Analogue Nostalgia

Arranging myself with pen and paper at my maker table rather than computer desk (that sounds more luxurious than the cramped reality of each), I am determined to get writing again. It has been an intense few weeks of action working on all aspects of Audiovisual Cultures podcast, and my brain and body need a break away from computers and electronic devices in general. I have had to have the same word with myself as I've had before about not equating being hunched over a laptop with productivity. I've probably said this before on the blog, but words just flow out of me when I handwrite them, whereas I get exhausted after typing half a sentence I've just thought of. 

So, no, better to jot this by hand and type it later; a method that befits the intermedial qualities of the artworks I want to discuss in this post. Following a wonderful phone catch-up with my dear friend, the North East-based artist Richard James Hall, Dick sent me an equally wonderful gift: several intricate dot and line drawings and a series of digital Polaroids. While I feel personally more moved by the drawings because I can feel Dick's presence and painstaking attention to detail with every dot and stroke and every choice of colour that I can lose myself to studying, the technical/technological aspects of the Polaroids pique my curiosity.

Of the nine Polaroids Hall sent, one is a stand-alone piece entitled 'Autistic Dissonance', the words appearing in white block capitals in an orange rectangle just a little above centre. Around or layered behind this are shards of digital debris, junk almost, and what appears to me to be a skewed map grid. The word 'SELL' is slanted in the top right corner appearing on a panel on top of the purple/yellow/black jumble and poking out from underneath a vertical blue panel with green land-like blotches. Near the top right are some angular red shapes, the left-hand two of which look a bit like isolation pods and the right-hand two are more like ticket turnstiles. Who knows if I'm on the right track, but there is something going on with the clutter to the top and right of the image cleared from the side of the grid which looks at once like a map and a floor; all an expression of a disharmonious mind - but by what measure? Certainly a conversation starter.

The 'Digital Meditations' series comprises eight abstract digital paintings printed on Polaroids. This photo-less photography becomes a way of displaying rather than making the image, using the signature Polaroid mount as a readymade frame. The equally signature slight haze in the resolution does make the images look photographic as if paintings are reproduced in the photos rather than this being a printing method for digital paintings produced in an app.

The colours used in the series include yellow, a rich blue, purple, a darkish orangy-red, orange, a light green, a dark green and teal. What I think are finger strokes look very much like wispy brushstrokes. They break off and have gaps in the distinctive and contingent way paintbrush bristles do. There are lighter touches that look as if they were made by a drying brush running out of paint. Some are more blurred than others, making the markings look farther away while the more definite ones, particularly 8/8, appear as if they are close-ups on a detail of a larger work. Each replicates or performs instances of smudging and colour bleeding. None are in any way figurative, but 2/8, 3/8 and 5/8 if regarded at a certain angle might give the impression of a face emerging from the shapes and placing of colours, with perhaps even a hint of sadness. 2/8 to me appears as a pale figure with its bold mask slipping off. The layering of colours in 8/8 puts me in mind of Wassily Kandinsky.

Where these works are digtal-cum-analogue, my writing must take the opposite journey to reach any readers. I might keep the paper, though, or send it to Dick. The handwriting process is performative in its own way, with visible edits and mistakes that are unmarked and erased in the publishing.

I mention performance because I know Hall primarily as a performance artist, and like many performance artists, drawing is an extension of their performance practice. With both the set of drawings on paper and the digital drawings printed on Polaroid, the artist's actions and presence remain locked into the fabric of the finished works, which in this regard become documents indicating that a performance took place and the end product is simply where that part of the live actions stopped or paused.

The life-art-technology relation this evokes puts me in mind of my learning about Fluxus and the live and intermedial work the Fluxists engaged in. The members of this group and their associates, largely in New York City in the 1960s, used to put on events, screenings or 'happenings' in their homes. Confined as we have been to our domestic spaces for over a year now, Hall has explored personal digital media as a platform and as art material to continue their performance practice. Using Instagram Live for a time in 2020, Hall made weekly performances to camera from home that re-evaluate the liminal or transitory spaces of door frames and staircases. In a similar way to Fluxus, these actions involved using regular household objects in very different ways. The performance I found most striking, though - the experimental film aficionado in me surfacing - was one showing Hall's hands working through a pile of Polaroids, placing them one at a time on a new, disorderly pile on a table top, which put me in mind of the films of Hollis Frampton, a photographer who used his stills in moving image films dealing with memory and past experience, films that fuel discussions on the ontology of still photography combined with moving image film, and the implications of notions of film as a time-based medium.

What strikes me most of all about the pieces Hall sent me, and which also links the works to these earlier practices, is the deeply personal nature of them. They may be abstract, but they are made with such incredible feeling, and to be gifted them via post (which in turn puts me in mind of Vito Acconci who posted artworks to friends), is so special. While I've pointed out here that some of the means of expression are not new, the expressions are made in very new ways and from a new place, making them all the more exciting and part of important and often institutionally marginalized legacies. But what really matters here is the bond of friendship through such powerful creativity.