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Richard Frater & Patrick Lundberg >

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At Patrick’s prompting, I decided to think about his wall piece in relation to the current Coke billboards - those ones which appear barely able to contain the fanfare of fashionable signifiers bursting at their seams. It is obvious that the impact of these ads derives purely from the associations that resonate out from the variety of images employed: the product’s value is accumulated by means entirely external to itself. By some clever trick of the semiological system employed however, the Coke-myth constructed is apprehended as concrete, and its meaning self-contained. It is ironic that while the ad (which I was directed to by the artist himself) somehow shows the product to be a unified and primary fact, artworks such as Patrick and Richard’s generally must fight to free themselves from an appreciation and understanding relational to or dependent upon ‘the Real World’, in that very secondary sense. In the grand tradition of Modern art, Patrick’s wall piece, though figurative, is undeniably non-representational and non-mimetic: it is a primary thing-in-itself. One might even be tempted to suggest that it follows a logic internal to itself, though this is problematic, for it leads us away from the complex formal relationship forged between the work and the Coke advertisement. It is in this formal dialogue that the work’s real interest lies: not in the generation of a critical content or space; which would exist implicitly and impossibly on some meta-level above the concrete fact of the artwork. Gilles Deleuze’s description of an ‘aparallel evolution’ of the work and the world is an apt one.¹ Patrick’s work, rendered in black, is by no means a negation of the ad’s content; it is merely a different version – one liberated from that content and all its consumer-ideological baggage. It is the Coke billboard’s stillborn twin.

Similarly, Richard’s carpet piece is of interest for the complex dialogues it constructs within itself between designer rugs, medical diagrams and unavoidably a whole truckload of more obscure stuff. Its form is a bastardization of anything that comes within reach. While medical diagrams are generally considered to be a pretty transparent and timeless vehicle by which to communicate anatomical information, designer rugs operate by their material functionality and are completely at the mercy of current trends. In Richard’s piece, the rug’s materialism excludes the diagram’s content, and the diagram’s timeless transparency excludes the rug’s style. Either way, the work is both useless and non-informational, and must be thought of as much more than an aesthetic phenomenon: it is question of the work’s role within a greater immanent system.

What, though, might this role be? In what possible sense might the immanent world-system need Patrick or Richard’s work? Well, every rose has its thorn. Within any system there is never an absolute and all-encompassing order, nor an absolute productivity; rather, areas of order are balanced by the joy of waste and transgression. These disparate elements (productivity and wastage) are two sides of the same coin, like Bataille’s amorphous general economy bubbling up from cracks in the rigid framework of his restricted economy.² Patrick and Richard’s works hold within them the same pleasure as that found in the site of a demolished building: they are a glorious waste of space, and one of absolute necessity. Any regime which doesn’t willingly allow some loss (of time, space, money, utility) – giving us that desperate breathing space exemplified by Patrick and Richard’s works – will undoubtedly suffer a greater loss, and one that will be deemed unacceptable. In this way, one can see how a function is served here that is much more essential than any art of representation (including that form of representation put to critical purposes). There is no semi-detached sense of aboutness, since the works graft themselves to the world in a bond of mutual dependence. Window might be located in a critical institution, but these works are not critical: criticism is secondary, these things just are.

1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Athlone Press, London, 1988.
2. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: an Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York, 1988.