ART: Laying it on thick
eye WEEKLY
eye WEEKLY March 28, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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ART ART
JIM DANDY
By John Armstrong. To April 6. Cold City Gallery,
686 Richmond St. W. 504-6681
by
OLIVER GIRLING
In John Lennon's first and last role as lead actor in a (non-Beatles)
movie, How I Won The War, he plays an enlisted man who at one point
has a confrontation with his sergeant. "Sir, yerra bastard" he states
in his patented Liverpool-ese.
If students still called their professors "sir," I could see a student
of John Armstrong's saying the same thing to the Sheridan College
professor. Not that he isn't a nice guy or a good teacher, it's that
he's slippery -- just when you think you know where he's going, he'll
confound your expectations. And enjoy doing it.
Armstrong is especially frivolous about certain insecurities that
plague the art world. If you really want to hurt an artist, call him
"decorative" or "baroque," or say she's "romantic" or "illustrative."
These insulting epithets play on artists' deep fears that, in spite of
years of studying critical theory, their work remains bone-stupid,
piss-elegant, apolitical and fetishistic.
All the paintings in Armstrong's current Cold City exhibition Jim
Dandy laugh at these worries with a headlong embrace of styles,
techniques and quotations that are often proscribed by contemporary
art.
Immediately as you enter the gallery, the piece called William faces
you. At first glance it looks like a photograph, and indeed a large
part of it is the giant cibacrome that makes up the background. It's a
reproduction of a piece of William Morris fabric, but some yellow
stuff, which turns out to be oil paint, interrupts the otherwise
smooth contour of its oval shape. In fact, some thick yellow roses
have been painted onto the pristine cibachrome print (and some have
then been painted out again with deep blue).
In this gesture: painting onto a picture of another medium, weaving,
there's an interesting combination of confusion and collusion.
Confusion in the disruption of the reading flow you get with a single
medium, whether it's painting or photography: the photograph's
"window-pane" versus the immediacy of oil paint's facture. But there's
an imagistic collusion also, between roses made by the hand of the
painter and the ones made on the loom of the master weaver.
Though this connection may seem more theoretical than real, the
proliferation of computer-painting, with its pixillated resolutions,
returns the handmade image to pre-Renaissance sources such as
tapestries, the early carriers of pictorial narrative. (William Morris
himself was a member of the 19th-century pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, a
group of artists and poets who espoused pre-industrial handicraft
production.)
The painting du Maurier follows a similar strategy, though this time
the paint has been applied to a sheaf of commercial cigarette posters
that have been stitched together. In fact, they've almost been
obliterated (with careful observation, you can see the Benday-dots of
the printing just visible at the edges of the paint). The painting
comes in two panels: the inner, featuring red roses on a mauve ground,
on an oval, linen stretcher; the outer featuring the posters -- the
paper buckling and rippling as it frames the inner canvas.
A replacement effect occurs here. As the commercial print is smothered
and hidden by the sensuous oil flow, the painted roses on the inside
panel take on the look of a logo -- a repeating sign rather than a
group of individual flowers. The painting begs the question: "How long
can you go on hand-painting roses?" Answer: ad infinitum, because even
the living rose performs a double duty, as a flower and as an
infinitely repeatable sign for itself.
Up to now, the viewer has identified Armstrong as an enthusiastic
thick painter, to the point of putting it on with a palette knife -- a
favorite artists' tool of the '50s, seldom seen since, which Armstrong
has re-established with irreverent zeal. A very recent work called My
Spar, however, has very little paint on it at all. It's a thickly
built up cardboard ovoid stencilled with phrases that may or may not
be product names: "Happy," "Champ," "Young Glenn" and more too
numerous to mention. "My spark" is the phrase used by Fanny Hill in
John Cleland's novel of the same name to refer to her johns.
Is a painting a reading matter? Yes it is, whether the "paste" on it
is as thick as mud, or as thin as a chalk-line. Armstrong lampoons the
foolishness of anyone who doesn't realize it.
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