Oliver Whitehead 25.3.-11.4. 2004
Imaginary Spaces - Digital Collages
The pieces in Oliver Whitehead's "retouch" are like virtual worlds, reminding us that we perceive/experience several realities at once. Just as in computer games, the viewer in the space of these works is cast in the role of a wanderer. We look at/use the spaces, ascribing meanings to them as if we were inside the works themselves. Just as in 3D animation films and computer games, objects grow, vanish, mutate or change their colour. The virtual world seems boundless. Seemingly innocent everyday objects mutate and bend to acquire new, different meanings.
Urban spaces with their associations of power and violence have often provided the subject matter or the starting point in Oliver Whitehead's work. The spaces in his work are not neutral or merely physical, however; more than anything else, they are experienced places, nodes of social networks, places that shape us as we shape them. For example, in "Visual Violence - Guide to Living (1994) Whitehead studied the way signs steer our behaviour and movement in cities. In his video "Mind's Eye" (1999), blocks of flats, subways and graffiti-covered fences glimpsed from a train window turn a journey from Espoo to Helsinki into a startling urban experience. Objects - especially toys - have also provided interesting material for him. About the meaning of objects, Whitehead says: "I see them as evidence of fetishist design, hedonism, violence, aggression, and the like." In the series "Fuse" (2002), he uses continuous exposure to photograph a person holding things, such as a doll or a perfume bottle. In "MELTDOWN" (1993) he videoed melting plastic toy soldiers, and has used toy cars in many of his works.
His more recent series, "retouch", utilises the same elements. Toys or parts of toys and other objects are magnified many times over, and associated with pictures of urban spaces. For instance, Whitehead has placed his strange toy sculptures in ominous-seeming passageways or benches offering a place to rest. The miniatures are shown as monumental, oversize public sculptures or as imaginary creatures from fantasy or science fiction. Some of the objects fill the view, one can only guess at the background.
The large size of the objects and the fact that their background is out of focus may irritate viewers who would like to reach the space behind the figure - yet without ever really being able to do so. There is one exception, a picture that shows the urban space as it is, except for a line of paint stretching over the image. Whitehead is also interested in the mechanics modern architecture uses to protect itself against subcultures, such as metal grilles preventing graffiti artists from applying their spray paint on the walls of buildings or subways.
Objects, the dramatic alteration of their size and dislocation are central elements in the works. Artists have always manipulated scale to create illusions. This is also Whitehead's method. "I like intentionally creating a hallucinatory appearance of something that is not quite viable. When objects are scaled or transformed, they can sometimes perturb the senses." The material in "retouch" came to him by chance and intuition. Whitehead says he walked around: "Whilst walking in the streets, I came across objects, mostly broken pieces of toys dropped presumably by children, and also many other types of objects."
For Whitehead, surprising combinations of objects and spaces is a method for drawing attention to the associations awakened by them. "Using this sense of 'reflective displacement' as a metaphor for looking at the ambivalent area between toys and the utilitarian world, I insert and manipulate the found objects as images into other 'places' to suggest other ambiguous associations. For example, what occupies us as we go through the daily mundane motions, doing something that might be utterly unrelated to what we may be thinking or 'partially imagining'? We are continually at the mercy of a constant stream of inner associations (visual, sounds and sensations recalcitrant to definition). Some we recall and some we put out of our mind. These associations are totally unrelated to what we are actually doing. It is this stream of irrepressible associations that I draw attention to in these works, as if something is constantly 'sandwiched between' us and the tangible concrete presence we exist in."
Oliver Whitehead studied in London in the late 1960s. Already as a student, he experimented with all kinds of media, drawing, painting, photography, collages and performances. He has also combined different media, presenting video, charcoal drawings and photographs in one and the same exhibition. His interest in Pop Art and the work of Claes Oldenburg also go back to his student days, and his playing with scale and use of everyday objects are allusions to those interests.
Whitehead's use of digital imaging in "retouch" has a corollary in his earlier collage and painting techniques. "In the late 60s (before computers) I was working using various collage techniques. Today it is impossible to work with the photographic image, which for me has similitaries to an earlier way of working that feels familiar and natural. The comparison between painting and digital imaging is quite complex, as both are similar in different ways. I use both techniques. The 'mental speed'at which I work with the computer feels faster, yet, painting has a different kind of spontaneity. It's different way of working, something that I have not experienced before, but somehow creates different kinds of work. With the computer it has a memory bank that can be used instantly."
Whitehead's work poses the question, what is real. "This is a concern in "retouch", to bring attention to the ambivalence of the realities perceived, so the two composed elements become insecure as experienced realities." A photograph is a trace, whereas a digital image is an icon, where the origin of the image is not so obvious. Digital collage is a fine medium for work that investigates the meanings, character and existence of several adjacent realities. And the zone where fantasy and reality become mixed, and where everything is real.
Pirkko Siitari
Translation: Tomi Snellman
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Backpassage |
Blue |
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Chaircanvas |
Chairplastic |
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Duo |
Fence |
Parkbench |
Robot |
Slopescreen |
Sofa-bow |
Steelpillar |
Stepscar |
Underpass |
Window |
Yellowtunnel |
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| RETOUCH-SERIES, 2004
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Two People and a Camera
Each of us continuously acts and reacts. From these elements of ordinary life we create a self. If pressed to describe this person, our first reaction is to rely on words. However imagine other ways to record these self-perceptions; invented gestures; your body's reactions to other people; shapes made from handling things or completing tasks. When we witch from worlds to this other way, we enter a territory, according to phenomenology, of the 'lived body', a province where thinking and doing are integral, and in which the boundary between self and world, subject and object, seeing and touch is obliterated.
Irving Goffman in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) reconsidered the fusion of self, world and other as first put forward by phenomenology. The sociologist proposed that how our bodies express us via sensual language is made explicit in public through acts of performance through which we enact negotiations with other people in order to communicate complex intersubjective clues. Writer Amelia Jones in Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998) tellingly goes on to situate Goffman's notion of performance in the context of radical social changes which had occurred in America during the 1960s. The decade spawned not only political activism in the form of demonstrations against Vietnam War, it gave birth to parallel, live manifestations in which artists and audiences collaborated to reexamine commonly held social values.
At around this time Oliver Whitehead, who then lived in London, was attending Hornsey School of Art (1967-70), a place also caught up - if less directly in a fervour of questioning and social change. Whitehead recalls, that even at this early stage he began to experiment with making live performance that explored body movements in relation to objects; when he painted or made drawings, he also addressed mark making as a correlate of behaviour.
During his period at Hornsey School of Art, Whitehead had also been inspired by J.G. Ballard's 1960s book, The Atrocity Exhibition , made in the 90s into the film Crash . The book exemplified for the artist art as a means to evoke intense, tactile visualisations. Between 1990 and 1993, Whitehead made a series of works that experimented with the polarity between how handmade imagery and photography each communicate violence. Of these works he said: "When I paint, draw or photograph utilitarian objects, I am thinking again about the world portrayed in Ballard's book where modernism and decay overlay each other. In this world there doesn't seem to be any difference between utilitarian objects honed to perfection and the transformation that comes of destruction...there is a series of black and white drawings and photographic diptychs, Ritual Behaviour (1990-1992) in which I drew shapes in total darkness. Simultaneously my movements were traced in light and photographed. I also made in the same period a 16 mm black and white film Personal Effects (1991) in which a pair of woman's hands set out in perfect order a child's tea service, or the hands also moulded clay into a minute bowl shape. We play to form patterns of behaviour. In turn this dictates how things are designed." (1.)
Five years later, Whitehead was commissioned to make a set of drawings. These were exhibited in 2001 at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, as large scale black and white photographs to celebrate their appearance in War or Health, A Reader (2002). The book, of international significance, examines from many perspectives the consequences of each individual in society's choice to favour or reject government's investment in nuclear armament as opposed to peace. In his search for appropriate images, Whitehead changed his working method. He shifted emphasis away from the formalist aesthetics of composition, was to consider image making as an interactive learning process between people. In Fuse (2002), the series of large scale colour photographs currently on exhibition at The Finnish Museum of Photography this is also where he has placed emphasis.
As the result of this change of direction Whitehead decided to move out of his studio for a period into busy Helsinki neighbourhoods where people could see him in process of working as he drew with chalk on the pavement. Being visible invited questions and participation. The six drawings which differed little from other public signage, expect in their emphasis on the performance of making and in content: Whitehead drew in people's pathway patters of signs which comprised simplified pictures of weapons whose scale he adjusted against the size of the neighbourhood's architecture or street furniture.
When the drawings were installed Whitehead used his camera to move along with people as they walked across the chalk lines. He neutrally recorded some that dismissed his drawings as silly graffiti as they walked with certainty through a minefield of explosive devices. In other photographs, Whitehead employed photography's technical trickery - long exposure times - to show peoples' unchanged patterns of walking automatically obliterate them as blurs in the photograph taken. A photograph of the simplest drawing he made for Behind the Lines calls to mind a school room blackboard drawing. Two tiny figures are depicted adjacent to the outline of a machine gun, which becomes grotesquely enlarged in the image's foreground as the result of the camera's angle. Equivalent to a child's imagination of spatial dimension, the image shows the dreaded as extra big, the defenceless as minuscule. Not without cause. Research undertaken on anxietys of the young, discussed in War or Health? showed that 80 % of children in Finland mentioned war as their top worry. (2.) The most freguent source of these fears was various media presentations of war.
To make his current work Fuse (2001-2002) Whitehead returned to studio based photography where he continued collaborative work. This time he decided to appear as an actor in front of the camera and in order to make the works more personal he elected to work with someone he knew. Drawing was rejected as a trigger, which would prompt chains of associative actions. The artist and his collaborator chose instead to focus action on handling mass produced objects: clothing, cosmetics, or household machinery; what Whitehead identified as consumer fetishes: "those designed objects which symbolise not only insatiable desire, but those which have been made according to finely tuned functional aesthetics... (3.)
The two went about performing these photographs, blind, in the dark, unaware at the moment of doing, how they would look in the final image. They enacted two separate sets of movements. One collaborator handled the object, searching for a comfortable use or some relationship to his or her body. The second moved around the first to intermittently highlight this or that movement with a point of light. Due to Whitehead's use of a continuously open camera shutter, the final images show a series of overlaid. But not necessarily sequential movements - an attractive woman playing with a toy; using a household appliance; handling a perfume bottle or an evening shoe. Not unlike consumer billboard advertisements for chic lifestyle, the high colour photographs in Fuse are literally meant to take us in by their glossiness , as their size, which is 110 x 140 cm, is also meant to immerse us in the world of luxury goods; Whitehead intentionally uses both elements as a decoy to seduce. However, once we are attaracted to the images, the series proceeds to forefront gestures alien to this kind of ease: clutching where there should be caressing; stabbing when there should be softness and secuction; banging and crushing in place of smoothness. In a word, Fuse, assists us to imagine the of fit between representations of processed experience and the potentialities of a multivocal self in process of formation. Umberto Eco applauds just this process and by implication Whitehead's current work. It is valuable to quote Eco's thoughts at length:
"The discontinuity of phenomena has called into question the possibility of a unified, definitive image of our universe; art suggests a way for us to see the world in which we live, and, by seeing it, to accept it and integrate it into our sensibility. The open work assumes the task of giving us a sense of discontinuity. It does not narrate it; it is it. It takes on the mediating role of between the abtract categories of science and the living matter of our sensibility; it almost becomes a sort of transcendental scheme that allows us to comprehend new aspects of the world." (4.)Caryn Faure-Walker
Footnotes
1. Faure-Walker, Caryn, " Static Image Travelling, A Conversation with Oliver Whitehead " in City (International Media Art Prize) Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2000, p 52.
2.
Solantaus, Tytti, " Children ' s Responses to the Great Threat of Nuclear War, in Taipale, Ilkka Al. (editors), War or Health, Physicians for Social Responsibility (Finland), Helsinki, 2002, pp 259-265
3.
Whitehead, Oliver, unpublished email to author 22 March 2002
4.
Eco, Umberto, The Open Work, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1989, p 90
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Actionman |
Car |
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Doll |
Iron |
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Perfume |
Shoe |
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FUSE-SERIES, 2002
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