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Judith Williamson in her seminal book "Consuming Passions" writes
about one of the limitations of critical engagement with the products
of consumer culture. Williamson notes, that while it was more than common
to discuss how commodities channel our desires for ‘the need for
change, the sense that there must be something else’ into ‘the
need for a new purchase, a new hairstyle, a new coat of paint’ what
is always lacking in this discussion is any sense of how ‘consuming
products does give a thrill, a sense of both belonging and being different’
. In essence, there’s no obvious understanding of why the products
are successful as products. Why there are attractive, entertaining - pleasurable.
Williamson rightly regards this as something of a major handicap to unraveling
and examining the global success of the entertainment industry.
Williamson’s criticisms are and remain transferable to art. When
she was writing the above during the 1980’s, art was dominated by
work which bracketed its use of the stuff and fluff of popular culture
with quotation marks laden with cool irony. More often than not the artists
were incapable of sufficiently disguising their contempt for the products
and the consumers. What was tellingly absent was any sense of passion,
enthusiasm, and pleasure - the very same affliction that was endemic in
the academic literature that Williamson squared up to. As Williamson wrote,
‘passion is another story. It is to be written about, but not with:
for the essence of this work on desire is to stay cool’ .
Fortunately a new generation of artists have in recent years attempted
to foreground their own passions and pleasures within their work. Their
curiosity regarding the consumer cocktail of intoxicating, mindnumbing
and liberating products on offer starts with unashamedly personal pleasures.
Jenny Hogarth is one of these artists. In discussion with Jenny, over
this piece I asked for supplementary information about her interests.
. Jenny’s list was as expansive and enthusiastic as you could get.
"Identity, trigger Happy TV, communication, time (past, present and
future), technology, relationships, networks, humour, real/unreal, what’s
cool? Time machines, DJ’s, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,
teenagers, lo fi, decorating your home in the style of.., owning desirable
objects, emotive music, emotional films, nostalgia, body language, projecting
an image, the ring tone of a phone, digital technology, Barbarella, Indiana
Jones, the wonder years, love story, scrap yard challenge"
Most artists don’t offer statements of interest like this. Mores
the pity.
Hogarth’s list is a good taste of her saturated practice. Interested
and engaged in the mechanics of everyday life, Hogarth’s curiosity
refuses to discriminate between proper and improper subjects for art.
Consequently her work is capable of holding in solution a powerful combination
of passions, loves and hates. Andy Warhol once remarked that ‘space
is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its
spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts.
Like a large condominium’ . As a cross section of her mind, Hogarth’s
list and her art, highlights she shares Warhol’s fascination with
a wide-ranging collection of cultural matter.
The kind of enthusiasm and curiosity that Hogarth displays in her work,
has as Judith Williamson implied, often been granted minimal artistic
pedigree. However if artists want to communicate, and Hogarth is patently
keen to, surely one of the starting points has to be communicating a personal
sense of shared existence within the broader culture. If artists had previously
been nervous of secretly ashamed of admitting to being fans of, say the
Wonder Years, the fear being it would negate the authority of their artistic
voice, artists like Hogarth, now seem to no time for such denial.
Significantly Hogarth appreciates if you are interested in the machinery
of cultural communication, be it mobile phones or TV, you have to address
how you, as an artist, communicate to your audience this work on communication.
Demonstrating some empathy and connection to your audience seems a good
place to start.
John Beagles
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