(Image: http://newsevents.arts.ac.uk/files/2010/11/boucher-back-story-11421.jpg)
As a group we visited the Royal Academy to see the Artist's Lab show 'The Back Story', by Stephen Farthing, a show focussed on art history and context as an impetus for the creation of work. Our particular focus was on 'The Back Story' (above), a painting based on the story of Francois Boucher's 'Resting Girl' (Below), a painting where Farthing thought the context surrounding it's depiction of a 14 year old nude was in fact as interesting as the painting itself.
(Image: http://www.2artgallery.com/gallery/images/Resting-Girl-1752.jpg)
Written below are notes taken whilst at the exhibition:
'The back story painting - literal interpretation of inscribing a narrative behind the painting and letting it bleed through - a sense of deliberately obscuring the image with narrative but at the same time obscuring the narrative as well by writing backwards - does the text then become a pictoral element as well?
Has the effect of making the viewer want to engage with the piece but shutting them out of it at the same time - no less illuminating than the original? Although it could be argued that in fact he does introduce elements of layers to a seemingly otherwise straightforward nude - the viewer is assured that there is something else behind it, if not sure exactly what.'
Farthing himself states of his work that it is about, '...degrading [meaning] on purpose, so it becomes not more ambiguous, but less what it was in the first place'.
However, it seemed to me, particularly with 'The Back Story', that Farthing was in fact trying to make the painting more than what it was in the first place, yet I felt that the reversal of writing and obstruction of the image proved almost to be an unnecessary gimmick, removing the emotive power that the original story and provenance actually has.
The second piece of Farthing's work that I wanted to look at was a detailed project regarding the mapping of artists into his own categories, in an attempt to place them both inter-relationally as well as contextually. Below are some more notes made on the day:
(Image: http://static.royalacademy.org.uk/images/width267/screen-shot-2010-12-08-at-18-05-59-11735.png)
'As in 'The Great Bear' (below) - Farthing deliberately uses a language we are familiar with, the Tube Map, but in difference to that, every link and placement appears to be deliberately chosen. The lack of scale suggests a map of ideas, styles, processes, with a disregard of where they appear in time, by detailing them more in smaller panels, there is a little more clarity as to why Farthing has chosen them.'
I left the exhibition still unsure as to what I felt about 'Mapping Artists'. In many ways I found it an intriguing piece of work, but maybe it was the familiarity or ubiquitous nature of Beck's tube map that impacted on how Farthing's piece worked. Maybe a map that is non-linear through time, does not have to be drawn in a linear fashion.