Anodynism

The studio is hidden in the heart of England’s South Downs, many miles from anywhere and difficult to find. Roads twist through woods and ascend and descend across typically English countryside, narrowing almost to the point of inaccessibility. Old fences and signposts seem of another era. Twisted oaks stand alone in fields that form the foreground of long views to the seascape beyond. There are flecks of poppies in amongst the wheat fields. Skylarks sing in the formidable silence.

It is nearly three years since I last visited the artists Oswald Boddington and Gemma Slaver in their Sussex hideaway. I was writing for Monopol and made a short film about them for Arte. It was a great time for them; their notoriety had brought some easy publicity, and they seemed the be enjoying the freedom that the fame provided. There was a carefree spirit to their work, a theme of ambition and progress. It seemed that from the simple ideas and almost primitive technology they were using to create their work, they were able to create quite a respectable impact in the art world. Puffer, Scabbard and the larger works like Gourami seemed to fascinate collectors. Certainly, in Europe their work was noticed. In the UK, it is much more difficult to force an entry into the art world without a marketing budget and corporate backing.

Eventually, after wrong turns and much time spent consulting an old paper map, I’m pulling into their driveway and parking outside the idyllic thatched barn that they use as their base. The place is tidy, carefully manicured and maintained. Before I have stood up from the car I can see Oswald jogging back and forth, the effervescence of his energy making him stop partway through a journey and run back up stairs to a doorway halfway up the side of the barn. He darts back down again to greet me. The enthusiasm of his greeting is like that of a dog upon the return of its master from an unendurable absence.

He leads the way into the large reception room. I am impressed by the architectural work they seem to have carried out, as the room now commands impressive views across the Downs and along to the English Channel. He cannot stop moving about, so overjoyed he seems by my arrival. He offers me drinks and insists I study the vista through the barn’s huge windows. I begin to wonder if there is not a hint of mania to his actions.

Later, we tread carefully up the exterior staircase to visit Gemma, who has been working in her studio at the top of the barn. She sits in shade in the corner of the room, looking like Virginia Woolf after a particularly heavy dosage of chloral. Her hand waves as if balancing on the top of her vertical forearm. Her eyes are heavy and only partly open. She moans as if a chronic ache has worsened. Oswald fusses round her like a sycophantic butler. I express my concern.

“Oh, no, don’t worry. It’s been a busy week. We have so many commissions.”

Gemma groans again and seems irritated by everything in her vicinity. She makes a vague gesture with the upright arm and then snaps at Oswald. He fusses again and makes frustrated attempts to please her.

“We are working so hard. We have hardly any time to work on new stuff.”

We leave Gemma and walk along a path that leads around the field adjacent to the barn. It is a cool summer morning. I remind Oswald of my previous visit, and we laugh at how their youthful celebrity seemed to be destined to go on forever.

“Well, things are different now. It’s a different sort of energy. Maybe we are striving for different things than we were back then.”

We talk of the work they were producing, and which featured in my film. They were innovative, large scale canvases that often featured a visual pun or element of humour that perhaps caught the viewer off guard. They were confrontational, recycling materials but binding novelty into the work. They were very popular, and sold well. I could not understand their success at all.

“We loved that period, it was very free. We produced those paintings almost on a whim. They were not things we had planned, not at all. In fact, the work we set out to do was very depressing in contrast. We were lucky the element of lightheartedness found its way in. It meant the pictures sold very well.”

The path takes us round the edge of the field and through a clump of old oaks, and then returns us along to the barn. Large container vessels are visible on the seaward horizon. The sound of motorcars is just audible in the far distance.

“Yes, we were taking ourselves very seriously to start with. As artists. The mission of the Artist. The Bohemian. These were our core values, that we were trying to articulate in our work. A didactic element. I remember that I said on film that I would not trust an artist who had not signed a manifesto. An artist must have a cause to support, to promote, to die for! This is where we saw our work progressing. In its message, perhaps. It’s like we relaxed a bit when we produced the first Puffer series. There was that comic element, it sold well.”

Their early work was received enthusiastically by the public. Word of mouth seemed to propel their popularity and sales. In the way that the Internet can create overnight crazes, so it seemed that everyone wanted a print from the Puffer series on their walls and was talking about it on social media. The more ambitious Scabbard and Gourami works were equally as sought after, and trended for a while. Critics were less enthusiastic when invited to review the works at a pop-up show. Most compared the work to the whimsy of a greetings card, as out of touch as a grandmother’s birthday card to a teenager.

Suddenly Oswald darts into the hedge and seems to disappear. The foliage moves about and there are odd sounds. Then again he appears, running back up the path towards me, as crazed and enthusiastic as an ill-trained puppy. His hair settles back after its cartoon blur as he slows to walk beside me again. Immediately there is a tacit agreement between us that we shall not talk about what just happened, but head back to the barn in a thoughtful stride.

“I think we were trying to understand Art. It is so ill defined. There is no consensus amongst anyone, critic or public, about what it is, or what it should be, or its role. In a way, that is immensely liberating, as everything becomes Art. But is this itself a form of entropy, of Art becoming so diffused that even the dust in the air in a gallery could be part of an exhibit. We have moved past the work that Duchamp called retinal, into the explorations of ideas and subjectivity in modern Art, and now we are moving even further where there is a social aspect to the work. Instead of being a separate activity, Art is in everything we do, it has moved from the process of depiction to the process of perception. The world is becoming increasingly mad-made, and hence there is artifice everywhere.”

We are sitting in the living room, and can occasionally look across to the large windows and admire the view of the Downs. It is idyllic, silent. The sofa is deep and luxurious and stretches an immense distance between the two main walls of the barn. A large table, carved from a preposterously enormous piece of wood, dominates the centre of the room, decorated with candlesticks and vases and small framed pictures and various sculptures and souvenirs. There is a complex array of electronic equipment across one wall, a television and gaming devices, digital receivers and music playback appliances for the perfectionist. It is a lavish venue.

“I’d be interested to see some of your current work, if I may,” I add, awkwardly interrupting the silence just as Gemma appears in the doorway from the courtyard.

“Sure. Sure. Let’s have another drink and another look around.”

Gemma moves across the landscape behind the windows as an apparition. Her long knitted cardigan drags across the floor. Her outstretched arms seem to guide her through benighted torments. She says something.

“What is it dear?”

“Oh, now.” She changes direction, walking blindly into the centre of the room.

“Is she sleepwalking?” I ask, a naive observer.

“Thank you!” she snaps at me, resting her arms on the sideboard where several bottles of spirits are erratically stowed.

“I’m sorry.”

“Gemma, please. This is a guest.”

“Yes. I have made up the guest wing. For you, Herr Färber.” She turns and sighs and appears disoriented. She takes a drink and wobbles across to the grand sofa and seems to fall from the air into a loose pile of knitted garments.

“It would be great if you’re able to stay. So you can take a look at our more recent work, and we can talk, maybe follow up on all the things we spoke about before.”

We settle ourselves by the windows and spend a while in silence, charmed by the view of the Downs, perhaps overwhelmed by the luxury of the setting. When I visited before, they had just been given the house, by Gemma’s parents, and were planning out the alterations they wished to make. The area we are sitting in was intended to be the studio.

“Have you invoiced everyone, Oswald?”

“Yes. I sent all the emails. They’re all done.”

“I hate this admin all the time.”

“It’s done.”

Gemma finishes her drink and seems unsure as to whether she needs to stand again. Oswald jumps up and seems to pace around the table at quite an alarming speed. He settles again.

“We were talking of the film that Burkhart made when he visited before, and our work from that time, the Gourami series. We said it would be good to follow that up, look at the evolution of our current work.”

“Did Daugherty pay his invoice?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Then he probably needs a reminder.”

“Ok. But it would be good to discuss how things have changed over the last few years while Burkhart is here.”

“Oh.” Gemma stands, as if footage of her fall is being reversed. She drops her head back to let her mouth gape open, and then drifts from the room as if slowly evaporating into the air.

“She is very focussed. It is difficult to step between the world of prosaic concerns, even politeness, and the forge of creativity. It’s often a crazy transition. From the infinite detail and potential that gives everything in the imagination its charge, to the fixed and unforgiving nature of the day to day world.”

“Of course. I have taken no offence.”

“These germinating ideas are so delicate. Criticism can kill if applied too early.”

I am fortunate to have been invited to the artists’ home, as I have been quite unkind about their work in the past. In fact, I have very rarely flattered them with a good review. I am also fortunate that they very rarely read reviews of their work.

“We were talking of the ubiquitous man-made element of the modern world, the fabrication that surrounds us and how that informs your work.”

Oswald jumps up and appears as lost as tourist in a strange city. He appears to have forgotten something, then charges round the table and sits back down and gestures to me to settle down.

“This is the compromise at the centre of our work. At one moment we are surrounded by fabrication, we become overfamiliar with human artifice. So when something is called art, it is difficult for us to work out why this thing is Art and why the rest of the fabricated world is not. What is this difference? Do people make things and then call them art, or do they set out with the intention of making art and whatever they end up with is art?”

“For yourself, do you begin with the intention of making art?”

“No. We begin with the intention of fulfilling the client requirement.”

“What is that?”

“Our commission. We begin with the objective of producing work to satisfy the commission. We are paid to complete a schedule of work hours that result in an original piece of non-functional design. This is what we do. That originality does not mean it is a new concept to humanity or a breathtaking addition to human sensibilities. It means it is not a reproduction.”

“This is very blunt and functional. You’re not talking about self-expression or confronting the expectations of your patrons?”

“Of course I am, but this is the artisan skill of the modern artist. To subvert expectations is to fulfil expectations. How else could the work be original? Most of our clients are corporations, who want something to hang in a boardroom or a lobby or atrium. We are able to deliver work that is edgily safe, that is just confrontational enough without even setting off a ripple of confrontation.”

“I see. I must say, I have misrepresented you.”

“This is why we produce bland art but why they are qualified to called it art. Art has always been about privilege. Our mediocre output has zero innovation, it is just the continuation of idle sketching or doodling, but we are able to define it as art, because we define it as art - that is our privilege. By calling our output art, we become controversial. Because we are subverting the idea that art should subvert its own definition.”

“I have been mistaken about your skills.”

“Our work, taken at face value, is terrible. It is trite, bland, insidious efforts at painting that makes even the air around it ache with a tired cramp. But we promote it as art, and this offends people, and their offence energises the work until it appears to have some claim to authenticity, to Walter Benjamin’s aura.”

“I see.”

“Nothing can exist in isolation. There is nothing that is innately art. Do you think anyone in the modern world cares about your technical ability in painting or sculpture? There is only the tension between perception and the created work, that is generated by being conscious of the work.”

“Of course.”

“That is the only requirement that modern cynicism has allowed for when we talk of art.”

“Oswald!”

There is a shout from another room, a shout of terrible distress. Something smashes. There is another cry. Oswald stands up without panic and strides across the windows to the doorway through which Gemma had made her slow motion departure. After a while, out of curiosity, I stand and go to the same doorway, and look in on the room they are both in. It is a workroom, a studio of a kind, although too neat and homely to accomplish any real creativity. Gemma is slumped in a chair, a haphazard assortment of woollen garments that appear to have been discarded. Oswald is standing near a table, on which is arranged a still life arrangement, a vase with tired carnations and roses. There is a pile of books near the vase, and a large joint of meat. On the floor are scattered shards of porcelain.

“Move the books. I’ve painted them too close.” Gemma points at the table.

“Sure. Ok.”

“Move them, Oswald!”

“How far?”

“I’ve painted them too close. Move them across a little more.”

“Here?”

“More!”

“What about…”

“Ah! I hate still life.”

“Is this ok?”

“It’ll have to do.”

When I visited the artists a few years ago, things had been a little more rough around the edges. They were pretending to squat in the barn, and foster some form of bohemian community, even though the property had been given to them freehold by Gemma’s parents. They talked of creating a self-sufficient small holding, of living off-grid and championed the ideals of sustainability. In the film I made they can be seen talking about creating a refuge for those oppressed by domestic violence or political censorship, a retreat from the hypocrisy of the modern world. They talk of the curing power of being close to the earth, the wellbeing generated by being in contact with the seasons of nature and an avoidance of electricity and modern electronics.

“You must be shocked by our bohemian ideals,” Gemma had commented. Instead, I was amused by the conservatism of their nostalgic vision. In the meantime, it would seem that they have taken more inspiration from suburban interior designers and landscape gardeners.

Later, we eat a meal at the table in the main reception room. It is an awkward affair. The food is a rather worthy and tasteless heap of beans and leaves, and the heavy chewing involved in eating means there are few opportunities for natural conversation. It is almost a relief when we are finished. I try to be polite about the work that has gone into the meal’s preparation.

“I hate overcomplicated food and fussy presentation.” Gemma pushes her bowl away.

“There was a certain honesty to this meal,” I add.

“We do try to be good,” says Oswald.

“Good,” I observe.

“We try to support local producers and organic methods.”

There is silence. I let my eyes run across the fields through the vast windows. Dusk is deepening the shadows beneath trees and along hedges.

“I was very intrigued by the methodology that you were talking about before, Oswald. Your comments were very unexpected. You have very successfully removed an assumption I had about your work. This is the function of good art.”

“Thank you, Burkhart.”

“Your comments said a lot about the function of the artist, also. This is going back to Duchamp, or Debord or Baudrillard. Your work is a kind of stealth outrage. It is so bland and anaemic that it offends us that it is taken seriously as art. This is a perfect riposte, a perfect attack on the marketing industry and the hyperreality of our world, an amalgam of the advertising world, the entertainment industry, a sci-fi celebrity mess of utterly collapsed values and beliefs. Here is your dreadful work that surely is only being appreciated in an ironic way, as a kind of kitsch. But your brilliance is in knowing this, and confronting it, subverting it. You are exposing the emptiness not of modern art, but of the modern audience, the vacuum that can be exploited by anyone with the savvy. And surely this is the true role of the artist, to confront the opinions and values of the audience. You have done so brilliantly, as you have with my presumptions.”

”…”

“I’ve come to realise that there is a deep level of satire in your work. I’d love to take a look at your latest work in progress, while I’m here, if that’s ok. I’m quite excited to see it, to revisit all your work, now I am aware of its satirical element. You are lampooning the insularity of the art world, and the idiocy of buyers. Passive dumb consumers, that’s all we’ve become, and as your awful canvases are sought after and bought and hung on walls, you have pointed a finger and made an important political point. Why are we so stupid? Where has our judgement gone? Why do we take these appalling daubings that you are producing here and keep them right there in constant contact with our daily lives, in boardrooms and atriums, like you say. They hang there to remind us of our emptiness. They sneer at our detachment from any kind of meaning. The awful brushstrokes are almost writing Why? in the midst of our hollow lifestyles. Our dead eyes look at the canvas but nothing enters our heads. We no longer see. Your work is a powerful statement of this truth.”

”…”

“As you mentioned earlier, in the film we made you said you would not trust an artist who had not put his name to a manifesto. The mission of the artist is to sign up to a movement, and it is this movement that seeks to disrupt the status quo, to break open the stifling presumptions of the settled art world, now everything is so safely commodified. Your movement we should call Anodynism. The dreadful derivative predictability of your pieces, the insipid uninspired imagery and amateur techniques - it perfectly captures the banality of the art world like a mirror held up to a patient who cannot recognise his own face. You are the accusers. You pamper art buyers with these dire pieces, and then suddenly it will explode in their faces when suddenly they realise what you have done. A grenade in the midst of all this empty talk about the relevance of modern art.”

”…”

“‘I have nothing to say, and I want to express that in art!’ might be the rallying cry to your Anodynism movement. You have exposed the truth that it is nothing but noise and bluster and that as the dust settles and the silence begins, there is nothing. Emptiness. Your perfect grenade has had the intended effect. We must begin again, as after a revolution, to rebuild, but only after completely reassessing our values.”

“Burkhart?”

I realise I am standing in front of the tall windows. Behind me the sun is disappearing and a deep blue haze seems to reach up from the sea. Oswald and Gemma are looking at me without expression, as if confronted by a novelty that as yet they cannot comprehend.

“Thank you.”

“Thank you?”

“You have really shown me some…”

“Are you ok?”

“Thank you.” I retake my seat next to Gemma. Her eyes follow me closely. There is dim recognition in them.

“If you’ve been taking drugs in our house…”

“You have inspired me.”

“Burkhart? Are you crying?”

“Even my criticism was a jaded echo of other people’s opinions.”

“Do you need to lie down?”

“I want to buy whatever you have been working on today.”

“We are fulfilling commissions. You know that.”

“Then I will commission you. I want your Anodynism above my desk. I want to watch the grenade go off.”

“Oswald, fetch him some water. He won’t take his head out of his hands.”

There is genuine excitement when we part the next day. After a restful sleep in their lavish home, I am able to review their work in progress and talk through details of my commission. We are looking forward to collecting a good number of their pieces together for a full exhibition next year.