Richard Hamilton
Articles
Site-referential paintings
Peter Langan, owner of a restaurant called Odin's, asked artist friends
to produce paintings for a new brasserie he planned to establish on the
site of Le Coq d'Or, an old-style French restaurant off Piccadilly, London.
The room was surrounded by panels, covered with a fabric (also used for
the curtains) showing hunting scenes printed in a rusty pink colour. They
were framed with a profile cut from brown-stained wood. Each panel was
to be allocated to a different artist.
One difficulty introduced by the request was that of ownership. What if it were sold in the event of the closure of the restaurant? A solution to the problem might be to make the picture so specific to its location that it would lose its meaning, its raison d'etre, if it were removed from its context. Pictures of rooms with pictures of rooms in them hold a fascination that goes back to 'Interior I' and 'Interior II' (1964). They offer 'the possibility of sub-encounters, two-dimensional simulations of interiors within the three-dimensional envelope of an actual interior'. That the painting could portray its own setting would be a bonus. The restaurant was photographed in its derelict state including the wall reserved to receive the work. It was agreed that the panel was to be left exactly as it was, retaining the original fabric and its scalloped frame, so that the painting could be seen to represent the space it inhabited. The photograph was enlarged onto photo-sensitive canvas. After redecoration the camera was set up in the new Langan's Brasserie and the same view was photographed, this time in colour. Unfortunately the frame and fabric had been removed, but a piece of curtain and some discarded framing from a rubbish pile set things right. A table, laid ready for a meal, was painted on the black and white canvas and the painting was then hung on the panel that appears in the picture itself. Sitting at that particular table, the diner was in same perspective relationship to the space as that represented in the painting which now formed part of his own visual environment. Together with the identifiable scalloped frame were other relics; the 'Exit' sign and door frame, echoed in the painting. Not long after the opening there were complaints from Peter Langan's partners that the panel, with its Coq d'Or printed cotton wall covering, did not match the other panels and they had it painted the standard cream without consulting the artist. The vandalized painting was withdrawn. Surprisingly, 'Langan's' looked quite comfortable hanging for some years in the dining room at Northend until it was exhibited and, reluctantly, sold in 1980. With the Langan picture wrenched from its intended site, the idea of a painting depicting the location in which it was intended to hang was revived with a project much closer to home. A 35mm transparency existed from a visit to Northend Farm in 1975 before it was purchased and restored. The camera looked across a derelict space to a person standing in the second of two doorways which opened onto a room bathed in light. The scrap of film, a partial frame at the end of a roll, holds a reminiscence of the figure silhouetted against an open door in the background of Vel‡squez's 'Las Meninas'; there are also overtones of Vermeer, not only in the colour and the illumination of the figure but in the grainy photographic quality that Vermeer was among the first to experience when he used the camera obscura to project his subject onto canvas. Since 'Langan's' was completed, computers had moved into the world of image processing. A Quantel Paintbox was used to square-up the scanned Northend source; the slightly diagonal view of the room introduced convergences and warps which could be brought back into a clean parallel perspective by electronic manipulation - in particular, the door frames were extended and realigned. The digital image was converted to a 10 x 8 inch transparency to print a Cibachrome enlargement which was then bonded to canvas. Though the dubious colour quality, camera shake and grain were welcomed as an abstract enhancement of the surroundings, the deficiencies in the centre of attention were magnified. The figure and the space behind it were painted into a sharper focus while matching the grain of the enlarged emulsion. The face was quite illegible so an earlier photograph dating from the mid '60s was used as a reference.  A second version of 'Northend', replaced the figure with bluebells
on a table. On the first encounter with the house at Northend a large bunch
of fresh bluebells had been mysteriously left, like a welcoming gift, in
the ruined house. They were found, on a tea chest, in the sunlit room seen
in the photograph. The table on which bluebells appear in the painting
is an 18th century (about the period of the house) folding wine table with
an elegant clarity in its geometry. The design relies solely on a circle,
a triangle and a square.
'Langan's' had been conceived as a solution to an economic problem. If the friendly restaurant owner decided to cash-in on a painting which was carefully locked into a specific location it should have no value when detached from it. That presumption proved to be flawed - the fallacy was confirmed when 'Northend I' and 'Northend II' were exhibited together and both were subsequently sold, after hanging briefly in their intended location. It seems that site specificity is a utopian dream which can be short-lived. 
The Anthony d'Offay Gallery proposed to make an exhibition offering each of five artists one of the five distinctive spaces available in the gallery in which to make an 'installation'. With the earlier interiors removed from their subject/source the idea persisted until an occasion arose to develop a concept which had been growing for some time - the possibility of producing a series of paintings which would relate to a space in its entirety. The opportunity was taken to make wide-angle photographs in the gallery for an initial test. A trial negative was scanned into the computer and reversed to a positive, the late de Kooning was erased and replaced with an available image used in a recently completed print. The subject, from a 1957 German film, Das Wirtshaus im Spessart, shows a group of people in a hunting lodge. Seven sections of wall were chosen on which to 'hang' pictures, then the empty gallery was photographed. The black-and-white negatives were scanned with an Agfa Arcus scanner into a Macintosh computer for transfer to a Quantel Paintbox. The inevitable distortions of the wide-angle lens were pulled into strict perspective and composed by 'cropping'. They were then ready to receive an 'exhibition'. Rather than use existing images it was decided to create new subjects based on spaces in the artist's home. A series of colour transparencies provided material that could be seamlessly collaged, edited, colour corrected and manipulated into a set of variations exploiting the tools of the digital Paintbox. The finished compositions were to be 'cut-out' and 'pasted', on the simulated walls of the gallery. The trial subject remained as an exception to the group. It is aberrant in not deriving from the house at Northend, it is the only interior to include people, the main subject was completed before the d'Offay Five Rooms exhibition was proposed and it is also the largest.  A projection roll from a German movie which had lain corroding in its can for some 35 years provided the material for the Ufaimage. Two 10 x 8 transparencies were made, one from a selected badly flaking 35mm film frame and another from an adjacent frame which gave a bit more information. The figures were sufficiently well defined in the clearer frame to make a stencil to isolate them from the background and then, with a broad 'spray', put them back into the more degraded frame as a soft white silhouette. Some surreptitious manipulation completed the image and a new 10 x 8 transparency was output from the digital information. Only 'Langan's', the first of these site-referential pictures, had been made without the use of a computer. That sophisticated equipment should be applied to an image in an advanced state of corruption must appear perverse. Strangely, the three subjects worked on most successfully in this area of computer image processing had been somehow crippled at the start. The first was the incomplete frame at the end of a 35mm roll showing decomposing plaster and dripping wallpaper in the abandoned farmhouse at Northend; second was an exposure casually made in the vestibule of a small hotel in Italy, using a 16mm negative from a 110 format Pentax pocket camera; the third was this corrupted film frame showing beautifully grouped actors frozen in some Ruritanian drama. The reconstituted image was called 'Ghosts of Ufa' because it was thought of as a homage to the famous German film company Ufa, which made wonderful films in the thirties. Confusingly, Das Wirtshaus im Spessart was made by Ullricht Productions in 1957 but there may have been some overlap among the actors.  Initially, the Five Rooms installation at the d'Offay Gallery was conceived to be a mini exhibition on the photographed walls of the gallery. It soon became apparent that the project would be more interesting if it consisted only of new images, though the time available was short to find seven new subjects in as many months. The 'interior' theme was fundamental to the site-referential idea so it was sensible to use my immediate environment as a unifying framework. The group of seven rooms developed into a portrait of a house. When photography was first practised it was thought to be a possible replacement for painting. Painting surely influenced photography and photography's influence on painting has been incalculable; indeed, there was a wide acceptance of the idea that photography was better at representing the appearance of things than paint on canvas. Another attitude to photography was that it didn't make painting redundant but added an invaluable new tool that not only changed the way painters looked at the world but extended the available mediums. Paint can supplement photography, and vice versa. The same can be said of the electronic paintbox, it doesn't replace old media but it can encourage new ways of thinking and working. Image processing on the computer can be surprisingly 'painterly'. Using 'brushes' controlled by a pen on a tablet can feel almost like paint on paper. The 'Smear' brush was used extensively for 'Dining room' as well as the most severe of rectilinear line drawing tools.  An important aspect of the character of any house is the way in which the personality of its occupants is expressed through works of art and other objects. Northend Farm houses a number of studies for a reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, these include a full-size perspective drawing for the lower part of the Glass hanging in a corridor on the first floor. The drawing is barely visible in the initial photograph - the faint pencil lines being obliterated by reflections from a window at the end of the corridor. The loss was overcome by adding a digital overlay of the Large Glass reconstruction itself. Because the intention was to replace the drawing with the reconstruction, it was necessary to give the illusion that the new image was under the surface of the reflecting glass. The degree of transparency of the overlay can be selected to precisely adjust the amount of ghosting effect. Perspective is adjusted in the computer by taking a corner of a rectangle and pinning it in the desired position; repeating the process with each corner the required perspective distortion can be achieved exactly. |