pAIN'Ter: Interpreting New Work by Tom Crawford

By Ross Downes

Developers decide the temporary aesthetics of a city in transition. The functional plywood fence, a barrier to protect civilians from harm and the site from civilians, becomes a decorative surface that restricts and segregates. Crawford’s direct allusion in Work in Progress, a to scale rendering of a construction site fence painted gallery white and covering the entire wall space, reflects on the uses of ‘paint’ and abstraction as exercises in divertive force. To bring this public-anti-public structure into the gallery as a means to restrict use or view of the walls both parodies and critiques the legitimacy and effectiveness of abstraction as used by past avant-garde idiomatic methods to communicate socio-political concerns. In this case the empirical dilemmas of showing environments are coupled with an appraisal of painting practices in a new era of daubed conservatism.

A relational reading, due to the East London location, contextualizes Work in Progress to the cause-and-effect contradictions between the creative industries with area regeneration and the inevitable subsequent gentrification. Post-industrial areas, along with their desolate neighbourhoods that once provided the labour force, are initially affordable migratory zones for artists. After the artists follow the gallerists, after the gallerists follow the developers and estate agents prophesying open-plan lifestyles within ‘up and coming’ districts. Myth abounds and as always establishes a meta-reality suiting those able to financially benefit. The effects on East London, traditionally an area of immigrant settlers and working class families on the one hand produces a diverse, multi-cultural, multi-class borough, and on the other, adds to the steady corrosion of the extended family. This all contributes to an estranged community identity where inequality is problematically evident: millionaire and welfare on the same street.

Urban planning often dehumanizes through its primary allegiance to economy and progress. It can result in a systemic treatment of behaviour and tastes in order to control. Galleries, like the construction site fence, suggest behavioural codes and rights of access. The paintings that generally occupy the neutral walls are themselves walls. They represent the accepted and expected requirements to sustain a discourse of speciality that is usually inapplicable to wider macro concerns that rule out diversity within its subjects and audience. This in turn stabilizes painting’s reactionary trend of gimmicks masquerading as originality for the attainment of cultural insularity.

As with property, painting’s relationship to capital and marketability is well established. In terms of commercial investment it is well understood that paintings are more expensive, easier to sell, handle, lend and store. The second of Crawford’s works, Coffin, a black T-frame usually used for transporting and protecting painted works, satirises the fact that the life of a painting is dependent on its exposure. It also seems to pessimistically suggest that once the work is completed, it’s entering into market and commerce, (which the T-frame physically facilitates) inevitably effects the integrity and intellectual intentions of, and for, the work. The T-frame here represents an ominous dilution of intention via the dependency of institutionalising or selling art works to have them fully ‘exist’. This focus on the network surrounding art and those in receipt of artworks becomes almost accusatorial. Black gloss alludes to fetishism and therefore suggests that the object it coats is for a very specific, perverse, audience.

By titling the work Coffin Crawford draws upon common societal ritual and art’s occasional use as a surrogate religion. Similar to the effects of religion, the inanimate art object often evokes irrationality in the onlooker which compounds archaic value systems that place significance on the infatuation of the unobtainable. Coffin rationalises these transcendental pretensions to offer a materialist viewpoint that by focusing attention on the T-frame (purely functional to protect one’s investment in transit and storage) produces a painting in omission or presence through pointed vacancy. The re-usable timbre packaging pessimistically suggests a life span of relevancy that is liable to depend on fickle circumstances such as trends, hype and novelty.

Ultimately Crawford’s monochromatic agitprop exhibits an absurd authoritarianism by editing out possibility. This process of cancellation uses the rules of disengagement to humorously deflate the import of various 20th century fine art vanguard schools. Using the visual language common to minimalism, conceptual art, abstraction and formalism the installation provokes the reconsideration of high art’s many failures.