Slumper
It seems to me that the strength of Miranda Parkes’s practice is that it continues to treat painting as a formal device. That is, her practice continues to treat painting as a condition which has the capacity to respond to aesthetic desire. It also occurs to me that it's impossible to talk about Miranda’s paintings without addressing her excessive flourishes that so ably provoke, nag and worry the limiting conditions of this desire. Slumped in the corner, Miranda’s deliberately bloated painting, drenched in paint and garishly striped in a remnant mix-match of arbitrary colours, deploys a conscious formal language that revels in the aesthetic preoccupations of painting’s manipulative gestures almost to the point of exhaustion.
It is all too fashionable to read exhaustion as a benign, compensatory response to an age of mass commodification. The easiest place to see this is Dave Hickey’s comment that Andy Warhol realised getting it exactlywrong often worked better than getting it right.1 Hickey points out that Warhol’s provocative banality is a convenient inversion that turns his garish adoration for the celebrity into an exhausted response to the sleek sincerity of art’s naively romantic social values. The same reasoning can be applied to kitsch, which feeds a self-serving and ever-widening spiral of domestication. Such pre-determined paths makes me think that getting it exactly wrong was never really the idea at all. Most of the time I think that if getting it so successfully wrong was ever important it was only because it was good taste by another name.
Perhaps a more productive way of thinking about exhaustion is to consider Hardt and Negri’s provocative suggestion that it can inspire a politicised desertion.2 I think maybe that’s what Lester Bangs had in mind when he turned his back on kitsch and championed lousiness.3 Bangs’s celebration of lousiness fits neatly with exhaustion’s desertion precisely because it loosens its reasoning in a far more muddled and far more exciting way than the overly produced moments of an acceptable or convened taste. It is this same sense of excitement that Miranda’s paintings continue to incite. Knowingly antagonistic towards aesthetic taste, her paintings awkwardly expose the procession of desire that continues to mark painting’s governance. There is in Miranda's practice a slight vindictive streak which rather guiltily exposes us to the way in which we continue to treat painting like so many polite human resource managers, acutely processing an expedient stream of capabilities as considered, appropriate conquests.
Sometimes I think Miranda keeps her research work hidden on purpose. For years now she has been collecting and taking photos of trash. She has complete folios of small pieces of garbage, tucked away and scrupulously maintained in white books. Each piece is set up to reveal their arbitrary marks as an aesthetic field whose discreet, peculiar feel is a knowledge to be learnt from. Somewhere I even have a photograph of a garbage jumble on the back of which she has written 'I look for the frame in everything'. Of course such a statement is indicative of the post-structural and decentred tuitions she no doubt received, and though such sentiment has become quite commonplace the strength of Miranda’s practice is that it still manages to keep that original, investigative impulse alive.
Miranda came on the scene by lifting her floor up off the ground and displaying it as a painting. This sounds every bit like the reinvestment of the found object but it's not. Rather, it was an articulating statement, a conscious decision to speak about the arbitrary marks that are everywhere about us. It was also an act that had everything to do with painting because it fore-grounded the formal processes that respond to aesthetic desire. It seems to me that even though Miranda's paintings are so overblown these days, they're still articulations of this impulse. She makes overblown, distended objects not as a rejection of painting, but as a continuation of the desire to paint in an overcrowded and oversaturated world.
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1 Dave Hickey, ‘The Importance of Remembering Andy’, Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly (eds), Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2004, p. 61. Although I should say Erica van Zon dragged this quote out and I’m really quite shamelessly pillaging it. Also, Roger Boyce had it tacked up all over the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts last year, which was a continual red rag.
2 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire,Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 212–17.
3 Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburettor Dung, New York, Vintage, 1998, p. 85.
