Kitaj has been an influence to me on many levels. One of the first things I saw was an interview with Kitaj by Timothy Hyman. I'm guessing it was done for London Magazine but I can't find it on my bookshelf to verify. Over a decade later I visited Timothy to ask him not about Kitaj but about Bonnard and he very kindly answered my questions. I did mention the interview because it had really sparked my imagination and he showed me a painting by Kitaj's second wife Sandra Fisher that was full of beautiful Manetesque brushstrokes and bright colours.
That interview made me go looking for Mondrian, Schiele, Benjamin... Oh God so many different people in fact. And not just people but ideas. Having grown up in an art world of post modernist conceptualism I was amazed not just that anybody still drew figuratively at that level, but that they drew so well and mixed it with so many literary and art historical ideas. He was intense and vivid and talked as much about notions of the abstract as he did about the old masters. I can be corrected on this but I don't think I ever saw him write about Donald Judd. He was a Modernist with Cartesian leanings and post structual notions that the author didn't know what they were creating didn't sit well in his work. I personally loved that about them. They were not unlike the American modernist poetry he loved and since I grew up with books of Cummings, Ashbery, Duncan and Creeley I was amazed that this painter not only drew ideas from them but that he actually knew them personally. Like those poets and their poems, you need to know something of Kitaj's personal motivations in each work to draw further interpretation. That was always a stumbling block of modernism. You always needed some research in hand, unlike post modernism which begs you to explain it because the author often can't. I love research though. Research is knowledge. If you have read my earlier post on the UK school system you will understand why I prize this very highly. To research is to both understand and construct further and Kitaj's work was replete with those motivations.
By the time I had seen the Marco Livingstone monograph I was on a mission to incorporate as many of the ideas I had seen in his work as I could into my own ideas. One of the main ideas was fragmentation. There is so much written about fragmentation in painting and sculpture that I won't reassess it here. I will however explain what I saw in Kitaj in this respect. This painting is a stunner...
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R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007), From London (James Joll and John Golding), 1975/76, Oil on Canvas, 152 x 244 cm, Private Collection.
Joll was a historian specialising in anarchism and socialism, and Golding was an abstract painter and art historian. The painting is full of references to their interests and lives and that is interesting in itself, but what I loved was its fragmentation. Kitaj wrote about this paintings state of 'unfinish'. Both fragmentation (in the sense that Rodin applied it not the way the Surrealists applied it), and 'unfinish' have a lot in common. The borders of the imagination are not so defined in a painting that has these 'unfinished' and fragmented qualities.
When I saw it, Golding's arm in the Kitaj painting instantly made me think of Elizabeth Frink's 'Dying King'...
Dame Elizabeth Frink (1930-1993), Dying King, 1963, Bronze, 850 x 1850 x 400mm, Tate Collection.
Frink's dying Richard III (the real one having now been found under a car park in Leicester!) is flailing in agony not just as his attackers move in for the kill but in despair at his predicament, the end of the road, and what lays beyond. That's my interpretation anyway and I think it does hold up. There are much greater greater metaphysical ideas at play here though (as well as an excellent solution for conveying movement in a 3D static object) and the arm extends to another metaphysical sphere beyond what we can grasp visibly. I'll probably do a QoE Creative course where I go into these ideas in much greater depth.
I suggest that we are essentially provided with three spheres of time; the present in which the piece is being viewed, the past in which it was created, and the historical past that the figure represents. This is obviously not true of all artworks but again, this is a modernist piece and the Tate's research shows that Richard III's death was the intended subject. Likewise we have three sphere's of seeing. There is the space between the viewer and the object, the spatiality around the object itself, and the metaphysical spatiality that is hinted at by the flailing arm. Again, this is a personal assessment not academic research but I think it is worth proposing. Rodin employed similar theories and certainly the Cubists and later the Surrealists later took ideas of fragmentation to signify the breaking up of time, space and contextual meaning.
In Kitaj's painting, Golding's arm has that aspect to it. It dissolves into an abstration and suggests what lays beyond the physical world and takes us into the metaphysical. I did this in one of my photos on a series I did about English Culture...
Mod Shop, 2011, Digital Print, Copyright E. Woodroffe 2013
When I shot this photo I actually had not just Kitaj but another great fragmenting artist in mind, Edward Burra. Esprcially his late works where he went away from the opaque and into the transparent as a further possible field of metaphysicality in two dimensional spaces. At face value my photo is about commodity culture and fetishism but if you look closely it goes a lot deeper into the realms of spatiality. Consumers often forget time when they are engrossed in shopping and sellers absolutely want them to forget it. Like gambling casino's that have no clocks, the longer that the shopper stays then the longer there is the chance that they will go home with a prize. I tried to capture this idea in one shot in 1/250th of a second through multiple layers of glass and consumers on every side of me during a street festival. That's just a barest snippet from what I have thought and written about this subject over the years and I do intend to do an event based around it. Keep tuned to www.qoecreative.com and our upcoming events and workshops for more details.
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