Keith Farquhar

This exhibition marks a solo outing for an ongoing series of works first shown by Farquhar in the group show Boneless Box at the Embassy gallery earlier this year. For each piece, a naked body is painted and then digitally photographed. The in-camera cropping leaves behind a torso reminiscent of a nude from late classical antiquity. The image is then sent to a specialist workshop where the torso is precisely machined out and assembled as a freestanding, life-sized, cardboard cut-out. This is then displayed upon a custom made flatpack plinth of the same material.

The work exhibits Farquhar’s trademark economy, by which multiple, disparate references are impacted within one unified, elegantly realised solution. With Nudes in Colour, the distillation process is intensified within the ready-to-assemble, kit formation of each finished piece. What begins with an intensely physical, messy and time-consuming endeavour culminates in a set of concise, three-dimensional works that can literally fold away to nothing.

More surprising, perhaps, is the central positioning of the naked human body, which, in Farquhar’s previous work, has registered only through its deliberate occlusion. It has been typical within his recent oeuvre for human subjectivity – disenfranchised masculinity, in particular—to be articulated through the strategic staging and casual détournement of mass-produced clothing. The stereotypical associations encoded within the threads of Levi jeans, Calvin Klein underwear or Pringle jerseys supplant the corporeal self and its congenital individualisms.

In his installation Atomised (Nyehaus, New York, 2005) a 16ft high column of factory-folded hooded-tops occupies the centre of the showroom. Staple-gunned to the surrounding walls, identical items of lumpen attire, slouch in anthropomorphic postures of moribund sufferance. Each clone appears to worship the compacted tower of information-rich plasmate, wherein the precise codices of a derelict existence await instructions for assembly. The contemporary references to the material culture of a nation’s underclass may seem far removed from the universally highbrow and timeless associations of the classical nude, yet in the production of his flat-pack sculptures, Farquhar shows an ongoing concern with the digital/biochemical processes of compression, transmission and unbundling. By re-focusing on the human body as a traditional (analogue) muse, and packaging it as a schema of infinitely recyclable components, he equates cultural inheritance (via cybernetics and information theory) to the blind transferral of genetic code. The grafting of a cosseted icon from an ancient civilisation upon a disposable prop usually reserved for the marketing of transient celebrity seems to posit idolatry as a timeless trait (a ‘fetish’ gene) within the human species. A kind of immortality is implied here; as though certain cultural forms are predestined (programmed) to be repeated, regardless of historical context.

Although the leitmotif of Nudes in Colour evokes a core set of ever recurring aesthetic ideals spanning well over two millennia (the neoclassicism of the Enlightenment being of particular import) the accompanying process re-cycles eclectically from recent canons of twentieth century art practice.

Production begins with an appropriately primordial, eroticised, and quasi-ritualistic series of actions reminiscent of a 1970’s body-art performance. Within the intimate confines of the home-studio a tarpaulin is laid down to catch residual splatter as a random selection of primary and Day-Glo colours, bought from the Early Learning Centre, are spontaneously applied to the body of both artist and model. Then, aping the unmediated gestury of abstract expressionism, lush compositions are built up through the haphazard transferral of paint from body to body. Though respect is paid to the apposite idioms of immediacy, individuality and the primitive unconscious, an awareness of the historical decay of these qualities remains intact. The auto-critique lies not just in the trusted ubiquity of post-structural discourses, atomising the notion of “self” as a coherent entity, but also in the foreknowledge that these activities are specifically staged for digital capture and subsequent (mechanical) processing.

By repetition of this procedure, a bank of images is accumulated on screen. Seen at this remove, objective selections can be made for transferral to the manufacturer with instructions for both prop and plinth to be constructed. The work is then returned by post ready to be ‘unbundled’ and, by means of a glue gun, reconstituted in three-dimensional space. A code has been written and followed. The work can now be infinitely replicated and cheaply mailed to any location around the globe.

As the exhibition title suggests (perhaps an aside to the digital re-colouring techniques applied to black and white documentary footage) our historical output is constantly re-coded (refreshed) to allow for easy synchronisation with contemporary modes of consumption. In our present era of ubiquitous digitality, this tendency is geared towards the compression, both spatial and temporal, of cultural production ready for instantaneous, global dissemination.

Farquhar’s new works reflect this reductive logic twice over through the digitisation of the human body and the literal flattening of some of the key tropes of art historical practice. At the same time, however, ‘loss’ is expressed through the obvious structural artifice of each piece. While the work occupies the same surface volume as the traditional sculpture it substitutes, the illusion of form is consciously exposed. The vibrantly coloured trompe l’oeil of fleshy vitality is betrayed by a simultaneously visible flip-side of machinic utility.

Exhibition Essay for Nudes in Colour written by Norman James Hogg