elizabeth rowe

Elizabeth Rowe

Elizabeth Rowe works on the surface, and on the surface what we see is colour, pattern, repetition, images from the everyday: the popular magazine, advertising, the consumer catalogue. The work is about confusion, choice and how sense is made out of multifarious experience.

The early work exemplified in Suburban Summer 2003 arose from the notion of subjectivity as a combinatory process, as continually emergent distributed in other things, in other people, in other practices. The collaging of disparate, highly coloured printed material, having both global and intimate references into continuous surfaces in Rowe’s work, reiterates the work of shaping selfhood. The images work as analogy for the vastly complex combinatory ethical and aesthetic relations we have and how we tell those relations of the self to the self: the selection of the best bits: the physical process of cutting-out and discarding those that don’t fit; the juxtaposition of contradictory elements of time, scale and printed syntax; allowing each image to have its say in relation to the other yet with some kind of ego: a different kind of ego emerging. The formal decisions of arrangement, sequencing, priority and framing all mimic the always becoming and creative processes of subjectivity.

In showing this early work in a gallery setting Rowe took the notion of artworks as analogy for subjectivity into a relation with an audience. In Toilet Trainer 2004 - reminiscent of Nancy Spero’s site specific single relief prints – were adhered lightly to the wall and the audience invited to re-arrange them, indicating that subjectivity is not ever ‘finished’ but is always in negotiation with other desires and responses.

Looking at Rowe’s Constable Country 2005 series immediately brings to mind Peter Kennard’s 1970s iconic Haywain with Cruise Missiles and the traditions of savage irony of photomontage artists such and Martha Rosler. Fragments and horrors such as those in Bringing the War Back Home: the starving child on the dinner table; the terrorist in the kitchen, were detached from their source and recombined in other ‘safe’ and suburban contexts. There are many criss-crossing power relations implied in radical collage work: of gender, race, and consumption. Perhaps in those times we could more easily see where we stood in the nexus of those contradictions and our own resistance to what they implied strengthened our own sense of self. The message that was so strong then, which united us in political opposition, which positioned us together against oppressive powers could not have the same impact today. It is every advertiser’s option to create identities, new ‘niche audiences’, coalitions of consumption: to juxtapose collaged surfaces, to appropriate art images and regurgitate them in confusing and clever witticisms to attract attention, and prick our minds.

In the 1930s Max Ernst experimented with metal engravings; he physically cut up and collaged the mechanical half-tones of Victorian popular prints, ignoring their realistic intentions and re-combining them in creating images evoking dreams and which today look like parody, pastiche and subversion. Rowe in a similar way, promiscuously and seamlessly recombines the logic of the picture plane into irrational surreal images, liberating the potentials in other relations. Rowe’s work has more in common with the always problematical always open interpretations of the collaged surfaces of Claude Cahun and Hannah Hoch in relation to the equivocal relations of gender and race. Like them, she too uses childlike and visible techniques of collage: the ‘sticking down’, the rough cutting-out, the use of paper as a material are reminiscent of school art, play at home with pritt stick and blunt scissors. The visible joins could be regarded as a failure of technique. Cahun’s and Hoch’s work suffered in a critical context of Modernism being assigned to the childish, haunted and relegated to ephemera by the modernist narratives of teleology, primitivism, the feminine, the unsophisticated. In the same way Rowe’s collages childhood is evoked but not as an ideal other: play with toys is implicated in terror and power. There is not always a focus point in the work, no single thematic image, no stable ground, no simple opposition to images of power. In Untitled Girl 2005 everything is mixed together, play and terror, toys and towns. Sylvia Plath referred to the mute accusation of inanimate things, the horror of the domestic everyday. This theme is picked up in Rowe’s concern with the global implications of personal pleasures, intimate choices of consumption having wider resonances. We are drawn into the reality that we are personally implicated in global power at every level including those of the consumption, art and of looking itself.

There is the pleasure of wanting to look closely, to see more of the fetishised half-tones and to engage in the gestalt of making meanings between seemingly unrelated elements. It is this hyperreal world that Rowe is constructing and, by implication, that constructs us as we are engaged in the viewing.

The unregarded process of printing is taken to task as printing processes and their juxtaposition in collage reiterate the micro and macro relations of subjectivity as distributed and enmeshed in other relations. Printing is a largely untheorised yet ubiquitous practice, saturated in every aspect of life. It mixed up in all sorts of things; to bastardise Yve Lomax’s words: There is painting in printing. There are words in printing. There is sexuality in printing. There is money in printing. There are a host of different “printings.” When we start with printing, we are already in the middle of quite a few things [Note 1].

Note 1: I have substituted here the word ‘printing’ for ‘photography’ paraphrased from Yve Lomax (2000) Writing the Image: An Adventure with Art and Theory. London: I.B. Taurus. P. 78.

Print media is embedded in sociality and culture: is distributed through all social systems in different conventional modes: as the dominant mode of reproduction of text and images, of fabric and wallpaper and the most common way those artworks are seen. It is about surface, mimesis, repetition and as a medium seems to deny deep interpretation. Not least in this context it is present the way that most images are remediated: changed and altered each time they are put through cameras, photocopiers, printing machines and the processes of collage and curating decisions [Note 2].

Note 2: The notion of ‘remediation’ here is drawn from Richard Grusin and Jay Bolter cited in Hayles, N. K. (2002) Writing Machines. Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press/Mediaworks. p. 5

Printing itself as a technology moves from micro personal ‘analogue’ indexical bodily experiences to molar, digital distribution in global culture, communications and power. At one end of the scale, each digital print is constructed of billions of tiny grains in bytes or pixels reminiscent of the fundamental units of life itself, nano-biology’s smallest elements: cellular binaries which can be endlessly recombined as solid or fluid moving invisibly in-between objects and things. Printing as an essentially binary practice can stand for the dissolution of subjectivity into millions of cells, even ‘molecular sexes’ that can endlessly flow between dualisms and oppositions, but then can be recombined in fabulations, remediated in collage to cluster or recombine in new creative fantasies.

Rowe’s work and the medium she uses recalls and reiterates the to-ing and fro-ing between the close observation and drawing back to see the whole: the personal and the political.

The idea of the original, the indexical truth that printing and photography once represented and the political certainties and oppositions that early photomontage referred to through become blurred through reproduction in magazines, journals, slides, digital displays, internet websites, and through in the expanded fields of art criticism and art history. What emerges in the history of the half-tone print is an increase in fetishised, idealised images of objects; collage removes us yet again from any indexical relation to an idea of the original.

Perhaps this difficulty of grounding subjectivity is why Rowe has moved on to a more concrete site-specific work in Haddon Tower 2006. On show there is a tv monitor with a record of the effects and the imprinting on the body as subjectivity, of moving around a deserted and threatening space. There is the echo from the hard wall, the sound of feet and a repetitive, downward movement of the body. She has taken her work into performance but here are the same themes at work: the ordinary and everyday, repetition, the daily routines of moving in a space, being prohibited from others, moving down stairs in and out of rooms. Unpredictable events - such as spraining her ankle on one day on the stairs – take on significance when compared to the everyday routine and are framed as such. Clearly subjectivity, the way we understand the self to the self is not totally fragmented and on the surface. There is an ego telling its tales, editing and ethically and aesthetically shaping its relations to itself: and there is a body in socially specific time and space. Rowe returns to the metaphor of art as a process of becoming subjectivity, but here she works in a material context. In the two related practices of collage and performance she realises subjectivity as located historically and socially yet always understood in relation to hyperreal and remediated practices.