‘The Information — Darian Leader’
“The thing I love about painting”, says Nigel Cooke, “is that it shows me I am in exactly
the same place”. But what kind of place could this be? Is Cooke referring to the
magical, disturbing spaces conjured up by his paintings? Or, alternatively, to some kind
of continuity in his own artistic trajectory? It might seem obvious that there is a
difference between the places that Cooke paints and the place that he paints them
from. But why should we have to assume that they are distinct? And what would it
mean for them to be one and the same?
The places that Cooke paints would be difficult to find on a map. Most of them could
never exist empirically. We see ruins and severed heads next to fruit and veg howling
with pain, surrounded by graffiti and foliage. Vast suns and human brains smoke
cigarettes, and strange recurrent singularities like lightbulbs, cords and wires appear
with no apparent use or meaning. This is not even a concatenation of objects with a
single mechanism, like some gigantic Mousetrap game, but a fragmented, dispersed
collection, an impossible landscape painted with all the realism and detail of the
possible.
Impossible juxtapositions are certainly not new to painting. We could think of the
Italian Baroque, or Gothic nativities or the universe of artists like Dali or Ernst. In all of
these examples, we find objects sharing the same space that couldn’t do so in the
material world. Yet the rationale for their juxtaposition may be quite different. In one
case, it may be to show the proximity of the world of the dead to that of the living; in
another, to articulate a logic of symbols that distances itself from the usual
conventions maintaining space and time. Cooke compares his own procedure with the
schoolroom assemblages of children, who put together the random objects they bring
to generate wonder in their classmates. A rock and a lion’s tooth can share the same
tabletop as a four-leaf clover and an army knife. And it is this “taxonomical bizareness”
that Cooke finds so fascinating.
Yet it would be difficult to ascribe such a randomness to the artist’s own landscapes.
He may tell us that these scenes “look like things arranged on a nature table”, but
there is so much more to their composition than an arbitrary dispersal of found objects.
The key here is no further away, however, than the ‘nature table’ itself, once we ask the
question of why children bring their special objects to school in the first place. Beyond
the occasional request from a teacher, aren’t we seeing here a form of communication?
Each object is the vehicle of a wider story, a testimony to the courage or curiosity of
child or parent. Whatever this story happens to be, what matters is that it is condensed
and contained within the object. And so each object, as a bearer of narrative, becomes
both a source of and a pointer to information beyond itself.
Although the view may seem unfashionable, for Cooke, painting is all about
information. Not in the obvious sense that any art form can send a message, but in the
way that the seemingly arbitrary encounters of dissimilar and heteregeneous objects
and realities stage a drama about the fate of information and the processes that shape
it. Cooke is intrigued by how information gets altered and distorted by the very
channels that transmit it. The medium might be the message, but how exactly does
this medium operate on, and even do violence to, itself?The Information — Darian Leader 2
Cooke’s response to these questions take place on many levels, and all the more so
when we realise that one of the forms of information he is most interested in is
painting itself. The information that appeals to the artist can range from a remark he
overhears on a bus, to a piece of theory, to a stylistic feature or genre of visual art.
What happens to these informational elements in the process of transmission? How
are they shaped and morphed and dislocated? Cooke has indeed compared his work to
the result of an intergalactic game of Chinese Whispers (telephone). As information
about planet earth is passed on from one receiver to another across galaxies, the end
result will be the strange and apparently random world of one of Nigel Cooke’s
paintings.
This dynamic is echoed in the comment we often hear that Cooke’s landscapes are like
a dream. Rather than understanding such comments as the sign of abdicating from
any attempt to get to grips with the work, why not take them literally? What is it, after
all, that characterises the contiguity of impossible objects in a dream? Dream
landscape relies on the logic of compression. When an unconscious desire cannot be
represented readily in a dream, it will take the form of an absurdity, an impossible
juxtapostion of objects. When Ernst unveiled his images of Oedipus, he made no effort
to depict the narrative of what happened to either Greek hero or Freudian toddler, but
presented incompatible beings and objects within the same space. In other words, he
took the Freudian idea seriously that it wasn’t the content of the unconscious thought
that was so radical, but the filtering process that occured before it could reach
representation.
If Cooke’s work has anything in common with the interests of Surrealism, it is in this
focus not on revelation but on censorship. Surrealism was never about unconscious
thoughts or wishes but about the way that these could only ever emerge in censored
form: the impossible juxtapostions, compressions and condensations associated with
artists like Dali and, for a certain time, Ernst. Unreality was simply an effect of the
transmission of information. To get through, it could only articulate itself in scenes
which could never occur empirically, and which had an absurd aspect. If Surrealism
had any real engagement with Freud, it was through this exploration of the processes
that distort unconscious material. It was an art not of revelation or freedom but of
censorship.
And it is exactly this vein of Surrealist art that Cooke takes up in his own way. His
project, as he says, concerns the question of “what happens to information”. His
paintings elaborate not only how an alien might picture earth after the great game of
Chinese Whispers, but they present actual stagings of this process. One of his aims, we
could say, is to give theatrical form to this movement or dynamic of information being
sent, distorted and blocked on its intergalactic path. Don’t the paintings, after all,
present immense, often monochrome backdrops, with a stage for the action levelled
flat right at the front of the scene? Even when Cooke dispenses with the local
geography of his landscapes, as in a painting like ‘The Dead’, his fruit and veg still sit
on a flat, stage-like stone shelf, as if a curtain has only just risen.
Given Cooke’s concern with information, why should theatre be so important? Is it an
embellishment or something more central to the place his art both depicts and stems
from? Theatre, after all, highlights how what we are seeing is a representation, and its
simplest way of doing so is through the use of a stage. Like a frame, a stage gives
whatever takes place within it a semiotic density, and isn’t this rendered in Cooke’sThe Information — Darian Leader 3
work by the elementary framework of horizon and base line? A pure line is all it takes,
as children learn, to set out the difference between earth and sky, and so enter the
world of drawing. This has little to do with our visual field (we rarely see pure horizons
and base lines) and a lot to do with the conventions of representation. When a children
become engaged in the activity of drawing or painting, this is how they are suposed to
start. The foreground-background distinction and base line ushers us into not just the
world of childhood but of depiction as such.
Once the stage is set, Cooke can then bring on his actors. And these are rather atypical
beings, less full human forms than bits and bobs, severed heads, light bulbs, birds,
cartoon-like books and fruit and veg. Although they invite us to invent stories around
them, the paintings never deliver a coherent narrative, and Cooke’s actors are
ultimately perhaps minimal parcels of information; this could be an image derived
from an overheard remark to a motif or genre of painting, like the Baconesque light
bulbs or Guston-like body parts. Even in his earliest work, we can find these references
to painting made present in the way that space is partitioned with screens. Flat screens
float within the painted scenes, dividing the space, and these would then become
actual paintings in subsequent work. These surfaces-within-surfaces allow Cooke to
sustain what he calls “a conversation within painting”, explaining perhaps the ubiquity
of painted surfaces, graffiti and inscriptions within the represented space of his works.
Cooke’s cosmology involves the very big and the very small, from a vast sun or
pumpkin or brain to a tiny fly or speck of graffiti. The detail of the paintwork is brilliant,
yet as we draw closer to wonder at the artist’s dexterity, we notice some peculiar things.
The pumpkin that had seemed three dimensional now appears to be painted onto a
wall; the massive sun has a cigarette burn in it, suggesting that it is less voluminous
presence than painted surface; the depth of an open book becomes the pure illusion of
a stencilled cartoon. Everything we took to be real turns out to be represented, and
even to have representations -like graffiti- inscribed upon it.
Mark-making is in fact everywhere. Perhaps prophetically, Cooke’s early painting of an
aviary does not hesitate to include the birdshit, a primary form of inscription, just as
more recent paintings include graffitied signs, scrawls and images. These
representations of representations index not only arbitrary acts but also genre, styles
and motifs from the history of painting. If the epic scale and structure of the
compositons remind us of both German Romanticism and American Sublime, we also
find Bacon, Van Gogh and Guston. We are teased with the promise of narrative
painting, and then forced to consider not narrative but, as Cooke puts it, the “entropy of
information”. These paintings could even be seen as a sort of graveyard for painting,
the place where painting styles and motifs go to take their rest.
Cooke often speaks about the necessity for him of “keeping the conversation about
painting going within painting”. And as we consider the antagonism between a
graffitied wall and a beautifully painted rock or pond, we are drawn to the question of
how meaning is generated in the painted image. Here are so many elements of
painting’s history strewn together in a grim yet humourous landscape. A Guston-like
brain smokes a fag, while a pumpkin placed like a lantern in Caravvagio begins to wail.
Here we find the high end of Modernism, with its big flat monochrome surfaces, and
the left-overs of much earlier European art. We’ve got Greenbergian flatness along with
the paraphenalia of early Romantic painting. It’s as if Cooke is asking how these
elements ever worked before and why we didn’t see the funny, daft side to them. Or, atThe Information — Darian Leader 4
times, why we didn’t see how menacing or scary they were.
The graffiti that we find on nearly all of Cooke’s surfaces invites us to wonder whether
this is in fact the fate of all painting. Or, from the intergalactic perspective of Chinese
Whispers, what painting would end up as. Would it consist of marks on surfaces
intended to leave a trace, and, in some cases, to deface or make more beautiful?
Graffiti, which came into Cooke’s work in the late 90s, was what he called a “painting
mechanism”. The bird outlines graffitied on walls and concrete structures evoke not
only the idea of Platonic forms, but the real human activity of marking, and Cooke says
here that he realised that with graffiti, “you can deface your own painting by adding to
it. You can attack the work from the inside”. And it’s here that we move beyond the
theme of language and information. Attacking, after all, involves a bit more than
information.
If Cooke’s scenes are like information graveyards, they are by no means dead places.
Graffiti casually invests the space, sprouting like a weed, just as vegetation festers and
invades. Mark-making may be about representation, but it is also, as Cooke says, a
“viral presence”. Language and the organic have met, and Cooke is showing us how
this encounter is far from benign. The invasive processes of vegetation are similar, in a
sense, to the swarms of locusts that inhabit Hitler’s bunker or the artist’s studio in his
earlier works. In this collision, painting becomes an equally organic and cannibalistic
force, devouring, vomiting and regurgitating the art forms of the past.
“Secondary representation”, Cooke says,“creeps over everything like vegetation”. Here
the language of painting eats, consumes, creeps, and envelops. If the most basic form
of information is DNA, this is junk DNA, the overwhelming, massive part of DNA not
necessary to transmit any specific message, just an “invasion of information”. And this
is exactly what is echoed in the graffiti. This is now not only a mark, but the active idea
of making a mark, the trashing, demolishing and vandalising that is a vehicle of both
information and the drive. Can the history of art be separated from the history of acts
of destruction of art? Cooke is showing us how in the end we cannot separate
vandalism and information, or, to put it another way, language and obscene organic
growth.
These mark-making acts take place on the very specific stage that the artist has
constructed. Graffiti may be vandalism and destruction, but it is also what Cooke calls
“the low-frequency side of painting as information, a sub-pictorial static”. It stands at
the junction between trashing, making art and displaying. And painting subsists here in
a curious way. Cooke manages to re-invent the famous theory of mimesis associated
with the French cultural theorist Roger Caillois. Caillios was interested in how animals
can mimic their habitat even if this doesn’t always ensure their survival. In his studies
of the praying mantis, he noted how this creature can play dead, blending in with
leaves and vegetation, and it can do this even when it is actually dead. The mimetic
process, Caillois claimed, continues for some time after the biological death of the
animal.
For Caillois, this testified to the existence of a curious law of nature, according to which
animals become images: they become part of a scene, like a painting. Cooke’s
question here is if a mantis can play dead to become an image, can an image, like a
painting, itself play dead? The obvious interpretation of this question would involve the
production process: do paintings hide the means of their own creation? But Cooke’s
revamping of the Caillois question seems wider than this. If an organic process like theThe Information — Darian Leader 5
growth of foliage - or graffiti - destroys and swamps in order to live itself, will art forms
of the past try to blend in so as to save themselves? Can paintings and styles blend in
to disappear? Can they disguise themselves? Can they be ignored in order to protect
themselves? These questions, which Cooke has elaborated in many contexts,
encourage us to scrutinise not only his own paintings but also all other paintings, from
the immediate ‘representation within a representation’ to the presence of details or
technical gestures within any given painting. And not forgetting those paintings and
prints hidden in shops throughout the country’s high streets.
As we think about these questions, they seem to develop logically out of Cooke’s
endeavour to explore how language and organic process are not separate but
profoundly entwined. The idea of playing dead links these two dimensions exquisitely,
and suggests, perhaps, that for Cooke, contrary to what we often hear, it wasn’t that
painting ever died - it just forgot it was alive. As he says, “Painting is always about
death, from cave drawing to Mondrian”. And this threading of the living and the dead
might give us another clue as to why Cooke paints studios as sites of vital, festering
deacy.
In a sense, paintings like ‘Thinking’, ‘The Dead’ and ‘Morning is Broken’ all approach
this theme. Motifs of life and death are present both as explicit icons and as
compositional tensions, to make of these works modern variants on the Vanitas theme.
Death is not only biological finality here but also a question about representations. If
Cooke starts with severed heads, he then moves to the fruit and veg that we usually
see grinning and laughing in advertisments. These are cartoons, and hence their
representational quality is emphasised, but they are still the bearers of unspeakable
sadness and despair, mixed in with a dose of comedy. This is a blend of a Disney and
German Romanticism, and with the ghost-like forms of ‘The Dead’, we could say that
Cooke is trying to put the Caspar back into Kaspar David Friedrich.
These slapstick figures are linked to one of Cooke’s working methods. If you put on
your best tie, he observes, you’re bound to get muck on it, and the human effort to be
perfect always ends up in farce or tragedy. If that is really the case, why bother trying to
be perfect? Why not, in fact, accentuate the imperfect? And why not let the imperfect,
the comic and the incongruous then have a place in the high art form of painting?
When a critic deemed Cooke’s work impeccable, apart from the silly pumpkin, Cooke
responded by multiplying the pumpkins. Once again, this is about information. Rather
than repress an element that seems to be geting in the way of the ‘message’, Cooke
gives pride of place to exactly this obstructive element.
It is the process of articulation that matters here, the distortions that interefere and
transform. Although Cooke’s privileged space is visual, doesn’t this suggest that sound
is equally his working material? If a comment he overhears on a bus can appear in a
painting, and if he conceives of his work as the result of Chinese Whispers, sound is
becoming image. The static that gets in the way of the message is less ignored or
deleted than amplified. If painting is information, and his work is a form of listening,
couldn’t we say that painting becomes a form of overhearing?
This overhearing will mean that the variety of references in a painting by Cooke will be
complex and resistant to a uniform narrative. He calls one of his works ‘Don’t Mess
With My Message’, but it is the messing that is the real substance of the message. This
may at times leave the viewer perplexed, and asking the question of where the painter
is coming from. But as Cooke himself once asked, “Can I be more than one painter?”.The Information — Darian Leader 6
Certainly, the graffiti and other forms of inscription might allow him to be another
painter within the space of a single painting, but since this painter also uses his ears,
everything that gets in the way of a message can get in on the picture too. And perhaps
that is why Cooke can say that painting shows him he is in exactly the same place.
