Michael Bracewell on Miles Aldridge (after)
British Writer Michael Bracewell writes an essay to accompany the gallery's winter exhibition Miles Aldridge (after) Projects with Harland Miller, Maurizio Cattelan and Gilbert & George.
The photography of Miles Aldridge alludes to a broad yet intense spectrum of cultural, art historical and aesthetic references. In adapting the allure, honed artifice and abbreviated narratives of fashion photography to a more singular and filmic practice, Aldridge has become a master of technical and thematic hybridization.
In his work, the tension of film noir conflates with Pop and post-Pop vibrancy; what could be tableaux of science fictional erotica mingle with a hyper-stylized account of domestic British vernacular; the visual language of a mid-twentieth century centrefold pin-up articulates icily de-personalized desire.
Within Miles Aldridge’s artistic vision, the iconography of mass cultural glamour is haunted by a sense of minutely constructed sexual presence that is at once dominant and vacated – functional yet controlling, psychologically askew or removed while physically and stylistically pristine. In this, the sexual psychology of Hitchcock, David Lynch, the Nouvelle Vague and Guy Bourdin might all come to mind – but imported in Aldridge’s work to a pictorial sensibility that shares the wit, exuberant Pop-imagistic extravagance, and sensory understanding of gloss, texture and surface that typifies the art of classic American Pop and post-Pop artists such as James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann or Jeff Koons.
In both his vision and technical refinement, therefore, Aldridge has developed the capacities of fashion photography to become a venue for broader artistic enquiry. Preliminary drawings, Polaroid studies, printing techniques, story boards and the art direction of mise-en-scène for individual images assume a more significant role – aesthetically empowered and conceptually open-ended – than that of mere process. From this basis, Aldridge makes images that conflate erotic theatricality, cultural and art historical reference, and cold, post-Pop (as opposed to classically postmodern) deployment of synthetic colour, cultural comment and stylistic wit.
Such a position, artistically and thematically, has enabled Aldridge to create responses to work by other artists that are at once interventional and comple-mentary. It seems as though, in more fanciful terms, the iconography of other artists – in this case that of Miller, Cattelan, Gilbert & George – and that of Aldridge himself, enter into a transference of visitations, each ‘haunting’ the other. And as such, the practice of hybridization that seems so central to the work of Miles Aldridge has been extended.
Aldridge’s stylized portraits of the iconic British anti-artists, Gilbert & George (titled Love Always and All Ways) were created at the artists’ ceremonial home in Fournier Street, in East London. These portraits have the appearance of lobby cards for a film in which Gilbert & George might seem like the some-what sinister uncles of a dapper and androgynous visiting younger guest.
We see this ‘guest’ arriving to be greeted by George as Gilbert watches from a downstairs window; the three wheel archaic bicycles down the eighteenth-century street, take tea, meet on the narrow staircase. Gilbert & George intrude into the bathroom to see their (clothed) guest taking a bath.
These images pay homage to the career long dedication of Gilbert & George to their lives together as ‘living sculptures’, within which they embody their moral and artistic vision: detached, seer-like [oracular? Prophetic?], vaudevillian, at once ultra-modern and conservative, genteel and radical. Pictorially, Aldridge’s portraits likewise reference spot-colourized Edwardian postcards, with their simultaneously dream-like and vividly artificial luminescence, abutting mono-chrome with patches of intense, prettified colour.
The characteristic otherworldliness of Gilbert & George, as they take their place in their own pictures, is mirrored by that of Aldridge’s model. A distinguishing trait within Aldridge’s artistic vision is the vacated expression of many of his female models. The model stares ahead, seemingly unblinking, robotic, de-personalized, yet also statuesque. The pose is both mannequin-like and entranced; the model becomes the embodiment of the constructed image of a model – no longer sentient (the pose disturbed by personality) but a work of living artifice, pure image, aesthetically, sartorially, sexually and semantically related solely to her hyper-stylized imagistic context.
In Aldridge’s response to the art of Harland Miller (whose work often takes the form of paintings of book covers, with drily ironical titles, all authored by Harland Miller) a seductive, platinum blonde centrefold-style model is seen – with extravagant coiffure and make-up – in a variety of stereotypically retro-British domestic settings. She appears to be in solitary reverie, alone with her book.
These tableaux appear like post-Pop reclamations of soft pornographic glamour magazine photo-spreads from the early 1960s: the domestic interior as an erotic venue. In responding to the different titles of Miller’s books-as-artwork, Aldridge creates a dialogue between Miller’s work and fantasy worlds of the ‘centrefold’ models.
As ever, colour, surface and texture are fundamental to Aldridge’s aesthetic; and as his responses to the art of Harland Miller are in the medium of screen-print, so the colour is intensified – this time by a block of transparent ink printed over one section of each image. The retro-kitsch settings make a pictorial and sensory fetish of a quilted bed head, a swimming pool turquoise mattress, mustard yellow floral curtains, pale pink and spearmint green cosmetics bottles, a bright red sofa and one-bar heater, primary coloured bathroom tiles and a wet plastic shower curtain.
Here we see the model in her various domestic-fetish settings reading books with titles such as Thought After Filthy Thought, Better Than Life and Circling The Small Ads. With enhanced vibrancy, these settings and accoutrements concentrate and explode the synthetics and artifice of the constructed image – revelling in the orgiastic super-realism of colour and texture, in which the sexualized, overtly constructed presence of the model becomes the dramatic focus and essence.
As Aldridge’s response to the art and aura of Gilbert & George makes play with eerie otherworldliness, and his engagement with the work of Harland Miller explores a form of ironical bookish solitude, so his address to the iconoclastic sculptural works of Maurizio Cattelan is confrontational, dramatic and dec-lamatory.
A statuesque nude model, somewhat android-Valkyrie like, her hair in various chemically bright colours, attends or participates within the scenarios depicted by Cattelan’s sculptures. She prays alongside a diminutive, adult schoolboy Adolf Hitler; stands astride the emerging head of an exaggerated self-portait sculpture of Cattelan who has broken through the gallery floor; lies on the red carpeted floor with her eyes closed and legs provocatively spread, beside the Pope struck down by a meteorite. Empowered by her dominating nudity, her role as witness-participant becomes ambiguous and erotically charged. Each image becomes a surreally cartoon-like event that both comments upon and pays homage to Cattelan’s absurdist cultural satire.
The projects brought together in (after) are unified by their wit, otherworldliness and eroticism. They could be updates of Surrealist excursions into the scenarios of fashion, or equally post-Pop variations on the work of modern masters.They exist with ease on an aesthetic continuum that is at once homage and intervention, adapting tableaux of contemporary art to new, filmic uses that are entirely Aldridge’s own.
