The Beautiful City

The Beautiful City is a mixed media installation looking at the beauty inherent in the erosion of the natural urban landscape. All the elements included were drawn from the city of Leeds in West Yorkshire. The slideshow presented here was a projection forming part of the installation exhibited at Leeds Metropolitan University in November 2004.

The projection was presented alongside a found object sculpture, a series of monochrome slides and 4 oil paintings. The intent was to provide a means of explanation of the ideas and concepts behind them in order to make the use of each medium and how they link together in the finished piece clearer, both to the viewer and indeed to myself.

The DVD projection was appropriate as it documented my experiments with abstraction of natural forms. The slide projection and found object both showed the natural decay of the landscape in a purely representational form and the paintings were the conclusion to the emotional response felt by myself throughout the project. I think that the installation could have been more succinct and to the point had the DVD projection been edited more or even omitted altogether; Its inclusion is justified as it forges a link between the purely representational and the purely abstract.

Firstly, the found object. This is a small brick chimney stack, found whilst taking photographs for the projection pieces. When one thinks of the found object as a work of art one immediately thinks of Duchamp.

It was Duchamp after all who took first took the everyday, mundane object and elevated it to the realm of public display with the infamous Fountain of 1917.

It is possible to look at Duchamps ready-mades and find some aesthetic quality within them, for example his Bicycle wheel could be described as having a fluid grace or to use the language of St Luke, the urinal could be described as White and Glistening. Such aesthetic considerations were later dismissed completely by the pop artists of the 1960's, notably by Andy Warhol in his Stable gallery show of 1964 when he first exhibited his Brillo boxes.

So does a found object need some aesthetic quality to be classed as a work of art? I would suggest that when all aesthetic considerations are ignored then something gets lost. The key to this lost elusive element lies I feel in the title of the work.

Arthur Dando says in his essay ' Works of art and mere things ' that “A title is more than a name; frequently it is a direction for interpretation or reading.” To this end I decided to name my chimney stack structure ' The enigma of Heinrich Boll '.

The main catalyst for this body of work was my subjective reaction or emotional response to the locations or objects found in the places I chose to explore. Every time I passed the chimney stack in its original location it reminded me of the feeling of "hope within the despair of urban depravation" inherent in the work of Boll. It is in this connotation that the aesthetic value of the piece becomes clear to me.

This doesn't however explain fully why I consider the piece to be a work of art. When I originally discovered the piece there were five identical chimney stacks on the site. The question I must ask myself is therefore: Why is my 'Enigma of Heinrich Boll' a work of art and the other four not?

One answer to this can be found in 'Mad Love', Andre Breton’s 1937 sequel to the novel 'Nadja'. Here Breton talks of “Two objects of whose existence he was ignorant of some moments before which imposed with themselves some abnormally prolonged sensory contact which induced him to think ceaselessly of their concrete existence. He goes on to say

“The finding of an object serves exactly the same purpose as a dream, in the sense that it frees the individual from paralysing affective scruples, comforts him and makes him understand that the obstacle that he might have thought insurmountable is cleared. ”

My interpretation of this is that it is not the object itself that defines it as a work of art but the reaction, the subjective emotional response to the object that sets it apart from the rest of its surroundings.

This leads me on to the main DVD projection and more specifically the framed objects at the end of each animated sequence. The same rules apply here as to the found object with one significant difference. By framing the objects in their original locations they become not so much "Ready-Mades" as "Ready-Installs."

In other words, they throw up a rather unique problem:

If these objects can be classed as works of art, when did they become so? Was it when they were discovered? When they were framed? Or did the intrinsic quality inherent in the objects make them works of art regardless of any interference from me?

I would suggest the latter, as for me the art quality lie in the emotional response to the area rather than the objects. By framing specific objects I am drawing attention to the location as much as to the object itself. In other words the suggestion is perhaps not that the framed object is a work of art but that the very existence of a framed object turns the entire location into a natural gallery.

Is the DVD projection an overuse of abstraction? I can acknowledge that point; given the nature of the project, (finding the natural beauty in urban decay), the theme would have been clear to the majority of viewers with purely representational photographic imagery. This, however, was covered by the slide projection. With the DVD projection I wanted to experiment with the original photographs and see how subtle manipulations of the colours and forms formed an aesthetic not so immediately obvious.

To this end I present the object in its original form and by a slow process of abstraction, try to explain the emotional response I felt on encountering it for the first time. This is most evident in the abstraction of the object at the end of each sequence once the object is surrounded by the picture frame.

This owes a lot to the work of the Abstract expressionists. Barnett Newman’s concept of art being the alternative to nature was an idea I explored in an earlier work where I abstracted video footage of found objects along the Leeds-Liverpool canal. Part of this research led me to the idea of the abstract landscape which formed much of the work of Newman and Willem de Kooning between 1945 and 1949.

It was this idea I developed further when abstracting the images within the frames in my projection piece. By using the ideas of colour and form inherent in these works I attempted to bring the emotional response of the area back into the found object in order to once again give another perspective to the overall point. I would argue that, had the technology being available in the 1940s, then artists like Newman and De Kooning would have experimented in much the same way as myself.

The paintings were the end product of this research. I am almost inclined to regard the DVD projection as a sketch book, showing the process of representation, through abstraction to a finished piece giving a subjective reaction to the areas under investigation. The paintings took some of the forms and colour compositions which emerged from the projection piece but also approached the problem from its source.

In 1951 Kenneth Martin wrote "What is generally termed "abstract art" is not to be confused with the abstraction from nature which is concerned with the visual aspect of nature and its reduction to a pictorial form, for although abstract art has developed through this, it has become a construction or concretion coming from within." He goes on to say "The abstract painting is the result of a creative process exactly the opposite to abstraction-Just as an idea can be given form so can form be given meaning." With the DVD projection I had succeeded in abstracting the natural forms but this "inner meaning" was somehow missing.

The solution to the problem became clear to me after reading Terry Frost’s notes on his 1999 painting "Lizard Sunrise" He wrote, "Over the years I must have taken hundreds of photographs of sunrises which are never the same and change every two seconds. It was a question of feeling right about the colour. Is it yellow, is it orange, what's the colour surrounding it? The canvas had been (in my studio) for a long time, having had a good look at the sunrise, I thought "I've got to take the gamble" I got the colour in the centre which was important and I had never got before. I knew I had made it. It was nerve-racking to finish it off and not to lose what I had got."

My reaction to this was to revisit each location and absorb the colour of the landscape as it changed over a period of 3 to 4 hours. Just as Frost had sat on the cliffs in Cornwall trying to work out "The colour of the wind over the sea", I watched the colour of the decaying urban landscape within an inner city environment as the sun went down. It is from these experiences that the finished canvases emerged.

The DVD projection was appropriate as it documented my experiments with abstraction of natural forms. The slide projection and found object both showed the natural decay of the landscape in a purely representational form and the paintings were the conclusion to the emotional response felt by myself throughout the project. I think that the installation could have been more succinct and to the point had the DVD projection been edited more or even omitted altogether; Its inclusion is justified as it forges a link between the purely representational and the purely abstract.