Jennifer Douglas, Workplace Gallery

From a distance (First)Second Floor appears as though the skin of the immaculate, white gallery wall has been peeled back to reveal a bear, time-worn wooden support behind. Upon a more intimate inspection of it's patina (First)... reveals itself neither as wood or painting but as a cast taken from the floor of an upstairs room in the gallery; its skin-like silicone rubber impressed with dust, splinters and rusted staples. The 'negative' spaces of doorways and window recesses determine the outline of the cast whilst the cracks between floorboards, scratches and wood grain remodelled in detailed relief.

“Location and point of view are constantly shifting at the apex of time's flow...”

Robert Morris (1978)

By taking an impression of the floor and turning it 90 degrees onto the wall, (First)... literally 'shifts' the viewer's orientation as they are brought into frontal confrontation with a disregarded thing, a space, a surface, which is usually below us. When stood up close to the piece – so that it extends into the periphery of vision – it evokes a strange, vertiginous sensation as if viewing the floor from a slightly hovering distance above. (First)... evokes an oscillating relationship between the space of the object and the space of the image: the three dimensional, anti-illusionistic space of encounter and the two dimensional, illusory surface of projection. Our reorientation in “point of view” is not merely the angle of observation (from horizontal to vertical, from below to alongside) but also in our modes and ways of seeing. (First)... - through it's physical index of time and space - invites an engagement which is not merely visual but also bodily-centred, somatic and kinaesthetic.

There is also something slightly eerie about (First)... like a death mask, or a physical photograph, impressed by the residues of time and human activity it captures both a moment, a history and a life of the space. In a sense (First)...- in it's intimation of unseen life and the passage of time - could be viewed in relation to the tradition of Vanitas painting. At the height of it's popularity in the early17^th century, Vanitas painters sought to represent the transience of life, thought and earthly experience through the substance and objects of the everyday; overripe fruits, blooming flowers, scrolls, smoke and skulls. Whilst (First)... similarly unearths – through the impression of dust and incidental marks left by ephemeral gestures – themes of entropy, physical disintegration and the passage of time, this is as far as the comparison travels. Through it's overt symbolism and meticulous rendering, Vanitas painting came to demonstrate the painter's virtuosity as much as it sought to illustrate ideas concerning the fleeting nature of experience. In contrast, Jen Douglas's (First)... removes almost all trace of the artist's hand, eschewing stylistic intent and authorial decision making as it takes it's formal properties directly from the world.

The appropriation of a fragment of real space (literally the ground beneath our feet) transferred to the gallery wall evokes the spectre of Duchamp and 'l'objet trouve' which sought to question the authority of the gallery or museum and its potential to transform everyday objects and materials into art. By making the gallery itself the subject and object of the work (First)... introduces a complex, elliptical set of relations between the work and the space or the “Location” (as cited by Morris in the earlier quote). In regards to the gallery “Location” may be a contentious issue as the term assumes a space of occupation, a place determined in time and space by context, use and distinguishing features. In contrast, the white walls of a gallery operate as a sort of conceptual container, one which denies the ravages of time and heterogenous possibilities of embodied space: the white walls of the gallery function as the armature of an illusory, consensus reality, one which is both timeless and contextless.

“If the white wall cannot be summarily dismissed, it can be understood. This knowledge changes the white wall, since its content is composed of mental projections based on unexposed assumptions. The wall is our assumptions.”

Brian O'Doherty (1976)

The gallery is a construction, a signifying container which privileges the frontal, visual engagement with objects displayed within and upon its walls. By lifting what is usually an overlooked feature of the gallery space onto its wall (First)... seems to gently dissect those assumptions and the invisible maschinations of the institution, revealing the hidden economies of objects, spaces and their manifold histories. There is a certain parallelism here between (First)... and earlier precursors in conceptual art of the 1970's: artists such as Michael Asher, Gordon Matta-Clark and Sol Le Witt who produced works physically and conceptually derived from the exhibition space and it's architecture. For the aforementioned artists their utilisation of the exhibition space and its apparatus – upon which the works relied for their very existence – offered a critique of the gallery, it's attendant pedagogies and institutionalised, art world context. In contrast, (First)... - though it may subtly expose some of the invisible prompts and operations of the gallery - seems altogether gentler: it exists without ideological intent or institutional critique, instead opening up a space in which a complex interplay of opposites can take place; both time and timelessness, the visual and the tactile, the real and the illusory.

The origins and heterogeneity of language and communication are concerns which emerge throughout Douglas's work. In her 2010 installation TheVoice of Silence incandescent light bulbs, strung above open, half-empty paint pots, silently blink off and on, transmitting a coded message out into the gallery. Douglas's use of outmoded technology and defunct communication systems is evocative of the ephemeral and uncertain nature of language and of the interrelationship between the 'message' and the 'means'. One specific language which abounds in Douglas's polyglottic practice is the language of materials. Materials do not communicate simply on the literal, cerebral level of written or spoken language but physically through a syntax of forms, properties and processes. In 19/21 Douglas combines materials of very different qualities and progenies in a poetry of contrasts; soft/hard, organic/industrial, ephemeral/permanent. The black steel armature of 19/21 is immediately reminiscent of the Minimalist sculptures of Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre and Donald Judd whilst also resonating to the impersonal, yet familiar, forms of mass produced office furniture. Though it certainly conjures something of the austere, objective and autonomous forms of Minimalism, 19/21 delicately disrupts Minimalism's seamless pedagogy through the juxtaposition with a limp piece of silicone. Impressed by the patina of wood, the pale silicone is vaguely anthropomorphic in character; evocative of dead skin, frailty and bodily states (and slightly reminiscent of the visceral materials of sculptor Eva Hesse who followed Minimalism). But somehow neither material in 19/21 completely neutralises the other; they sit in a perfectly balanced coexistence of opposites.

Draped over the first 'step' of 19/21 there is an almost humorous interplay between the delicate silicone and the austerity of the steel: Did the structure change shape in response to the addition of the flaccid material? Or was this addition a lightly seditious – but playful – after-thought? A contraposition to, or contradiction of, the original armature? As I walked around 19/21 silently asking myself these questions I was struck and amused by my inherent tendency to seek meaning and understanding through knowledge of the artist's intentions and decision making processes. The prevailing ambiguity of 19/21 – in which artistic presence, authorship and intent is kept at a distance – made me recall Roland Barthe's thesis From Work to Text in which he posited that the text (in this instance, the art object) is not a singularity or a 'readable' object but an entity whose meaning is always heterogenous and contingent.

“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

Barthes (1967)

Though 19/21 conjures the monotheistic “isms” of Modern Art is does so in a complimentary dialogue of opposites eschewing the maxims and authority of any single movement or style. Perhaps by appropriating and restating these fragments of art history Douglas is underscoring the inadequacy of art criticism and art history to accommodate the complex, subjective reality of art, tending instead to oversimplify and categorise it in bounded “isms”, movements and art forms. 19/21, in comparison, remains resolutely paradoxical and without closure; it is simultaneously a drawn line and a sculpture; it is minimalist and expressive; it occupies inside, outside and their borderline simultaneously (the form and scale having been taken from the steps outside the gallery and it's main doorway). 19/21 declares its existence in a universe which is not divided by art(ificial) historical and philosophical categories but which is ultimately ambivalent, ambiguous and complex, where all of these states and positions (even contradictory) exist simultaneously.

“The eyes are the organs of asking”

Paul Valery (Date unknown)

If Walls Had Eyes is a small (60 x 42cm) painting on canvas penetrated by numerous screw holes, some of which have been filled with rawl plugs. There is an immediate resonance to the Buchi (hole) paintings of Lucio Fontana who originally began perforating his canvases with holes in the late 1940s/ early 1950s as a means to volatilise or renounce the virtual, two dimensional surface of painting, penetrating it with the “real” three dimensional space of the world inhabited by both the viewer and artist. The clumsy, seemingly random arrangement of the holes and brush marks of If Walls Had Eyes appear more evocative of the incidental residuum of utilitarian activity as opposed to the deliberate, gestural actions of a painter. In a sense If Walls Had Eyes is a sort of anti-painting; it is not illusory, beautiful or stylistic, it does not awe the viewer with the mystery of it's creation but openly, tactilely demonstrates the real and imaginable process of its construction.

The title If Walls Had Eyes also posits a situation where the wall is not merely a neutral, inanimate surface onto which we project meaning but an active agent in the production, perception and interpretation of meaning itself. If walls did have eyes it would bring into question the whole human-centric perspective of reality (I.e. that we are the consciousness of the universe which uncovers, interprets or creates meaning in unconscious things). In addition, there is something uncanny or slightly sinister about this idea of reordering relations; of making the familiar unfamiliar; of blurring the lines between real and imaginary, subject and object; whilst also endowing walls – the containing backdrop of our lives – with the possibility of voyeurism.

The last works in the show, the three photographs Blue, Assemblage (Penthouse 1) and Fun pick up threads of the conversations introduced by the previous sculptural pieces; the dialectics of 'found' and 'composed', 'chance' and 'order', 'presence' and 'absence'; the evidence of human activity through residual traces and the meanings inferred, implied or innate in these; resonances to art history; and the relationship to defunct communication and language (as the photographs were all taken in Dundas House, the abandoned British Telecom Headquarters in Middlesbrough). Blue depicts a teal blue wall, peppered with an orderly grid of white-tac blobs where signs or notices were previously affixed. For such a seemingly empty image Blue bristles with signs and half-signs; with signs of absence; of messages which were once there but now removed; of the very particular design and intended function of this space (now disused) i.e. the deliberate choice of a 'neutral' blue to appear friendly or accessible (a staff room perhaps?) but which was actually used to communicate messages to employees, the wall once again incorporating intent and social prompts.

Just as the silicone cast has a way of isolating, framing and restaging a fragment from the continuum of time and space, the photograph is similarly a direct impression of, or index for, the moment which it captures.

“Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface. The photograph is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship to its object.”

Rosalind Krauss (1977)

Whilst (First)... was evocative – in it's direct indexical relationship to a particular point in time and space - of l'objet trouve, these photographs could equally be regarded as 'l'image trouve'; visual fragments gleaned from the 'real' world and transferred to the gallery walls to be regarded and decrypted as art works. Both in the silicone cast and the photograph there is a removal of more traditional signs of authorial presence and intent; mark making, gestural intervention and forms are not contrived by the artist but exist as they are found, artlessly within the world. There is a kind of semantic duality to these images between the deliberate act of appropriation by the artist - in selecting these particular tableaus, framing and titling them - and the chance or found language encoded in the materials and gestures of the spaces' inhabitants. In Fun someone has re-arranged the gold pins of a typical, ultramarine office pin board to spell out the word “Fun”. Swamped by the blue of the notice board this word embodies an almost futile, childish rebellion against the containing work environment and it's prescriptive systems of communication. However, there's an unshakeable equivalence between this pin board scene and Yves Klein's monochromatic blue works of the 1950s. For Klein, pure blue embodied the limitless freedom of the sky, pure thought, the immaterial, the spiritual and the transcendent. Having appointed himself as the 'messenger of the blue void' the evocation of Klein (whether deliberate or inferred) seems whimsical as though, having achieved his ultimate unity with colour, Klein has been channelled through this blue coduit on the wall of a BT office in Teeside to deliver the ultimate message of... “Fun”. Assemblage (Penthouse 1) is a slightly unsettling photograph of the corner of a wall, papered in a distasteful mottled pink and perforated by various plug sockets. In front of the wall's skirting board are two incongruous lumps of concrete like inert meteorites. Though the title would imply a space of luxury (the Penthouse) the scene seems consumed with malaise, neglect and decay. The allusion to artistic process or intervention “Assemblage” brings into question the 'naturalness' of the scene or whether it has actually been composed, it's elements deliberately analogous to other states or meanings. There are echoes here back to If Walls Had Eyes with the socket holes reminiscent of those perforations of the canvas, the sockets almost like tiny eye sockets or navels of the wall. If we were to look at this scene as anthropologists, to consider it as the backdrop to the conscious and unconscious life of those invisible subjects who inhabited it daily, we might be disturbed by the collision of faux domesticity, atrophy and the summoning of borderline states.

“One of the most conservative or traditional properties of Modern art is its reliance on style. The signature of virtually every modern painter and sculptor has been his style, or series of styles. Style replaced illusion while at the same moment it gave the individual artist the area within which he could develop his art...”

James Monte (1969)

In this essay I have sought to provide an overview of Jennifer Douglas's most recent work whilst lightly locating it in the continuum of her artistic enquiry. From a tertiary, purely formal perspective these recent works may appear like a departure from the more colourful, seemingly playful installations of RollingShowdown (2006, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art) or FANTASTICA (2008, Grundy Art Gallery). However, this overly simplistic assumption, based purely on style, does not take into account Douglas's recurring and ever-evolving themes, concerns and approaches. For work which often explores issues of how we see, how we communicate, how we understand and the relativism of all these processes and positions, consistent style would be incongruous as it would seem to imply foundational truths or certainties. In comparison, Douglas's work does not exist in a world of categorical, binary positions; 'interior' and 'exterior', 'soft' and 'hard', 'sculpture' and 'painting', 'imaginary' and 'real' can and do exist simultaneously, they affect, infect and invert one another in a constant, shifting, cyclic motion. This admission to the paradoxical nature of things and simultaneity of experience makes her work at various instances complex, amusing, compelling and ambiguous.

Whilst the development of modern art is popularly characterised as a linear progression with each artistic movement or 'breakthrough' superseded by the following, Douglas's process is truer to life admitting to the interconnectedness and interdependence of everything. Minimalism did not simply cease to have efficacy with the arrival of conceptual or installation art any more than painting ceased to be a valid medium with the arrival of Minimalism. All of these movements and mediums have their moments of insight and potency but nothing can encapsulate “the whole truth” as, to paraphrase Nietzsche, there are no truths, only interpretations. What remains consistent in all of Douglas's work is a rigorous dedication to, and empathic engagement with, materials and their properties. It is her process, an ongoing dialogue between the artist, ideas and materials, which is present throughout all her work, a sort of 'thinking through making' in which the work is co-authored by a perpetual call and response, an infinite echo between maker and material. But like all the best conversations, it doesn't set out with a fixed conclusion in mind, but is an open-ended, irresolute unfolding of ideas, contradictions and discoveries.

Iris Priest

Newcastle, May 2014

1. Morris, Robert 'The Present tense of Space', in Art in America (January – February 1978), p.7; reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Massachussetts: The MIT Press, 1994).
2. Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: The Lapis Press, 1976; reprinted 1986) 76 – 77.
3. Barthes, Roland (1968), "The Death of the Author", Image, Music, Text (published 1997), ISBN 0-00-686135-0
4. Krauss, Rosalind (1977) 'Notes on the Index, Part 1', in October (3, Spring, 1977), reprinted in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1986 p.196 – 209.
5. Monte, James (1969) 'Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials', Exhibition Catalogue (May 19, 1969-July 6, 1969) Whitney Museum of American Art, NewYork, 1969. Online: https://archive.org/details/antiillusionproc61whit last accessed 01/05/14.