Bundesgartenschau, Pantyhose or Megadeath?

Painting, Landscape and Capital in the work of Daniel Buren and Carol Rhodes

I was recently awarded a bursary to conduct research in the studio of late Scottish painter Carol Rhodes (1959–2018). I presented a paper on this research in April at 'Carol Rhodes: Seen and Unseen', a symposium at Glasgow School of Art organised by Dr Neil Clements in collaboration the School of Fine Art and Exhibitions at the Glasgow School of Art, and the Estate of Carol Rhodes...

Paper Blurb:

Located on the southern bank of the River Clyde, Untitled: 170 Bollards (1988) is a largely forgotten public art commission by conceptual painter, Daniel Buren. In this paper I use Buren’s artwork to introduce and critically examine the relationship between landscape and capital in Glasgow during the late-1980s and early-1990s. It is this same relationship between the spaces we occupy and the structures of power and industry that shape them that, I propose, is somehow imaged or figured in Carol Rhodes’s landscape paintings. Like Buren’s public art commission, Rhodes’s cryptic depiction of spaces of capitalist production, extraction and distribution can also help us grasp and think through the spatial logic of Glasgow’s political-economic development since the 1980s. 

Undergirding this dialogue between Buren and Rhodes is the question of painting itself. Painting’s resurgence after modernism was a hot topic in the 1980s and 1990s. Was the medium’s return simply a conservative market reflex? Or, despite reactionary developments such as Neo-expressionism, could forms of ‘postmodern’ painting function critically, somehow? Just as these debates were taking place in the pages of October and Artforum, Fredric Jameson was observing how the ‘strange new landscape’ of Late-capitalism was beginning to pose problems of spatial and political orientation for urban subjects. In response, Jameson called out for new aesthetic tools – what he called ‘cognitive maps’ – that might provide some kind of footing or grounding in the disorientating new reality of the Late-capitalist city. While Jameson was reluctant to provide specific examples of cognitive mapping in practice, theorists and historians since have focused on cinema, photo-conceptual art, and so-called ‘research art’, in order to attempt to demonstrate Jameson’s concept. To date, however, little or no attention has been paid to painting as a model for the practice of cognitive mapping. Using Buren and Rhodes’s respective relationships with Glasgow as examples, this paper attempts to remedy this. 

Symposium link

I also organised a vitrine of materials relating to Rhodes's involvement with the Free University of Glasgow. See image below.