are contingent on the world in which they find form, the space that expresses them and brings them down to earth. Conversely, her titles always have the air of too-clever puns, self-consciously summarising the conceit that sublimates idea into object, as though reminding the object of the idea that triggered it, and which it can’ t escape. I’ m reminded of something the critic Adrian Searle said of the painter Gary Hume – that his paint never belies the look it had in the pot. That Floyer, like Hume, was among a generation of British artists who emerged during the late 1980s to international acclaim, most of whom were associated with Goldsmiths in London, makes her early-conceptual inheritance anomalous. Producing bold, Pop-effective, artprofessional products, these were artists whose work had more to do with the pragmatism of the post- 1970s British market state, with its distrust of anything too abstract, Platonic and economically unviable, than with what might be its antithesis: Conceptualism’ s severe distrust of art’ s commodification.
The contrast between Floyer’ s work and that of her peers was immediately apparent when I saw it for the first time in Manchester, during the early 1990s, in one of the first British Art Shows, in which Steve McQueen and Douglas Gordon also participated. All three showed filmic or photographic projection, but the gallery-filling installations of McQueen and Gordon couldn’ t have been further removed from Floyer’ s apparently humble Light Switch( 1992) – a lifesize cut-out photographic image of a standard British domestic switch panel projected onto the white wall of an entranceway by a slide projector on a plinth so close to it that it seemed to belittle the image it produced.
Light Switch looked like a rogue, nihilistic cell in the midst of the exhibition’ s youthful self-promotion; a tautological construct so airtight it cancelled itself out in an endless loop of form and meaning. Light triggers an illusion of the object that triggers light( even that sentence resembles an extended palindrome). Light Switch heralded Floyer’ s programme by proposing an artwork’ s occasion as one of futility. It asks us to pay attention to the image of an object that is usually there to be unobtrusively functional, and exacerbates the futility of this demand by making the image contingent upon what the object would be only there to produce: light. Whereas Duchamp divested his bottle rack of its function, releasing it into functionless art space, Floyer makes an object’ s function the tool by which to denote the art object it produces as futile. She uses its function to invalidate rather than liberate the object. Light Switch’ s lack of function – except in the sense that an artwork is a calculated trap for aesthetic contemplation – is made synonymous with its futility. After all, what is the point of a light switch that not only doesn’ t work but needs the energy it is meant to release in order to appear? The piece even goes so far as to qualify aesthetic contemplation itself as futile.
And yet in its power to generate conceptual narrative, Light Switch is anything but miserly. A sign(‘ light switch’) unpacks as both illusion( photograph) and material( light – in the sense that light is Dan Flavin’ s material), each a sign for the other( photography requires light); only for that material to signify and name the sign it creates. Even minimalist materiality – defined by its resistance to figuration and analogy – is here double-edged. Light is revealed as capable of
What is the point of a light switch that not only doesn’ t work but needs the energy it is meant to release in order to appear?
Floyerland is like the ultrasanitised hospital ward that brings to mind the bacterium that no amount of disinfection can exterminate
dissolving an object into the abstraction of a sign, a sign for a light switch but also for the medium of light. Light is both material( particle, in the language of quantum physics) and archetype – a symbol for illumination and enlightenment, as the cartoon image of the‘ eureka’ moment is the lightbulb coming on above the genius’ s head.
In Bonn, Light Switch differed from the version I saw in Manchester in that the image projected was of a German-style switch, as much a standard for its context as the English one in Manchester. The varying versions( there have also been Japanese, Irish, American, French, Italian and Turkish ones) denote the specificity of the wall onto which they are projected. As much as the generic form of the switches abstracts their images into an unlocatable language, their variety specifies the place the image occupies( ie a wall in Manchester or Bonn), as that place claims it as local. This ambivalent site-specificity was underlined by the Kunstmuseum’ s installation of Light Switch in a large unlit gallery, otherwise empty. The projector placed the switch image at the end of a wall, where it gave onto the entrance into another gallery, as if the switch were an afterthought, or rather – like a switch in relation to its domestic setting – an appendage to the interior it serves. Floyer’ s passiveaggressive claiming of a context through the agency of an overseeable intervention is the equivalent of her catalogue installation shots, in which the almost-empty gallery that appears to be a superfluity signifies the negative space that each work’ s narrative draws into its orbit.
But if her interventions claim the context they occupy, they treat it squeamishly. They demand an ideal, white-cube gallery, and given that that is always an ideal, proceed as though the space were a neutral backdrop against which they can enact their conceits with as few impediments as possible. The genericism of the objects is matched by that of the interiors the objects can only require and imply. The empty black Garbage Bag( 1996), puffed up and scrunched in to look full, languished in a corner. It looked just like it always has. This continuity depends on the generic bag, as ideally standard as the‘ ordinary flashlight’ that Jasper Johns told David Sylvester he had in mind to use as a model for a work, and expected to find in every hardware store, only to discover that it was far more elusive a product than he had imagined. But in Floyerland, the ideally standard trash bag, light switch, ladder or handsaw is always at hand, ready to divest itself of its specificity and resolve into a sign for its function. It is as if the conceptual reversal on which Garbage Bag turns – an image of content that proves to be its absence( we take on trust the wall plaque’ s listing‘ air’ as one of its ingredients) – were paramount, and the specificity of the bag had to be disowned in order to manifest it as transparently as possible.
The paradox is that Floyer’ s reduction of her objects to generic signs makes us conversely aware of the specificity they reject. Floyerland is like the ultrasanitised hospital ward that insistently brings to mind the bacterium that no amount of disinfection can exterminate. It makes us conscious of a sign’ s inadequacy, either by forcing it to overcompensate in its function – to get stuck in a reiterative loop; to keep saying, but saying nothing – or by exposing it as a covert particular. Her two identical photographs of a half-filled glass – one entitled Half
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