A December “one-boy show” in the main Hall of Charterhouse School seemed a good idea at the time, to bow one’s way out of the year and wave good-bye to a very private, highly privileged and inordinately wasteful** Public School education. At the very least this had afforded opportunities no born eccentric would ever pass up.
It was to be the first of a number of “shows” that all design students and any future design professional inevitably has to grapple with on a regular basis. Start early then, that’s what I say ! Conditions at Charterhouse were ideal for such an experiment, and I remain indebted to Michael WOODS (MW), the Studio Master, for encouraging any creative streak, including this one, no holds barred.
Having scored low in my language A-levels it was deemed pointless to pursue the Oxbridge examinations – on the very unlikely off-chance of being admitted to Architecture school in Cambridge school – and far more appropriate to work up my portfolio for application elsewhere. The school fees for the term had been paid, I might as well take advantage of the outstanding resources that the school Studio provided.
Still 16 when I was sitting my A-levels, six months earlier, I nevertheless had some fairly clear ideas of What Art Is All About, and wanted to put them to the test ! In a space transformed for the occasion.
With hindsight I realise that nearly everything I exhibited had something to do with the notion of remediation which underpinned the contemporary art I was intuitively interested in.
Whether self-quotations (“Art is thought expressed in media“) or industrial readymades (Tennant’s lager cans with female pin-ups printed on them), original items (pottery and paintings) or blown-up copies, plaster cast or photographs of them (with the portrait of Ted BROWNE), the tongue-in-cheek re-use of everyday items (photo tripod as plant stand ; Kraft parcel wrapping as wall hanging…), the partial veiling of a picture or the retro-projected slide-to-screen re-appropriation of another’s photograph of myself (i.e. posing as a sort of self-portrait), the underlying notion of remediation was the common thread which made Exhibitionism ‘hang together’.
Michael WOODS reportedly suggested to my parents, who turned up for the event, that this was already the sort of performance Art School undergraduates might indulge in….
The title itself was the fruit of a similar process of reflection on the transformation of phenomena in relation to each other, though I was not at all interested in a posteriori definitions such as ‘phenomenological’ at the time. Even the invitations (to the likes of sculptor Carl PLACKMAN and Mick JAGGER no less) were individually B&W prints from a negative of another document drawing-pinned to a board and photographed. I’ve since learned that terms used in literature to describe such embedding, of one work within another, can also involve mise en abîme.
** I sincerely doubt that the school fees were ever covered by ‘subsequent earnings’ ! Capitalism (as Maggie THATCHER understood it) in just one of its most unpredictable disguises….
opus incertum 