(Please note: the following text contains a small plot detail from the film Being John Malkovich- while avoiding this paragraph will not affect one’s understanding of the text, it may spoil enjoyment of the film on first viewing.)
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect
contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
- Marianne Moore Poetry ('67 version)
In 1967 Marianne Moore whittled her poem Poetry down to just four lines in a purposefully awkward enjambement (the earlier ‘complete’ version can be found at bottom). In it, she jettisons the twisty-turny epigrams and metaphors of the original to leave a practically perfect verse, which seems to generate its own form and content entirely from its own content and form.
It’s not a poem about poetry, but an embodiment of poetry, a manifestation of it. Or rather, it is not so much a poem about what poetry is, as it’s a poem about what poetry doesn’t have to, isn’t always, but might, possibly, be. One discovers, in ones’ perfect contempt for it (Moore’s poem, that is), a place for the genuine. It says practically nothing about poetry, except that from a position of supreme doubt and scepticism, a small culture of ‘the genuine’ might be grown or encountered- whatever ‘the genuine’ might be...
Crucially it is a ‘perfect’ contempt: an active ruthlessness is necessary for the possibility of the genuine. Ordinary contempt won’t do- as there’s just nowhere to go from ordinary contempt.
Clive Hodgson might justifiably be said to work
from such a perfect contempt. Perfect disregard, disobedience, perfect disparagement.
Not ironic or parodic contempt, but a perfect doubt and mistrust, Moore and
Hodgson suggest, can clear a space for the genuine.
Only when one accepts that one’s work is potentially without genuine value can the potential for value be genuinely cultivated.
Only when one accepts that one’s work is potentially without genuine value can the potential for value be genuinely cultivated.
Startlingly, for a painter who focuses entirely on
declaring his own name, Hodgson makes paintings from a place of total sceptical
humility. Such a disarming ‘sceptical humility’ might equally be the best way
to approach them as viewers.
III
Hodgson (b.1953), disillusioned by the figurative
painting he’d been working with since the 1980’s, has in recent years abandoned
all content bar the continuity of date and signature as a central motif.
The name and date
are the first things a viewer might notice in many of the paintings (already an
inversion of convention) and are perhaps the first thing we are invited to consider.
For obvious reasons a signature has historically
been something ancillary to the work of art- across time chased from the lower
corners to the back of the canvas, and away altogether. In some cases, emphatic
or declamatory- notably Courbet’s autographic signatures in large red
lettering- but always implicitly something one should ‘ignore’.
The signature disrupts illusion on the one hand,
and pollutes abstraction with admin on the other. If it’s there at all it’s
something we really shouldn’t notice. Yet it’s something which absolutely has to be contributing to the overall aesthetic effect in any
painting where it’s present- usually also, effectively, dating the picture to
some specific range of decades or centuries, depending on the ‘handwriting’,
its placement etc. It also stresses the condition of the picture as a ‘made’
thing (in Courbet’s landscapes particularly the signature tempers the
romanticism with this kind of conscious ‘picturing’).
The feeling it often gives is of a certain period
of easel painting, the signature more like a cabinet maker or a silversmith’s
mark of approval and carrying notions of production-line manufacture abhorrent
to later modernism, as well as antiquarian connotations of ‘name’ collecting and
bookish filing.
Yet the signature contributes to the picture in
other ways. It’s also a kind of affirmation- I’ll stand behind this thing (as a
‘place for the genuine’). A signed thing says, ‘ready to go’, ‘I endorse the
above’, I’ll stand by what I’ve said, I’ve considered the terms and details
carefully and accept them. It’s a form of contract binding artist and work, but
also meaning the work is a package ready for delivery to a viewer.
It also begs the question of where the ‘signature’
stops and the art begins- as the work itself is also, surely, some kind of
cumulative signature (in an existential and material sense).
Certainly, all the above aspects of the signature
are much more slippery in Hodgson’s paintings, wherein the signature or date is
pushed to the front. Even the notion that the naming and dating marks some kind
of completion is misleading- often it’s clear that the signing and dating took
place at some indeterminate earlier point, were perhaps the first marks made.
In starting and ending with the signature the
paintings cancel out the content in between, in the same way as Moore’s
super-condensed verse. Hodgson starts at the very end, a very good place to
start...
But he doesn’t just start at the end- he stops
there as well. They are paintings in which the content rambles around in short
circles – while the wider, primary things like marks, colour and composition go
off on elaborate, gymnastic triathlons.
Hodgson estranges what seem, on the face of it,
very simple implications of signing. We are left to wonder what, exactly, is
the relationship between these marks, this object, and the year 2017, 2008, the
person identified as C. Hodgson? Do they express something about him, existing,
at that particular point in his and our lives? Or do they simply register the
activity of their own making? Are the decorative elements ‘signed’ by the names
and dates, or are the swirls and marks purely there to decorate the signatures?
Do the swirls and decoration (comically) aggrandize the signatures, or do the
signatures aggrandize the decoration? Is it a picture of the date signed by the
artist, or a picture of a signature, dated? Where should our attention go
(round in circles)? 
In Being
John Malkovich, the actor (playing himself and through a series of unlikely
events) enters a parallel world where every person, image and word is replaced
with his name and likeness- he speaks ‘Malkovich Malkovich’, and is answered, ‘Malkovich
Malkovich’.
It is a more extreme version of the feeling
Hodgson must have in the studio (perhaps many painters do, at some level), or
the feeling a viewer might feel when surrounded by his paintings in a gallery.
Which might be absurd, but it also speaks of the way our own inescapable selves
cannot help but be inscribed on everything we experience. It also speaks of the
way in which our own names, likenesses, biographies (the furniture of one’s
existence), can appear strangely alien from our ‘selves’ (whatever they might
be). There is a feeling that Hodgson is trying to establish some kind of
connection to the abstract symbology with which we navigate our time on the
planet- our names, the year, the days of the week. Or the lack of recognition
when we hear our own names called, or see them printed, or the way they sound
strange when we have to introduce ourselves. Or even just the chasm of
meaninglessness that opens up when a word is repeated often enough (the
abstract language of a person’s name particularly).
I don’t think Hodgson makes paintings about
alienation though. I think, rather, that they can be letters of invitation, to
join him in a small corner of the ‘place for the genuine’.
Hodgson’s work is generous, and his works are
almost like extremely terse but cheering correspondence from an existentialist
pen pal. The paintings are more like letters or parcels- and not formal letters
but utilitarian notes, requests, claims of ownership, identification– things
signed so that they might be properly addressed, in the hope that they might find the
correct recipient or be returned to sender. They are like empty envelopes, parcels filled only with polystyrene beans. Blank messages marked only by their posting. Sometimes the marks swirl and fizzle out like confetti and streamers- as if from a doleful party popper. It's the thought that counts.
XXX
It’s very much something specific to painting that
Hodgson can go on repeating this motif without repeating himself (a set of
songs, each containing the singer’s name sung in a variety of melodies, might
get tiresome more quickly, or a film consisting only of a well-designed set of
titles/credits).
This is partly to do with the ‘signature’ being standard issue painting kit- it’s part of the furniture of painting, it's 'allowed' (even to people who might not think about painting a great deal, a signature in one of the bottom corners- along with a picture frame- must seem part of the basic paraphernalia of a painting, a surprisingly strong part of what an 'imagined' painting is, to the extent that it's almost caricature). But it’s also to do with how painting displays and deals with information and attention, how we can ignore (to some degree) the signature, how parts can be subsumed into the whole, the verbal and non-verbal. For the overriding theme of Hodgson’s painting is not the narrowness of his ‘limited’ signature and date motif, but conversely the sheer diversity that can be achieved within such limits.
It should also be made clear that as much as we
might ponder the significance of the name and date, they are also present as a
neutral, generative element- one that staves off certain ‘looks’ associated
with abstraction (a field as loaded with symbolism, ideology and inherited
‘meaning’ as any in painting) while giving something to hang the works’
improvisations on. And of course, part of the excitement of Hodgson’s ongoing
work is seeing how he can keep going and going with the same basic motif, how
he can keep pulling hankies out of the hat. This is partly to do with the ‘signature’ being standard issue painting kit- it’s part of the furniture of painting, it's 'allowed' (even to people who might not think about painting a great deal, a signature in one of the bottom corners- along with a picture frame- must seem part of the basic paraphernalia of a painting, a surprisingly strong part of what an 'imagined' painting is, to the extent that it's almost caricature). But it’s also to do with how painting displays and deals with information and attention, how we can ignore (to some degree) the signature, how parts can be subsumed into the whole, the verbal and non-verbal. For the overriding theme of Hodgson’s painting is not the narrowness of his ‘limited’ signature and date motif, but conversely the sheer diversity that can be achieved within such limits.
Besides the signatures there are consistent visual motifs, a consistent approach to colour and composition across the paintings, which can in turn be sub-divided into looser or tighter groups. Similarly, each ‘year’ seems to produce a set of paintings more closely related to each other than to paintings from across the years (though certain forms and strategies are also re-deployed and re-cycled within and across these groups). Which is all to say that, taken purely as a maker of abstract paintings, Hodgson has a compellingly ‘alive’ oeuvre.
The paintings from around 2008-2011 are often slightly barer and in a more subdued palette; by 2012 they’ve taken on more of a mixed language of cornicing, acanthus, arrow, dart, spades and diamonds, rosettes, etc. (many of which are no longer to be found as things have become more gestural); there are recurrent ‘spot’ paintings and paintings of Catherine wheel-like circles or sprinkled doughnut targets; from 2015 onwards there have been more paintings which are explicitly marks on a blank ‘white’ background, as well as things that look more airbrushed or sprayed, accompanied by a leaning towards primaries rather than sherbety, pastel-greyed tertiaries.
Often the biggest canvases are the ones with the least amount going on (his variety and consciousness of scale is always compelling).
They can look like a combination of decorative details from Roman, Pompeian and Renaissance painting (which Hodgson has acknowledged an interest in) but also a host of other things; the swirly/geometric whorls and diagonals of 1950’s neckties; the pencilled notes and diagrams on plastered walls pre-paper or painting; school jotters, doodles on exam papers, mock-ups and maquettes; or more accurately, the exploratory range of marks made when trying out a new tool, material or surface; ruled lines, pen squiggles, paint splodges, a new set of stencils overlapping (it’s always advisable to look for the literal ‘spade’s a spade’ associations within Hodgson’s place for the genuine). There’s a hint of pulpy print culture, a certain kind of strip cartoon- the economy and humour have a Charlie Brown, Peanuts tone- the spacing between the letters like a filled-in crossword puzzle or a looped word-search.
Often he defies easy balances within a
composition- the ‘wonky’ is welcomed. Non-art methods of mark making are also
shamelessly undisguised- sponge stamp and patterning, stencilling, spattering
and stippling. Sometimes he does surprisingly little, and often it’s the
signature that lifts it, that reconfigures and reorganizes the marks as
something worthy of the fine art signature/seal of approval- and something
worthy of his and our attention. It’s something of a playful challenge- how would it be if it was the kind of world
in which this kind of painting existed, and I appreciated it?- playful but
still to an extent confrontational (perhaps it’s our tastes we have to
confront?). Hodgson and Moore both
seem to see ‘poetry’ or the ‘genuine’ as something we have to imagine ourselves
into recognizing (...imaginary gardens
with real toads in them). We have to acquire a taste for the genuine.
The signature also protects them from seeming to
come from a tradition of floating, earnest abstraction, or from the gestures
being demonstrably about a certain
type of gesture- it makes the marks come across as pictures of marks, in a way,
paintings of abstract paintings. Model abstracts.
As much as Hodgson has said he wants to avoid the
connotations of specialised hobbyist interests such as model railways and so
on, there is a sense within the work that he is aware of the paintings as part
of an obsessive interest in a potentially pointless and rarefied enterprise, a
kind of hopelessly arcane pastime for sad cases; though it’s also kind of clear
that he knows they are not. They transcend such notions, partly through their
humour and partly through the kind of crazy strength in his commitment to this
enterprise, and to his sustained and specific interest in painting as an
activity in itself, broken down and built up from the simplest or most wayward
means.
They are a kind of anarchic ‘alternative’
abstraction, alt-aesthetics.
The paintings refuse to play standardized games of
layering, ‘seriousness’ or expressivity- and emerge as deeply (sometimes
comically) moving, faulty material translations of the baffling patterns of
life, feeling and thought.
They explore the potential for different kinds of
decorative motifs or setups to have different ‘moods’, different speeds of
thought, different cerebral-emotional registers. They have a child-like,
filling-in space kind of quality- but with the added melancholy of filling up
time. They seem first and foremost something to do.
Decoration is a very human language. Anyone can
basically decorate or embellish with little flourishes in the corner, round the
edges, join the dots, connect the lines, put boxes around words or letters.
Anyone can drop shadows. Draw around an outline. Make a pattern. We are
organisms that like to fill space (and time) even just for the sake of it (and
we don’t tend to let things pass without ‘personalizing’ them- adapting
existing structures to our own particular temperaments, or adding what we can
to an existing practice).
But art also takes great pains to counter this
impulse, to temper addition with subtraction, heaviness with lightness,
slowness with quickness (and one feels Hodgson is a natural contrarian, even,
perhaps especially, unto himself).
Hodgson’s wish to ‘make something with very little
reference to mass...something very light and dispersed’ recalls Italo Calvino’s
appeal to ‘Lightness’ as one of his Six
Memos for the Next Millennium. Calvino talked of wanting to launch himself
like an arrow, of subtracting weight from the world, about lightness, quickness
etc. as literary values going back to Ovid’s Metamorphosis- images of sudden transformations or bounding leaps,
Baron Munchausen pulling himself and his horse up by the tail and pigtails,
Mercury’s winged sandals-
Hermes-mercury, god of communication and mediation...inventor of
writing...mercury with his winged feet, light and airborne, astute, agile,
adaptable, free and easy, established the relationships of the gods among
themselves and those between the gods and men, between universal laws and
individual destinies, between the forces of nature and the forms of culture,
between the objects of the world and all thinking subjects...
Hodgson’s buoyant ‘memos’ are of a piece with this
dispersed, airy, logic defying literature -if there is a logic it’s the protean
logic of meandering, objectless daydreaming, or of boredom evading flights of
fancy. Hodgson leaps over standardized pictorial organizations, contents,
compositions, clears space (he also recalls the- sometimes arbitrary-
generative systems of the 'Oulipo' group to which Calvino belonged, restricting
himself to using the date and signature the painting equivalent of refraining
from using the letter ‘e’, for example).
What’s startling is that Hodgson
manages to make such leaps through ‘meaningless’ marks and flourishes alone-
through pure ‘composition’. In this he particularly
brings to mind Flaubert’s famous (proto-modernist) 1852 letter to Louise Colet-
What seems beautiful to
me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on
nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style,
just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its
support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the
subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible. The finest
works are those that contain the least matter; the closer expression comes to
thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and merging with it, the finer
the result.
Various modernist schools would junk the idea of having wider constructed ‘meanings’ within a work, in favour of using blank generic subjects on which to hang demonstrations of their latest formal innovation or novelty. Yet the resulting works would still be tied to appearances and associations in some degree, while later abstraction would conversely come loaded with a rediscovered notion of meaning and significance (often quasi-spiritual).
To be truly blank and vacant while remaining
compelling is quite a feat. As James Elkins writes in his study of
‘meaningless/meaningful marks’, the attempt for language to self-cancel, to be
eloquently and fluently senseless, is a difficult task-
It is, perhaps unexpectedly, not easy to make a disorderly picture and supremely difficult to create a powerfully and profoundly disordered picture. The process of drawing near to meaninglessness is like the physicist’s problem of reaching absolute zero: at first it seems that you can just turn down the temperature, but then it becomes clear that there is tremendous resistance, inherent in the medium itself, to any close approach to the perfect absence of meaning...
Is decoration, for Hodgson, a kind of ‘strongly
imagined disorder’? Strong and somehow almost inevitable, but also almost totally
resistant to ‘meaning’? His approach to expunging content seems to be about
embracing the idea of the decorative rather than pure ‘style’ as such (the
strongly imagined disorder in Pollock, for example, carries far too many
connotations for comparison with Hodgson’s spatters and stipples). They are
physically, materially, intellectually what they are (purposefully blank and
vacant?). Similarly, the naming and dating is a kind of negation of language’s
meaning generating and expanding properties- they are dead end, self-cancelling
language, anti-metaphorical and purely 'labelling' signifiers. And despite or
because of all this, Hodgson still manages to smuggle in so much melancholy,
elation, puzzlement, curiosity...
Perhaps the project is one in search of eloquence? Or a different kind of eloquence? An anti-eloquence?
In a way it’s the rambling articulation of
inarticulateness that goes on in the work of Samuel Beckett, wherein the
impossibility of ‘saying’ anything is measured against the absurd impossibility
of not saying something.
Beckett spent his career reducing language till
barely intelligible. The implications of this reduction are twofold: that on
the one hand ‘meaning’ cannot be killed by reduction, and that meaning is
therefore meaningless, is all in our heads, is a projection, a spook. We cannot
help but say and mean, reality cannot help it, cannot help but be within
and outwith language, and therein lies the trap.
Meaning and depth are for Beckett a projection, an
illusion. Yet also an inescapable one, literally a haunting one, and his
whittled, sharpened works consistently attempt to exorcize this ghost, to
puncture an aperture in themselves, for language and meaning to be sucked out
into the open and forced to cancel each other out. In a similar way, Hodgson’s
paintings play with and frustrate the fact that we are meaning attachers,
projectors, hunters. As he writes himself -
At some point painting becomes more articulate in
its own right because it becomes isolated from carrying messages, so the
ornament thing is familiar but it carries no message. Things easily seem to get
too symbolic or have very strong geometric connotations, for example in a
Euclidian way or a Platonic way, and then it begins to seem like symbolism
again. I was looking for where the painting seemed real to me in the way that
decorative painting seemed real. Something begins to happen because there
aren’t any points of reference for meanings.
It’s therefore in the decorative that Hodgson
finds his ‘place for the genuine’ (as Nick Lowe- almost- said, it’s ‘Pure Painting
for Now People’). He’s someone for whom depiction (like language), as it stands just now historically
and for him personally, seem a bit too deceitful, or a bit too much like admitting
failure. And if paintings generally fail, Hodgson’s ‘fail again, fail better’.
XXX
Some final bits.
I hesitate to use the word ‘jazzy’, but there’s
something rather like hearing a pared-down piano improvisation to Hodgson (perhaps
even unexpectedly, as if hearing something exciting from someone who’s just sat
down at an out of tune pub upright). It recalls the kind of double negative
inversion in many statements attributed to Thelonious Monk: There are no wrong notes- some are just more
right than others; there are no wrong notes on the piano- just better choices;
I played the wrong wrong notes etc.
Indeed Hodgson has spoken about a restlessness
with whatever his work has started to look like at a given time, each addition
or subtraction leading to an inverse subtraction or addition (I can work on a certain number of paintings
till something rises up within me that says, if this has got such and such quality,
what would happen if it did not have that quality?)
I’ll leave Geoff Dyer, in an extract from But Beautiful- his great book on Jazz- to
talk about Monk, and about Hodgson, and Moore, and their sparsely decorated
places for the genuine-
If monk had built a bridge he’d have taken away the bits that are
considered essential until all that was left were the decorative parts- but
somehow he would have made the ornamentation absorb the strength of the
supporting spars so it was like everything was built around what wasn’t there.
It shouldn’t have held together but it did and the excitement came from the way
that it looked like it might collapse at any moment just as Monk’s music always
sounded like it might get wrapped up in itself...
XXX
Poetry
Marianne Moore
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets,
the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them,
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
