Richard Phillips

Some Candy Talking: the Art of Richard Phillips

In this most recent series of paintings and drawings by Richard Phillips, collectively titled ‘Michael Fried’, this is what you get: firstly, somewhat glamorous young women, posed and caught in the stock expressions of commodified desirability. There is a standardised quality to their faces, expressions and hair and make-up, which seems to place them – regardless of whatever else we might know or find out about them - from almost any decade of the last fifty years. They look like cover girls, pin-ups, glamour shots, photo-pictorials, all new models – any of the casual editorial categories might be their sterile home.

And then there are sex pictures – images which might be drawn from the endless, febrile galleries of cartoon erotica. In one, Herzausreisser, a young woman dressed in funky bikini briefs – (to judge from the Pop art nouveau curls of her go-go dancer’s hair-do, and the elongated, Biba-esque arches of her eyebrows, she might have emerged from a fantasy reclamation of psychedelic illustration) – advances towards the viewer with a human heart held in her outstretched hands. There is a votive quality to her, but as it might take its place on the pages of a sci-fi comic. More explicit is Threesome – which does exactly what it says on the tin. All the clichees of pornography are there, right on cue: stockings and suspenders, bared breasts, one couple fucking, a young woman watching.

But within this selection of images from the pop sexy end of modern mass media, there is also a single, shadowy portrait of a man’s face. He appears middle aged, but virile; his expression is stern, his countenance somewhat regal, and he looks out from the picture with a clear but averted gaze. He seems to embody some impressive weight of authority. At a glance he might be an illustration of one of the Old Testament prophets from a modern Christian Bible, or a Plantagenet king, or perhaps some venerable character from The Lord Of The Rings,
as depicted by a fan on a tribute web-site. The image is titled, Michael Fried.

This image – its importance, after all, is underlined by the fact that it lends its title to the whole series – must surely have a role in adjusting how we might feel about all these pictures? But before we get to it, we might consider some other routes by which we come to the dizzying, monolithic, unnerving art of Richard Phillips.

In the first place, his paintings are big - often eight feet tall, or more, and over six feet wide. Also they are sometimes mesmerically coloured, in warm, rich, sensuous tones – the palette of glamour photography, or of the heavily air-brushed, colour photographic portraits which used to feature on the cover of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then again, this vibrancy seems filtered, just slightly, as if through the hot colour range of Kustom Kar decoration, pin-ball machine back panels or the muted technicolour of cinema ‘lobby cards’ from the late 1960s.

The effect is a variation on photo-realism, but with a softer, less clinical texture. In one incredible art historical equation, their impact might best be described as a marriage between Pop art and pre-Raphaelism. Indeed, the fierce pre-Raphaelite fetish for painting direct from nature, but thus producing works of extraordinarily heightened artifice, seems comparable to not only the visual rhetoric of Phillips’s art, but also the evident rebelliousness of its intent. The imagery of these paintings, also, is specific, blatant, vivid, and seemingly open-handed. Often the subjects appear to rejoice in their own sensuality and desire - inviting collusion. But there is a coldness there, too, akin to a form of pictorial ruthlessness and emotional disorder. Despite the girls and the sexiness and the pop hip signage – nothing is quite as it appears.

We might first consider this art as it takes its place within the broader context of contemporary society and culture. We inhabit in the West a world which is saturated without cease by the endless production of commercial, pasteurised, sexually charged imagery. For example, around forty cable television channels devoted solely to the fantasies of ultimate male potency dreamed up by the stars of rap, urban and metal music, and thousands of magazines and advertisments concerned only with the commodification of desire. A total consumer mono environment, in fact, where the corporeal and mortal must always be camouflaged as the physically alluring and eternally turned on.

Tom Wolfe – the great social commentator and novelist - has been keeping an eye on the Jungian shadow of America’s desire systems for the best part of four decades. In this passage from his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, concerning power, corruption and lies within the many strata of Manhattan society in the mid 1980s, he describes a wealthy white investment banker, Sherman McCoy, taking the morning air:

‘In the candy store, after paying for the Times, Sherman turned to go out the door and his eyes swept across a magazine rack. The salmon flesh jumped out at him...girls..boys...girls with girls...boys with boys...girls with boys...girls with bare breasts, girls with bare bottoms...girls with paraphernalia...a happy grinning riot of pornography, a rout, an orgy, a hog wallow... On the cover of one magazine is a girl wearing only a pair of high heeled shoes and a loincloth... Except that it isn’t a loincloth, it’s a snake...Somehow it’s wedged in her groin and looking straight at Sherman... She’s looking right at him, too... On her face is the sunniest, most unaffected smile imaginable.. It’s the face of the girl who serves you a chocolate-chip ice cream cone at the Baskin-Robbins...’

In a bravura side-step of associative critique, Wolfe’s description of pornography finds its way to the classic source imagery of American Pop art. Sensuality and erotica - even of the lumpen kind crowding sweatily off the pages of adult magazines - becomes entwined with the whole colourful trip of mass production and commodity culture. You can imagine the easy, visually enticing relationship between the pastel colours of the ice creams at Baskin-Robbins, and the “salmon flesh” on the covers of the pornography.

In this respect, the art of Richard Phillips can be seen to maintain a vivid extrapolation of Pop art - but one through which our relationship to the classic source material of mass media and mass production is updated, vitally, to audit the emotional reach of its contemporary status. As much as forty two years ago, Warhol noted (as he described in Popism: The Warhol Sixties (1980)) that there were now generations growing up in America for whom ‘Pop was all they’d ever known.’ We now inhabit a total pop world in which the ubiquity of popular culture has both erased its claim to rebellion or ‘otherness’ and made its future largely reliant upon quotations from its past – hence our fluency in reading ‘retro media’.

In terms of its lineage, therefore, we might think of Phillips’s paintings as generationally descended from (for instance) Tom Wesslemann’s Courbetesque Great American Nude 92 of 1967, or the glistening canned peaches, inverted ice blue roadster and silver and cerise female nude of James Rosenquist’s Lanai (1964) ). But while there are qualities of colour, texture and subject matter which Phillips seems to share with Pop art, there are also pivotal differences. These could be summarised as a fundamental sense of tension - a taut dichotomy between the often sensual, erotically poised subjects of his work, and the spiritual weariness - at times nearer vacuity - which seems to be hollowed out within them. ( T.S. Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’, “Leaning together/ Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” comes close, as do the whacked-out cast of Brett Easton Ellis’s early novel, Rules of Attraction.)

More specifically, where Pop art sustained an ambiguous celebration of modern consumer culture, in terms of both the exuberance of its subject matter and its mingling of techniques (at once atelier skilled, commercial and industrial), Richard Phillips approaches his material from both a more ‘painterly’ and a more philosophical position. He often makes paintings in oils on linen, which are meticulous renditions of his initial drawings. From the tension between this intensely crafted nature of his work, and the psychological allegories embedded within the seeming banality of his subject matter, there is created the momentum of an image seeming to reach critical mass.

Confrontational yet inscrutable, therefore, the subjects in these vast, mesmerically coloured paintings seems always eloquent of a particular stillness. This stillness – it seems to exist as an almost physical state, akin to a visible tension just beneath the surface of the image – is at once poetic and deathly. It is a condition akin to
the visual equivalent of subsonic reveberation. Romantically, one could conjecture that it comes from the resonance – as a cultural informant of Phillips’s art – of industrial mass production.

Phillips has maintained his interest in the capacity of ‘Death Metal’ and industrial music – a genre concerned with the physics of volume, above all – to de-stabilise not only its own form, but its entire venue and context. Famously, he invited metal group Black Dice to play a specially conceived piece of music at the opening of his show ‘America’, at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, in early September 2001. With noise levels reaching in excess of one hundred and forty decibels, the gallery – and the surrounding streets - began to clear.(In retrospect, the targetted aggression of this sonic disruption, in relation to the title of the exhibition, and the portrait included of President Bush (The President Of The United States of America (2001)) might be seen as an eerie portent of the attack on the Twin Towers by terrorists, which occurred just two days later.)

But this interest in so-called ‘industrial music’, and its related sub-strand of extreme noise bands, can also be seen to mirror processes at work within Phillips’s own art. In particular, the notion of an image exceeding the presumed boundaries of its own visual and cultural capacity, and thus acquiring a presence which converts appearance into
spectacle, and painterly volume into sheer visual mass. In an earlier painting by Phillips, Shaking (1997) one might easily believe that the image is visually punning on its own embeddedness in the concept of reverberation - almost as though the painting is wired, empathetically, to a generator source.

In more recent works, such as the eerily monochromatic-looking series of paintings made in 2002, in oil and aluminium leaf on linen (Suzanna Leigh (After John D Green), for example, or Ingrid Boulting (After
John D Green)) this sense of amplified volume takes the form of seeming to reverse the relationship between pictorial scale and physical intimacy: a distortion - created by an over intensity of expression - appears to skew the otherwise ‘perfect’ surface of the paintings.

In many ways, the most accurate critical language with which to discuss the art of Richard Phillips is the archaic, art historical language of nineteenth century romanticism. His work seems most directly concerned (although ‘concerned’ is perhaps too clinical a term to describe the currency of the art) with concepts of physical beauty
in relation to questions of morality, aesthetics and the politics of representation. It would be wonderful to read what John Ruskin might have made of these paintings, or Théophile Gautier, or Oscar Wilde.

In any event, this brief introduction to this vibrant, spectacular art can conclude by returning to Phillips’s portrait of the ennobled-looking, shadowy individual, which he has been titled Michael Fried. As the title of this series of new works, as well, the name is significant; seemingly it refers to the distinguished art historian and critic whose writings on what he calls ‘the antitheatrical tradition’ in painting have been the hub of much controversy over recent decades.

It seems to me that the dialogue between the art of Richard Phillips, and the tradition of antitheatricality discussed by art historian Michael Fried, will lead inevitably to a debate about the nature or legitimacy of art as spectacle. And in a return to archaic terminology, one can’t help but be reminded by such a dialogue of the cultural resonance of the term ‘to behold’. Which - in fact - is where we came in.

Within its cyclone of aesthetic philosophising, the art of Richard Phillips primarily reflects the momentum and urgency of modern desire – the ritual art of capitalism, perhaps - right back at itself. This is an ambiguous capacity, and one which seems encoded through all of Phillips’s work to date, as a cumulative artistic statement. (A final musical analogy: that the visual force of Phillips’s art might be compared to Phil Spector’s ‘wall of sound’ production technique, as that was punned upon by, for instance, The Jesus And Mary Chain’s ‘Some
Candy Talking’.)

Like most philosophical situations, the ambiguity within the art of Richard Phillips (that virtuoso balancing act between visual blatancy and reticent meaning) can be refined to both statements or further questions. Such as: Are these paintings of pop hip sexy young women, stylised within an inch of their lives, the sloughed skins contemporary desires, the discarded shells of adolescent monsters? Or do they exemplify, rather, the orgiastic jouissance, the money shot of modern romanticism, so championed by the critical theorists of the 1970s? Or are they mute agents; and the rest – as they say – is up to us?

Bracewell, Michael. 'Some Candy Talking: The Art of Richard Phillips' in Richard Phillips, (London: White Cube and New York: Frierich Petzel Gallery, 2005)

More on Richard Phillips

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Bibliography
Interview by Yilmaz Dziewior

Exhibitions
Michael Fried 9 Dec—14 Jan 2006
Birds of Britain 29 May—29 Jun 2002