The age of innocence is no more, in our age of uncertainty, the experiences and traumas of history have tainted forever our ability to look at art in an unmediated, and uncoached way. As Arthur Danto asserts, the art of our time is mediated art, where context and explanation is needed to situate the work of art in place and time, and hence our consciousness. Increasingly, it seems almost old-fashioned and politically-incorrect in our multi-cultural age, to speak of a painting or sculpture as being ‘beyond the pale of history’ and geography, as having an existence in and of itself outside the viewer, his/her community and social conditions.
The most sustained attempt at a socialised analysis of Natee’s work is probably found in Iola Lenzi’s catalogue essay “Beyond the Object”, published in the 2008 exhibition The Amusement of Dreams, Hope and Perfection, where she sought to demonstrate how the latest series of images, though painted broadly in the still life genre “marks a conceptual break from past objectbased investigations, the artist here conjuring the birth of Thai democracy and so modern Thai political history as a means of commenting on actual and pressing political issues” (Lenzi, 2008:7). Lenzi makes an impassioned plea for the viewer to look beyond the visual seductiveness, the ‘ease of stroke’ to uncover how the works can also ‘ambush deeper meaning’ (Lenzi, 2008:7), specifically as a commentary on recent political developments in Thailand.
Yet any attempt to analyse the paintings of Natee Utarit merely through the lens of the social and the historical constantly faces the sheer impenetrability of many of the paintings. By this I do not mean to refer to this as a fault, but rather to point to a characteristic of Natee’s art that I find most interesting artistically and idiosyncratic. One is struck by how readily the paintings resist singular interpretation or any attempt to explain away in language, to wrestle out of the paint surface, any singular concepts that provide the rationale for the existence of the artwork. Meaning in Natee’s paintings is slippery, constantly escaping the traps set by the ostensibly solid images that form the subject of his paintings. Part of the problem seems to be due to the fact that a constant theme running through his work has been that painting or the representations that painting constructs itself has been the subject and ‘content’. The medium literally is also the message. This concern has been made famous in his 2002 exhibition called Reasons and Monsters Project. Part of the works in this show focus on figurative paintings that are re-representations (read: refigurations) of Western old Masters from the likes of Caravaggio and Raphael etc. An understanding of this series is perhaps one of the keys in which a viewer can unlock Natee Utarit’s artistic repertoire.
In works such as Judith and Monster Smile (2002), he recreates a detail from the 1598 Caravaggio painting Judith Beheading Holofernes. Whereas the original 16th century work shows our heroine enacting an act of violence on another human being, Natee’s representation decapitates the heroine herself, ‘cutting’ her off at the neck (Daengklom, 2007:8). The artist himself is the aggressor now, using artistic representation against the subject of his work. Yet this act of artistic assault, is itself assaulted by the layer of woodstain added onto the canvas, art against art. The irony of the male artist obliterating the female subject surely raises its disturbing shadow here. What does one make of this strategy? Is the second assault really an attack on the subject or an attack on the attacker? The missing link in this equation is really the social and cultural context that the viewer brings to the work, this is what allows for the open interpretations that each viewer (or critic) brings to his/her reading of Natee’s work. Indeed, Iola Lenzi’s social/historical reading of Natee’s 2008 exhibition is an attempt to fill the gulf of meaning raised by the tearing apart of representation and the subject of that representation. The power of Lenzi’s reading in fact derives its power and ‘call to action’ precisely because Natee’s work refuses to reduce meaning to simple direct mimetic terms but rather forces upon the viewer a deliberate act of bringing forth his/her own social/cultural context and desires.
Now that the ways (ie mode of artistic representation) in which the content of the paintings are created or treated are set apart from the content itself of the paintings, one realises that one should approach Natee’s works in terms of how they can explode into a world of endless possibilities. I would argue that Natee’s deployment of the tools of artistic representation as a critical instrument against the concepts of artistic representation itself, as since most clearly in the Reasons and Monsters Project is the greatest contribution the artist has made to contemporary Southeast Asian painting. It also places him in similar company among the contemporary ‘conceptual’ painters of the Philippines like Geraldine Javier and Yasmin Sisson whose works constantly raise
the problematic of how art represents reality and how artistic representation is itself a reality. Among his contemporaries, it is perhaps Natee that has raised these issues with the greatest urgency and intensity.
In his various writings, Natee’s responses to interpretations that seek to ground his work through a social/historical reading of the subject matter in his paintings, has been often ambivalent and shifting. He often argues against a singular interpretation even though when pressed he does offer a somewhat logical but not entirely direct response. Indeed Natee’s own interviews and writings, at their core, intimate his frustrations with language and the rupture between style, content and concept. In response to a question whether he deliberately avoided being associated with a particular style or subject, Natee asserts that while his
subject and style can change, his concept has not:
“All my works are rooted in the same concept, presented as different variables of the possibilities of painting. I believe that there are more than 10,000 ways to paint a good image that communicates well” (Yong, 2008:8). Later, in the lengthy artist statement to this latest exhibition of his latest works, Natee details how the fairytales and myths of his childhood were the inspiration for this series of paintings, in a characteristic elide he also notes that: “Other reflections on reality and unreality contributed, but it’s just not appropriate to put them into words.
Besides I’m a painter. I prefer to let the images in my paintings speak for themselves about the nature (of) happiness, dreams, hopes and other such figures of speech.” The artist’s responses characterise that aspect of contemporary art that Susan Sontag (1969:22) calls ‘The Aesthetic of Silence’, where the artist ‘is moved by this quest for a consciousness purified of contaminated language… Art becomes itself a kind of counterviolence, seeking to loosen the grip upon consciousness of the habits of lifeless static verbalization’.
What follows is a socialised reading of the latest series of works by Natee Utarit. With this series Tales of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Natee continues his interest in the possibilities of the still life genre. Still life came to prominence in the 14th and 15th centuries in Flemish painting as part of the development secular genre paintings, including landscapes and history paintings (Vandenbroek, 2009:123). Essentially it was the rising urban bourgeoisie that was the shaper behind these genres, as they sought to distinguish themselves from the other social classes. Still life was a way to describe the world and to narrate stories
specifically about their place in the new world. In other words, the significance of still life, did not lay in the intentions of the artist but rather the commissioner who would sometimes also be the primary viewer. John Berger (1972:93, in his landmark work Ways of Seeing, notes that these types of paintings frequently portray what gold and money could buy, the subjects were frequently merchandise, turned into objets d’art. Art but nevertheless objects possessed by individuals. Oil painting, with its substantive physicality was the ideal vehicle to convey these desires.
In contrast to the substantiality of classical still life painting, Natee’s contemporary still life exhibits a reduction of means, a sure marker of Sontag’s aesthetic silence. Sontag’s eloquent words could almost have been tailored for a viewer of this latest series: “The notions of silence, emptiness and reduction sketch out new prescriptions for looking, hearing etc-which either promote a more immediate, sensuous experience of art or confront the artwork in a more conscious, conceptual way.’ Compared to the Reasons and Monsters Project, this latest series (and the 2008 one) demonstrates a refinement of Natee’s artistic strategy. Violence is no longer necessary and the physical obliteration of images undertaken in the former series has been abandoned completely. Silence and reduction become the means by which the artist subverts the genre and our expectations of it. In contrast to the often-moody shadings of light and dark in many objets d’art paintings, the objects in this series are lit by a clear, white light. The paint strokes are invisible and the canvases have a smooth pristine quality. The overall effect is not of substantiality but ephemerality.
Camille Paglia (2004) in her evocative essay The Magic of Images, laments how contemporary youth have largely lost the ability to read still images, like those found in the long contemplative takes of studio era movies. She argues that the constant eye movements necessitated by the moving images that flood our world now do not allow the eye to orient us in space and time, and thus we are unable to fully comprehend context. The large sizes of the canvases in this series along with the magnification of and reduction of details in many of the objects in the paintings thus force the eye to see and contemplate, not just look.
The objects painted are discarded toys and memorabilia that the artist sourced from antique markets and souvenir shops, rather than the proud material possessions of the past. In his artist’s statement, Natee reveals that the paintings in Tales of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow are about fairy tales, fables and folktales and ‘how these affect our collective memory and colour our understanding of society’. The artist is interested in the ways in which fairytales told to us during childhood stay with us and shape our understanding of the world into adulthood. In this case, the literary genre of fairytales is being appropriated by
another artistic genre, namely painting. Just as the classical still life communicates the higher and more virtuous universe lived in by their owners, fairytales communicate the morally ambiguous universe of heroes, heroines and villains. Like the clarity of these paintings, fairytales can be clear only when we are clear in our moral and ethical bearings. It is interesting to note that the earlier versions of the Brothers Grimm was a lot more undecided and ethically challenging in their characterisation than the later sanitised versions we are now familiar with.
Yet the objects in these paintings did not originally start off as the fairytale characters- Alice, Marie, the Princess, the Politician etc that are named as such by the artist, and as a consequence, interpreted along these lines by us the viewer. They are acts of artistic representation but by associating them with iconic fairytale characters, they are given power because of the social/cultural context that we, the viewers, bring to the paintings. From this perspective, it is less important that we try to understand the artist’s intentions, but that the paintings allow us, the viewer a chance to bring our own contexts, with its preconceptions and moral bearings onto the works, if we know how to read them.
Like art, fairytales (in essence, morality tales) have power in the real world. What we do with that power, is entirely our own volition, for art cannot compel us to do anything. While Natee’s art, with its violence and subversion of representation forcefully opens up multiple possibilities, it also makes it clear that it is the viewer’s responsibility to act upon those possibilities. For society and its contexts is out here with us, not in the art. This perhaps, is one of the most interesting ideas raised by the series.
Calvin Tan
Curator
References
Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing, London: BBC/Penguin Books, reissued 2008.
Daengklom, Sayan (2007) “Re aesthetic and Dialectic in Intertextual Analysis of Painting”, Silpakorn University International
Journal, Vol 7, pp.5-23.
Lenzi, Iola (2008) “Beyond the Object: New Works by Natee Utarit”, in The Amusement of Dreams, Hope and Perfection,
exhibition catalogue, Bangkok: Numthong Gallery, pp.7-10.
Paglia, Camille (2004) “The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age”, Arion, 11.3, pp.1-22.
Sontag, Susan (1969) “The Aesthetics of Silence”, in Styles of Radical Will, New York: Anchor Books, 1991 edition, pp.3-34.
Yong, Beverly (2008) “Dreams, Hope and Perfection: An Interview with Natee Utarit”, reprinted in Transparency Happiness,
Beijing: Soka Contemporary Space Ltd, exhibition catalogue, pp.7-10.
Vandenbroek, Paul (2009) “Art for Unknown Consumers: The Development of Secular Genres in Flemish Art, 15th-18th
Century” in The Story of the Image: Old and New Masters from Antwerp (exhibition catalogue), Non Profit Association of the
Museums and Heritage Antwerp: Antwerp, pp.99-173.
