The Consequence of Truth

The Consequence of Truth Consequence one: As a result of a previous text, the original twin of this text, I have been asked to write something to accompany an exhibition of the work of Philomene Pirecki and Steve Bishop. It occurs to me that I don't know what this exhibition will be called, and that I would like to know. I should ask. For the moment, I shall borrow the name of the gallery as a little cell of language to invert and find space within. The previous text was about Pirecki's work, and this text will be about Bishop's. The previous text was called The Persistence of Image. It began as a review of Pirecki's exhibition Image Persistence, at Supplement Gallery in London. But you, the reader of this text, will have read that text by now. It is some months after that text was written, and after the exhibition it described. Its thoughts have faded somewhat from my mind, although certain of its images persist. I am, in any case, revisiting its structure if not its contents. I've just returned from Paris, where I met the curator of the present exhibition, and made a few notes during the meeting. The notes are as follows: Julia Time Steve Bishop Real-time in the studio Kiosk! They are an inconclusive beginning. I'm sitting at my desk, which has only just been reconfigured after being used as a film set. This is another story. In a couple of hours I will visit Bishop's studio, and see some of the works being made; see them in their place of manufacture. A striking thing, when considering the somewhat elusive work of Steve Bishop, is that it is inconsistent in its appearance. Different works look different to other works. This is something that is surprisingly rare to come across, at least in the cultural micro-climate in which he and his works inhabit. Where is the stylistic watermark that guarantees 'something' to commercial buyers, or guarantees some other 'something' to curators seeking illustrations of a thesis? The works have a light visual presence, and are composed of pleasantly odd materials. The catalogue information regarding these materials forms linguistically attractive lists. 'Bitumen on polythene taped to melamine faced chipboard', 'Shirt, metal alloy', 'Removed MDF', 'C-print squashed in frame', 'Listerine 'Arctic Mint', stainless steel', 'Table and chairs, non woven fabric', and so on. These are all obtuse poems, seen from one perspective. They are like ship's manifests resulting from the acquisition of perplexing cargoes. Consequence Two: Bearing in mind that I'm writing this before visiting Bishop's studio, and before seeing the works and materials operating in space, it seems reasonable to consider this manifestation-in-language for a moment. Of course, I've seen his work in space before, in exhibitions. When doing so I was very struck by the objects, and by the consideration given to spaces and, at times, the architectural space of the gallery. I now have the feeling that this distracted me from the language present in the work, and I'm puzzled as to what this language is. Is it the cargo, the freight, or is it the vehicle carrying the cargo? These verbal manifests have a counterpart that forms quite another linguistic field – the works' titles. These titles are often phrases, occasionally centrally divided by a comma, and often seeming to resemble spoken phrases. That is to say, phrases that have a voice. 'On The Crest Of A Slump', 'If Everything Has a Place, Then Place Too Has a Place', 'An Escalator Can Never Break, It Can Only Become Stairs', 'A Shared Vision Is No Vision At All', 'When The Lights Go Out You Keep Moving', and so on. The most recent of these (the title of an exhibition held at Supportico, Berlin), 'It's Easier To Love Your Song Than It Is To Love You', deflates any sense that these titles might be language that aspires to abstraction. It remains mysterious, but it has the quality of frankness. Consequence Four: In the studio, Bishop points out that the phrases that form his titles are not titular in character. Frankness is a consequence of truth. “Let me be frank”. This is phrase usually meant to indicate a conversation's move into a more rational register, but these frank phrases seem to open up an emotional space of some sort. The voice is quietly persistent, rather like the the sparse phrases of Don DeLillo's short novel The Body Artist, in which a performance artist is gently haunted by a ghostly boy whose language has been learned from tape recordings of her deceased husband. The novel is pared down to small cells of enquiry and conclusion. 'Coming and going I am leaving', 'And I will go or not or never', 'When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see', and so on. These phrases are both concise and open, and they surround a protagonist negotiating, observing and performing the matrix of her self, her thoughts, her objects and her spaces. I think about this in relation to Bishop's work – language as a delicate interface between the manual and the haptic on the one hand, and the viewer's reception of the work on the other. Consequence Three: I really must leave my desk now, and see the new objects for myself. It's one thing to be led by language, but quite another to be led away by language, to be led away from objects and their interactions. Sitting in Bishop's studio, I'm facing a structure that is, more or less, a life-size model of what the work to be installed at Truth and Consequence will be. There is an image pinned to the wall, representing the front window of the gallery, and against the wall adjacent to this a number of boards form the partitions of small cubicles, or 'cubby-holes', as Bishop describes them. They are measured to resemble the cubicles of internet cafes. The boards are covered in some ephemeral materials that may well not be ephemeral, and might in fact be elements of work. Consequence Nine: Bishop has now read this text, and he has reconsidered the size and social nature of the cubby-holes a little (not as a result of the text). He walked past an internet cafe, and realised that his cubby-holes are rather bigger, a bit like reading desks at a library. But, either way, he says that they are 'about finding personal space within a public space', which makes perfect sense to me. There is a picture of a lost dog. This is verifiably an element of Bishop's work. Photocopied playing cards – in fact, the backs of playing cards photocopied onto sticker-sheet cards, replicating the cascade of cards when a game of Solitaire is won. These will not be in the final work. Consequence Eight: In 1994 Microsoft commissioned Brian Eno to compose music for the forthcoming Windows 1995 platform. Solitaire has been included with Windows systems since 1990, however. A sentence: 'wine glasses always break because they're fragile and suddenly you're drunk' and 'im no goodw ith faces', which reworks a previous title. A Black and Decker 'Workmate' bench, forming an ad hoc table. The boards might be printed with an image that would be cut, and partly jigsawed when the cubicles are assembled. Bishop says that he would like the 'eye to be searching' when seeing the structure, rather like in his previous works that fragment a massive image that can never quite be seen at once. And rather like the missing dog. It is lost, but a search is underway. At one end of the structure there will be a video. It will show a 'reading' of some disused buildings in the Mojave desert, a circuit around gratified walls. One shot of this video presumably shows the triangular tops of two sides of the buildings, like quasi Mesoamerican pyramids. Or, as Bishop points out, one would see the two open (empty) doors of these sides of buildings at once. Consequence Six: I'm reminded of two films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie Point and Blow Up. Zabriskie Point was filmed in the Mohave desert too, and of course it also contemplates those strange spaces in addition to recording its narrative. But Blow Up is set in London, very far from the Mojave desert. I saw it last week, a few hours after meeting the curator of the exhibition, in the Cinéma Filmothèque near the Sorbonne. The projection room was quite small, and the print of the film was quite scratched. In the course of the film many things happen for no apparent reason. At least, if one believed the story to be real, there would be no apparent reason. In reality one knows that everything that happens in the film was happening to Antonioni's design. He was a meticulous director, who had some of the grass in the film's park location painted green, to make it more like itself, or perhaps less so. In one scene the main character, played by David Hemmings, buys a large propellor because it is beautiful. In another, towards the end of the film, he attends a concert given by the Yardbirds, essentially standing in for the Who. Jeff Beck smashes his guitar on stage, and throws its neck into the audience. David Hemmings catches the guitar neck and escapes with it, pursued by fans. This feels like a claustrophobic, paranoid version of the antics dramatised in Richard Lester's Beatles films. When he reaches the street, he tosses the guitar neck away. A nearby man picks it up, looks at it, and then tosses it away himself. In any case, Bishop's plan for the video's soundtrack is to use a short loop of his neighbour singing a gospel song. Which, along with the location for the video, and the gradually sifting collection of matter that all the work forms, reminds me of the constructive qualities of the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. The album's title sends my thoughts back to Bishop's work, however happenstance the relation between it and the album may be. As I write, I'm still not quite sure what the exhibition will be called, but the curator informs me that at one moment a working title existed: While it Was Running You Were Stroking Your Chin. This certainly makes linguistic sense in regards to all of the material I'm presently looking at and reading, and rhymes in some way with Brian Eno's romantic declaration, on quite another album: 'I'll come running to tie your shoe'. Consequence Five: Bishop seeks an opinion on a selection of photographs that will also go to Switzerland, but for another purpose. He has made two wall-mounted 'frames' for pre-framed small photographs to be set into. These frame-structures are made of parts of a bed, a child's bed presumably, as the pieces of wood have some stickers and doodles on them. The choice of photographs is between some shots that closely resemble those of the video of the abandoned buildings in the desert, and another taken on the same trip. This photograph is of a folded up ladder-chair construction by the side of a swimming pool, with its blue tarpaulin cover on. The resulting object is strange and disguised, and resembles his work Sleep Image, from the exhibition in Berlin. This work was the one made of 'table and chairs, non woven fabric'. There seemed to be a point of ambiguity in our conversation as to whether it was quite right for new works to be codexes of older works. I couldn't help but feel that the 'kiosk' structure destined for this exhibition might function in this way, as a deliberately ad hoc space for the voices of previous works to haunt the present. My first question to Bishop during the visit to his studio was about what it means, and what it feels like, to continually make work that does not resemble previous work. I have the impression that it's important for him to avoid repetition, and to avoid things that are overly definitive. Things can be gently arranged into being what they are, perhaps. Seeing as a tangential comment is not out of place when considering a practice that pays attention to tangents, it may be worth noting that as an older man the actor David Hemmings directed the first two episodes of the television program Quantum Leap. Consequence Seven: Bishop shows me another element of what may or may not become a piece of work – a replica of a guitar neck used by the guitarist Steve Vai. The fret markings form an exploded diagram of a flat-topped Mesoamerican pyramid. This guitar neck remains latent in the studio, waiting to find an appropriate purpose. He speculates that it might exist like a Franz West work; to be held and used in some way rather than only looked at. To inhabit its user's hands.