EMPTY ICONOGRAPHY? BY CHARLOTTE APPLEYARD FOR ROUNDTABLE
Artists have always tried to symbolise the divine, most familiarly through Christian iconography where artists use symbols as visual shorthand. Examples include the cross or the dove. Traditionally representational painting has had four main characteristics. First, the artist. Second the viewer. Third there is the painting itself and fourth there is what the painting’s visual language is trying to represent. The Modernist interest in the pictorial plane eliminated the fourth element, the mundane or metaphysical object, preferring to concentrate on experiments in colour and form, or, the nature of art itself. Apart from brief resurrections in 1920s Paris, where artists such as Georges Roualt and the circle surrounding Neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain attempted to reaffirm a theology of visual art, the relevance of iconography had all but disappeared from art criticism. But the work of young artists like Benny Dröscher and Laura Morrison indicates that there is a renewed interest in visual language. This work is not concerned with representing a Christian God, as with Damien Hirst’s usurpation of the terminology in his work, but with a questioning of the nature of iconography and the object it is trying to represent, and by association, the role of belief in contemporary painting.“I am so tired of being an atheist” is the title of Dröscher’s recently commissioned sculpture for the city centre in Copenhagen, and perhaps it sums up a general feeling in contemporary art. Dröscher’s sculpture consists of thousands of tiny mosaic mirrors mounted on wood and polystyrene to create a mandorla of light recalling of the halos that crown the heads of saints in historical religious painting. The theme continues throughout his recent exhibition Lurking for Transcendental Moments at Rokeby gallery in London. Halos of colour, light or often indeed, nothing but circles of blank paper dominate the artist’s work. Combined with surrealist images of nature (trees, birds and deer being favourites) the artist creates a feeling of enigmatic longing for something beyond the mundane. The composition of his paintings, with trees tapering away into the distance, suggests that the viewer is lying beneath a fantastical forest canopy gazing into the abyss searching for meaning. The unreal compositions of everyday natural objects suggest a dreamlike state through which Dröscher dares to imagine the possibility of a transcendent meaning. He is hinting at the revival of the fourth aspect of representational painting; the metaphysical object beyond. It is, of course, a futile gesture. The artist is pondering the idea that visual art might be an inadequate language for illustrating the divine. The very fact that the artist “lurks” for his moments of transcendence is evidence of his mistrust of his own medium.
Laura Morrison, a graduate of Chelsea College of Art whose work was exhibited at New Contemporaries last year, has similar ideas; only Morrison does not mistrust the medium. Her use of symbolism is intended not to hint at a metaphysical beyond but to question the relationship between iconography and its relationship to belief. Her painting and sculptural work, influenced by Philip Guston, often involves the repetition of the same characters. But while Dröscher uses real objects in his iconography Morrison’s is self-manufactured. From start to finish, it is entirely unique. She begins by making her own objects, usually rocks that she paints or covers in textile and then incorporates them into her paintings. They reappear, in different compositions and different sizes; some resembling surrealist still lives others more akin to primitivist painting. For example, her Mini Monolith reappears in the works, Cave Painting and Jungles in the Garden with Tiles. Exhibiting the rocks alongside the paintings the effect of the recurrence of these symbols establishes a haunting visual language. The very composition of the works tempts the viewer to read her symbols as iconographic. Cave Painting has two different perspectives. On the left hand side of the canvas there is a sense of dimensional depth, the objects forming an absurd still life. Whilst on the right the background is flattened and heavily patterned. This warping of the perspective underlines the foreground’s totemic or iconographic quality – coercing the viewer into trying to ‘translate’ Morrison’s symbols.
The same might be said of David Thorpe, currently artist in residence at the Camden Arts Centre. Thorpe’s most recent work consists of totemic sculptural pieces that while similar to Morrison’s work, take on a monolithic quality. With his piece Fragile Resistance, a plaster and leather obelisk in the Saatchi collection,Thorpe claims to be “playing with certain associations” and that he is “absolutely in love with people who build up their own systems of belief”. So for Thorpe, the object is not meant to signify anything specific, the viewer “builds” the belief system themselves. Thorpe’s abstract sculptures, like Morrison’s, are empty fetish objects. They are items the viewer feels compelled to attach beliefs to and yet refuse this at the same time.
By subverting the traditional use of iconography, artists like Thorpe and Morrision are taking Dröscher’s point one step further and her subversion of this language highlights the crucial point; can a pictorial vocabulary ever really mean anything? Like words, visual symbols are just signs we devise to designate ideas or concepts. Just as if a person who had never learnt Arabic would have no idea what the letters or symbols would mean, neither would someone who had never seen Christian imagery before have any reason to understand the symbolism of the cross. So is Morrison’s iconography just one of the uninitiated? The artist insists not and that there is no deeper meaning as such. She is a staunch atheist but “firmly believes in our need to believe, even if in the smallest, most unnoticeable way”. Morrison is no cynic, she does not believe in a divine presence but the “human propensity for belief, its many guises, pious and secular” is crucial in understanding her work. By playing with iconography she is examining the tendency towards belief itself. While her visual language may not mean anything she still relishes the “seductive” nature of art objects but claims that her process illustrates “the very real and often frightening way that certain constructs convince and encourage us to join”. Morrison suggests that the repetition and recognition of images and symbols is a seductive mechanism, appealing to the viewer to want to understand and subsequently to belong. We want to believe that her repeated symbols mean something; we are still lurking for our transcendental moment.
Both Morrison and Dröscher manipulate our desire to believe, an idea that seems to have lapsed largely in contemporary art. Morrison’s work is more direct, where Dröscher’s work seems to hint at the existence of something to believe in, Morrison’s paintings and sculptures hint at nothing but the desire to believe itself. While she is fascinated by the drive to read meaning into symbols her own iconography does not refer to anything outside of itself. Her approach might be seen to owe a lot to Nietzsche who claimed that in the absence of any other source of meaning, man would have to inject his own meanings into the world. This would be a logical conclusion to the process from a traditional or “valid” iconography, with all four characteristics intact, to a concentration on the symbol or picture itself and finally an arbitrary iconography, one that seduces our desire to believe.
Charlotte Appleyard