Untitled/Site
Specific Artwork. Crosby Ravensworth, Cumbria.
2016-2019.
Pencil on Household Emulsion/Plaster.
In this piece the artist records a period of his own physical growth between January 2016 and February 2019, specifically his changing stature during the early period of his adolescence. The drawing was made by standing with his back to the wall, marking the position of the top of his head at approximate right angles to the wall and repeating this act at informal monthly intervals. The repetition of this act, its performative basis and the single but changing metric it records accompanied in each case by a month/year index forms the basis of a complex and self-referential work of a tightly constrained autobiographical nature which addresses the artist’s unwillingness to accept the physical limitations of his own (short) stature during this time and his anticipation of change. Some of the marks knowingly show an ‘aspirational stretching’ of natural posture.
In common with much time based and performance work, of
which this drawing could be said to be the physical trace, the work has an
extended durational basis of substantial length (3 years) that places it in
sharp contrast to the relative brevity and drama of that masterpiece of 20th
century performance art Chris Burden’s (b. 1946 d.2015) ‘Shoot’ 1971 which also required the participation of ‘another’ actor.
It is not known whether either Barnes or Golding drew
influence from works in the performance genre that also develop over an
extended period and require an element of endurance to realise such as the frequently
performed ‘The Artist is Present’ by Marina Abramovic (b.1946). However, the
intervention of Golding in the work can be better likened to the brief and
unanticipated engagement of Ulay (b.1943 d.2020) with Abramovic during the
presentation of her piece at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2010 than
with the ‘role’ of ‘marksman/assistant’ in Burden’s ‘Shoot’. Burden’s claim to
sole authorship throughout ‘Shoot’ was maintained by the artist. The marksman, Bruce
Dunlap, whose subsequent career as an accountant comes as something of a surprise,
is not identified, recognised or even named by the artist as a collaborator but as an
element of the work under the direct authorial control of the artist. Whereas, Ulay and Abramovic’s time together (3 minutes) in the
NYC iteration of ‘The Artist is Present’ both formed and signalled a rapprochement and even reconciliation between two artists of
equal/unequal standing with a shared/appropriated history of collaboration, performance,
partnership and dispute.
In ‘Untitled’ 2016 2019 Golding’s intervention has a dissonant
effect. He uses his intervention, adopting the same idiom of mark making established
by Barnes and even going so far as to use the same pencil with which Barnes has
persevered throughout, to record his own greater height despite having been
born later. Golding’s intervention is mischievous, antagonistic,
confrontational, disruptive and even mocking and like Ulay’s unexpected participation
in Abramovic’s performance, committed
him to substantial risk driven by his desire to claim ‘his’ stake in the other’s
artwork. Dunlap never made this gambit and ultimately abandoned his artistic
ambitions.
Golding’s mark making and intention can be differentiated from
that of Barnes as he dramatically commits his own first name ‘Toby’ to the
piece. This is an act of intervention not collaboration. In addition it is not
known whether Golding faced away from the wall as he marked his own height which
introduces the exciting possibility of a contrived fiction in a work otherwise
deriving authority from its clearly defined method and discipline. We may ask whether the artist was in fact as tall as he claims to be.
Barnes’ marks however, made whilst facing away from the
drawn surface, carry a tortured quality drawn from the artist’s contorted
posture which he then develops to expressive effect by physically turning whilst
retaining contact between the pencil and wall. This process oriented act
extends the critical frame of reference of the work from a basis in the austerity
and discipline of a purely documentary format from which anxiety may merely be
‘inferred’ to a format which clearly references a mid- century trope of works
rooted in Surrealism and extended in the work of the Abstract Expressionists in which
‘writing’/mark making are said to tap into the unconscious and approach the
seat of anxiety as ‘automatic writing’/gesture. Barnes reveals himself to be
both a writer and a maker of images of writing. The emotional scope of
the work is thereby extended in this piece as anxiety can be both inferred and
‘read’ by the viewer in a final rendering that recalls the grafittiesque work of the painter Cy
Twombly (b.1928 d. 2011).
The work is site-specific being located on the upper landing
of the artist’s home adjacent to a body length mirror near the artist’s
bedroom door. Whereas Burden and Abramovic both placed their works in an
artworld context by performing in an art gallery, Barnes’ choice to eschew an
art world context is given added piquancy in its embrace of his father
Christian Barnes’ (b.1966) recent practice by situating his work in the locus
of his home. Barnes senior’s notebook based works ‘Peak Flow Diary’ (2014
ongoing) and ‘Blood Sugar Diary’ (2016 ongoing) document in a similar way (by
recording a single metric at regular intervals) his experience of Asthma and
Diabetes and the struggle to resist physical decline against the processes of
ageing and chronic disease. ‘Untitled’ 2016 2019 which stands in youthful
counterpoint to his father’s stage of life can now be said to have been
completed/abandoned by the artists. Barnes jnr. is now the tallest member of
the household although irritatingly for him Golding is still taller.
As ‘Untitled’ is painted over we are given the opportunity
to reflect on the fabric of the buildings in which we dwell and the extent to
which they serve as a palimpsest upon which the narrative of our lives is
written/unwritten.
Links/References.
1997; Cizza, G., Chrousos, GP., Anxiety and Short Stature, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9041314
accessed 18/04/2020
2015; uploaded by the failing New York Times, Shot in the Name of Art, Op-Docs, accessed 19 May 2020 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drZIWs3Dl1k
2012; uploaded by G Mmazz, Marina Abramović e
Ulay - MoMA 2010, accessed 19 May 2020 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS0Tg0IjCp4
2020; Tate Gallery Website, accessed May 2020 | https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/cy-twombly-2079
