I had acquired a load of clothing and perfume catalogues in House of Fraser with an eye to using them as reference or collaging them into some drawings.
The J'adore Dior drawing came about through a brochure of Dior make-up which I cut up a bit and some patterns found in the print room. This is the frenzy of shopping for the 'perfect' luxury item. There's a hint of a bestial face from behind the woman's outstretched arm. There's even a 'J'adore Dior' which is the brand's official moniker. This was certainly another Steadman-influenced scene and the sort of thing he might focus on - mad shameless greed.
Below: The Gleam of Diamonds in her eyes:
This drawing was an attempt to recreate an actual scene I had seen in the store; an older lady wearing shapeless clothes looking with what I took to be wonder at a red dress hanging on the slim frame of a shop mannequin. I collaged in a photo from a catalogue, and was thinking roughly Steinberg-y about this with the off-white background. I put the 40% off sign in there (which was hanging everywhere in the store - sometimes it was 20%). Maybe she's thinking 'well if it's 40% off, I can squeeze into it."The joke is the contrast between dream and reality and how this is pushed in our faces in such places in order to sell us junk. I had looked a little at Steinberg, his use of collage with line drawing:
I also liked the way he drew these women's coats with patterned mark making:
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Overall, in this experiment I think I was trying to do a few things.
1: The use of collage makes a direct link with the actual products and store, hopefully circumventing my hole-ey drawing of clothes and bags and whatnot.
2: The use of colour in the drawing can hope to play off the collaged elements - either the old lady with her shabby clothes or the use of the gold colour - the colour of money - in the Dior drawing.
3: There is a poke at the shoppers themselves in the caricature of the features - this comes across perhaps more sneery than I intended. The joke ought to be perhaps on the place - although perhaps the joke is ultimately really on all of us.
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One might frame the drawings as comment on the awful way in which ordinary people behave when confronted with the frenzying effects of consumerism. I'd been reading a book called Consumed! about the deleterious, infantilising effects of consumer culture on children and adults. Which was a cheery read and might have planted seeds in my febrile brain.
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Here is a small essay about Otto Dix written by me:
All the bad things - Otto Dix
Dix (1891-1969) is a giant of an artist whose work progressed through different genres during his life - dadism, realism, new objectivity (also Grosz) and German Expressionism (see here). Much of the power of his work stemmed from his dramatic portrayal of his experience in the Great War - Dix had been a machine gunner, and thus learned his anatomy in a direct and gruesome way. You can see this in his drawing, which is often twisted and torn. There is a good, short history of this violent period in Dix's art in a post by Elliot David in the Paris Review here.
There is scant sympathy in this vision of marauding German troopers:
Some of Dix's later work took Weimar society as it's theme and was unflinchingly, often controversially, critical. He depicted sexual violence and prostitution, poverty and corruption; here we look down upon the beggar, presumably a war victim, in the street as would a shopper passing by. Like the shopper, the gallery visitor also inevitably walks past, ignoring the beggar for the next picture:
Compare Dix's card players, for example, to Cezanne:
Corruption of the mind and body; greed and evil intent - this is a jaded, jaundiced vision.
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I enjoyed writing that essay.
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One of the uncomfortable things this experiment has thrown up is I think the concept of the artist as observer and reporter, and the conflict this entails with living life. Was Otto Dix supremely miserable and horrible all the time, or did his work allow him to exorcise his demons, as it were? Perhaps there is in actuality a more ambivalent reaction to consumer capitalism which we all demonstrate - the fact that we all essentially co-operate with it - which one could express in some way perhaps.
I imagine I was drawn to these artists in particular because their work carries a fairly direct comment on society. Also that much of their work tends to be quite dense - both in the subject matter, the viewpoint, the medium and graphic approach. It tends towards heaviness (less so Steinberg) and can be gruesomely captivating if sometimes claustrophobic.
The sense of scale and place is hard to capture in a piece if there are holes in the artistic memory or toolkit, and if there is an unfamiliarity with tackling drawings from different viewpoints or subverting perspective entirely. This is something I shall attempt to tackle in my next experiment.
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