| Biography | Essay | Video interview | ...More Art Now |
Michael Fullerton
Suck on Science
by Lizzie Carey-Thomas
Michael Fullerton’s work explores the transmission and reception of information in its broadest sense, from the tools and technologies of communication to the institutions and individuals responsible for its generation and dispersal. The associations he makes are far-reaching and often densely layered, but collectively they expose the role and responsibilities of the interpreter in disseminating information in the public domain.
Fullerton’s line of enquiry translates into two apparently distinct bodies of work which appear to share little aesthetic common ground: portraits skilfully executed in the classic tradition of eighteenth-century English painting and more obviously conceptual works that span sculpture, screen-prints and film. Both, however, relate to the processes involved in the recording of information. This relationship is articulated through the artist’s ambiguous homage to chemical giants BASF, around whose manifesto of inventions the exhibition is framed. The company, famous for inventing magnetic tape in 1935 and industrialising the technology that established analogue recording in its modern form, in fact began life by pioneering the chemistry necessary for the mass production of pigments. Fullerton sees a neat parallel between the two innovations which can be seen as ‘revolutionising’ two different types of broadcasting technology.
For Fullerton, the painting process is analogous to a recording mechanism for which the artist claims ultimate responsibility. Once a subject has been selected, a host of aesthetic choices are necessary in shaping the image, in conveying intent. Aesthetic decisions therefore potentially represent political decisions with the power to produce an ‘effect’. Fullerton’s interest in the eighteenth-century painter Thomas Gainsborough stems from the role he played in documenting and reinforcing a social class that he would not have gained access to without the aesthetic component of his vocation. He says ‘I like the idea of aesthetics symbolically underwriting the importance of politics’.
Fullerton’s portraits often depict individuals who are to some extent defined by their political convictions or commitment to a vision that follows through into action. A Loyal Beautiful Aesthete For a World That Didn’t Care 2004 is a-head-and-shoulders portrait of Michael Collins who served a two-year prison sentence for his role in the anti-capitalist riots in London. Fullerton describes the work as a ‘model’ of painting, suggesting a link between the physical intervention taken by Collins and the force required to manipulate paint. Ross McWhirter Aged 13 at the Outbreak of War 2004 is a sepia rendition of the co-founder of the Guinness Book of Records, the world’s best selling book. McWhirter was an outspoken critic of the IRA, renowned for his right-wing beliefs, who was fatally shot in 1975. Fullerton’s full-length portrait of John Peel, complete with jumper, cup of coffee and quizzical smile, exudes warmth and admiration for the late broadcaster and committed champion of the avant-garde.
Fullerton’s paintings possess a ghostly, transient quality that is the very antithesis of the monumental portrait commission which presents the subject at the height of their achievement. Instead, his subjects emerge tentatively from the indistinct gloom of the background, through loose, soft brushwork that gradually gains definition around the features, humanising rather than elevating. This hesitancy may suggest Fullerton’s desire to represent a quality beyond an accurate likeness and his persistent questioning of the painting process as his images slowly take shape. Underpinning all his investigations is an examination of whether aesthetic decisions succeed in communicating values beyond the merely decorative.
This idea is further elaborated through sculptural works such as Who Keeps the World Both Old and New, in Pain or Pleasure? 2004. Consisting of six four-metre-long poles suspended vertically from the ceiling on wires, the sculpture seems to reference a Minimalist vocabulary in its formal rigour. The work is, in fact, a scaled-up model of the rods of the human eye, the receptors of light, taken from an anatomy book, cast from mild steel and coated in one of BASF’s latest pigments, ‘magic purple’ (the pigment shifts colour from orange to purple, depending on the angle from which it is viewed). Similarly its counterpart, two cones made of a mixture of urethane and ferric oxide (the raw material that stores signal on videotape), alludes to non-visible information contained beyond the visually pared-down surface of the objects. Furthermore, Fullerton has positioned the cones either side of the original microphone used by the late Alistair Cooke to broadcast Letter From America, the world’s longest running speech radio programme, reinforcing the notion of the objects as active mechanisms, of one thing influencing another.
Providing a backdrop to the installation is a grid of billboard sized silk-screened images on newsprint, based on a photograph of a room in the apartment of the controversial nineteenth-century philosopher Nietzsche. In a sort of reversal of the painting process, Fullerton begins with a complete image and, through a process of repetition, subjects it to a level of distortion until the image is almost unintelligible. The disintegration of the picture plane echoes the way in which Nietzsche’s ideas have been variously appropriated and manipulated for a variety of political purposes beyond his original intention.
At the root of Fullerton’s practice is an awareness of the mediated nature of the process of recording and the ways in which this information becomes open to distortion once out in the public arena. Thus, for Fullerton, the artist’s role is a precarious one but at the same time one of the highest responsibility. Once out in the world and divorced from its context, the work is reliant on judgement from institutions and critics, often with other motivations, for its interpretation and validation. At the centre of the installation sits a large roll of blank newsprint. Titled No Title (‘silence is so ... accurate!’ – Mark Rothko, 1947) the work’s mute objecthood offers an eloquent retort.
