A life measured in tea towels: Jonathan Monk and the art that freezes time

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/18/jonathan-monk-art-and-language-lisson-gallery

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Old lags cross off the days of their prison sentence with marks on the wall. TS Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons. Jonathan Monk uses cute kittens, Austrian pastoral scenes and Australian birds: every day, week and month is recorded in his growing collection of souvenir calendar tea towels. There are 46 tea towels, one for every year of his life. They hang from a wall of the Lisson gallery, a miserable account of a life.

Unlike On Kawara’s daily telegrams, postcards and tweets that announced he was still alive (until he died last July), or the diaries of Hanne Darboven, which counted her days in a maddening arithmetic, Monk’s My Life Within the Lives of Others II, is unrelievedly prosaic.

There are other ways of seizing the passing moment. In a series of collages, archive gallery invitations are paired with family photos featuring Monk as a child. One twins an announcement for Bruce Nauman’s 1975 Consummate Mask of Rock with a photograph of Monk’s own family, including young Jonathan, held aloft in his mother’s arms. The whole family, faces painted as clowns, grins for the camera, undoubtedly ignorant of Nauman and his fascination with clowns, let alone the text of Consummate Mask of Rock that begins “This is my mask of fidelity to truth and life … this is to cover the mask of pain and desire”. Other pairings have the younger Jonathan twinned with invites to shows by On Kawara, Lawrence Weiner and Sol Lewitt, somehow inserting his favourite artists into his own backstory.

It may be a bit arch, but these collisions of the art historical and the personal can be poignant. I like it when Monk complicates what would otherwise be art-about-art gags with his personal life. Pish to the work-life balance, I say, and the distinction between the public and the private. It is all the same on life’s soiled tea towel.

Monk also gags about Bernd and Hilla Becher’s flat, calculated and indexical black-and-white photographs of cooling towers, industrial furnaces and chimneys and the like, redoing them with dramatic found internet images of similar subjects at the moment of their demolition. Chimneys collapse, cooling towers fall in on themselves in clouds of dust. In these irreverent images Monk points out the impermanence of the Becher’s dour subjects, perhaps in a nod to Roland Barthes’s observation that photography is always about death.

Monk has also got some of the surviving arte povera artists, including Jannis Kounellis and Gilberto Zorio, to deface classical-looking busts of his own head, knocking off the noses. These are exercises in iconoclasm. Other works play games with the works of Robert Smithson and Jeff Koons. Not every one is a winner.

Everything comes from somewhere else. Most art reflects, consciously or not, on its own condition and on the art that came before it. It can be a friendly nod, or a calculated insult. That’s part of culture’s conversation and its cumulative richness, whatever the medium. Monk worries perhaps too much about originality and its apparent impossibility. Originality, and saying something new, is more a matter of the right sort of luck, and following your nose. Maybe Monk is telling us he has lost his.

The complexity and game-playing found in Monk’s work are redoubled in Art & Language’s show Nobody Spoke, across the street in the Lisson’s other space. A series of new paintings, Sea Ghosts, rework an earlier 1980s group called Hostages. Just as the titles are an anagram, so too is their subject. Art & Language are forever shuffling the same deck.

The paintings look like abstract landscapes, or dirtied palettes, laden with multi-coloured scuffs and lumps of dried-up paint. These are interrupted by painted inlays and strips that quote earlier works. Seen through the picture-window on the street, they look rich and meaty. Up close, they are somehow undernourished. All texture is gone. All the shadows of the raised whorls and nubs of dried paint have been drawn on, in ink. The paintings must have been laborious to complete. Art & Language paint as if they don’t like it. I mean this as a compliment.

I imagine Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden cackling and arguing in their Banbury studio, where the two remaining members of Art & Language work. It is the last redoubt of British conceptualism. Over the years others have come and gone, died or been excommunicated. As wilfully obtuse and recalcitrant as they are intellectually acute, as playful as they are deadly serious, Art & Language is as much as anything a conversation from which work arises and goes off on its own tangent, referencing itself, dragging Art & Language’s compendious history with it as it goes. Theirs is an art that makes and unmakes itself, eats and regurgitates itself.

All of which is a way for me to avoid the toil of describing what they do, a difficulty the artists themselves are only too happy to compound. At the Lisson, they even employed a German theatre group, The Jackson Pollock Bar, to act out a sort of play in which they did all the describing for us, ventriloquising a script written by Baldwin and Ramsden, which explained a new work based on a lengthy series of drawings that the artists had made, and transferred to a large number of canvasses that were then bolted together to make a number of unusable chairs that fill one gallery. There are jokes about minimalism and modernism, Courbet (an obsession for decades), a kettle from a hotel room in Lille, an upside-down kangaroo and much besides.

Right now, Art & Language have a major retrospective at MACBA in Barcelona. I can only hope that the spirit of their work translates, because their stuff can be heroically opaque. My favourite work here is a series of descriptions of 16 portraits of world leaders and public figures. We never get to see the portraits themselves, which stay hidden beneath the sheets printed with the texts. If they actually exist at all, that is. I have my doubts. Each text portrait occupies its own vitrine in an upstairs space. The subjects include Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin and Bashar al Assad. The descriptions, which go on for hundreds of words, are all surface, no depth, every one of them a single sentence with multiple clauses. Without the name, you would be hard put to identify them. They seem interchangable. “The top of the head tilted slightly forward, brightly lit, with streaks of thinning hair; a lightly shaded patch above the forehead, coloured light green …” begins the portrait of Putin.

This is a kind of mechanical literary scanning, pure description without adjectives. In its way it is brilliantly done. Poring over the vitrines, your eye jumps around the dense and repetitive texts, and you end up with nothing, or rather no one. This is portraiture as Chinese whisper, an impossible guessing game. There’s no end to it.