Insidious Lassitude

The music video is nothing if it is not an advertisement for the song, is it not? When the director of one talks about making art as well as making money then what they mean, in most cases, is appropriating a style – looking like something. This, after all, is the most bankable way: tap into an imagery – a visual discourse, an appearance – that already has a set of connotations which define the artist and song. The rules of advertising apply, ie time is short, attention spans are limited, and the viewer is often passive and stupefied on a couch and is thus unwilling or unable to engage critically, intellectually, or even emotionally with the video. They’ll be a sitting duck for bombardment with unsubtle marketing manipulation. Pretty young people will do the trick. Naked ones are even better. And sparkly things too, maybe fireworks.

It’s crucial that a video can be easily read – that it places the artist effectively in a particular milieu with the minimum of confusion. There’s a visual shorthand for all sorts of pop music genres and sub-colonies; the signifiers are often clothing and fashion and they are very distinct and easily recognisable – hip hop very obviously has a different set than those of punk, for instance. In today’s visual-led marketplace even bands with small audiences are required to make videos. I’d probably denounce it as a dead art form, but it’d only invite conjecture about whether it was an art form to begin with. Generally I find them a tedious bind to even watch – not that I often do – and they must be even more tiresome to make. Necessarily, creativity must be stifled in order to streamline the product and drape it in the most easily understood rhetoric. Signifier and cliché are stitched into every shot in a way which is anathema to art.

That said, there are some opportunities for musicians whose marketable image is actually genuine creativity. Normally these musicians are – by their very nature – in the hinterlands of the mainstream. Perhaps because they are further from commercial restraints, it is these slightly peripheral musicians who can make videos which roll with a similarly more peripheral visual language.

The most recent video by nouveau art-disco avantress Roisin Murphy takes as its precept the work of Cindy Sherman. Though Sherman has pervaded mainstream imagery, it is doubtful whether the couched torpored masses would have the critical faculties and requisite knowledge of contemporary photography to enable them to unpick the references of such a video. They will though, likely recognise that it has the slightly haughty and aloof look of art. It is no surprise then that, as felicitous and accessible a pop romp as it is by Murphy’s standards, even the stonking lascivious bassline didn’t propel the song anywhere near the charts.     

A musician with a high degree of visual literacy and understanding of image, as well as a career-defining interest in fashion, Murphy reiterates Sherman’s conceit of identity fluxed and flummoxed by image. Identity is constructed by appearance, by style, by visual signifiers. The video also quotes an aesthetic that is reminiscent of any number of contemporary photographers. It’s even set in the requisite suburban house, and there are the other standards – a whiff of alienation, the vague vestige of a perceived but undisclosed threat, a hint of hyper-real lighting, a quasi-supernaturalism lurking in the soft furnishings, and some other things recognisable from Gregory Crewdson et al. Both in subject and in visual style, this kind of rhetoric is well trodden by any number of contemporary photographers. An aesthetic not too dissimilar is often used brilliantly by Hannah Starkey, for instance.

Once you assume Sherman’s ruse that identity – or at least the perception of it – can be altered by image – or by the style, or fashion – then the whole shebang comes unhinged and starts flapping in the wind. Here we have a video which references images which themselves are in quotation marks. Questions arise, particularly at the intersection of art and commerce: Can you look like something and be something? Can you look like art and be art? Can you look like art and be advertising? Can you look like advertising and be art? Is it really relevant anyway? Such is the postmodern discourse.

The recognition that photographs are a construction is of course, old hat, so to speak. The image can be a set up, it can reference things outside of the frame; it is understood and accepted that a photograph is not the whole truth, but a selection of it – or even a verisimilitude of it – and that the cultural climate and the context are critical to the image’s reading. This is all basic critical stuff. Given that this is yer staple foundation to any critique of photography, it is interesting then to consider the hullabaloo created by Ryan McGinley’s latest show.

Much has been made of the way the photographs in his ‘I Know Where the Summer Goes’ show look a bit like the photographs you might see in advertisements. In particular they look a bit like fashion shots or images used to sell clothing. There has been, from many quarters, an imputation that McGinley’s photographs are too commercial-looking to be art.

The same critics who are take as given that the cultural climate and context are crucial to the understanding of work, are vitriolic that McGinley’s work is irrelevant or invalid because it looks a bit like fashion or commercial photography. Fashion and commerce though, are part the cultural context and climate, and a particularly significant part for the young or adolescent, which is who the show is about. The blind-spotting or discrediting of this context is a dubious critical position to take, and one which somehow seems anomalous and not commensurate with current critical thinking. The first utterance of ‘commercial photography’ scatters critics who’d previously held coherent critical values founded on the illusion of veracity of the photograph, how it can be reproduced and manipulated, how identity is a construct, etc. They seem to leave the axiological desert of their own creation, flee from the shifting sands of visual representation, connotation and identity, and retreat to the shade of a tree to prop themselves up against the trunk of modernism. From here they peer out their binoculars at McGinley’s photographs and chunter to the resting cheetahs that “he doesn’t have no authenticity, man”; that the images don’t show ‘the essentiality of youth’. Both of these are accusations that have been repeatedly directed – nay, doused in petrol and hurled – at McGinley.

I’d argue that if – and this itself is subjective – the photographs have some elements that are redolent of fashion photography, it is a resonance which could be complementary and sympathetic. This is after all, a series of photographs about adolescence and travel and temporality and transience. And in the images the models are very deliberately not in fashionable frocks and slacks, but are nude. And they’re often in a vast American desert. It doesn’t take much head-scratching to see that this could engender an interesting subtext for such a set of photographs – that the look of fashion photography could provide a useful undertow to the work. But I’ve not seen any discussion or considered thought about this. There’s only been a churlish harangue about the utter worthlessness of the images because of their likeness to photos used in commercial applications.

Commercial applications of photography pick up ‘art photography’, but art photography is still unable to pick up anything from commercial photography (mostly; unless it’s flagged up clearly). If it does then its identity as art is spontaneously combusted. Art, it could be argued, shouldn’t be a one way street, constantly trying to escape its shadow. In some ways this is something which McGinley’s photographs could be seen to touch on – self-awareness, the impermanence of youth, and identity and meaning. Not that anybody seems to care too much about this when there are petrol bombs to be made.

The invention of photography was a Rubicon for the image. Likewise, that photographic images are used in advertising, is something which cannot be undone. To pretend that they don’t is similar to pretending that the photograph offers a stable fixed and truthful essential nature of identity. It doesn’t; its meaning – its identity – is contingent on the world that is its context. The world we live in is capitalist, visual-led, and image-based. It is pointless and reductive to still be stuck in an argument about the dichotomy of art and commercial photography. To truculently posit them as opposites – incompatibles – is to render them Manichean; the whole world becomes good and bad, black and white. It is a recision of the particularities of photography, the very strengths of the medium that the work of someone like Sherman made overt. The identities of ‘art photography’ and ‘commercial photography’ cannot be easily separated into independent realms – they don’t have static identities which are distinct and unfettered by one another. Quite obviously the Venn diagram of photographic imagery has a big central area of overlap between commercial and art photography, and there isn’t any reason that this shouldn’t be the case. Art is a reflection – a product, if you will – of the circumstance of the creator, of their society. It is thus surprising that there remains such an abject refusal to even consider the artistic implications of a likeness to commercial photography. Commercial photography is part of the text. It can’t be ignored, or quarantined; it’s out there. And – though most people seem oblivious to it – there are times when the invocation of it is a subtext which only enhances artistic depth and substance. In McGinley’s photographs it is an apposite reference and, whether intentional or not, resonates and expands the meaning of the photographs in a cogent, and intelligent way.

McGinley’s art photos look a bit like advertising photos that are quoting art photos. Murphy’s video looks a bit like an advertisement and quotes art photos. In neither way is artistic value necessarily precluded from the outcome. Art is the primary context for the photographs in McGinley ‘Summer’ show. The primary context for Murphy’s video is commercial usage. Yet, McGinley has made money from these photographs and Murphy has made a film which is essentially an art short with a kicking disco-house tune overdubbed. Like most art these days, they both sit in the middle overlapping section (the technical name for which escapes me) of the photography Venn.

From underneath the boughs of modernism some of these critics have even been moved to witter incoherently about ‘intention’. McGinley’s intention was to make money, they surmise, ergo his work is not art. This is arguably part of the same vaguely atavistic mutter of “where’s the authenticity, Ryan?” Whilst there is an acceptance of the terms of photography in a postmodern culture – reproducibility etc – there is still some confused heatstroke-afflicted ghost with a residual hankering for things like ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality’. It’s a bit like the confusing twitch of a knee-jerk from phantom limbs amputated from current critical theory. When these critics talk of ‘authenticity’, what they are mostly talking about is authenticity of motive – ‘legitimacy’,’ validity’. Motive, of course, is even now of little – not always none, but little – consequence. Without rehashing the intentionalist fallacy here, any language is interpretative; the meanings that constitute a word are in the same state of flux as the clothes in Cindy Sherman’s images. Context is what is important. (Though some discussion could be more productively made of the intention of context.) To this end, the context McGinley’s show has been received in has been churlish, unsubstantiated, curmudgeonly, and, well, couched in stupidity.

‘Summer’ has been rounded on not just in the blogs on the nit-wit-ernet, but in newspapers by people whose opinions are held in some esteem. As well as being of debatable critical intelligence or value, the tone of criticism has also been inflected with a sort of infantile jealousy. Notably, it has been mostly a peculiarly male sort of jealousy too. This is the kind of unreconstructed vainglorious tush you normally hear in pub debates about football. It is hard to reconcile these art critics’ critical standpoint to McGinley’s photographs with the values they previously held, and reading between the lines I sense that some of the antipathy is because McGinley himself is young and acclaimed and lives in New York and has photographed beautiful famous women like Sienna Miller. He’s currently trendy and is receiving a lot of attention too, so all the invidious buttons are pushed to invoke in critics a regression to huffy adolescent contrariness and a sort of insecure objectionism. The intonation of some of the criticism is very noticeably akin to the way critics desert a band once they’ve become popular.

In a neat summation of that, the title of the show has been widely mocked and poo-pooed. ‘I Know Where the Summer Went’ was an early Belle & Sebastian B-side, and those who are hip and smug have snarked that they’re a band that is now well past their ‘cool’ zenith. This is somehow put forward as further evidence that McGinley is a dilettante; and not just a dilettante, but not even a very cool one. The cognoscenti have scrambled to withdraw their patronage and rushed across town to the moral high-ground of a Vampire Weekend gig. In their petulant braying none of them have yet noted the possibility that choosing a band who used to be young and hip – and, to invoke a fashion term, trendy – and are now ‘past it’ may imbue a show about youth with some poignant resonances. Nor that the slightly self-conscious and gauche deployment of a B-side is also perhaps suggestive of the coltish – but slightly attention seeking and contrarious – naïveté of youth. That these considerations have been ignored or supplanted by sniggering mud-slinging is the kind of truculent critical intelligence – replete in some instances with sexism and homophobia – that’d likely be rejected by the Sun for being too vapid, petulant, boorish, and inane.

In a fitting twist, the joke might actually be on these critics. Their very identity founded on the fluctuations of cool of a Scottish indie band; crying out that McGinley is too commercial to have anything to say. It is not with irony that these people crow that the models in McGinley’s photographs look too much like ‘hipster kids’ to tell us anything worthwhile about youth or identity.

I’ve only seen a selection of the images from the show, so – even though this is the internet and seeing the work is by no means a prerequisite to having an opinion – I don’t want to make an assessment of it. I’ve no problem with people not liking it – I myself am still fairly undecided about it. But what I do find problematic is the tone of a lot of the critique; for whatever reason, the work seems to have provoked an unedifying playground squabble. Perhaps taking to heart the subject of the show, the critics seem to have regressed and begun to debate along the terms that teenagers would. A lot of these critics haven’t even seen the show and are making tasteless noises based on prejudice and rumours that they’ve heard while smoking outside the school gates with the cool kids. And even those who have seen the show seem to be judging it by a set of criteria that are entirely trite, irrelevant, or inappropriate.

The question is not whether it looks a bit like this or that. The only thing which is of significance is whether McGinley’s photographs do something. Perhaps those other things come into the matter if they are relevant to the effect of the work. In themselves they are only anecdote, and not grounds to dismiss a show on. The fact that he utilises an aesthetic or a style which isn’t far removed from fashion photography is in itself not an issue that should immediately cause muck to be chucked. It seems like people can’t get beyond this surface and see the way in which the surface is being used; which is ironically the very thing they accuse McGinley of.

Do the photographs do something which fashion images don’t? Do they take the conventions of this genre and transcend their normal outcome, do something different? Does McGinley get inside the clichés and deploy the aesthetic to an end which is affecting and revealing? Is the cultural code cracked open; what’s inside of it? I’ve not seen enough of the show to tell, but from what I have seen it seems to me that it is quite possibly this very blurring of the boundary between fashion or commercial photography and art that makes the work engaging – that makes it art. That tension seems to work when depicting youth. It is perhaps something to do with an intangible quality of youth or adolescence; the way it is peripheral to both innocence and self-consciousness, but depends on them both. The photographs are perhaps reflective of this. Yes, there are elements of appropriation, and this is perhaps indicative of the way that youth is experienced. In the models and the photographic artifice there is a nonchalance and insouciance in one moment, and then in the next the models and the artifice are self-aware, gauche and slightly awkward. Both the models and the artifice have a kind of identity which is unfixed. As these models trawl through the desert the naked, they are dislocated but simultaneously full of promise; there is a sense of purpose in a place with no landmarks.

From my limited experience of the photographs, they don’t seem to have anything like the vapidity and vacuity that the prevailing critical – or not, as the case often seems – opinion suggests. It feels like these critics have got scared when they’ve seen the appearance of commercial photography encroaching on art photography. I’d like to see more of the show, but it seems possible to me that these photographs could be seen to fill the empty surface of fashion photography with something; and indeed the fashion style perhaps says something about identity through the role of the surface – which is what fashion itself can do. Filling an empty image of something with something, is a bit like the process of adolescence. It is maybe not unreasonable to consider the state of youth as a tension between surface and content; between interiors and exteriors.