paint! If you want to have a look www.haddow-art.com it won't be obvious, any connections!
I was also inspired by your writing and within the context of my own work I will be exploring the aspect of 'pocket' which I have considered using as a metaphore but not really understood why until I read your 'essay'.
Life just seems to have a habit of throwing up things and if you don't catch it first time, or its relevance is missed, around it comes again until you get the message! Bit like books that one starts, hates/can't get into and years later it makes sense/ can't put it down - I guess you know what I mean.

REPLY

Thank you so much for this! I very much wrote that essay as a way of exploring where I was at at the end of the course, but felt sure my experiences would resonate with many women. I have realised we women are part of a sub-sulture, just like any other 'minority' group, with shared experiences and ways of coping. My (male) tutor felt I should get rid of the biographical elements of the piece - mainly (I think) because I need to cut it back for it to fulfill the course criteria - but I felt strongly that this human element was my way of reaching out and communicating. So it's great to hear that this has worked! I think he thought it was all a bit personal and speculative, when I believe it's descriptive of the world of Women. Men are naturally going to find it hard to access this way of being, just as, for example, I, as a white person, don't find it easy to truly appreciate the everyday reality of a black person. Women, as an oppressed group, have their own subculture that they access easily, while even the most clear-sighted men will need help to be able to see what we take for granted.

_________

I’ve finally had time to read through your catalogue and I wanted to say how much I enjoyed it. You raise many interesting and important ideas the main ones being the idea that woman is nothing in herself and the representation of this is the ‘empty’ womb.

How fascinating that the BMI medical diagrams inaccurately represent this in this day and age! This is very telling and backs up your ideas that older philosophical representations of how women are perceived are still current in the medical profession, at least.

I like your focus on the meaning of the word womb as meaning ‘a hollow space’. This misnomer seems a symbol that woman is still often seen as a hollow space waiting to be filled socially, intellectually and sexually by man. Why haven’t the sexual revolution and fifty years of feminism done more to change this? There have been a few articles recently reflecting on this; I remember one by Charlotte Raven. I think this is a fascinating area and I’m sure you’ll keep exploring it in your work.

I used to swim in the Women’s bathing pond on Hampstead Heath when I lived in London. A very special and unusual place with what seems a unique, supportive atmosphere. It felt so safe and uncompetitive – a place that you could spend time alone and really relax in a way that you couldn’t outside its leafy surrounds. Heaven. Why aren’t there more places like that?

This started me thinking about books I’ve read which represent all female societies. One is ‘The Carhullan Army’ by Sarah Hall, another ‘The Cleft’ by Doris Lessing. ‘The Golden Notebook’ by Doris Lessing is a book I’ve found myself going back to again and again during my life. Although some parts of it are dated, it was groundbreaking at the time. It explores what it means to be a woman and all the aspects of the self. In the book these are represented by different coloured notebooks.

I read quite a few feminist texts when I was in my twenties but none recently. I know when I became a mother all of the issues of feminism became immediate and made me revisit my earlier ideas. One fact seemed to stick – ours is a capitalist society and parents that are raising children don’t usually have much money. I noticed the way in which I became ‘invisible’ because I was pushing a pushchair, how people focus on the child, not the parent, how sales people sometimes treat you differently because they assume you are browsing because you’re bored. Respect in our society seems to be based on money and status and raising children isn’t valued. I know the New Feminism struggles to address these issues - there has also been a rise in ‘misery-lit’ memoirs by women (and men) who struggle with parenthood. Let alone the way child bearing is treated…

I didn’t have time to read about Angus Fairchild but I’ll go back to it. I love the work of his I’ve seen but hadn’t realised he’d committed suicide.

Do try and read J.G. Ballard. He’s a fascinating and iconoclastic writer. His memoir, ‘Miracles of Life’ is brilliant. I always find Germaine Greer’s work absorbing. Perhaps you should try and get in touch with her about your work? I’ve heard she’s supposed to be very supportive and interested in anyone trying to address these issues.

I’m sorry I didn’t have more time to look at your visual work in the show. I was entranced by the images I saw and reading this has added to my understanding of your work. It has especially made me think of how we interpret reality and sometimes accept that the maps and diagrams etc… we see are accurate without really knowing if they are or not. And how the role of the artist relates to this.

I was intrigued by what you said about the pulsing/ buzzing noise you wanted your images to project. When I saw Mark Rothko’s paintings at Tate Modern I had a sense that the paintings were ‘humming.’ I haven’t heard any artist talk about trying to create this effect through light and colour and layering before. At the time I wondered whether I was a bit crackers!

I look forward to seeing how your work develops out of these intriguing ideas.

REPLY

Thank you so much for your response. There's so much for me to explore here, it's fantastic, and I really appreciate it.
It's a great idea to get in touch with Germaine Greer. I did think about it, but, I think I need to actually do it! I love JG Ballard too. I agree, "Miracles of Life" was a great book.
I will certainly read the books you suggest. I'm reading female authors a lot at the moment, and really examining how different the 'voice' is. I think I should also return to JG Ballard now, as I feel I have changed lots since I read him last.

_________

Angus Fairhurst Retrospective, Arnofini, 31 January – 29 March 2009

I found the Angus Fairhurst retrospective exhibition appreciable on many levels. Aesthetically, I enjoyed the work in this exhibition. In addition, I felt the work resonated with me on a personal level; it stirred me mentally and creatively.

I wish to explore the work and the working practice of Angus Fairhurst through this essay and related practical work, and to come to an understanding of the significance of Fairhurst’s art and my relationship to it.

Artistic Themes and Practice

The following two quotes indicate areas of interest that I would like to highlight in relation to Fairhurst’s work. These relate to his artistic themes and practice. Throughout this essay, I shall return to the claims made within these quotes and I shall use them as a starting point to explore my own position on Fairhurst.

[Fairhurst’s work is a] travesty of the super-cool messages of sex, bodily ease and prosperity that they once existed to proclaim…. He is especially fond of cutting around the human figure, and then leaving out the figure itself, so that the work becomes a statement about absence, about the fact that we have this immense superstructure of visual seduction, but at its heart, there is no one there. The human has absented itself. Hollow vessels.
(Glover: 2009) (1)

Angus didn’t make it easy, either for himself or for his audience. He deflected enquiries, appeared to be making great deviations from the path, and switched frequently from one medium to another… [he] denied himself the comfort of making signature art, and with it the safety of a conventional career(2) …. Consistencies that ran through his thinking and the making of his work… [included] his affection for and exploration of collage… his obsession with layering, both physical and conceptual, and with the silhouette….
… In… late works, the billboards, advertising signs and blank walls of faceless buildings evoke the common, shared, but often hostile and dangerous, spaces of the inner city urban experience…..
… Fairhurst has a fondness for laying down images, one upon another, to the point where illegibility gives way to new meaning…
His images distil the contemporary worlds of advertising, billboards, and magazines, and lodge themselves in our memories more insistently than their sources…
(Nicholas Serota, Craddock 2009: 8)

I shall pick out and explore Fairhurst’s themes, as I see them, in more detail.

Death, suicide: its resonance for me on a personal level
I found the exhibition very moving. Fairhurst had taken his own life not long before, and it was impossible not to feel the sadness of this; the loss presented itself everywhere. I have some personal experience of suicide. A man I once felt close to committed suicide several years ago. I experienced his death like a black hole in my life: it sapped me emotionally. It was a vacuum of pure sadness created by someone who had abandoned all hope and responsibility for their life. Someone for whom I cared had been emotionally unreachable yet crying out for help: I could not help him in time, and now it was too late. In addition, I probably have a peculiar sensitivity because my father died when I was a young child in ambiguous circumstances that could be said to have been suicide. I am interested in the messages that lie in the empty space. The power of the black hole.

Emptiness
For the retrospective, unnatural death had become a theme in Fairhurst’s work, if it had not been before. Negation of life was suggested, for instance, by the empty space left behind by the negation of the words and human forms in the cut out images. By negation of space, I mean to suggest the unnatural and sudden removal of a human from the space they occupied, and in which their presence was still felt. This negation was also physically present in the sparcity of the exhibition and the emptiness of the beautiful polished-concrete exhibition space.

Given the status of the artist, and the quality of the work, the fact that there were very few people at the exhibition was surprising (3). There was a stillness about the place. On the first floor was a room with a drum kit. I requested some drum sticks and the stillness continued as my son started to play a pulsing rhythm. The sound echoed against the concrete. The effect was profound: I was overwhelmed. Afterwards, my feelings were gushing: his work had been honest and worthy, and he had been deeply engaged in it as a way of exploring himself and his relationship with the world. He had been hugely successful…. But I did not want to excuse his death or feel sorry for him. Suicide feels demanding: demanding that it should have been avoided. It is something no-one wants to happen, but the demands are left behind, entreating us into empathy with the suicidal misery of the lost life. Fairhurst had attempted to cut himself out of life, but like every suicide, had left an emptiness that could not be filled. Anti-suicide advice says killing yourself will not stop you feeling unbearable sadness, because dead people cannot feel. The living continue to feel. They take on the burden, but the strength of feeling is not necessarily lessened for the fact that many more will feel it.

I cannot help feeling Fairhurst’s suicide is inextricably linked to his work, his working practice, and to how I understand his work.

Career suicide
Even after his death, when critics become more deferential, most reviews of Fairhurst’s work describe him as a minor YBA (Young British Artist) and imply that he achieved less success than other YBAs.

According to Serota’s description of Fairhurst, quoted above, he is effectively committing career suicide through his approach to his practice. Fairhurst chose not to take up the tools artists routinely use to smooth their path in the world. “Branding” is a good cover-all term for these tools. Branding lets people know in advance what they should expect. When a person gets what they expect there are no jarring surprises. This remains the case even if the work on offer is as shocking as some of that made by the artistic career-management master Jeff Koons (for example, his Red Butt [1991], a photograph of anal sex between him and his porn star wife and mother of his children). The implication is: given the opportunity to make up their own minds from the start, people are likely to underrate and misunderstand the work, and bring it down to their own humble level. It is clear that Fairhurst was not ‘making the most of himself’ (a commonly used, and vaguely threatening phrase), and was, as a highly talented, engaged and well connected man, committing career suicide.

It is interesting to compare the ‘brand’ of Fairhurst with that of his contemporary Damian Hirst. Both are artists of international repute, of course, but in the mind of the audience, I sense that Fairhurst’s work appears more humble, approachable and human. The retrospective’s gallery space and curatorship obviously makes a difference here, but could or would Damian Hirst have been curated in the same way? Could Fairhurst’s work stand up to the pedestal treatment the more ‘popular’ artists receive? And would Hirst have the same level of success if his work was viewed in a less reverential atmosphere? Would it still hold the same level of interest if viewed in intimate surroundings? (4) This leads me to a difficult question: was not Fairhurst being naïve and stubborn to flout convention, perhaps to the extent that his life became unlivable? Ultimately, Hirst is generating enormous financial success and is still alive and working as an artist. Fairhurst appears to have failed to achieve this. He could not even live out his natural life.

Poststructuralism and postmodernism
Fairhurst’s work was clearly poststructuralist and postmodernist. Eleanor Heartney could have been describing Fairhurst’s work when discussing Victor Burgin: “[he] is interested in the social messages embedded in photographic images culled from Hollywood film or advertising. After isolating them from their sources, he provides new contexts that highlight the unspoken assumptions they embody” (Heartney 2001: 35). His work pursues the postmodern act of “purloin[ing] already existing images and recontextualis[ing] them in ways that leave plenty of room for viewer interpretation.” (Heartney 2001: 36). Fairhurst was interested in the production of language. His work was inconsistent and he did not develop himself as a market entity. Though he developed as an artist, he stubbornly refused to make the full leap into commodification of his work that appears to be necessary for contemporary artistic practice, even for those only interested in playing with language. For an example of an artist uninterested in the proliferation of objects yet who is still able to achieve market success for his language-based work, see Martin Creed, and his website http://www.martincreed.com.

Further Artistic Themes: Their Links With My Work

Having talked about Fairhurst as an artist, and his artistic themes, I would like to move on to discuss the links his work has with my own.

Metaphor
As a poststructuralist artist with interest in language and metaphor, Marcel Duchamp will of course have been a major influence. His Étant Donnés is referred to by James Cahill as an influence for Fairhurst.

In their massing together of metaphors… the… collages bear revealing similarities to Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated project Étant Donnés (1946 – 66).
(Craddock, 2009: 17)

I saw this piece of work some time ago and it had a strong affect on me. It came up again when I was developing a sculptural piece of work I called Fish Dream. I created a box containing a small sculptural representation of a scene from a dream, with peephole access. What I liked about Étant Donnés was the surprise and complicity I felt when I went to the peephole and saw what we had all been queuing for. Duchamp had created this weird intimate space. From this private moment, one has to turn around and walk out of the room. I felt self-conscious and wondered what response I should give to the person next in line. There is room for the imagination when looking into the spaces in Fairhust’s cut-out images: like keyholes through to the next page.

Gorillas
A theme running through Fairhurst’s work is the gorilla. In his film Cheap and ill-fitting gorilla suit, for instance, Fairhurst breaks out of the fancy dress costume gorilla suit and emerges vulnerable and naked, reminding me of another of his images: a peeled banana. After visiting the exhibition, I began to notice what a powerful cultural idea the gorilla is (see, for example, the films Morgan, A Suitable Case For Treatment and Human Nature [1966]) (5). By coincidence - or some strange cultural pull - I had chosen to become a gorilla when working on an animated self-portrait of myself turning into an animal. I was excited to find this as a theme in Fairhurst’s work.

Layering
Fairhurst’s theme of layering had also been interesting me prior to going to this retrospective. I had looked at an artist who had layered every page of the Koran so that each page was visible at the same time (making the entire thing illegible, but complete to one view). I had also seen the work of a local Cornish photographic artist Ian Brown (6) who had made multiple exposure photographs of a whole day in various rural locations. This overlaying of many images seemed to me to be an animation with time removed. I was surprised to find Fairhurst had produced images of newspaper front pages overlaid, and had also put time back in with animations featuring overlaid drawings.

Collage
I have always enjoyed collage and photomontage. This theme was one I took up again immediately after I went to the exhibition. I wanted to pursue the work Fairhurst had done and make my own experiments with magazine cut-outs; it was an enjoyable process and one which led to some seriously interesting questions.

I questioned if a vessel ever really was empty or hollow - as the above quote from the Independent stated. If we look at his ‘text removed’ work, Fairhurst has sometimes cut precisely around the text so that the words are still clearly legible (see image). To remove the legibility of the text entails removing the space around the letters, too. Otherwise, the space is empty but as a signifier it is still pretty much meaningful in its original way. The same applies to the cut outs of the human forms. I question whether the messages of “sex, bodily ease”, etc, are not still powerfully present. Surely as with the textual signifier, the signifier of the model is still as clearly legible to any reader in our culture as is the cut-out text. Staying with the same quote, I question what is the “human” that has “absented itself”? This implies to me that there is a primal human within us, who would prefer to be frolicking in nature if only they got the chance. This human, by implication, can simply ‘do without’ the modern culture s/he is locked into but, oh no! , for some only vaguely intuited reason, somehow they cannot achieve this. But what is the reason? If we examine it for even a moment, we are forced to realise the impossibility of this romantic notion. I am influenced by J G Ballard here to say that modern culture cannot be simply negated (7). In light of the idea of suicide I discuss above, and to use Fairhurst’s cut-outs as an analogy, if the human is removed what we are left with is an abstract image with even more power in its potential to cross-over (to use the advertising term). In my opinion, the following quote is more germane:

Fairhurst deconstructs the metonymic images of adverts – beautiful bodies, luxuriant interiors – to reveal their intrinsically incomplete and substitutive nature. Yet paradoxically, his technique extends the process by which visual advertising itself selects, excises and dissimulates, so as to recast reality in a shorthand or metalanguage of paradigms.
(Craddock 2009: 15)

How Potent is Fairhurst’s Work?

I described above being overwhelmed with an emotional response to the retrospective exhibition. I would like to explore Fairhurst’s potency on a deeper level, in relation to our culture. Clearly, his work exposes cultural norms underlying the imagery he works with. I would liken the process by which he does this to one which Catherine Belsey discusses in relation to the making of poetry: “what the poem does is isolate… images… from the ‘noise’ that would surround them in actuality… proposing parallels, inviting the reader to make surprising connections between apparently distinct signifiers.” (Belsey 2002: 15)

This has a certain amount of interest in and of itself but I would like to focus on what Fairhurst is exposing.

The language of advertising
At the most basic level, in magazines and billboards, Fairhurst exposes the poses and compositional page layouts, and the relation between words and figures on the page: ie, the language of advertising. The question that comes up for me is how important is this? Are these not issues of minor importance concerning throw away, trivial media? Unpacking this thought, I find an assumption (similar to the one above) that we could exist without advertising and ‘the media’: an implication that these are not an intrinsic and deep part of our lives as modern humans. But again I return to J G Ballard and am confronted with the (unpleasant) fact that these issues are deeply part of our lives. The language of advertising needs to be exposed, as much as, or maybe more than other things (I’m thinking, for example, of the beauty of roses, or something equally ‘poetic’!).

So, we live under an illusion that ‘the media’ and advertising are removable from humanity, like a nasty blemish that – with the aid of cosmetic surgery - could be cut from a beautiful body, making it perfect. The reality of the blemish is more like a cancerous growth in the tissues of the body of humanity; not an attack on the body from the outside, but the body’s own inescapable response to its environment and condition. So I maintain the seriousness of Fairhurst’s work and the issues he deals with, starting, as I say above, at the most basic level.

Progression of My Practical Work

Hand in hand with my theoretical work goes my practical work on Fairhurst. I shall now describe how that work has been progressing.

I have already mentioned making some cut-outs with magazines, imitating Fairhurst’s work. I proceeded to experiment with making cut-outs from photographs. First I used my own photos, then those of other people that I found on the internet (see images). It seemed appropriate to me to use the internet; I wanted to fully engage with contemporary culture without prejudice, as Fairhurst had with print media (the prejudice being that these are superficially irrelevant, better to ignore them and concentrate on more important things). The images I found were on Facebook ([Online] available at http://www.facebookcom).

Facebook is a new common language in our culture, and I wanted to treat it as Fairhurst had treated magazines and billboards.

The language of Facebook
Links to photographs of ‘friends of friends’ (Facebook terminology for these mostly unknown people) automatically appear on each Facebook account home page as and when they are added by users and commented on by ‘friends’. In my normal use of Facebook, I noticed that I was accessing the meaningless and repetitive holiday/good times photographs of complete strangers. These photos were without any personal interest to me whatsoever, but I looked anyway.

What was I seeing?
To find out more, I began to play with the photographs. I traced figure outlines from the images using the screen as a lightbox and cut out the silhouettes of the figures. I worked on cutting individual figures out of group shots, to explore their special relationships to each other, and also made one complete album of silhouetted figures overlaid onto each other in the style of Fairhurst’s complete magazine cut out.

The perfect profile
I had been using Facebook for about a year, and I was becoming aware of the gradual process of assimilation of the language of Facebook (Belsey describes this as “internalizing its meaning” [Belsey 2002: 12]). On Facebook, we are branding ourselves using similar techniques to those of advertisers and public relations consultants. As my work on Fairhurst proceeded, I felt I could set up the perfect Facebook account based on the accounts of others: classic friendship shots in photo albums, but all in silhouette and completely abstract (8). It would be the perfect person’s profile. This person would have a fun life and a collection of interesting and interested friends. I hoped to make discoveries about the underlying language we are taking for granted. Instances might include: how many friends? Are they the right people? Do they make funny/endearing/life-enhancing comments? Are updates on your profile being responded to correctly? Do enough people ‘like’ them? And deeper, because there is less chance of getting it wrong by chance: do your friends behave correctly? Eg, are their sentences formed ‘correctly’? Do they appear appropriately in their photographs? I want to explore how wrong we can get it, within the structural limitations of Facebook (9).

On-line, as in everyday life, we are drawn to accumulate and display collections of attributes to appear as though we are living correctly instead of simply living. If you get your story straight, it cannot be unpicked. The perfect Facebook account would be based on the perfect human. Is there such an ideal? There clearly is a good approximation, but as Belsey describes in Poststructuralism this is likely to be understood by difference to rather than by meeting the approximation exactly: “meaning is differential, not referential” (Belsey 2002: 10).

Conclusion

This is such a fertile area of study and I have only made a start in understanding Fairhurst’s work as it relates to my own ideas and current research. But in so doing, I have begun to understand Postmodernism and Poststructuralism better and am putting to use the conceptual tools they have on offer. By engaging both on a practical and theoretical (written) level, I have opened myself up to the practical problems Fairhurst engages with and have generated ideas for future projects. I hope that this is an outcome sympathetic with the spirit of the work of Angus Fairhurst; to “range over, not pierce” his life’s work.

Footnotes

1) “While Damien Hirst and other YBAs went on to make millions, their friend Angus Fairhurst seems fated to be remembered for his suicide. Michael Glover visits the first retrospective of his work”
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2) Jeff Koons (interviewed on the Tate Channel) says it is necessary to develop an artistic vocabulary; this appears to be something Fairhurst did not do. It appears to me that to become aristocracy – in the realm of art like any other – you have to be a sustained and cohesive personality with a strong sense of self, and of the innate ‘rightness’ of that self’s actions. There’s no room for self-doubt. Sudden and confusing changes of course lead people to stop and question the validity of your position. And why not, when the choice of artistic direction is so clearly up for grabs. So an artist needs to chose their vocabulary and stick to it….

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3) In the section Career Suicide, below, I discuss this in relation to Fairhurst’s Goldsmiths contemporary Damian Hirst.
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4) Also, compare with Jeff Koons’ recent exhibition at the Serpentine (Popeye Series, 02/07/09 –
13/09/09): the work literally could not be less approachable since everyone was specifically requested not to touch the work, and gallery assistants intensely scrutinised the movements of everyone in the room.

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5) This theme also brings up issues of interchangeablility of identity: so see also, Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983): “Zelig’s own existence is a non-existence; devoid of personality, his human qualities long since lost in the shuffle of life, he sits alone quietly staring into space: a cipher, a non-person, a performing freak. He who wanted only to fit in, to belong, to go unseen by his enemies, and be loved, neither fits in nor belongs, is supervised by enemies and remains uncared for.” See also, the futuristic idea of this in Tarkovsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973) (the identity mask factory).

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6) Exhibited at The New Landscape at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, 17/1/09 - 14/3/09
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7) J G Ballard says the suburbs, ring-roads, out of town shopping centres and supermarkets have the power now, and there is nothing those with ‘good sense and good taste’ can do about it. His ideas are fascinating and deserve move attention than I can offer them here.

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8) See also Peter Coffin’s work, Sculpture Silhouette Props.

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9) Lars Von Trier exemplifies this process of exploration into cultural language though getting it ‘wrong’ in his films (see The Idiots (Von Trier 1998), for example).

Bibliography

AINSWORTH, Martha. 2009. ‘If you are thinking about suicide… read this first’. Metanoia: online therapy e-therapy mental health education suicide prevention internet counseling help psychotherapy spirituality consumer advocacy Martha Ainsworth [online]. Available at: http://www.metanoia.org/suicide/. [Accessed 08/10/09]
ALLEN, Woody. 1983. Zelig. [Video: DVD]
BELSEY, Catherine. 2002. Poststructuralism : a very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press
COFFIN, Peter. 2007. Sculpture Silhouette Props
CRADDOCK, Sacha with CAHILL, James. 2009. Angus Fairhurst. London: Philip Wilson Publishers
CREED, Martin. ‘Martin Creed’. Martin Creed [online]. Available at: http//www.martincreed.com. [Accessed 08/10/09]
DUCHAMP, Marcel. 1946 – 1966. Étant Donnés
JODOROWSKY, Alejandro. 1973. The Holy Mountain. [Video: DVD]
KOONS, Jeff. 1991. Red Butt
KOONS, Jeff. 2009. ‘Tate Channel: In the Studio: Jeff Koons’. Tate Channel [online]. Available at: http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/26522806001. [Accessed 08/10/09]
GLOVER, Michael. 2009. ‘Angus Fairhurst: The forgotten man - Features, Art - The Independent’. The Independent [online]. Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/angus-fairhurst-the-forgotten-man-1570775.html. [Accessed 08/10/09]
GONDRY, Michel. 2001. Human Nature. [Video: DVD]
HEARTNEY, Catherine. 2001. Postmodernism. London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd
REISZ, Karel. 1966. Morgan, A Suitable Case For Treatment. [Video: VHS]
VON TRIER, Lars. 1998. The Idiots. [Video: DVD]

If, in the UK, you have seen Nannie 911 you will know about "good job"bing. The nannie uses this expression all the time to "encourage" children who usually only get criticised by their parents. We don't use "good job" here, but it is creeping in (someone said "good sharing" to my son the other day), and we have many equivalents ways of boxing children up with praise.

'"Good job!" is a remnant of an approach to psychology that reduces all of human life to behaviors that can be seen and measured. Unfortunately, this ignores the thoughts, feelings, and values that lie behind behaviors.'

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