Toby Deveson: embracing the most sacred depths of souls

27/12/20

Toby Deveson: embracing the most sacred depths of souls 

Dance as the narration of a magical story; that recites on lips, illuminates imaginations and embraces the most sacred depths of souls. [Shah Asad Rizvi]

 

Before becoming a photographer, Toby Deveson wrote music. ‘Avant garde, atonal and arrhythmic’ is how he describes it. ‘Jarring and jolting.’ Even his use of alliterative adjectives – whether intentional or not – has a sense of the lyrical, and, born and largely brought up in Italy, he is certainly a passionate Romantic, in the true sense of the word (originating from a Romance country). Although his photographic journey began as one of documentary, his preferred genre these days is landscape: always black-and-white, always analogue, always full-frame negative. Deveson, in part, still approaches these images as if they were documentary, however: he seeks to capture not a story, per se – that, he says, would be too simple – rather the emotions of the place and the moment, that je ne sais quoi which will provoke a reaction and, he hopes, move the viewer to tears.

Deveson’s photographic compositions are infused with his talent for musical composition, and his approach, too, is similar. He speaks of finding the geometric pattern in the viewfinder, abstracted to the point where you almost don’t see what it is; you don’t see the textures or the shape, you just see the overall jigsaw. As Henri Cartier-Bresson said: ‘Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing,’ and Deveson, likewise, describes building a foundation – a solid and stable structure with science, knowledge and experience – on which to then let his instinct loose to do something ‘nebulous and creative’, to dance as the narration of a magical story. 

 

Musician Brian Eno uses the metaphor of gardening for his compositional process: ‘The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when’. Deveson, similarly, admits to not necessarily knowing why he pours a certain chemical where and when he does, why the result is as it is, or why it looks good (or not!) – he simply learned what he needed to know through time and habit – he is largely self-taught – and follows his intuition.

But his compositional process is not a solo dance, it is a pas de deux with a quite extraordinary and demanding partner – Mother Nature. Nevertheless, Deveson takes the leading role – after all, as Ansel Adams made clear, ‘you don’t take a photograph, you make it’. ‘You’re having to let what’s in front of you into the camera, but also put yourself into the camera from behind,’ says Deveson, who sees the process as a two-way conversation – indeed, a dance, or the intimate – and often intricate – choreography of a relationship. ‘It’s exhilarating,’ he adds. ‘A relationship infused with wonder and awe, passion and fear. A relationship with an undercurrent of playfulness and power and a constant sense of potential danger.’ As in any union, it’s a case of holding one’s own shape, while respecting that of the other – meeting midway, caressing, moulding a little to each other’s form, becoming a ‘we’, but ultimately remaining two ‘I’s. Deveson speaks of the immense challenge of placing his style and emotions on to something as vast and imposing as Mother Nature: ‘To not be engulfed by her, and to not rely on her to provide you with a stunning image, but to work with her and create something unique from something so universal’. 

To this end, Deveson travels widely, frequently driving for hours at a time, a vague plan half hatched, his route being steered, nevertheless, by his wayward dance partner. He seeks to experience as much of her as he can, to celebrate her gifts, to rise to her challenges, to capture that elusive moment in their relationship when everything changes, when something is learned and can never again be unknown. As with most significant realisations, these often only come later, when he returns to his darkroom and exposes the fragments of a partially recollected dream, reliving them all the more vividly for their bright monochrome. The dream as a whole, however, can never be fully resuscitated, leaving Deveson – and, in turn, his viewer – with the narration of a magical story, weaving in the unique stance of the present, and that of the individual’s past. Cartier-Bresson coined his famous term ‘the decisive moment’ to describe the fact that ‘photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression’. Just as no two performances of a given dance will ever be identical, the event itself is necessarily ephemeral, but the image Deveson makes represents the essence thereof, recites on lips, illuminates imaginations and embraces the most sacred depths of souls. 

 

© Anna McNay, 2020

Image © Toby Deveson, 2020

See also Spanish and Italian translations on the Metralla Rosa site

Essay: ‘The end is where we start from’. Laura Moreton-Griffith’s history painting of the future

18/07/18

‘The end is where we start from’: Laura Moreton-Griffith’s history painting of the future

In a series of lectures delivered at the University of New Brunswick in 1950, professor of political economy Harold Innis decried the ever-increasing loss of respect for the past and the future. This ‘present-mindedness’, as he termed it, was, to his mind, a symptom of capitalism, which had fostered the measurement of time, facilitating the use of credit and the rise of exchange-based calculations of futures that were deemed predictable and insurable. In his 2016 essay, ‘A New Politics of Time’[1], Professor John Keane similarly discusses the ‘myopia of democracy’, ‘encouraging a fixation on the here and now […], discriminat[ing] against younger generations [b]y allocating health care resources for the elderly and financing social insurance schemes out of current taxes […],turning a blind eye to long-term environmental degradation and […] the risks associated with bio-genetic engineering and burgeoning population growth’. These beliefs, Keane adds, are all ‘egged on’ by claims that we are facing ‘the end of history’ (as proposed by the American political scientist and economist Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 essay of the same name [2]) and the arrogant conceit that we have solved all the problems of the past.

The idea of a politics of time plays a key role in Laura Moreton-Griffiths’ dystopian installation, Truth Lies Within (2017). A ‘three-dimensional history painting’, it entraps and entwines the viewer in the act of storytelling, implicating her in the denouement of its disturbing plot. Walking amidst the ensemble of characters, she takes on a participatory role, bearing the burden and the guilt of every false decision. It might be described as a postmodern, post-truth, post-whatever-you-like scenario, but this would, in fact, be a misnomer, since the real key to Moreton-Griffiths’ work is the fact that it stands outside of time, or, at least, outside of the linear model of time on which modern – western – history is predicated. Instead Moreton-Griffiths employs the concept of non-linear, cyclic time, and weaves the elements of her work together as an author might weave a work of speculative fiction.

The term ‘history painting’ was introduced in the 17th century to describe paintings with subject matter drawn from classical history, mythology and the Bible. Derived from the wider sense of the Latin word historia, it essentially means ‘story painting’ and is a genre defined by its subject matter rather than any specific artistic style. In the 18th century, the term began to be used to refer to more recent historical subjects, usually depicting a moment in a narrative story, rather than a static subject. Typically a history painting would be large scale, made as a propaganda piece for those in power to represent and demonstrate the effect(-iveness) of their regime. For Moreton-Griffiths, however, history becomes the future – and a future which, discordant and undesirable as it seems, ‘could’, as Margaret Atwood says of her own works of speculative fiction, ‘really happen’. The social structures and power relations necessary are all already in place; they are all already (mis/dys)-functioning – the artist merely mirrors and exaggerates what she knows.

Each laser-cut standing figure adds to the painstakingly constructed tableau of cultural and art-historical references, conflating past, present and future in one pictorial event; a timeline of interacting and cascading cause and effect. Classical and Renaissance sculptures stand in ruins, symbols of the true democracy of times gone by, when oral tradition enabled the collective achievement of a healthy balance between time gone by and time still to come. Semi-bionic, the victims of technology, these sculptures are transitioning to computer-directed automata. Yet even these robots are at risk, positioned – helplessly rooted – amid armed putti on hoverboards, swooping menacingly, dancing the dance of the demon alongside dragonflies, which, on closer inspection reveal themselves to be military drones (sourced, Moreton-Griffiths says, from the CIA flickr site). Virtual reality headsets, voodoo dolls and segments of indecipherable binary code: the closer you look, the more threatening the scenario reveals itself to be. The work collages themes of propaganda, false information, and algorithms that target us with personalised political messages. The installation, or combination of elements as a whole, takes precedence over individual painted or constructed elements: the crowd, rather than an individual; the complex and daunting narrative of a mob. Them against us. But who is the us? Clearly, the ‘Other’, the lesser, the victim. Do we, the ‘Othered’ viewers, then stand united, or is it each man and woman out for him- and herself?

Moreton-Griffiths wants her timeline to be multidirectional – like a choose-your-own-ending teen fiction book – but does this allow for undoing one’s false decisions, redressing one’s mistakes, redeeming society from the sins of the past? In One Dimensional Woman [3], philosophy lecturer Nina Power speaks of ‘a feminism of failure’ – a model in which women would have the freedom to fail, to be uncertain, to question, experiment and ultimately define – and redefine – themselves. Might Moreton-Griffiths’ dystopia be read as a dystopia of failure – a dystopia that might yet be inverted, rescued, even rendered utopian?

Perhaps what is represented is a form of limbo, or purgatory, an indefiniteness of time as much as of identity and direction, a place of looping back in order to move forward, or of looping forward in order to move back. A place of the conditional perfect, of would-have-beens and could-have-beens, but not necessarily ought-to-have-beens, for in a model of non-linearity, such uni-directional modals cease to exist. Anything becomes possible. The actors becomes the directors. We, the protagonists, build and arrange the next act. ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past,’ writes TS Eliot in Burnt Norton (1935). ‘What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning/The end is where we start from.’

© Anna McNay, July 2017

Images: © the artist 2017

Laura Moreton-Griffiths' website

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[1] John Keane, ‘A New Politics of Time’ in The Conversation, 2 December 2016, http://theconversation.com/a-new-politics-of-time-69137 [accessed 16/07/17]

[2] Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’ in The National Interest (16), 1989, pp3–18 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents [accessed 16/07/17]

[3] Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, Zero Books, 2009

Essay on the work of Nick Malone

06/05/17

Travelling through Time and Space: Meaning and Interpretation in the Work of Nick Malone

Nick Malone would rather think of his current practice as that of a painter who writes, than a writer who paints. His career trajectory has taken him from writer, with a sideline as a literary academic; to painter; to painter employing fragments of text in his works; to, most recently, author (does one say author, or artist?) of a graphic novel, purporting to tell the (abridged) story of his far from mundane life. For his exhibition at Art Bermondsey Project Space, Malone will bring together this graphic novel, as it currently stands, with a soundscape bringing to life its final, dramatic sequence, and some of his recent, large three-dimensional paintings, all of which draw from what he describes as his ‘personal and private mythology’. In such a scenario, without knowing the artist’s story in advance, one might well wonder how the visitor is to pinpoint any meaning in the work, or, more importantly, whether there even is such a thing. What can one hope to find? ‘They do have meanings,’ says Malone, of the assorted works that will be on display. ‘And they all emanate from this common vision. But there is no absolute […] There are differences in emphasis.’

Using a model, whereby the subject matter and artist’s intention are external to the work of art as an aesthetic object, Virgil C Aldrich delineates a difference between an artist’s intention and the meaning of the work.

‘Just as someone might say something he did not intend to say, so may an artist fail to get his intended message across. […] Thus do the material and the medium have their own powers of expression which may run counter to the intention of the user, depending on how he deploys them.’[i]

He concedes, however, that knowing both the subject matter and the artist’s intentions ‘tends to assist one to grasp what is in the work’. Malone, however, would not see such a difference in intention and received meaning as a failure. The ‘differences in emphasis’ he refers to are, if anything, quite deliberate, stemming from his deep-seated intrigue with ‘ambiguity, and the possibilities of multiple significance in meaning’[ii].

Malone’s paintings deliberately eschew a hierarchic structure, as he seeks to introduce chance into his practice, initially by pouring paint over hidden objects, creating a 3D landscape, and it is their mixed-medial nature, in which word and image simultaneously elucidate and obfuscate one another, ‘sharing the same space, though remaining clearly distinguished in terms of spatial relations, kind of intelligibility and often the division of labour,’[iii] that engenders what Simon Morley terms ‘topographic’ space, namely space subsuming both time and space.[iv] Accordingly, as well as subverting hierarchies, Malone’s works breach the boundaries of painting, considered since GE Lessing’s seminal essay, Laocöon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766), to be a medium concerned solely with space:

‘Painting, by virtue of its symbols or means of imitation, which it can combine in space only, must renounce the element of time entirely, progressive actions… cannot be considered to belong among its subjects. Painting must be content with coexistent actions or with mere bodies which, by their position, permit us to conjecture an action [ie. imply a narrative].’[v]

In Malone’s work, both space and time play a role, and a certain level of ambiguity necessarily arises depending in part on which plane you view it from. In the graphic novel, the level of diachronicity, or ability to travel back and forth through time, is made explicit by the use of windows cut from one page through to the next (and back), an idea developed from Richard McGuire’s Here (Pantheon Books, 2014). This time travel might also be seen as space travel, however, but specifically space travel between inner and outer worlds. As Malone explains, drawing inspiration from the lines of TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, with which he opens his graphic novel:

‘There’s always the “you” and the “I”, and the “you” is the Makepeace [a character in the novel], who opens the trapdoor into another world. […] The two worlds co-exist and you can go between one and the other. There’s this constant dialogue between the inner and the outer worlds. Imagination comes from this. It’s the human psyche.’

By employing word and image side-by-side, or, rather, interwoven and meshed, one on top of the other, Malone’s works insist upon two distinct modes of information gathering – one involving the visual scanning of the image and the other the reading of the words. The former mode allows freedom of interpretation and uninhibited mental and sensual movement, while the latter confines the reader to a predetermined route, constructed from a row of letters to be deciphered from left to right or top to bottom.[vi] According to bi-lateral models of the brain, image interpretation takes place in the right brain, the site of non-logical, intuitive skills, while language is sited in the left brain, which shows a bias towards the rational, logical and discursive. Morley concludes, therefore, that the interpretation of word and image not only occurs at quite different speeds, but, involving different orderings of perception, ‘we simply cannot do both simultaneously’.[vii] Thus returning to Aldrich’s discussion of the origin of meaning, the material and the medium of Malone’s work clearly exploit their own ‘power of expression’, with word and image each drawing the viewer down its own route. Bringing the overall picture together in one’s mind is not so much a process of discerning the meaning as of creating an interpretation, and it is this interpretation that offers the full aesthetic experience.[viii]

While Malone’s work may arguably have one central subject matter (recall: ‘they all emanate from this common vision’), his use of multiple media and materials means that there is no direct mapping of meaning to interpretation. This situation, of a ‘quantitative abundance of the forms […] correspond[ing to] a small number of concepts’, is equally a result of the model employed by Roland Barthes, in his analysis of myth as a metalanguage,[ix] and this model might be carried over to explain, in greater depth, the presence of ambiguity and multiplicity of interpretation in Malone’s work – work dealing, as we have heard, with his ‘personal and private mythology’.

In Mythologies, Barthes takes Ferdinand de Saussure’s model of the linguistic sign,[x] as composed of the signified (the underlying mental concept or form) and the signifier (the arbitrary material aspect of the sign, with which the signified becomes associated) and proposes a secondary or meta-system, whereby the mythical sign (the myth) is composed of a signified and then a signifier, itself comprising a pre-existing sign, the meaning of which is already complete.

This mythical signifier ‘postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions. […] When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished…’[xi] The essential point, however, is that the form does not suppress the meaning entirely, it is still there, albeit at a distance, to be drawn on.

‘The meaning will be for the form like an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness, which it is possible to call and dismiss in a sort of rapid alternation: the form must constantly be able to be rooted again in the meaning and to get there what nature it needs for its nutriment…’[xii]

Thus, in the case of Malone’s work, putting pre-established fragments of text together with fragments of imagery is like building a doubly complex myth and creating a metalinguistic sign from two or more pre-existing signifiers, each of which may draw on multiple pre-determined meanings. Depending on which features one calls up, and in which combination, the resulting interpretation might be infinitely construed – a rich plethora of ambiguity. Barthes concludes:

‘Myth is a pure ideographic system, where the forms are still motivated by the concept which they represent while not yet, by a long way, covering the sum of its possibilities for representation.’[xiii]

Since Malone’s work, like the mythical concept, has at its disposal an unlimited mass of signifiers (words and images), and since ‘there is no regular ratio between the volume of the signified and that of the signifier’,[xiv] so there is no limit on possible routes to and outcomes of interpretation. Aldrich’s conclusion therefore holds: both form and content (or, in his terms, medium/materials and content/subject matter) are key to the aesthetic experience and interpretation, and this, with his rich variety of mixed media, is an understanding that Malone exploits to the full.

© Anna McNay, February 2017

Published in the catalogue to accompany Nick Malone: A Tale of Two Lives at Art Bermondsey Project Space, 14-25 March 2017

Also available on Nick Malone's website

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[i] Virgil C Aldrich, Philosophy of Art, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1963, p92

[ii] Owing to a long-term friendship with the writer William Empson

[iii] Simon Morley, Writing on the Wall. Word and Image in Modern Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 2003, p10

[iv] ibid, p17

[v] GE Lessing, Laocöon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766) (trans with introduction and notes by Edward Allen McCormick), Baltimore, MD, 1962, p77. Cited in J Dixon Hunt, D Lomas and M Corris, Art, Word and Image. Two Thousand Years of Visual/Textual Interaction. London: Reaktion Books, 2010, p15

[vi] Morley (2003), p9

[vii] ibid

[viii] Aldrich (1963, p94) elaborates on this, using Dylan Thomas’ poem, The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait, as an example:

‘Suppose […] you ask […] what does it mean? This could be taken as a question about content and subject matter […]. But to press the question in this direction would be to turn your back on what counts perhaps even more, which is the texture of the medium of the composition; and that is what a good interpretation […] will draw attention to. How does the interpreter do this? How does he help you to the aesthetic experience of this property of the medium? He reminds you of the materials of the poem, not its subject matter.’

[ix] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, (selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers), St Albans: Granada Publishing Limited, 1973, p120

[x] F de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, New York: Philosophical Library, 1959

[xi] ibid, p117

[xii] ibid, p118

[xiii] ibid, p127

[xiv] ibid, p120

Essay: Laura Moreton-Griffiths

16/04/17

Essay: Laura Moreton-Griffiths

Like the myth of Pandora, Laura Moreton-Griffiths’ work might be seen as a kind of theodicy, addressing the question of why there is evil in the world. Brought up with a military background – her father was in the Royal Navy and her mother briefly a Wren – discipline and hierarchy were instilled in her from a young age, alongside a notion of patriarchy, which might well have been defined as: ‘blind obedience […]; the repression of all emotions except fear; the destruction of individual willpower; and the repression of thinking whenever it departs from the authority figure’s way of thinking’.[1] A lot of her work is based on arguments she used to have with her father, looking at human kindness and goodness and how ideologies get in the way. A key photographic series, for example, is Portrait as my Father (2016), in which, in the tradition of many female greats such as Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, she plays the role of the person she seeks to understand.

This method seeps through her practice, be it photographic, drawn, installation-based, or performative. Often objects created for one medium will resurface in another. In Machine For Winning (2016), inspired by the 1936 Olympics, Moreton-Griffiths takes on the roles, amongst others, of dictator, spectator and mother. This series also sees her don what she terms ‘a wearable painting’, in this instance an ironically lugubrious smile, adopted from the 1930s’ Budapest Smile Club phenomenon, in which attendees wore the smiles of such characters as the Mona Lisa and Loretta Young, fixed Hannibal Lecter-like over their heads with medical tape, in an attempt to counteract the city’s post-war suicide epidemic.

 

Moreton-Griffiths’ work reflects the things she is opposed to and thus necessarily deals with issues of conflict, control and politics. She makes a piece with a specific meaning, but then lets it go for her viewers to find a meaning of their own, thus treading the line between personal and societal. Performance is key to her practice and, for this, there must be costumes – and these costumes constitute works in their own right. The Inglory Suit, a Ku Klux Klan hood and duffle coat, for example, or the less Machiavellian Gas Hood, become characters, whom Moreton-Griffiths takes on outings, seeking out and ‘meeting’ other randomly related objects to be photographed with.

The idea of playing the role of evil, in particular with relation to the Klan, is one that Philip Guston explored back in the 1960s: ‘The idea of evil fascinated me [...]. I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot.’[2] While Guston grew up in Los Angeles, the child of Ukrainian Jewish parents, only too aware of Klan persecution of Jews, Blacks and others, Moreton-Griffiths has no such personal history, simply a keen sense of what is right and wrong in this world and a desire to unpick and understand the seemingly incomprehensible. Discovering her work’s commonalities with Guston’s, however, she took some photographs of herself in performance, wearing Gas Hood and the Klan hood, and turned them into Guston-like drawings. The characters in these – with their echoes of Nosferatu and creeping 1930s’ monsters (read: right-wing ideologies) lurking in the shadows – are now set to pop up elsewhere, so watch this space!

Moreton-Griffiths also works with text – in particular, she redacts certain documents. From the first page of the Human Rights Bill, for example, she has drawn out the words: ‘the incompatability of power to safeguard freedom’. From a page further in, all that remains is: ‘terror terror terror terror terror’ – a very clear echo of the patriarchal repression of all emotions except fear.

Moreton-Griffiths’ work is not all doom and gloom, however, and it bears a strong comic undercurrent. The plain white duffle coat, used as part of Inglory Suit, also appears elsewhere as her father’s arctic coat, and this reappropriation, or alteration of identity, suggests that nothing and no one is necessarily permanently fixed; redemption is always a possibility. Although the opening of Pandora’s box allowed evil into the world, hope remains inside.

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[1] As defined by the psychotherapist John Bradshaw in his book, Creating Love. Cited in bell hooks, The Will to Change. Men, Masculinity, and Love, New York: Washington Square Press, 2004, p23.

[2] Guston quoted in Philip Guston Paintings 1969-1980, exhibition catalogue, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1982, p54.

Images:

Sunk in the Arctic (2016)
From the series: Portrait as my Father
Collaborative digital photographic drawing on Arches Paper
112 cm x 140 cm
© Laura Moreton-Griffiths



A (2016)
Documentation of a performance.
Print on aluminium
30 x 20 cm
© Laura Moreton-Griffiths



The Group (2016)
Indian ink on Saunders Waterford paper
56 x 76 cm
© Laura Moreton-Griffiths

For more information on Laura Moreton-Griffiths, see her website