Neal Tait

Some other in the house than we

How can we enter into Neal Tait's work? This work is a rhizome, a burrow We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever: none matters more than another, and no entry is more privileged, even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage. Only the principle of multiple entrances prevents the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier, and those attempts to interpret that which is actually only open to experimentation. We'll start with a modest way in: a portrait of a man with downcast eyes...

This is not a false start, but it is a potentially misleading one, on two counts. First, this opening passage is, in fact, as the telltale reference to the rhizome might well suggest, a crudely telescoped adaptation of the opening gambit in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's seminal study of the writings of Franz Kafka. Second, it is possible that the portrait referred to exists now only in memory, given the high rate of attrition in Neal Tait's studio. Yet it is worth persisting, if only because a line of engagement shadowed by Deleuze and Guattari will serve as well as another. In any case, this particular image of the man with downcast eyes was, on the evidence of a visit made to his studio, enjoying a momentary prominence in Tait's work in early April 2003. At that time, it existed in multiple versions, including a series of exploratory drawings, two small paintings, and a larger unfinished canvas.

One of these paintings presents the profile of a man wearing a dark hood. His eyes, too, are hooded, his seemingly unseeing gaze directed downward; his head is slightly inclined and his chin melds, improbably, with his upper torso; his face is pale and puffy and his features indistinct, apart from the broad curve of his nose. The nose is further accentuated by a crude black outline that contrasts starkly with a light background Were it not for this rude pictorial device, the man's inchoate countenance might merge into the otherwise undifferentiated ground; the black outline emphasises the indeterminacy of the boundaries separating the body from its environs, the motif from its matrix. In the context of Tait's work as a whole, this device serves to highlight the precarious and provisional nature of the intelligible image.

The image, for Tait himself, is less an end in itself than an almost arbitrary token of the work of the imagination, or the work of memory; often, it is a relatively unmotivated point of departure, or a fortuitous by-product of the pursuit of painting. The motif is sometimes subordinated to the mark-making: a range of painterly effects, such as smears and washes, stippling and cross-hatching, that stubbornly insist on their own self-sufficiency A tendency to distrust programmatic, or even predetermined imaging is matched by an impatience with painterly facility, so that content and form alike are worked hard against the grain. The air of anxious calm that has typically pervaded Tait's gallery exhibitions to date represents a notable distillation of his activity in the studio, which is a site of febrile invention. In this body of work, the Signifier is persistently confounded by a flow of images that, both individually and collectively, have the disjointed syntax and inconclusive semantics of a particularly disquieting dream, though one graced by its own morbid beauty.

Tait's paintings, though rarely rebarbative, have a reticence that tends to keep the viewer at bay. Even in the artist's most visually seductive pictures, we are offered limited access to the inner life of the shadowy figures that sometimes inhabit them. We are often left in considerable doubt as to the specific import of the mutating motifs we find framed within the bounds of a given picture. These can range from everyday objects - a lamp, a birdhouse, an umbrella, a piece of playground furniture - to largely indecipherable polymorphs. Yet these figures and shapes are invested with a significance as seemingly unbearable as it is incommunicable. Organic and inorganic forms alike appear burdened, often deformed, by the pressure of some unresolved trauma.

Over the past three or four years, Tait has painted a succession of so-called 'portraits' of unidentifiable subjects whose features are partially occluded by viscous masks of unnaturally hued oil paint. Introspective and unapproachable, these discomf itingly opaque presences have been described by John Hutchinson as 'strangers', in that they are all, in their different ways, 'distanced from others or from themselves'. The disconcerting otherness of these strangers is taken a step further by the man with downcast eyes. He has retired deeper still into the realm of the unknowable, the unfathomable. The earlier works were mostly based on found photographs, whereas, more recently, Tait has relied on drawings generated by his imagination. This may partly account for this sense of removal from a communality of images to a more private and inaccessible domain. Melancholy aloofness has been transformed into something more akin to autism. Here we find, not just resistance to the quizzical gaze of the viewer, but an abnormal withdrawal from the world of reality, and of other people.

Images of withdrawal and dissociation proliferate in Tait's recent work. A pale, cartoonish wraith of a boy, viewed in profile, is reminiscent of a world-weary Charlie Brown. His shoulders droop and his arms hang by his side. He wears what could be ear-muffs or outsize headphones; or, perhaps, he simply has a large, round hole in his head. He is as oblivious to the noise of the outside world as he is untroubled by the viewer's gaze, which passes right through him. In another work, a stylised, solitary figure (apparently male but as anatomically rudimentary as a crash-test dummy), sits alone, bolt upright in a chair in a low-beamed loft. An absurd and doleful figure, he features in a number of related line-and-brush drawings. He is an emblem of self-involvement; or, as the artist prefers to see it, self-sufficiency. This incongruously pinstriped mannikin is an updated version of the traditional bohemian figure of the artist in the garret, estranged from society and periodically immobilised by self-doubt. In another drawing, the figure slumps over dejectedly in his chair; and in a third, surrealistically, he fuses with his seat, seemingly caught up in the creative process of becoming a hybrid man-chair.

Hybrids are a key trope in Neal Tait's art, which is a breeding ground for such figures. During the aforementioned studio visit, the artist presents two related images of a distorted human figure rising up out of a tract of tilled land, with which it is, literally, at one. Tait seems sure of the importance of this forbidding chthonic totem to his current thinking and making, but less certain he can explain why. He refers to this figure as vThe Farmer's Bride', acknowledging this as the title of a poem by the Edwardian poet Charlotte Mew. Mew's poem is put in the mouth of a simple, insensitive farmer whose young bride shuns him. Fearful of her husband's unrequited sexual yearning, the bride abandons the world of men for the company of wild animals. In a number of other drawings, this object of stunted desire has mutated further into a half-human haystack that is bedecked with various accoutrements of rural domesticity.

A month later, on a second visit to Tait's studio, the Farmer's Bride has disappeared from view. She is not, however, without issue. Three small canvases are propped against the studio wall, each of which features a similar (but not identical) contorted, pale-green, stem-like shape, which has multiple protuberances. Caught on a cusp between the vegetative and the humanoid, this mutating form resembles a sprouting vegetable pictured in the throes of an ecstatic dance. The affecting incongruousness of this imagery is, on this particular occasion, coloured by the fact that, as we are discussing it, a torrent of intensities is emanating from a small television screen in the corner of the studio. Tait has slipped a copy of Kenneth Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother into the videoplayer to illustrate a point that subsequently somehow gets lost amid the meanders and by-ways of our conversation. The frenetic, gothic psychedelia of Anger's film seems a world away from the misshapen pallor of Tait's lugubrious hybrids. Yet, both are undeniably infected by the sensational logic of 'becoming other'. This is further underlined by a larger painting that depicts a rosy-cheeked shepherd boy who is awkwardly holding a misshapen dog in his arms, while a number of shadowy, monk-like figures lurk in the background. The boy's face is as bland as a marionette's, while the dog's disconcertingly expressive features are, at once, pig-like and curiously human.

To follow Neal Tait on his lines of flight in and out of the realm of the inhuman is, of course, to cover ground well travelled by Deleuze and Guattari. Their profoundly anti-humanist philosophy is predicated on the notion that all 'beings', including human beings, are just relatively stable moments in an endless flow of becoming-life and becoming-other.

Their fascination with Kafka is fuelled by his capacity to persuasively imagine being an insect, an animal or a machine, without falling back into a normative view of the world that would privilege man's position as its principal participant or disengaged observer. This is a mindset with which Tait clearly has some sympathy. In a telling comment on the recurrence of disarticulated lower limbs in his work, he notes that an early painting of this subject was prompted by his observation of a disabled child walking. This attempt to express the pragmatic reality of a non-normative body experience (we may note that another painting from 2001 is entitled Blue amputee) has, since, extended well beyond the bounds of being human into the realm of becorning-anirnal, becoming-vegetable, becoming-machine.

One imaginative extension of corporeality (on both the figural and analogical planes) to which Tait is repeatedly drawn, is architectural: an animated tangle of legs melds with some crudely outlined barracks-like structures; a seared and shattered skull doubles as a bombed-out building. Various different works depict houses, platforms and a variety of interiors that have the elaborate impermanence of a stage set. Anthony Vidler has drawn attention to the recent reinscription of the body in contemporary architecture as a referent and a figurative inspiration. Far from signalling a return to the classical reliance on anthropomorphic analogy for proportional and figurative authority, this renewed appeal to corporeal metaphors is, according to Vidler, based on a 'body radically different from that at the center of the humanist tradition. As described in architectural form, it seems to be a body in pieces, fragmented, if not deliberately torn apart and mutilated almost beyond recognition.' Tait's work is evidently attuned to this contemporary predilection for mapping the corporeal onto the architectural, and vice versa, just as it registers the sundered body and the prosthetically enhanced body as the fruitful areas of artistic and theoretical inquiry they have indeed become over the past two decades.

If Need Tait's work is, therefore, in one sense at least, of its time, it is less obviously of its place. The various deterritorialisations effected within the work are in keeping with a sensibility that, in many ways, appears more at home elsewhere than among his best-known British contemporaries and immediate predecessors. The prospect of situating this protean body of work more generally within the context of Northern European painting, past and present, may be more promising. Tutelary spirits as disparate as Edvard Munch, Andre Derain and Jean Helion might be invoked in this regard, not to mention more immediate predecessors such as Rene Daniels, Luc Tuymans or Michael Krebber. Yet, even a loose triangulation along such lines runs the risk of interpretive closure in the teeth of an evolving body of work that offers a sustained and spirited resistance to interpretation. Better, perhaps, to close provisionally and temporarily with a formulation adapted from Roland Barthes, and suggest that Need Tait's painting will continue to insist that the space of painting is to be ranged over, not pierced. His is a painting that ceaselessly posits meaning to ceaselessly evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. Richly suggestive and quietly affecting, it is, for the viewer inclined to exegesis, painting in which much may be rewardingly disentangled, but nothing conclusively deciphered.

Referenced sources

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Dana Polan trans.) (University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis 1986), p.3
'Personal Effects', John Hutchinson in Need Tait (The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 2002), unpaginated
The Architectural Uncanny Essays in the Modem Unhomely, Anthony Vidler (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
& London 1999), p.67
"The Death of the Author' in Image-Music-Text, Roland Barthes (Stephen Heath trans.) (Hill & Wang, New York
1977), p. 147

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith is a critic, occasional curator, and Lecturer in Gaelic Literature at University College Dublin

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