Gary Hume
The work of the painter Gary Hume is quite difficult to talk about. Writers frequently resort to a potted history of his work, from hospital doors to post-pop figuration, because the work is curiously resistant to any exegesis beyond a straight description of the empirical facts. They are actually very easy to describe - gloss paint on panel, m.d.f. or aluminum, bright colors, pop imagery etc., but they are quite tricky to explain.
Hume emerged during the eighties' Theory boom, when critique, ("critiquing"), was the rule, and art-making became an obstacle course of caveats and prohibitions. Pleasure was out: Self-Expression was out: Men doing paintings was very out. Art had to make sense. Hume's work still exhibits a kind of self-reflexiveness, a consciousness of the condition of painting in the late 20th century: but is also mired in the thoroughly subjective experience of his own appetites, passions, likes and dislikes. Hume's paintings are about Feelings.
He can't be accused of mindlessly clinging to redundant articles of faith like authenticity and self expression, but neither can we talk about this work in terms of the ironic and the critical. It's all in there, part of the fabric, but not in any form we have hitherto been acquainted with. Our language is slow to adapt to developments in art (and elsewhere), and the postmodern vocabulary can feel very thin. Writers are stuck for words.
His earlier work, the door paintings, may have been a critique of modernist "nonrepresentational" painting, playing as it did on the similarity between a white painting and a white painted door - a visual pun... but that's not what he's doing now. That kind of self-consciousness is still there but that's not what he's on about. And when you look back at those doors the critique doesn't seem to be as central to their meaning as it was to the work of numerous other artists of Hume's generation. (It's tempting here to use words like "pathos" and "nostalgia," but that doesn't seem quite appropriate either).
Hume's new work is involved work. It is acutely aware of the secondhand, received nature of all the desires and opinions we like to think of as our own - which we experience as our own - but it doesn't let his late-20th-century truism have things all its own way. Yes, my self is a construction, an effect, and the things I like and think about are put in shops, films, magazines etc., precisely for me to like and think about. I can no more choose what fills my head than I can choose to speak my own personal language. But these things, my likes and dislikes, are equally still mine. The feelings I have about them are mine.
A common strategy in Hume's work is to start with a familiar image - a picture of a celebrity, some flowers, whatever - and without actually distorting it at all, alter it in such a way that when you see the painting the subject flicks in and out of your consciousness. It's reminiscent of what happens when you look at Jastrow's duck-rabbit, or the famous picture of two profiles which also describe, when you reverse the figure-ground relationship, a vase. Figure and ground are often given equal emphasis in Hume's paintings, a (probably unintentional) metaphor for the artist's own relationship to the culture at large.
Hume's paintings are involved and sincere. A choice of color and subject matter that can be, often is, regarded as ironically tasteless, or even sarcastic, is intended to be beautiful and human. ("Beauty" and "Human" are two words Hume uses a lot when talking about his work). He wants to invest his work with a sort of practical, everyday, moral integrity. What they clearly have, as a kind of substratum, is intellectual rigor - a different sort of integrity. With the invention of other means of making pictures, and the threat of redundancy, painting fought its corner by concentrating on those things that were held to be unique to painting and junking what could be achieved as well in other, newer media. Figuration was believed to compromise the integrity of painting; to undermine its right to live.
Hume's figurative paintings do things you couldn't do in any other way - their conception is thorough. The kind of paint, the kind of support, the color, the treatment of the image are all quite specific and essential to the work's being as an object. What jars is that, whilst being quite specific and informed, a lot of the decisions in this work seem perverse. Despite the nakedness of the means by which they are made, and the childish subject matter, they manage to retain an occult element. The thing they keep hidden is what you want to talk about but can't.
Hume's paintings pose the question of what kind of pleasure we will allow ourselves, knowing what we do about the state of the world and of the culture and of ourselves. The knowing substratum and the suggestion of an occult rationale give us a license to enjoy - Human subjects, Beautiful colors. We can simultaneously acknowledge and ignore all questions of bad taste and bad faith while we look and enjoy.