Sorcha Dallas

The Imaginary Critic

The motivation behind Clare Stephenson’s work is critical. Her target is the empty, Byzantine complexity of certain current art. The method she uses is parody. Or, the origin of Clare Stephenson’s work is critical, but the end is the creation of an imaginary world of visual devices and semantic fillips that eludes a straightforward decoding. Or, both of the preceding characterizations are true. This might imply a paradox, or it might not.

Stephenson’s recent work has largely taken two distinct but related forms. On the one hand we have fairly large works on paper executed in airbrushed ink and pencil based on constructions that are not exhibited. On the other there are small, less numerous sculptural works which incorporate carved wooden artifacts such as cigarettes and three-dimensional lettering. While the works on paper are tight and elaborately composed, the sculptures are more freely worked, almost indecisive, and seem qualitatively different from the never-shown constructions depicted in the images. At the same time there is an air of self-consciousness about both, a play of revelation and concealment with the emphasis on the latter. In the two-dimensional work it’s sometimes as though Stephenson has invented an artist who makes arbitrary, over-complicated, symbolically inconclusive assemblages, and chooses to depict that artist’s work in a more sober and precise hand that we might identify with Stephenson herself. Equally, the constructions might be the residue of the first faulty but essential impulse to make something, and the reproduction a more selfless appraisal and modification, a critical screen. All of which begs the question, where does the real investment lie?

A recurring presence in the work is the nineteenth century French republican, painter and caricaturist of genius Honor Daumier. If Hogarth and Gilray mark the beginning of caricature as a developed art, then the by turns somber, acidic and effervescent inventions of Daumier, whose draughtmanship is easily a match for Picasso’s, are perhaps its fullest efflorescence. In Daumier Stephenson has identified a sharp alignment of aesthetic validity, critical energy and accessibility, one that ought to deflate the vacuous pomposity of much recent critical practice with a few swift strokes. But of course it’s not as simple as that. History, art history and social structures aren’t static. Daumier can’t be reanimated, and if he could be he’d probably seem pass. Stephenson doesn’t need to be told this. She also doesn’t need to be told that it isn’t enough simply to refer to Daumier, as a model of best critical practice. More is required of an artist than the ability to refer to things – some sort of transformation is required.

The Daumiers that appear in Stephenson’s work inevitably aren’t Daumiers any more, but material and semantic artifacts. Drawings of his sculptures, which are based on images at a decisive photographic remove from their subjects, are manipulated in the imaginary space of the paper, piled up, cropped, recombined and dislocated. Daumier’s targets are dead. Caricature and parody persist, but the last example of art successfully embracing explicit social commentary by means of caricature is probably the anti-fascist photomontages of John Heartfield in the 1930’s. (The fact that his most famous work exploits photomechanical media so thoroughly both presages and parodies our current immersion in photographic rather than graphic imagery, with all its doubtful claims to objectivity.) Stephenson’s gesture towards this kind of direct criticality is itself oblique and parodic, acutely conscious of its limitations, and at a root a mutation into something quite different. In this regard there seems to be something significant about the original marginality of Daumier’s sculptures. They were made as models to be drawn from and never exhibited as independent works in his lifetime, and the decision to cast them in bronze was made many years after his death. This chain of reproduction and reappraisal is evoked and complicated by Stephenson’s images; what exactly remains of the historical Daumier’s intentions in these copies of images of objects, objects made to produce images of a quite different kind?

Next to nothing. Historical context, facture, three-dimensionality, scale – these are only some of the vital organs the patient can’t manage without. Daumier is treated instead a strange sort of raw material, still activating a field of associations with a pugnacious charge, but also somewhat hollowed out. In La Technique – with Daumier Bust the titular object is set on an incompletely materialized field of stripes and erratically orbited by coat-hanger wire (the coat-hanger acts as a sign for fashionable emptiness in Stephenson’s image repertoire), resolutely characterful but quite inert by contrast with the formal play of lines around it. This formality is at once satisfying and troubling. Is it masking an absence or redressing one? Does Daumier need to be jazzed-up by an unlikely synthesis with Constructivism and Pop? This second question implies that the image is a rebus, but its success actually lies in its wholeness, the consolidation of fluidity and clunkiness, the way a stilted illusion is achieved through controlled execution.

Only in its actual, visual, material manifestation does the work stand or fall, and the concreteness of Stephenson’s work forms the necessary counterpoint to its precise but brittle web of associations. A carving of a stylized eye into the flat top of a jelutong stake could be a reference to the disembodied orbs that appear in the work of Odilon Redon, or a blunt and jokey reversal of the relationship between the looker and the looked at. For me it will always be a stamp waiting to be inked, one that would leave a visible trace of its wooden gaze on magazines, posters, television screens, paintings. The physical tics and resistances of graphite and sprayed ink, the spitting, slips of the template and wanderings of line, are always crucial to Stephenson’s effects, but a recent image called The Prompter also introduces a material transformation of the starting conditions of a picture. While the familiar sources and techniques are in evidence, the ground is a less-than-virginal sheet of newsprint with a scalloped tear near the middle and a prominent are of sun bleaching. The abstract and representational marks and motifs flirt with and are guided by the picturesque damage, and the whole thing is held together by a pun – the title refers to both the sculpture depicted and to the fact that the paper could be seen as the prompter of the image. This kind of visual-linguistic play can seem labored, but the work is so much a product of practical sensitivities and so little an exercise in cleverness that as an image it remains mobile and alive.

Stephenson’s practice suggests disenchantment with conventionalized critical tactics, especially the rejection of ‘traditional’ processes in favor of those that mimic mass or corporate culture. Such tactics, which currently enjoy a high level of institutional approval, frequently fold back their objects of critique; at worst an artist ends up merely negotiating commercial and bureaucratic structures, using their knowledge to milk systems rather than to escape or transform them. Drawing and painting might be forced to live within these systems, and they have done so with considerable material success, but what happens within their frames needn’t duplicate those apparatuses’ usual imaginative poverty. Rather than promise to dismantle bad invisible structures later, Stephenson calmly and incisively attempts to make good visible structures now. For Daumier there was no contradiction between visual richness and critical bite – that separation has been forced in retrospect. Stephenson, in a way that is peculiar to her own moment, a way as private and arcane as Daumier’s was public and explicit, shows that the fusion of criticism and invention still needn’t produce a dichotomy. -David Musgrave