IN THE MANNER OF EXCESS BY BILJANA JANCIC
2011
Description
Matthew Hopkins and Clare Milledge at Galllery 9, 2009. Essay by Biljana Jancic.
Fields
contemporary art, art criticism, essay
  • 2009

    Catalogue essay for From The Scrapheap of False Metaphors and Other Draft Deceits at Gallery 9



    Eccentric, as ex-centric or exceeding the centre, is a useful position from which to locate the work
    of Matthew Hopkins and Clare Milledge. The substance of excess as an idea along with its sister
    expressions, the grotesque and exaggerated, is often forgotten, negated and dismissed as
    ‘sinister.’ It is a challenging task to contemplate that which is in excess of representation,
    meaning, perfection, and language itself and what can we hope to find beyond those limits?
    These works present traces of the psyche both collective and individual through a series of
    gestures which exaggerate certain tendencies and moods.

    Excess was central to the politics of sixteenth and seventeenth century Mannerism. Although it
    might initially sound strange to look so far back in contextualising contemporary practices,
    Mannerism is often credited as the first Modern art movement and as such has exerted a
    powerful, if often underrated, influence on the trajectory of artistic thought leading to the present.
    Mannerism framed itself as a reaction to the excessive perfection sought during the Renaissance.
    It pursued in contrast grotesque, exaggerated qualities that ultimately made Mannerism
    unattractive to the eyes of Art History, once removed from its initial historical context.
    Mannerism was eventually resurrected by the avant-gardes who were interested in its expressive,
    experimental qualities as well as the way that it signified individuality through severe stylisation.
    Georges Bataille was a Modern writer who especially cultivated the notion of excess. He became
    one of the foremost theorists of transgression and his writing helped shape notions of abjection
    that were highly influential. These were later appropriated by many artists particularly throughout
    the 1990s when they were broadly stylised as ‘grunge’. The practice of young artists such as
    Hopkins and Milledge is differentiated from such practices and has, in a sense, elaborated a
    Mannerist tradition of excess, giving it a strangely renewed contemporary significance.

    The Renaissance aspiration towards seamless artifice was exemplified by the courtier Baldassare
    Castiglione’s idea of sprezzatura, or the skill of making artful proficiency look naturalistic and
    effortless. Mannerism extended this idea into sprezzatura artificiosa1, whose goal was to
    emphasise pleasure in the act of presenting the artifice of expression, just as in the work of
    Hopkins and Milledge there is a great interest in staging and imitation. In their work there is no
    desire for naturalistic representation instead it revels in the revelation of artificiality. The artists’
    interdisciplinary approaches lead to the creation of theatres of the grotesque, embellished
    mutated realities.

    In both practices there is a field of confusion between bodies and objects, creating impossible
    scenarios. Hopkin’s photographs, which are composed of multiple exposures of images, objects
    and drawings, leave the viewer searching for traces of logic. His works confuse still life with
    portraiture much like the famed Mannerist Guiseppe Arcimboldo’s portraits that are composed of
    collages of assorted organic matter. However, in Hopkins’ work there is a more confused system
    of representation in which objects are given facial features while his drawings and representations
    of faces become objects in still life compositions. Although the technique used to create many of
    the images in the exhibition recalls Surrealist photography I would hesitate to refer to them as
    surreal or dreamlike because they are thoughtfully constructed. They create an illogical narrative
    from a series of mutations, contradictions and dissolutions of familiar references. It seems that
    something is being communicated but it is impossible to clarify what that may be.

    Similarly, Milledge uses complexity and oversaturation as strategies to draw viewers into the work
    but simultaneously denies the satisfaction of empathy audiences may feel by understanding what
    is being communicated. Her body of drawings in the exhibition were not originally intended to be
    exhibited as finished artworks but were conceived as a collection of sketches, executed while in
    Berlin, imagining scenes for future performances or sculptures. They were not treated as ‘art’ and
    so fell victim to ‘stains of drunken tears, wine, beer, chamomile tea, creased, torn, oil etc.’2 The
    onslaught of the moment and the pressure of individuality - as signified by the accidental damage
    done to the artwork - has conflated ‘reality’ with its constructed fiction. Thus the artist’s state of
    mind was being expressed here through images as much as through this additional layer of
    unintended expressionism.

    Subversion of communication is achieved by Hopkins and Milledge through the complexified
    symbolism of the images as well as the deliberately perplexing use of titles. It becomes difficult to
    say if what we are seeing is code for an idea or if what is being signified is excess itself. As a
    retort to Milledge’s statement that ‘magic is often in the mud,’3 Hopkins questioned if ‘perhaps the
    'mud' is the message?’4 This so called ‘aesthetic mud’ effectively signifies the lack of certainty and
    fixity in the world and is paralleled in equally fluid and unsettled representations. Excess and
    exaggeration in Mannerism appeared at the moment when the earth was revealed not to be the
    centre of the universe. Along with this cherished sense of centrality, stability in general also
    disappeared as did the underpinning logic of perspective and its spatial ordering of meaning.
    Perhaps these images ultimately correspond to the contemporary loss of symbolic order that
    results when the hyper logic of neo-liberalism is pushed to madness.

    Global contemporary world is overwhelmed by information and images which dissect and collage
    in our minds to create a fractured sense of reality. Australian writer Paul Carter has observed that
    in the post-colonial context, collage is the ‘normal mode of constructing meaning.’5 Due to its
    ubiquity collage has lost its power as a strategy of disruption, as once deployed by the
    Modernists. Practices of Hopkins and Milledge reflect this state of being through the fragmented
    images they produce. Hopkins has equated his recent work with the clash of images which occur
    in areas of the mind flooded by a range of stimulus which need an expressive outlet. Similarly
    Milledge’s images combine a broad range of cultural references together, not in an attempt to
    equate or reconcile them but rather expose them as disparate fragments.

    The practices of Hopkins and Milledge communicate a great deal, they do so strategically to
    collapse meaning through an excess of signification. Indeed, what makes these practices excentric
    is that they are not positioning themselves outside the systems of meanings and
    metaphors but rather they tease and teeter on the edges of the centrality of meaning while
    pushing these constructions beyond logic. Their images do not offer us solace but leave us
    suspended in a world of uncertainty and contemplation of the manner of our being.

    1 Gregorio Comanini, (Trans. Giancarlo Maiorino, Ed. Ann Boyce‐Anderson), The Figino, or, On the Purpose of Painting: Art Theory in the Late Renaissance, University of Toronto Press, 2001.

    2 Clare Milledge, Email correspondence with the artist.

    3 Clare Milledge, Press release for the exhibition on behalf of Gallery 9.

    4 Matthew Hopkins, Email correspondence between the artists.

    5 Paul Carter, ‘Post‐Colonial Collage: Aspects of a Migrant Aesthetic,’ Living in a New   Country: History, Travelling and language,