Temporary Sitters: Painting People in Contemporary Society
'Art is... of the people and by the people and for the people.' -Frank Pick, 1917
‘Every generation must re-create reality anew…’ -Linda Nochlin, 1971
The paintings in Temporary Sitters freeze and capture what seem to be momentary returns of people travelling throughout the London underground. The immersive installation of the paintings invites you to take a seat, encounter, and exist in the same space as your fellow passengers for longer than you would usually desire and ponder each of the strangers' stories.
Throughout Art History painting has drawn attention to how a space can be read and navigated. The immersive environment in which these paintings are displayed aims to push a genre of new figurative painting further by playing with levels of representation. This playing involves the drastically divergent concepts of reality that shape our daily experience, for example, the act of back scrolling, and looped relationships between photography, painting, and realism in an age marked by public images of people obtained through social media sparks a debate as to what social realism is today and painting’s ability to address contemporary realities and the ethics that surround them.
A quote in bold in the London Transport Museum reads: “The bed of a London thoroughfare may be compared to the human body- for it is full of veins and arteries which it is death to cut.” This year the tube celebrates 160 years of serving the capital, and therefore, the timing of this exhibition at JD Malat could be no better.
The circle line which was the world’s first deep-level tube is the setting for most of these paintings. This is mainly due to my use of the Circle Line when I lived in South Kensington. I would commute to work to and from High Street Kensington. I would also travel back home via Liverpool Street. The body of paintings is marked by the 2010 design for the District, Circle, Hammersmith & City, and Metropolitan Line. These trains are known as the S7 and S8 trains. You can tell that they’re modern trains as they are marked by the smart little multicoloured squares which appear on the moquette seat patterns across the series. Details such as this mark and distinguish a time in which modern life has been observed.
The Circle line around central London took over 20 years to complete. Shallow cut-and-cover construction was expensive in built-up areas and created chaos on the streets, and even then, it was reported that life on the underground was “so packed with people that getting in or out was a regular scrimmage.” The amount of people on the tube is in fact what drew me to create a body of paintings as there were so many rich sources of inspiration that could be taken from the life that unfolds in these public spaces.
The London Underground can be seen as a microcosm of the city. As I have already suggested it provides endless opportunities for the act of people-watching. People watching on the London Underground specifically refers to observing and studying the behaviour of people using the subway system. The London Underground identifies as an anthropological place. It is a public space where everyone that rides the underground has no choice in whether they’re a temporary sitter. The sitter gets on at one stop and gets off at another. It doesn’t matter where the sitter has been or where the sitter is going all that matters is that once they resided in this transitory state. It could be argued that all the Temporary Sitters are no more than human actors, anonymous individuals, sitting in what can only be described as a foreshortened space. Can you remember the face of the last person that sat opposite you on the tube? Sadly, most Temporary Sitters do not hold enough significance for us to remember their faces. Most are strangers, with destinations unknown. Passers-by.
My travels over the last year have included observing how people interact with each other, how they move through the subway system, and how they respond to their surroundings. Specific journeys have specific memories. The bustling and crowded environment of the London Underground offered a rich and diverse range of people to use for painting inspiration. Subjects ranged from commuters who take up seats with their briefcases, backpacks, and laptops to tourists with all kinds of union jack-inspired paraphernalia. However, despite the passenger’s differences, they were similar in the fact that most were underpinned by technology in some way or another.
The act of people-watching which can also be termed ‘modern-day voyeurism’ draws attention to a new and complicated world of voyeurism which can occur in contemporary society. The term ‘modern-day voyeurism’expands the act of people-watching through a world of online activity and easily accessible digital surveillance.
Modern-day voyeurism in contemporary society can appear in many forms from the use of technology such as the rising quality and readily available smartphone cameras installed with GPS trackers and apps that allow you to upload pictures that have been taken in public spaces without an individual's knowledge or consent. Other forms may include hidden microphones, body cams, CCTV cameras, a pandemic of reality TV which documents the intimate lives of everyday people, and social media which enables the stalking of everyday people like they’re celebrity people. The last enables you to scroll through personal information, pictures, and posts, which the poster has agreed to by using the terms of the site.
Temporary Sitters seem to capture candid moments of strangers that have been observed and painted akin to data attainment processes. This is what painting from life today might mean to a post-Lucian Freud generation. Instead of scrutinising every detail about someone’s being in the flesh, a computer can generate and translate a way of seeing a person through a digital perspective.
The sitters in this series are plucked from several sources including my photography which documented my travels around London. Other methods included searching through other public domains. The kind of public domain which generates the uncurated gallery found in our pockets. It is easy to find anonymous subjects to paint by scrolling through feeds, looking under hashtags, and analysing street photography posted on nameless accounts.
Although modern-day voyeurism permits many benefits in contemporary society the ethics of using this kind of reference imagery may spark a debate. This debate may state that using anonymous subjects as a source of inspiration may be an invasion of privacy. However, all these subjects have been sourced from images already in public domains and do not relay specific identities. Instead of representing selves, they create assembled selves like that of strangers that appear on my TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook feeds.
This ties to Michel Foucault’s theories presented in the Panopticon. He revealed that modern society is characterized by surveillance and the constant monitoring of individuals. He suggested that voyeurism is a natural consequence of this panoptic society, as people are constantly being watched and monitored.
In addition to this Philosopher Jean Baudrillard has proposed previously that contemporary society over time is growing to be increasingly narcissistic. In the digital climate we currently find ourselves situated within it seems that there are more and more methods in which people can be more self-absorbed and self-obsessed. For example, being faced with oneself on Zoom allows the self to watch the self and dwell inwardly. These kinds of face-to-face encounters which lack physical presence further a kind of voyeurism that is a natural consequence of a growing narcissistic society. The people in this series of paintings may also only be selected for how I have seen parts of myself reflected in the behaviour of others. This only goes on to suggest another way in which my desires and needs have been sorted by using a contemporary way of sourcing sitters to produce the paintings.
Jean-François Lyotard proposed the theory of the post-modern condition, in which he argued that contemporary society is characterized by a loss of faith in grand narratives and a fragmentation of meaning. He suggested that voyeurism is a natural consequence of this post-modern condition, as people are constantly seeking new ways to make sense of the world around them. Therefore, my sourcing of these people also makes sense as I am trying to make sense of people and what it means to paint from life today.
This Postmodern condition can be seen to be reflected in the coining of the Korean term ‘Molka,’ referring to the growing laws behind the use of hidden cameras or miniature spy cameras that are secretly and illegally installed for traditional voyeuristic purposes. Molka is an abbreviation of molrae-kamera which means a sneaky camera. Although this series required the observation of strangers throughout my own journeys, and the journeys of strangers captured and uploaded onto the internet I do not by any means agree with Molka, but these new laws highlight ways in which contemporary image-making is happening today.
The practice behind these paintings is situated both at odds and indebted to a trajectory of realism. Temporary Sitters manages to distort traditional realism to reflect an ongoing fragmentation between modern life and how things are constantly changing. Through addressing a theme of modern-day voyeurism in contemporary society the new figurative paintings highlight a way in which handheld devices and the portable machines found in our pockets have altered our attention spans and are redefining our everyday visual experiences. This can both be seen in the literal sense; people are depicted on their phones oblivious to any potential viewers, which is then heightened by the installation of the paintings. The display encourages a viewer’s eye to settle, and their brain to process what they’re looking at which is unlike the endless simulation of images we find in our digital worlds. So, what does this disrupted and neglected bodily presence mean for a trajectory of Realism when there are multiple ways of being without sensation?
Linda Nochlin asserted that each generation must reassert reality anew, it finds importance to question how closely Realism was related to the social and political issues of its day. The hybridisation of traditional painting techniques alongside contemporary technologies has become dependent on how my screen has become a representative and vernacular account of vision.
I acknowledge that the prevalence of digital discourses in my everyday life relates to social issues we face today through greater ethics of visuality. What are the ethics behind using photographs of people I do not know, yet have been uploaded to public feeds in the meta sphere for anyone and everyone to access? In an age of digital surveillance that is watching our every move is it ok to use personal surveillance equipment such as body cams to take still images and use them to provoke my imagination?
According to Art Historian Linda Nochlin, the most innovative representational painters will always attempt to redefine the concept of “the real” at any given moment in time. She succinctly defined the mid-nineteenth-century Realist artist: as “to give a truthful, objective, and impartial representation of the real world, based on meticulous observation of contemporary life.”
Therefore, concerning the genre of portrait painting, we already know there has been a long tradition of manipulating reality. Some might argue that the motivations for documenting and lying about people at the same time are no different to the way we can touch up pictures of people today using digital tools. Other examples of “contrived settings, filters, and costumes, all within a curated selection of images, only seem to reflect an ongoing interest in portraitures' age-old project of communicating social messages about a sitter. One difference today is the ease with which “every man” or woman can edit and share his or her artistry by purchasing and installing Photoshop.
The lack of physical presence of the sitters in the Temporary Sitters series gives rise to another question. Is identity inseparable from representation? The subjects in these paintings further a complex relationship between bodily and personal presence assumed in portraits due to the process in which the sitters have been found.
The ideological requirement that a portrait should be taken to be a true representation of a sitter has meant that, in a discourse of art, portraiture could only be explained as the exact, literal re-creation of someone’s appearance or as an accurate record of the artist’s insight. However, in these paintings of people, anonymous subjects on the London underground, there was a desire of breaking free of portraiture’s paradigmatic ties to likeness.
French philosopher Guy Debord proposed the theory of the society of the spectacle, in which he argued that modern society is characterized by the proliferation of images and the commodification of reality. He suggested that voyeurism is a natural consequence of this spectacle society, as people are constantly bombarded with images and are encouraged to consume them.
Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." He explains that “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived is now merely represented in the distance.” This applies to these paintings in the sense that the distance between myself the painter, and the temporary sitters can be navigated through the flatness, the generated light, and the mediated distance between my eye and my screen. I can consume these people and turn them into whomever I desire by simply scrolling on my devices. This is where the ethics of visuality presents itself.
I have found myself trying to think that any kind of depiction of a person is contained in what their acquaintances see in the sitter, rather than it being a mimetic copy of the external and internal qualities of an original sitter. Therefore, creating these characters from fleeting encounters and making them interact with other fleeting encounters of other sitters has enabled me to find a way of inventing people and situations inspired by my own experiences in day-to-day life, whilst also attempting to respect the privacy of others.
A special thanks to…
JD Malat Gallery, Jean–David Malat, Cat Necula, Annie Pereira, Victoria Aboucaya, Charlie Lewis Marffy, Eliza Rennie, Luke Walker, Rafael Barros, and Yana Ssergeeva.
