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Published on the occasion of - 'As my father, I have already died'. Solo show at Firstsite Gallery, November 2004
Text by: Peter Suchin
At the Edge of Darkness: Adam Thompson
Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secrets of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.
Dylan Thomas [1]To summarise the work of Adam Thompson is not an easy task. The intense, dense blackness of the work's surface seems at first to suck into it, like the proverbial black hole, all possible meaning, holding back, whilst simultaneously parading and indeed literally embodying the elusive "dark clue" that might allow the viewer into its critical and contextual orbit. [2] We encounter a range of distinct modes or manners of expression in Thompson's practice: miniature landscape constructions, treated photographs, interventions into the very space of the physical structure of the gallery itself. These and other approaches used by the artist suggest that the mediums employed, whilst necessary foils for meaning and artistic investigation, are not the primary concern. Formal means are here a necessary but not sufficient condition of the work. Thompson has, rather, operated across a range of technical fields, adopting or adapting his material in accordance with the various issues he wishes to address. At the same time, several of his concerns can be seen to manifest themselves across the several types of structure he constructs, taking on new twists and turns according to the particularity of a given object or image. Recurring elements include the miniaturisation and manipulation of landscape (both actual and imagined places), the recontextualisation of found objects, and the masking or complete obliteration of chosen elements so as to focus attention upon the tiny, the overlooked, the hidden but essential details of a place, an attitude, a conceit or presentation.
A most striking aspect of much of Thompson's output, as I have remarked above, is its colour, or rather its studied lack of this feature as conventionally defined. The blackness evident throughout this artist's developing oeuvre is not an incidental feature nor a mere shying away from the complexities that a rich deployment of colour would demand. Black has, historically and culturally, a rich seam of connotation and effect. Just how laden with accrued meaning black and blackness is is demonstrated in John Harvey's provocative and extensive study Men in Black. [3] At the beginning of his book Harvey observes that:
the meaning of a colour is to a great extent the history of the colour. It is a meaning that is made by movement through time. This is a point that should be stressed with the colour black, which is a paradox-colour, as perhaps should be expected of a colour that is no-colour. For black tends to play a double game with time. [4]
Such a "paradox-colour", is then, a very complicated thing, its references and aspirations multiple, subtle and contradictory. Harvey again:
Black is rich and has many meanings, but still its most widespread and fundamental value lies in its association with darkness and night, and with the ancient natural imagery that connects night with death. [5]
Two of the qualities mentioned by Harvey, a complex relation with time and the link he draws attention to between blackness and darkness, with death, seem to me to be implicit within Thompson's use of that colour, and indeed can be tracked within other facets of his practice too. (There is, for example, a sense, within all this darkness, of death and extinction). Another notable aspect of Thompson's work is his concern with the miniature as a form with which to carry a rich cluster of ideas. Miniaturisation, as with blackness, holds a febrile, enlivening relationship to time, to how we normally perceive the world around us. As a kind of insistent disruption of everyday space the shrinking of a fragment of landscape imposes a pause within the unfolding of time as we exist within and through it. "The miniature", notes Susan Stewart,
does not attach itself to lived historical time...The reduction in scale which the miniature presents skews the time and space relations of the everyday lifeworld, and as an object consumed, the miniature finds its "use value" transformed into the infinite time of reverie. [6]
This remark is most appropriate as regards Thompson's sleek but not overly slick "reproductions" of portions of forests or predominantly deserted plains. Looking at such occasionally spectacular constructions can bring on an intense introspection as we imagine finding ourselves within the fabricated environment, a place which can apprear both actual and unreal or uncanny at one and the same time. This effect partly comes about through Thompson's close concern for detail when putting together what are only, after all, fictitious landscapes, fake geographical features purchased in model shops and assiduously assembled so as to effect an impressive purchase upon the real. Gaston Bachelard was correct in his suggestion that "the miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world." [7] And Susan Stewart develops this theme when she proposes that "the miniature and the "tiny" accrue around certain social and historical matrices - the lost worlds of childhood, of hand or craft labor, of aristocratic wealth and ornamentation..." [8]
Thompson's tiny flags and trees point to, amongst other things, the world of childhood and toys. There is a kind of aristocratic but playful excess, too, in his going to great pains in order to come up with something so small and potentially frail as a landscape segment under glass or, conversely, this feature presented as the entire content of a gallery space. In both cases the required production skills are considerable. This should not, however, lead one to concentrate solely upon the works' technical resolution. Thompson is open to both a "conceptual" and a rather more traditional or handmade approach to producing work, drawing on particular methods or skills on a case by case basis that is admirable at a time when the often unquestioned anti-skills legacy of Conceptual Art has become a slick, easy option for many current practitioners.
" Back to black silence melt and mourn", wrote Dylan Thomas in his "Vision and Prayer". [9] To fabricate a deep, deep blackness, as does Thompson in his landscape fragments and photographic prints, is to instigate something akin to what one might call a deliberately unvisual visuality. Looking across the black bleak landscapes Thompson makes we may find it difficult to focus upon, or even find those markers he places there in the form of flags, also black, indicating a point of possible incident, yet made of the same inky invisibility as the surface from which they project. In such works the viewer's attention is requested only to be frustrated or delayed. This is precisely the opposite of what takes place when we regard the small but intense photographically-based images Thompson reworks from photographic sources culled from postcards, books or magazines. In these works the velvety blackness is used not to obscure but to emphasise a smaller part of the rectangle that comstitutes the piece. One is drawn in by the extremely effective framing effect as though peering through a peephole in a wall, looking out, arguably, from a dark interior to an unbounded exterior space. The act of voyeuristic involvement, the gaze, glance or stare, is itself raised for scrutiny here - "One can look at seeing", as Duchamp once astutely remarked. [10] In these pieces the blackness forms an intense and quite extensive border around the landscape section to be found at the centre of, or occasionally on the edge of the work. The usual hierarchy wherein it is the picture, and not the frame that we are supposed to be concentrating on is reversed. [11] These "borders" are so prominent as to be of at least equal importance to what they enclose. The complexity of the relation between container and contained is further evoked by the fluidly-expressed interior edges, which are sinuous rather than straight, attractive rather than merely functional. The representational sections of these pictures - landscapes, seascapes, curving roads drawing us through the "pinprick" of the picture plane - have been manipulated by Thompson so as to remove or rearrange their component parts. Distracting items - human elements in general - these have been eradicated, the complete image being as much an artificial construct as an index or trace of the place at which the original photograph was taken. Once again, Thompson's work brings out an aspect of art that is today often forgotten, that of artifice or staging. It is not the job of the artist to constantly reiterate and represent "the real" (so it might be argued); that which we term real is open to dispute. To raise questions about the limits of what is and is not real, authentic, relevant or true: surely such an act of interrogation is as important a task for the artist today as it has been in the past. The beauty of Thompson's work is that it carries out such an investigation through an inventive, subtle and highly engaging sensuous working of images, materials and ideas.---------------------------
1. Dylan Thomas, "Light breaks where no Sun shines", in Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems 1934 - 1952, J M Dent, 1977, p. 24. Thompson's work also recalls the text by Tom Phillips included in his design for the sleeve of King Crimson's Starless and Bible Black, Island Records, 1974: "this night wounds time".
2. The expression is from James Wilson, The Dark Clue, Faber, 2001.
3. John Harvey, Men in Black, Reaktion Books, 1995.
4. Harvey, pp. 13 - 14.
5. Harvey, p. 41.
6. Susan Stewart, On Longing, Duke university Press, 1993, p. 65.
7. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, 1964, p. 155.
8. Susan Stewart, "At the threshold of the Visible", in the exhibition catalogue of that title (Independent Curators Incorporated, New York), 1997, p. 61.
9. Thomas, p. 132.
10. Marcel Duchamp, in Michel Sanouillet & Elmer Peterson (Eds.), The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, Thames & Hudson, 1975, p. 23.
11. For a series of discussions on the relationship of pictures, borders and frames see Paul Duro (Ed.), The Rhetoric of the Frame, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
---------------------------Peter Suchin is an artist and art critic and a regular contributor to Art Monthly, Frieze, Untitled and Mute.