CATALOGUE ESSAY - STEVEN RENDALL
For the exhibition ‘Fragments, Excerpts and Categories’ at Niagara Galleries, 2021.
You might not have what you would call an ordered mind. You misplace things, forget appointments. Fundamentally, though, you’re a walking filing system. Your mind is an archive. You can’t help but categorise the world.
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The conversation between painting and writing is full of mistranslations. The languages do not connect. Still, the right way to enter into a discursive relationship with a work full of fragments is surely to write in fragments. Step back far enough, and some sort of whole emerges.
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Children have to learn to focus. Before that, there is no figure, no ground, just shapes with no meaning. What a rare thing, to see something without ascribing meaning. You can get close, if you’re really high. Staring at knots in wood whispering ‘What the fuck is that?’ It never lasts, though. To categorise is to assign value. To assign value is to judge.
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High value cultural objects: oil paintings.
Low value cultural objects: schlocky horror films. Collections of occult symbology derived largely from urban legend and printed at average quality, at best. Screencaps.
Intermediate value cultural objects: notes kept for decades by artists (value dependent on perceived genius or lack thereof ascribed to said artist. Value higher if artist dead).
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David Foster Wallace, in his essay ‘E Unibus Pluram’, on Octavio Paz’s notion of meta-irony: ‘the categories we divide into superior/arty and inferior/vulgar are in fact so interdependent as to be coextensive.’
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There are layers to looking.
At first: a dense, rippling plane of colour. Like the aura that precedes a migraine, shapes distorted, the world fractured.
Then: a recognisable thing emerges. A hand, perhaps. A cat you remember from childhood. A snorkel.
Then: the grid asserts itself. The separation between things. The fragmentation that reveals source material.
Then: the nuance. The humour. There are puns, here. In-jokes. Art history references.
Then: the eye drifts, endlessly, a slow maelstrom.
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The writer HP Lovecraft’s great power is his refusal to describe the horrors that his characters encounter. He writes of the awfulness of not being able to ascribe meaning to what is seen, the terror of form without identification. Horror, then, is a failure of categorisation.
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One of the reasons that paintings are so venerated is their capacity to transmute the flat space of the canvas into something 3D. They become portals.
Steven’s portals are more like a wormhole; an event horizon that eats data. Ravenous.
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Categories imply hierarchies. Fracture the categories, and the hierarchy breaks down. Without the order of the archive, the content speaks directly, unencumbered by expectations. The binaries of important/unimportant break down. This is freedom, of a sort, the freedom to wander the wreckage like a child, pocketing shards of mirror and rugged stones with equal interest.
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Steven, on the white space in the canvas: ‘I can’t handle that. I have to fill it up.’
Sylvia Plath, on the sky:
‘The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole…
A bone white light, like death, behind all things.’
White as the representation of terrible absence.
Think of the works as a glass of water, filled to the brim. The meniscus on the lip, the tension of water about to break. Full, but not excessive. A delicate thing.
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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives the following example of a category mistake: ‘The number two is blue.’
Observe, in Category Drift, the stencilled blue turd, modelled from a lithograph of a poo on a beach: Richard Hamilton’s Sunset (f) (1975).
I had forgotten the name of the artist. I Googled ‘poo sunset beach artist.’ Google responded, ‘Do you mean beautiful photos of the beach at sunset?’
‘Poo + sunset’ is a category error. The machine rebels.
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Who puts works by other people in a solo show? If the categories do not serve us, we can break them. And these works are all collaborative, in a way, aren’t they? A game of Exquisite Corpse played with hundreds of illustrators and painters, unwitting participants.
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It’s not surprising that Adam Curtis’ The Trap (2007) is of particular interest to Steven. Curtis’ work describes the Britain that Rendall grew up in, a Britain simultaneously suspicious of control and obsessed with rational categorisation. The whiff of libertarianism was in the air, a faith in the awesome power of the free market. Personal freedoms were the talk of the day. No more fusty structure. At the same time, it was a place increasingly fascinated with categorisation, with computer predictions of human behaviour, with the objective power of numbers. The bureaucratic machine was on the rise, wide-eyed with faith in rationality, in objectivity, in systems and targets. Elegant, clean numbers. The two things, hand in hand: terror of control, and obsession with it.
No wonder, then, that Steven’s work bristles with tension, between its rigid formal structures and his refusal to adhere to his own rules.
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Isabelle Graw, in the essay ‘The Value of Painting’: painting is ‘a highly personalised semiotic activity.’
Anyone can break a whole into pieces. It takes a practised eye to reassemble them as something new, something crawling with its own life.
Also Graw: culturally, we often consider ‘artworks as equivalents of people.’
At first glance, these artworks are monstrous beings. Not like us. Other.
You’re foolish, though, to think that you comprise a single, whole individual. Are we not all this hazy collision of bits — half-remembered, assembled by intuition and held together only tentatively? Can you even really remember your most formative memories? Do you not act, often, in ways that do not fit the structure of your own self?
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Meaning attaches to objects, to images. These paintings are spaces of semiotic disarray. They are a mess of signifiers, jostling to be understood.
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An archive is predicated on the idea that a document is a whole, and that a collection of wholes reveals the truth. Every document, though, is merely a fragment. A transcribed moment; a version; a recollection. These paintings are true forms of archive: stuffed full, but incomplete; aware of the other stories that cluster, unarticulated, at the margins.
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Some of these works draw together decades of hoarded material. In the studio, I watched Steven leaf through a folder of images. A photograph of a beautifully carved chicken, notes scribbled in lectures, newspaper clippings. If he wasn’t an artist, he might be a conspiracy theorist. Is there much difference? Both involve a slightly superstitious relationship with a world bristling with possibility and meaning, waiting to be uncovered through intuition.
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There is discomfort, in many of these works. The collaborations with Andrea Eckersley contain an uncomfortable tactility. The low reliefs are a type of body horror. They are fleshy. That’s not even to touch on the hulking human-sized entities that Steven has been forming out of plastic waste. Check his Instagram. They’re terrifying.
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Each of these paintings is stuffed with flat layers. This writing you are now reading on a screen is text describing digital images of paintings based on collages of prints of originals, themselves based on studies. Flatness speaking to flatness. Translating translations. Many of these originals are themselves a form of fabrication: monsters, stories, hypotheticals.
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When we look at images of outer space, most often we’re not looking at anything that could claim to be indexical. We’re looking at an artist’s impression. But this is true of the whole world, isn’t it? We see through sickening layers of representation: jostling, crawling over every form. Immanuel Kant: we can never know the ‘thing-in-itself’; we can only know the way we observe it. We cannot see the object without parsing it through structures of meaning, of categorisation.
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Boundaries give us safety. Chaos is free, but it is not reassuring.
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So often, fractures and glitches are socially construed as error, as machine failure or madness. An algorithm comically misunderstanding nouns, JPEGs exploding into each other, the word salad of schizophrenia or Wernicke’s aphasia. To speak of error is to reveal faith in the rigid demarcations of categories, which delineate where things stand out, where they do not belong.
Steven’s paintings remind us that categories are constructed, and, like all human-made things, slippery. Their borders are permeable.
In these works, the fragments expose an illogical logic, a structure made of intuition and feeling, impossible to predict or reproduce. There is humour in them. A machine, after all, does not know how to laugh.
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These fragmentations and fractured categories are the antithesis to machine logic, and to machine error, too. Machines don’t make mistakes quite like this. Steven has a particular feeling for the absurdity of modern bureaucracy; the insistence of machines speaking with binary authority to endlessly complex humans. He is attuned to the bleep of an object demanding ‘please make a valid input’; to the rigours we code into the world around us and take as given.
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There is a proposition, in these paintings: structure contains us, but our rebellion defines us. Freedom lies in testing the limits of order, of being attuned to the chaotic possibilities of the world. Slippages, mistakes, surprising eccentricities in the archive: these are the triumph of humanity in the face of rigour.
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Memory and thought are both fragmented. We perceive them as linear, but they break down under interrogation. Still, we experience the shards as wholes. To view these paintings, as to view ourselves, requires a curious doublethink: these things do not belong; these things are entire. To see the fractures at the same time as the whole requires us to say no while also saying yes. Now is the time to practice. Give yourself rules and then break them.