Empty, the other Half Full( both 1999) – expose the cliché of the upbeat adage their titles allude to by presenting us with photographs – representations that insist on an empirical reality that the blithe saying and Floyer’ s bland photography are set on disregarding. The medium is a spanner in the works’ abstraction. The photographs further expose the pretensions of conceptualist abstractions by satirically alluding to a famous but facile work of British conceptual art: Michael Craig- Martin’ s( one of Floyer’ s Goldsmiths tutors) An Oak Tree( 1973) – a glass of water on a shelf that a text explains has been transformed into an oak tree as though by the power of language. Floyer’ s photographs are the critical inverse of Craig-Martin’ s gung-ho alchemy. They show that language’ s – and, by extension, reason’ s – possession of reality is pathetically limited; that reality is neither half-full nor half-empty but inexorably resistant to such glib generalisations.
Interpreting the generic object, the cliché, the mean value, as forms of wishful thinking belied by recalcitrant reality, Floyer qualifies her conceptualist heritage as of the British kind, which was always more concerned with empirical pictorial representation than its American or German counterparts. This is the lineage of Richard Wentworth’ s( who also taught at Goldsmiths) photographic series Making Do and Getting By( 1973 –) or Susan Hiller’ s Dedicated to the Unknown Artists( 1972 – 76). Wentworth’ s photographs capture makeshift manifestations of human ingenuity applied to urban entropy. Minor adjustments to the prevailing chaos – a shoe used to prop up a sash; a railing spike proffering a lost glove – are models for a rational, human ideal( many of the‘ interventions’ are endearing and charitable). Hiller’ s diptychs combine grids of vintage British tourist postcards, representing stormy seas bombarding a coastline, with typewritten analysis. It is impossible to determine whether the statistics are ironically assiduous, or if we are projecting irony onto an earlyconceptual mindset that precludes it. Either way, the images function figuratively. The shorelines cannot contain the sea’ s battery, as Hiller’ s art is overwhelmed by the information it strives to assimilate.
She can only rail against the impenetrability of history to her act of remote representation.
As Hiller alludes to an art convention through a mass-produced cipher, and takes that contrast as a cue for a meditation on the resistance of history to representation, Floyer’ s Monochrome Till Receipt( White)( 1999) pitches a disposable receipt as a white monochrome – a modernist form that abjures information and reference in favour of optical purity. The list of purchases intimates a world of consumer objects as overwhelming to the carte blanche of the monochrome as the high waves to Hiller’ s Romantic coastlines. That all the listed products are white makes them symbolically invisible by imaginatively converting them into art signs, putative readymades, aligned – in their art-ness – with the monochrome paper. White paper and white objects expose the words describing the purchases( in black ink, the colour of the exception in the white of Floyerland) as an unassimilable excess. Their local specificity( each time the work is realised, the items are purchased from a nearby supermarket) is another aspect of their clashing with the generic monochrome they qualify. As the receipt is abstracted, so the purchases – but not the language that represents them – are generalised as white objects. The black print in its local language represents all that threatens the dominion of abstract art’ s aesthetic preserve, and that it consequently rejects.
It is consistent with the anticommodity stance of Floyer’ s conceptual models that this threat is made synonymous with consumerism. Sold( 1996) imputes the travesty of specific objecthood to the clumsy, dated art-market convention by which a gallery indicates paintings as sold by sticking a small red circle on the wall. But it may also be imputing that travesty to painting as the default medium of the art commodity. In Bonn, a hole was drilled in the wall at the corner of a Georg Baselitz painting and filled with red paint. Perhaps it was not coincidental that Floyer had chosen to place her dot in conjunction with the work of one of the avatars of the resurgence of large-scale figurative painting in the 1980s, which at the time was considered
Sold, 1996, cadmium red oil paint, 7 mm hole, 7 mm diameter. Photo: Axel Schneider. © the artist, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015. Courtesy the artist; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Lisson Gallery, London; 303 Gallery, New York
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