Sorcha Dallas

COULD WE? I AM ASKING

The bicycle: an unusual and perhaps unexpected object in early 21st century art yet here it is in the work of Kate Davis; as immediate physical presence and as mediated image. During the overture of 20th century modernism, in the work of artists as various as Delaunay, Duchamp, Leger, Ernst, Bunuel & Dali, Boccioni and Picasso, the motif of the bicycle -- in fragments or otherwise -- is a recurrent referent. In such works it frequently operates jubilantly as a signifier of the freedom and mobility offered to the modern urbanite by a humanized and democratized efficient form of the bicycle, the machines of industrial mass-production are revealed as agents of joy and release, in partial contradiction of their conventional role as masters of oppression and captivity. The world becomes newly available to the leisure cyclist as technology becomes the servant of will, desire and practical convenience. Muscle and machine, body and technology, human energy and progressive civilization: the innocent upbeat matrices has gradually faded from our general cultural consciousness, replaced by a dim popular dread of the inhuman cyborg. This is not to claim, of course, that the bicycle itself is now stripped of all cultural connotation, psychic resonance and indexical powers; far from it. Choppers, BMXs, touring cycles, racing cycles, mountain bikes; the available range of types and models is greatly expanded, but such expansion and the degree of specialization thereby entailed explode the currency into myriad fragments. However, by virtue of its relative ordinariness the actual bicycle used by Davis brackets such multiplication. Its workaday, sit-up-and-beg form suggests a directness and simplicity beyond and before the advent of the \'style\' bicycle. It is, as nearly as possible, a generic bicycle; a bicycle-symbol. If such a word existed, it might be said to exemplify bicycleness. It has also been painted red. This perceptible act of repainting serves further to remove the object from its immediate social and functional contexts. Manufacturer\'s identifying signs and trademarks have been obliterated, and originally immaculate surfaces exposed to fallibility of the humand hand. In sum, the bicycle has been lifted from the world of managed commodities and inserted into the realm of individuality fabricated symbols (aided by the fact that it is now in an art gallery). Now partially defamiliarized as both object and sign it encourages us to fresh speculation.

The front wheel of this red bicycle touches the wall directly in its path. Its conventional function is thus undermined: it cannot go forward, the only direction of movement implied by its engineering. Already something quite unavoidable is suggested, something metaphorical, something at odds with the hurtling optimism of earlier days. If this were all, we might acknowledge the rather familiar conceit and move on. In this case, on the contrary, such an arrangement provides merely the prelude to a far more complex and subtle play of semantic possibilities. The progress of the bicycle has been arrested but it now stands patiently, doggedly, in front of a framed image suspended on the wall. Was this image the chosen destination of the bicycles absent rider? We\'ll never know. Whatever the case, the bicycle now interferes with our own ability to stand directly in front of that image. Here we are, confronted with one of Davis\'s characteristically staged paradoxes: that which we are invited to see is made difficult to see. Our access to an image is physically obstructed (or otherwise shepherded) by an object. And yet this object is an integral part of the work itself, something, furthermore, that is more or less directly referenced within the image. The ensuing awkwardness becomes an essential part of the viewing experience. A mental retreat from the real, shared, public space of the gallery into an imaginary mode of private, isolated and undisturbed introspection is disallowed. Consequently, the very conditions upon which this notionally ideal mode of art spectatorship is predicated within bourgeois culture are revealed by Davis in their ideological dimensions. This is not simply a theoretical posture; it takes the form of a specific physical reality; experiencing this work often provokes a high level of social self-consciousness and bodily self-awareness. To reinforce this point a second situation -- repeating many structural elements of this first, but also differing greatly in particularities -- is staged another part of the gallery space. The red painted metal of a ladder directly echoes the red painted metal of the bicycle frame. This ladder, however, appears (like the bicycle) to lead nowhere: there is no visible opening in the ceiling at the point where its upper rungs terminate. Placed high on the wall, far too high by normal exhibition conventions, is another print. We are offered a challenge; do we climb the ladder to view the print closely (is this permitted?), or do we respect social etiquette and \'keep our distance\'? The image in this \'skied\' black and white monoprint is of a shirt: pressed flat and with rectangular sections removed, its linear skeleton mimics the structure of the ladder.

If we now return our attention to the framed image on the wall above the bicycle\'s front wheel we are rewarded with a mild chock. What may strike us at first in this monotype is the image of someone\'s buttocks and upper thighs. We are, in fact, looking at the directly imprinted impression of someone\'s arse. But that is not all. Superimposed on this image is another, this time the image of the propulsion unit of a bicycle: pedal, cog wheel and chain. (This monotype is actually one of a set of four. The others, positioned to the left, repeat these motifs but, as is typical in much of Davis\'s work, such repetition also involves a significant play of differences.) Immediately a train of associative connections is set in motion, shuttling back and forth between this image -- ultimately, in fact, across this suite of images -- and the adjacent red bicycle. These transfers are so swift and fluent that it would render them dull and sluggish to chase them with words. I prefer instead to follow other lines, lines that I hope will begin to connect across other aspects of Davis\' work. In returning to the bicycle we can perhaps find new directions to follow. We could, for example, examine the bicycle as a particular kind of object with distinctive relations -- formal and metaphorical -- to both the modern art object and the modern construct of the imaginary body (fragmented, decentred, etc.) Thus, as Philip Fisher notes, \'The bicycle is an essentially new object of the type produced within mass production because it is so visibly an array of parts ... Each part can be easily and specifically identified ...\' To this extent, then, the bicycle might readily be thought of as the very model for the characteristically constructivist character of modernist sculpture production -- and for collage technique in all media. (Picasso\'s \'Bull\'s Head\' -- constructed from a bicycle saddle and handlebars -- assumes a particular appropriateness in this light.) This would be of purely academic interest if it were not for Davis\'s frequent recourse to modernist art and its associated techniques from the inter-war years of the 20th century. (Other such references in her current work include Boccioni, Leger, and Max Ernst\'s frottage method.) We could perhaps even stretch the point and suggest that the newly applied red skin of paint on the bicycle\'s metal frame may evoke from a distance the high modernist aesthetic Anthony Caro\'s welded and painted steel sculptures of the 1960s, such as \'Early One Morning\'. The point here would be to suggest that Davis has situated her bicycle within a complex network of references and associations: cultural, psychological, and (art) historical in terms of both iconography and technique.

The bicycle is a piece of engineered equipment that mediates between its rider and forward movement. But in order for the rider\'s effort to be efficiently converted into forward momentum, body and machine must come into intimate contact at three points. In his brief analysis of the bicycle French also makes the following observations: \'Each of the three points of contact with the body ... is specified by a part whose material and shape are unique. The seat is usually of leather and is shaped to the buttocks and designed to transmit the weight. The pedals, where the feet make contact are either of rubber or saw-tooth edged material that can be gripped by the hands. Each of these contact points for hands, feet, and buttocks is separately addressed by materials...\' There is a sense in which this use of materials at the point of interface between body and external world becomes thematized more generally by Davis in this exhibition. It is evident, for instance, n the imagery of clothing: discarded garments whose mutilation means that they can no longer act as a protective second skin. It is underlined more delicately, perhaps, in the printmaking techniques employed bby the artist, whereby the body (represented by the buttocks in this case) presses directly against a material that will passively receive its imprint. Points of contact between the body and materials that have been selected and arranged to receive the physical contact of that body recur throughout, but actual moments of such contact remain absent, indicated only indirectly through proposals and the vestigial traces of indexical signs. We never encounter representations of the body directly engaged in action here; we only have the traces of what it has done in the past (sat naked on a flat surface, for example), or hints of what it might do in the future (climb a ladder or ride a bicycle, for example).

On reflection it may occur to us that more than one body is evident here: there is the body of the artist who made the work (who cut -- perhaps even owned -- the garments, painted the bicycle, printed the images); the body represented in the work (either indirectly by the discarded garments, or directly by the imprint of buttocks); and our own body (which may or may not ascend the red ladder). The interplay between these three (and possibly more) registers of the body -- the representing body, the represented body, and the viewing body -- constitute a further development of Davis\'s exploration of the complex relations between the conditions of representation and the experiences of viewing. This entails no only a concern with the images and objects themselves, but also their disposition in space. Once again there is a hint within the imagery itself that movement through space is under consideration: the bicycle facilitates horizontal movement through space in conformity to gravity, whereas the ladder facilitates vertical movement through space in symbolic defiance of gravity. In both instances technology (advanced and basic) is used to enhance the body\'s capabilities and overcome certain of its limitations. As we ourselves move through the exhibition, such psychosomatic (mind/body) experiences become increasingly apparent. Having descended the stairs into the lower gallery we are greeted by a strategically placed monotype print. A pair of trousers have been carefully dissected and arranged into another ladder-like configuration: a reminder to the eye of what we have recently seen (the shirt-ladder print up stairs), and a witty reminder to the body of what it has just done (negotiated the stairs). At this point we might extend the relatively commonplace equation between a building\'s lower spaces with the mind\'s unconscious and consider Davis\'s orchestration of difference-within-repetition throughout space (upstairs shirt-ladder: downstairs trouser-ladder) in terms of the Freudian concept of Nachtraglichkeit. This term refers to that delayed effect whereby recognition of an event or experience surfaces to consciousness only at some later moment. The wider implication of this would be that the fullness of the present instant is always somehow still to come, and that it is somehow preceded by the ghostly presence of a persistent past. We might then recall (Nachtraglichkeit) the bicycle upstairs: its forward movement blocked and yet impossible to ride in the reverse direction, it is suspended in time and space.

In the lower gallery areas the themes of body, materials and space take on new configurations that gain in resonance by virtue of this delayed experience gained in the gallery above. Images now appear on the horizontal plane, supported by plinth-like structures and consequently acquiring an enhanced object-like property. These works occupy real space, rather than creating the illusion of pictorial space. And, as if to amplify this concrete, sculptural aspect, the plinth like structures rise to varying heights. As we pass along them we follow a flat horizontal trajectory (recalling the notional path of the bicycle) whereas the diminishing heights of their upper horizontal planes echo the stepped verticality of the ladder. Images of the body appear in these works, but now in the form of profiles of a female breast cut from metal sheets. This hard, implacable material is in stark contrast to the soft, yielding materials employed and referenced in the works in the upper gallery and as such, typifies Davis\'s exploitation of materials and production techniques as significant elements in their own right. Thus the (female) human anatomy is captured variously throughout the works in this exhibition as tightly drawn, loosely adumbrated, or as a clean excision. It may appear soft or hard, distinct or vague, depending upon the particular economy of marks, techniques and materials. Often it will appear in conjunction with the image of an engineered, mass produced object (a bicyle part, a house hold key, a metal door handle), but there will be no predictability governing the mode of representation. The body may appear fragile and vulnerable to the rigid and inflexible object - or the opposite may hold. In all instances, however, there is a relationship of tension. Overarching and embracing each of these individual representations of the body, moreover, is a potentially more complex thematic and conceptual suggestion. This might be thought of in terms of dialectical play between interior and exterior. As French observes, unlike the automobile, the bicycle \'has no smooth external skin\' to conceal its internal parts; it has no \'unified aesthetic surface that blocks us from functional information.\' Within the context of the European humanist tradition it is almost not to read this relation between inside and outside in anthropomorphic terms, as metaphorically signalling body and mind, or body and spirit. In Davis\'s work, however, surface and internal structure or so thoroughly disarrayed that their resolution is not easily given. The bicycle is all metal \'workings\', whereas the female form has been presented here as uninterrupted and uninflected plane. Elsewhere the bicycle and ladder invite comparison with skeletons (i.e. internal structures), whereas the dissected garments -- which have a formal appearance directly comparable to the ladder -- are exoskeletal in nature (i.e. as clothing they function externally in relation to the body).

We are confronted then by a host of paradoxes and challenges. In order to negotiate our way through this exhibition -- physically, intellectually and sensually -- we are asked to discard our conventional and habitual modes of thought and behaviour. We might even say that the testing of rules and conventions governing procedures is at the heart of Davis\'s practice. The limits of rule, convention or procedure will be tested to breaking point by applying it to an inappropriate situation. Thus when garments are subjected to the structural logic of the ladder, they disintegrate. All of this conceptual complexity might seem daunting if not for the fact that Davis develops the whole enterprise from imagery that is immediately accessible to all. Just as Jasper Johns was careful to select the commonplace and nondescript as the source for his complex analysis of imagery (flag, target, numbers, letters of the alphabet -- in the most workaday and anonymous typeface available), so too does Davis. The bicycle is ordinary, the garments are run of the mill, the metal door handle is low on style. In fact, so mundane are they in appearance -- so generic -- that they begin to take on the character of concepts, or Platonic Ideas: the bicycle stands for all bicycles, the door handle for all door handles. As such their invitation to us to both look and think is readily acceptable. They ease the passage from sensory perception to abstract conceptualisation, and from personal experience to social and shared values. And the fact that the bicycles and ladders are themselves instruments of passages is perhaps not coincidental. The English language owes a great, if often unrecognised debt to the Greek, and it is therefore highly appropriate to acknowledge that in its Greek form the word \'metaphor\' means to carry or transport from one place to another.

John Calcutt