A New Visual Code

Tristan Pigott: Juicy Bits
Cob Gallery, London
08.06.17 – 01.07.17

1. In her essay ‘In Plato’s Cave’ ( 1977 ), Susan Sontag is emphatic: photographs alter our understanding of what is worthy of our gaze. In fact, in 1839, the year that practical photography was introduced to the mass market to riotous response, we began to operate with ‘a new visual code’. Sontag continues: ‘The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images.’ Important, here, is the deliberate ambiguity. Watch this phrase, ‘to give us the sense’. For while we have always operated under the naive illusion that our anthology is something close to boundless, its contents have always been at the mercy of regulation, convention and context – as they invariably will be. It’s Truman Show ( 1998 ) logic: ‘Boy, take a look at that horizon!’ Then the boat pierces the wall.

2. How wide is today’s ‘whole world’? How comprehensive the ‘anthology’, when images and information circulate in greater quantities, at greater velocities, than ever before?¹ Not so wide, and not so comprehensive! For now, in addition to those preexisting forms of censorship and streamlining, we have digital technology to contend with. Now we have algorithms, cookies, caches; consumer surveillance; the re-targeting of cookies: those unseen henchmen that ensure we see far more than we can ever digest, but far less at the same time.

This repetition, this imposed scroll/swipe systematisation and the related consumption of content, have led to an internalised form of fatigue that not only alters the manner in which we consume, but also the ways in which we produce. With few alternative sources left, we acclimatise to relentless repetition and, thereafter, unconsciously reproduce – once, twice, thrice, ad infinitum.² As selfie breeds selfie, landscape breeds landscape, avocado breeds avocado,³ I tentatively propose that we are returning to a lost era of machine art. For today, Marshall McLuhan’s oft-quoted proposition that technology represents an extension of ‘man’ seems foggy. Might ‘man’ have become an extension of technology? Telling is the epigraph-cum-epitaph of Ezra Pound’s Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years: ‘For every thinking which is lost’.⁴

3. Somewhere in the throes of this techno-lethargy, as user is recast as ‘account holder’, we find Tristan Pigott’s oil paintings – paintings that are fucking tired of it all. There is something undeniably ‘Instagramish’ about these works, currently on view at North London’s Cob Gallery under the title Juicy Bits. An attractive runner sports fresh lemon and moss Lycra; an attractive twenty-something slouches over a MacBook, Rodin’s Thinker in a ‘post-internet’ age; an attractive ( they’re all attractive ) rocker crouches against a wall, legs wrenched to an unrealistic, yet aesthetically desirable, angle. With neck craned, eyes wandering and bleached denim scuffed, our young cad is backed by his gloopy, green visualisation of how this scene might roll out online: free, formless, with no indication that it was choreographed with precision.

Following suit, the accoutrements encircling these figures also conform to social media’s silver standards. In the titular Juicy Bits ( 2017 ), we find a psychedelic still life, curated to cultivate online attention: flourishing plant life; remnants of take-away food; a can of imported tea; an ad hoc arrangement of coffee-table books ( one titled Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Copying ). Over it all floats the shadow of the photographer, whose personality dissolves into, and is defined by, the dislocated mise-en-scène below.

4. These thematic banalities are spewed riotously across Pigott’s paintings – excuse the phrase, my dear, but these are the ‘Juicy Bits’, after all; the bite-size rundowns of content that we have been conditioned to consume – regurgitate – spit out. Here, however, clickbait cliché and app-centric ideology warp and melt in a manner that unveils their sheer vapidity. The fastest food, the quickest fuck, the most futile of middle-class fantasies: they’re all here, battered, bent out of proportion and left badly bruised.

Tristan Pigott, Captain as Lard , 2017, oil on linen, 80 x 90 cm. Courtesy the artist and Cob Gallery, London. Photo © the artist and Cob Gallery, London. 图片由艺术家和伦敦Cob 画廊提供.

Special attention is paid to masculinity, that font of more injustice than we have time to unpack here ( there, anywhere ). On a wooden chair sits the very same fetishised ( white ) torso that has condemned us all ( me ) to a long, cumbersome life of awkwardly donning swimwear beneath a beach towel. Here, however, it is limbless and globular, dripping like a libidinal ball of lard onto a rendering of a Persian rug that in 2013 fetched an ostentatious $34 million at auction.⁵ The heft returns in Captain as Lard ( 2017 ). ( Imagery hops between Pigott’s paintings, mimicking the quick-fire photographs that blurrrr beneath our disinterested thumbs. ) Here, he dribbles, content, atop the semi-submerged Costa Concordia cruise ship, which in 2012 sunk to the depths after its captain tried to wave to a friend on the shore. That’s masculinity for you. Not a rippling six-pack with 50k+ followers, but a congealed, drizzling blob, making a mess of everything beneath.

5. Pigott’s works are less photorealistic representations of a tangible demographic ( the often-criticised, always-feared ‘youth’ ) than they are visualisations of a technologically-birthed phenomenon of distraction and dislocation from the ( old ) world. This is reason enough to deem Juicy Bits a biting denunciation of our time. But to deem it such would be completely to miss the mark. For while these paintings are appropriate tropes of ( and, yes, batter ) the Instagram-age, they do so in a manner that: a. acknowledges the artist’s complicity in the act and b. revels in the joyous, the loopy, the lovable. Vast, perspectiveless backcloths of block colour warp and whack us out of joint; ghostly figures gargle in the wings, chiselling, watering plants, melting things to a pulp. Glorious non sequitur rules the waves: TalkTalk router plus teapot; broken iPhone plus heat sealer; painting-by-numbers kit plus cucumber.

Tristan Pigott, Artist as Medium , 2017, oil on crisp packet, oil on beer can, papier mâché, oil on linen, 140 x 95 cm. Courtesy the artist and Cob Gallery, London. Photo © the artist and Cob Gallery, London. 图片由艺术家和伦敦Cob 画廊提供

But before you term these wacky non-worlds the stuff of ‘pop surrealism’, or something equally as ungainly, note that these objects, upon which this peculiarity is assembled, are drawn from reality! Pigott does not summon these scenes from nothingness. Instead, he plucks preexisting mundanities, renders them bizarre, exuberant, and in doing so offers a much-needed reminder that we can still mine pleasure in the unpleasurable – unremarkable – unfashionable. Life continues beyond the square borders of an Instagram post, beyond the frame of a ripped YouTube clip, beyond the 13.3-inch LED-backlit display of your MacBook Pro, and you can still enjoy that. Put a router next to a teapot. Put a painting-by-numbers kit next to a cucumber. You can find what you’re looking for out there, offline, ‘IRL’; you just need to reconsider what you’re looking at. You just need a new visual code,

to give us the sense

of fatigue

these

sports fresh

still

are spewed

down

Here

like

at auction

a friend

out of joint

plucks

the square borders

You

You’re looking

1. At the time of writing ( 20:46 CET, Sunday 24 September ), 18,533,915,410 photographs have been uploaded to Instagram in 2017; 1,634,093,954,072 videos have been viewed on YouTube; 62,944,203,839,264 emails have been sent. These figures are lifted from Internet Live Stats, and are now redundant.

2. Interesting, here, is Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel’s long-standing interest in the French philosopher René Girard – crucially, his 1978 book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Girard termed his central hypothesis ‘mimetic desire’, the notion that, as Thiel summarises it, ‘imitation is at the root of all behaviour’ ( John Lanchester, ‘You Are the Product’, London Review of Books, vol. 39, no. 16, 17 August 2017 <https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product> ). Also interesting is Nicholas Carr in ‘The Bookless Library’: ‘it’s hard not to conclude that as we adapt to the intellectual environment of the Net our thinking becomes shallower’ ( Nicholas Carr, ‘The Bookless Library’, in How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future, ed. John Brockman, Atlantic Books, London, 2011, p. 3 ).

3. At the time of writing ( 20:49 CET, Sunday 24 September ), the hashtag #avocado has been used 6,651,256 times on Instagram; #avocadotoast: 524,829; #avocados: 260,337. These figures are now redundant.

4. Ezra Pound, Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, ed. Maria Luisa, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1996.

5. The price paid for the item in question, which had previously belonged to the William A. Clark Collection, was more than three times the previous record price paid for a rug. A CNN iReport of the event ( <http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-990457> ) claims that, upon the close of the sale, ‘the entire room erupted into a cathartic and beautiful applause’.