This my first ‘Conceptual’ art work which happened quite by chance.
One day when I was out sketching in the countryside near school. I had almost completed a pen and ink landscape when it started to drizzle. I saw small drops of rain settling on the paper, creating small blotches on the inked lines. Almost like small flowers in the long grass. One’s immediate reaction would have been to cover the paper. But I could see natures work. It was not only benefiting my work but very much part of the same landscape that was being represented at that moment. The rain was fine so the change slow. I think about two minutes of just watching. I then covered it, happy that the work had received enough rain. The work competed by a certain amount of rain as if painted by rain. The action of such also providing the means of representing rain and its effect on the world. To grow the grasses to make them flower.
In the period leading up to this work I had come to realise that the natural world was being destroyed by humanity. The realisation that natural creation in all its infinite beauty was being destroyed by man’s actions and that the quality of human creation no match to that of the natural.
At the time I was attending a catholic school, Downside, in
Somerset run by Benedictine monks. They sought to teach and instil a religious
doctrine which I felt to be completely at odds with my realization. Their ethos
that god created man and man can do what he likes with god’s creation in his
interest profoundly wrong. In effect conferring on humanity a moral priority
which was not only wrong but now also as it turns out the cause that would endanger
not only all of the natural world but also that of humanity itself.
The area I was most talented in was art so in consideration
of which I tried to address this wrong artistically. With a symbolic art act.
Shortly before the school’s Sunday Mass in the abbey, I
removed the crucifix from the main alter. Hid it. Then placed a small mound of
earth centrally on the crisp alter cloth.
At the time the term used to name this to my brother and a
small group of confidants was that it was part of my DADA campaign. Unaware of
the more apt term of Conceptual Art. With its preplanning this was my first
true Conceptual Art work. Which I think in terms of content and simplicity
still my best.
This act resulted in my expulsion from the school.
At the age of 16 in Sept 73 I started attendance at
Colchester Art School which I did for the Michaelmas and Lent terms. This was a
foundation course so I did a mix of formal studies and free work which by then
had become largely conceptual.
A week or so in I heard about a slaughter house up the road from the college.
Keen to know exactly what happened to animals I took my
sketch book and walked in asking one of the staff if I could make some
drawings.
What I witnessed and drew extraordinary and horrific. I had
to make a work which would convey this.
I realised that no matter how good my depiction of any of the dead animals I was simply not going to be able to convey the shear physicality and the horror of what I had seen without actually using blood itself to make the painting. There being something innate in our perception of blood that confers particular significance.
So the next day I went back with several jam jars and filled them with blood. One of the staff caught me doing this and was a bit concerned but somehow I managed to brush him off. I then assembled a large un-primed canvas on which I could paint one of the cow drawings, life size. The cow depicted hung upside down, legs splayed having just been disembowelled. I used charcoal and some white primer to delineate the outline of the form. Then laid the canvas down on the tarmac at the back of one of the Art School buildings where the work was painted. Only bringing the canvas in doors to finish the drip areas.
I had to pour the blood on as just dipping the brush did not
transfer the blood quickly enough onto the canvas. Further the blood tended to
sit on the surface of the Cotton Duck even though it was un-primed. So I had to
work the blood quite a lot to get good penetration in certain areas.
Whilst doing this a group of female catering staff walked
by. One said ‘It looks like blood’. Another with something of a gasp ‘I think
it is blood!’
A month or so later I had a personal ‘crit’ with a couple of
lecturers, one of which was Bill Packer who at the time also worked as Art
Critic for the FT.
I just brought this one work along and I recall it being too tall for the room, appox 9’ high, so we had to view it on its side.
After about 20 minutes of discussing the work Bill said ‘It’s just a bit too monochrome Michael’. I said ‘Blood is like that’. There was a long pause and Bill said ‘It’s a bit like using real cannons in the 1812 Overture’. For me the length of pause confirmation that the painting had worked.
I believe that this was the first painting made using blood as a substitute for paint.
Unfortunately the painting was lost about six weeks later when another student apparently stole it for its wooden stretcher.
I include the image below as it was something of an objet trouve for the blood painting which I had kept 3 months earlier. I was rather disturbed by this when I saw it on the kitchen table. It had been used to wrap a joint of beef. Moved by the physical power that the blood conveyed I asked my mother if I could keep this.
As a class exercise one of the lecturers asked us to paint something expressive.
I thought about it. Then went off to find the largest paint brush available. With this I made a single brush stroke in red gouache. Producing an image that would symbolize the brief. The next day I went on to make three more of the same. Three, because I was not particularly happy with the first two efforts. To my surprise I recall the work being well received by the lecturer.
Lichtenstein used the image of a single expressive paint brush stroke eight years earlier. In a work that was also clearly conceptual in its means of depiction. The vastly oversized brushstroke produced using his very non painterly dot cartoon method which further served to enhance the abstraction of the image. In addition, by choosing to use an image alien to cartoons in his portrayal provided another level of abstract distance within the work. The abstraction of the brush stroke in this way distances the image from what it purports to depict, in so doing also to say something about abstract expressionism and to distance the work from this movement. Here I was trying to do something different. The type of abstraction that I was attempting was that of the creation of a pure symbol. One that would simply stand for art expression, using the same medium and method, a paint stroke with which one might use to make an expressive art work. All that provides its symbolic transformation, is its scale and singularity. The scale and contrivance in producing this symbolic device which was designed to function as an art form. Conceptual only in this sense. A work of less complexity compared to that of Lichentein’s but none the less original. In so doing create a symbolic device that has been now been so exploited by graphic and contemporary artists over the years.
I was amused by an awful colouring in paint book that I found my local newsagents. The like of which I had not seen before. I bought it thinking I might be able to do something artistic with it.
Noticing the small printed dots, presumably those of pure pigment/die filling each paint area. I thought that I would represent this function by only ‘colouring in’ one ‘dot-spot’ on each page. Only one dot-spot area in the same place on each page had the painting treatment. Each spot painted with pure water, now containing colour the result of the dissolved pigment dots. The resultant spot on each page now representative of potential colour. The spots now representing colour visually and perceptually through their creation as an amalgam of pigments. The idea of the spot as a conveyance of colour born.
I clearly liked this work sufficiently to visit the same newsagent that evening and purchase an equally awful plastic star to award to the work. This work in part the catalyst that influenced my choice of the dot to represent colour in the London Folio Dot-Spot works a year later.
Whilst this shares some similarity with Long’s work of which I was unaware at the time this is an entirely different animal. Where Long’s work was about following a pre-planned route in open countryside. This provides exploration of a very different kind. Indeed that into the unknown the potential of which entirely open ended.
Shortly after lunch I walked up to a common area behind the
Art College taking with me a hog’s hair paint brush. The rules for this art
action simple. Throw the paint brush high in the air, the direction in which
the bristles point on landing that which one must proceed making every effort
not to deviate from the route so provided. This simple directive effectively
one to supersede general rules, social norms and one with no respect for
physical boundary. A device that had
created a blank canvas. This art action would require considerable fortitude,
resourcefulness and physical dexterity for substantial progress.
On this occasion I the brush pointed toward relatively open countryside. The first major obstacle was the river Colne. Fortunately only about 20ft off my direct route, was a tree with an overhanging branch which I was able to climb and drop down from onto the other bank. Then the A12 and the main East Coast rail line, hedges had to be crawled through or over, farmland and an angry farmer. About 4 miles out I came upon a small group of houses, progressing through the garden of the first and the crossing the road entering that of another the direct line taking me right up to the front door. The house seemed relatively rundown, I knocked, no answer, so I tried the handle it opened. I went in moving quickly and quietly toward the back of the house, found a window opened it, climbed through it and went on my way. I progressed on for another 3 or so miles with no great incident then turned round electing to return in a direction about 5% off the path that I had taken which I figured would take me into the centre of Colchester so I could get the bus home. This passed with no great incident.
I only attempted this work twice. On the second occasion and from the same starting point the brush landed in the direction of the town. Initially I made quite good progress and then came upon a row of terraced houses. Somehow I managed to talk the lady occupant of the first house into letting me enter and go through her house. She then shouted to her neighbour to let me through her neighbour’s back garden. The neighbour agreed to this and I then passed through a walk way to one side of her house. On the other side of the opposite terrace there was no one in any of the houses that I tried, so I simply gave up.
This the first time in 46 years since it was created the work has been ‘written down’ or more precisely put to silicon. For me at least it has been transferred only in the oral tradition. As a work of pure conceptual art, any image relating to it existing only as the altered neurons of its creator and those told about it. It has remained free from pretentious art presentation, with no monies exchanged and no material wasted for its material production.
This work consists of 10 almost identical screen prints. It explores the concept novelty and the roll this plays in the context of art.
This work had to be done in print so that I could generate a
number of the same objects. Despite its apparent simplicity the work was
intended to raise several ideas.
The first to explore the nature of novelty itself indeed its
function perceptually. We view the first New image and then the next which is
also new but in a different way and the next and so on. Each different in a
slightly different way and the accumulation of these individual perceptual
events also resultant in another form of novelty.
When we see something new for the first time we create if you like a new unique image template. Through which we can reference this image at a later date and through which we can recognize the same image again. This unique template is central to novel function and so too the essence of what we understand novelty to be about, our concept of it. This image template a kind of signature comprised of a composite of ID forms each of which provides the means to create a specific representation of space. This signature a new key pattern with which we can reference the composite arrangement that is the image again. This the means of reference through which the image is stored. The stored arrangement through which we can recognize the same arrangement or one that has similar component parts. This a stored assemblage of ID forms through which we can also follow when making a representation. A unique assemblage generated the first time a new form of image is observed. Any of the ten images are able to do this. That’s why when we see something new we look at it longer to understand the pattern assemblage and create a new ID form signature key.
When we observe the second print we also reference what we observed in the first print. So our reaction to seeing the same in the second print, is OK but what’s different? In effect saying to one’s self, why are you showing me this again? That’s why the second print is somewhat boring. However as I have just explained the second print does not do nothing even if it does not generate anything substantially new. What we see in the second print is not new, although it says it is, it is in one sense old. However the accumulation of the two experiences is new and so is the case when observing each of the other prints. But now each observation is just a kind of confirmation loop of what is contained in the preceding observation. But for each loop a record is made even if after several loops the record now thoroughly boring so that we know that we have seen several of the same. It was this exploration of the workings of novelty that which I was primarily trying to demonstrate in the work. However there was also one other that of its companion role in Art more generally, the creation of a new work of art and what this is and does. A work of art in its essence that which provides a new way of looking at the world. This work was also trying to say something about this.
In the Lent term space was provided in the college foyer for students to show their work. Not many took up the opportunity however I decided to show this there. After pining up the prints on several of the screens together I loitered around for a while just to gauge reaction. Just by chance almost as if from nowhere a chap started looking at them for some time and seeing me asked if they were mine. He introduced himself as Donald Judd. I don’t know whether he was just being kind but he enthused about them in the long discussion we had. He particularly liked the repetitive aspects within the work, the delivery of the ideas through the production of identicals.
When I was at prep school in the 60’s I once asked our priest, ‘what is difference between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost?’ He said ‘It’s a bit like this, God the Father is in one match box, God the Son in another and God the holy Ghost in the third’. I don’t know exactly what he was trying to say but I thought the image rather marvellous and it kind of stuck in my head. A wonderful yet absurd abstract device.
When the work/s were first made I simply stuck three Swan Vesta match boxes side by side as shown above, having removed the contents, onto paper side by side spaced apart and labelled underneath each in Letraset; God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost.
At the time, I made two versions of this work and the preparatory layout drawing which I still have. One of the works was made using Swan Vesta match boxes the other using Bryant and May (Brymay) boxes.
This work is about the perception of abstract entities in
abstract space.
Each empty match box identical yet apparently containing three very different types of abstract entity. The box a representation of the type of space and thing each entity could occupy and be. The void within each match box only a representative sample of such space and entity. We also know that god is all around us, around each of the match box voids in which each god exists. The type of spatial extension dependent on whether you are on earth, in heaven or in some other kind of coexistent space. Here each match box contains and is surrounded by three different types of god space and each godly entity unified by the sheet of paper on which the match boxes are bonded. All these different spaces and entities coexistent outside each box and only apparently different inside each box. Only the labelling indicating which. So there we have it!
I recently remade this work so that it could be displayed here. For this I followed the layout set out in the original retained drawing done for these works in 73. I thought of using old match boxes of the same type to do this but felt that this might introduce an element of retro nostalgia. At the time I only used Swan Vesta and Brymay boxes as these were those most commonly used. After all father Brendan only said match boxes not a particular brand of box.
Taking a lead from my first rain painting I decided to work outside and produce works affected and influenced in the main by working outdoors in all weathers. I moved my desk and chair outside onto the lawn at the back of the college where I worked producing drawings and paintings effected by the prevailing conditions. Only coming inside for lunch and tea breaks. The first day I wore only my usual clothing and got soaked through and thoroughly cold. The next day I put on all my sailing oilskins however even with these on the shear cold was numbing. The numbing effect on my hands such that is really effected the quality of the artwork made. The effect of course part of the work. However the exercise turned into something of one of endurance which lead me to curtail it after about a week. All the works made here were destroyed along with many others in my decimation work.
Michael Barron Conceptual Artist 73-75 