FEATURE THE PAINTING OF MODERN LIFE
around him have begun to fade away, and the young friend to his left
(actually, in the photograph, a more androgynous figure than Harry),
has been prematurely aged, his delicate lips and brows coarsened.
Peyton may have painted a fantasy – the privileged waif at the
heart of a nation’s weird anthology of fairytale sentiments – but the
photograph is already, so the comparison alerts us, a kind of painting.
For a start, it is not a photograph at all, but a video still carefully isolated
for the sense of frozen detachment it discerns on the prince’s face: a
‘face in the crowd’, as the caption has it. What the painting makes us
see in the photograph is not the intimate reality behind media fakery,
nor even, actually, the mechanisms of that fakery itself (as we might
expect from a more direct appropriation or critique), but instead
a renewed sense of the strangeness of the image and its historical
moment: the way indiscriminate, unexceptional TV footage is already
monumentalised on the fly.
And yet: at the same time, what Peyton – as also Warhol and
Richter, pivotal figures for The Painting of Modern Life – responds to is
a certain inadequacy in the photograph: its precise failure to speak of its
historical instant. Something of this weakness in the image is visible in
Andy Warhol, Big Electric Chair, 1967, silkscreen and acrylic on primed canvas, 137 x 186 cm.
an agency picture of the electric chair at Sing Sing prison, where Julius © Licensed by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc/ARS, New York,
and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953. The original artefact –
and DACS, London, 2007. Courtesy Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart
complete with handwritten instructions from Warhol as to its cropping
in preparation for his Big Electric Chair (1967) – ought really to resonate
more than it does. In truth, it’s an object of curiosity rather than horror,
much like the photograph (taken in Los Angeles in 1959) that Warhol
What artists respond
used for his Orange Car Crash (Orange Disaster) (5 Deaths 11 Times in
Oranges) (1963), in which it turns out that the blurred figures one had
always assumed were corpses are three survivors still trapped beneath
to is a certain
the wreckage.
For Richter, such photographs manifestly lack something: they
are all picture, and the job of painting is precisely to shatter the picture.
inadequacy in the
This is certainly true of Woman with Umbrella (1964), his painting from
a photograph of the grieving Jacqueline Kennedy. The ‘picture’, as
Richter sees it, is a communicative object, the bearer of information
photograph
that the painting elides in favour of indistinction and anonymity.
Similarly, in his Nurses (1965), the eight faces of a household of student
nurses murdered in Chicago seem to recede into historical distance,
to become emblems of universal loss or mourning. The original image, by which Republicanism represented itself, merely appending his own
however – a set of school or college portraits, clearly syndicated abstract version of the same imagery in the expressionist expanse of
internationally at the time (Richter’s copy is from a German newspaper) smeared faeces. Sometimes, in other words, a photograph is already
– has already gone some way to making the women look anonymous. considerably more resonant, not less, than it looks.
Richter takes photographs that say little, almost nothing, and then There is a final category: the ‘photograph’ that is strictly speaking
drains them of what affective clarity they possess, so that looking then not a photograph nor even a film still (which implies a privileged
at the original images, preserved in the archive of his Atlas, they look as moment) but an apparently random fragment of a cinematic interstice.
though they might fade to a greyish smudge in an instant, such is their (Actually, a good number of the photographs behind The Painting of
historical frailty. Modern Life are not photographs.) In the paintings of Judith Eisler,
The opposite tack – a frank monumentalisation of perceived unrecognised instants from filmic originals – slurs of cigarette smoke,
significance – is risked by Richard Hamilton in The Citizen, his 1981 obscured faces, the blurred evidence of passing bodies – are painted
painting of a Republican prisoner in a cell of the Maze Prison, Belfast. as peripheral or phatic matter that has suddenly come centre stage,
Based on an image from a BBC report, it shows a heavily bearded the unreadable asking to be read. How to go looking for the ur-image
figure wrapped in a blanket and, on an adjacent panel, a shit-daubed here? As we tried to replicate the moment Eisler jabbed her remote
cell wall. The ‘blanket protest’ and ‘dirty protest’ were instituted in control, the ‘photograph’ would inevitably elude us, though the film,
opposition to prison regulations, and such images were already being in consequence, would start to look like nothing more than a collection
transformed into paintings, murals and stencils by the prisoners’ of such evanescent and meaningless moments. Which is perhaps the
supporters: that saintly physiognomy was everywhere in the Ireland effect we want paintings to have on photographs in the first place:
of the late 1970s and early 1980s. To look at the photograph now in to make them disappear and reappear in the same instant.
the light of Hamilton’s painting is to be reminded of the swift unofficial
aestheticisation of such images and to suspect that the painter had only The Painting of Modern Life is on show at the Hayward Gallery, London,
belatedly, and at some debilitating political remove, cracked the codes from 4 October to 30 December
95 ARTREviEw
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