The art of Ceal Floyer presents itself, and is typically presented, in banally deterministic terms. The pairing of reproduction and textual summary reduces an artwork’ s conceit to an itemised recipe. A title wittily encapsulates an installation’ s point. The catalogue accompanying last autumn’ s Floyer exhibition at Kunstmuseum Bonn is a page-by-page directory of her works to date, presented in this vein. Each double-page spread has a photograph on the right, facing a title, a date, a list of constituent elements and an explanatory paragraph on the left. The text / image binary is presented as a transparent equivalence. The layout issues paragraphs in the spirit of keys required to activate the images, which are mostly perfunctory. This pattern is familiar from the exegesis around Floyer’ s art, which often reads like a self-satisfied explanation of a series of one-liners. Whereas most art catalogues are intent on generating an aura of mystery and significance around the art they document, Floyer’ s are as tersely factual as a pharmaceutical brochure. Many of the images show what at first glance looks like an empty gallery in which a second glance reveals a minor intervention. If the work is an audio piece, the gallery may actually be empty of art objects. The effect is to emphasise the correspondence between concept and form, and the latter’ s synonymity with the former, casting the image – or visuality itself – as subservient to the reflexive conceit it manifests.
But the experience of Floyer’ s art belies this cut-and-dried format, and returns us to it aware that the emptiness of the images is a positive value. Her work is brief but it claims the space it occupies as its fictional world. Those almost-empty galleries signify the precincts of that world, not merely the expedient foils against which art objects articulate themselves. The Canadian poet Anne Carson once remarked that she considers the imaginative worlds created by certain writers – Beckett, Euripides – to be too bleak to dwell in. Something similar might be said of Floyer. Her spaces are sparely furnished, comfortless, almost colourless, repetitive, tautological, self-circling, indeed full of circles of all kinds, or signs reiterated to the point of dysfunction, like words repeated until they cease to make sense. They are mostly white
– a white broken only by a few black glitches. It is a world of logical processes that wind into Escher-like conundrums. It keeps telling us that our presence and engagement is pointless. It makes us feel foolish for persisting in the face of such hostility. It is always clean and dry. If you’ re not wearing the chic artworld uniform of all black, minimally cut, you feel like an eyesore. That it presents itself as a hipsterish decor is a joke on us – the viewer, the culture – and on the expectations we bring to looking at art. Floyer is always using simple illusions to make us think about our vulnerability to delusion.
The resolution of an abstraction into the materialism of decor, and the confirmation of an assumption in order to reject it, are both forms of irony, which is another reversal given that Floyer’ s crucial antecedent is early conceptual art of the late 1960s and 70s, which was unwaveringly earnest. Irreverently, she bites the hand that feeds her. Early Conceptualism was telling us that art should be an objective communication, a missive in the consensus terms of language. It should transmit a datum instead of resting, like a modernist painting, on the laurels of its aesthetic autonomy. It was saying – in the words of Queen Gertrude, the mother of Hamlet –‘ more matter, with less art’. The idea was the thing, the look of it a delivery mechanism that should dematerialise once it has served its purpose.
But visual art can’ t escape its look, and what this intention produced was not a‘ non-look’, but a déclassé, plain, objective look, which, of course, as the technologies on which it was contingent have dated, has begun to look very much like a look. It is now difficult to know whether British conceptualist Stephen Willats’ s recent silkscreens – with their Xeroxed, typewritten layouts – are art in the early conceptualist style or a nostalgic referencing of that style – a retro idiom. What was originally intended to circumvent art’ s reliance on appearances – its‘ retinalness’, in Duchamp’ s phrase – has become a set of appearances. That Floyer’ s art conforms to the look of art aloof from a concern with its look, and converts that look into a form of brand decor – the corporate identity of Floyerland – is an act of historical assimilation as well as a remote satire. It intimates that ideas
above Domino Effect, 2015, domino tiles, dimensions variable. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin
facing page Half Full, 1999, colour photograph mounted on aluminium, 105 × 105 cm. © the artist, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy the artist; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Lisson Gallery, London; 303 Gallery, New York
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