Bullet With Butterfly Wings 2007

Commissioned by The Arts Council of England

For Dilston Grove, London

Excerpt from Urban Gothic

Catalogue Essay By

Charles Darwent

Art Critic for The Independent

As with most things, John Ruskin held firm views on the Gothic. Pondering the stones of Venice in his essay of that name, he found the city’s medieval buildings to be full of “savageness”, “grotesqueness” and “wolfish life”. But Ruskin also saw another quality in Gothic architecture, that it was “changeful as the clouds”. This was not meant as a criticism. Rather the opposite: in the steely Ruskinean eye, changeability was what the Gothic was all about, “the very character that it made it deserving of our profoundest reverence".

And as with the thing itself, so with the word that describes it. What, exactly, is the Gothic? What does it mean? Like Ruskin’s buttresses and corbels, the answer to that is prone to change. When applied to Medieval architecture by Renaissance Classicists, “Gothic” was an insult: it meant non-Roman, uncivilized. (The jibe, as it happens, was wide of the mark, Gothic cathedrals having been built five hundred years after the Goths had ceased to exist.) Three centuries later, boundaries shifted again. The term “Gothic horror” – the word’s next big appearance in Western culture – implied an anti-Enlightenment fondness for the irrational and nasty. Itself ever-changing, Gothic became obsessed with change. One minute it looked like one thing, the next like another – a quality it shared most obviously with that shape-shifting Gothic pair, Messrs. Jekyll and Hyde.

So varied have Gothic’s meanings been, in fact, that it is difficult to trace any useful continuum from the word Getica as used by Cassiodorus of the 1^st century Germanic tribe to the word “Goth” adopted by contemporary fans of black eyeliner. That, partly, is the point. Gothic has always defined itself by what it isn’t, whether that thing was Roman or Enlightened or Neoclassical or post-Punk. It is, in that sense, an inherently tribal phenomenon, although the tribes necessarily rebel within themselves, against each other and ceaselessly. In a mood or temper based on self-definition, excess is vital: whatever you take Gothic to mean, it is your duty to be more like it than anyone else – to have bigger buttresses or blacker hair, or to fill your stories with more ghouls or blood. Noble restraint is not in the Gothic vocabulary. Rather the opposite: excess and inconsistency are probably Gothic’s most consistent traits, with one possible exception.

That exception is a tendency to the ridiculous. The Gothic – Milan Cathedral, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Castle of Otranto, Strawberry Hill – walks a tightrope between making us shudder in awe and making us split our sides. The difference between Gothic and mock-Gothic is by no means always clear: there is a thin line between self-knowledge and self-parody, and the Gothic, in its various forms, sits astride it. In her famous essay, Notes on Camp [i] , Susan Sontag tracked her titular subject back to its lair in the 18^th century Gothick aesthetic. "Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much’,” Sontag wrote. Two of her fifty-eight theses seem particularly pertinent to this text: “Camp…is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre”; and, “Camp proposes a comic vision of the world…but not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyper involvement, comedy is an experience of under involvement, of detachment.”

Which brings us to Urban Gothic, an exhibition held in London in May 2007. The purpose of this show, as I see it, was not to suggest a new school or movement, far less to imply any kind of explicit Gothic revival. There were no pointed arches to be seen in the work, relatively little in the way of ghouls. None of the pieces had been made with the word “Gothic” in mind. Rather, the show’s aim was to uncover a mood in contemporary art that crosses all categories of representation and practice, whose appearance is as changeful as Ruskin’s clouds.

The works in Urban Gothic found their subject in film, floor painting, sound, installation, drawing. In some cases, it manifested itself as a vampiric theatricality, in others as political satire or plastic formalism. The point of all this, as with Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, was to haunt the viewer with uncertainty. Urban Gothic ’s meaning was best glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Seen head on, it tended to slip away. The show’s title applied as much to its curatorial approach as to the works on display.

If a single quality linked these, then it was Sontag’s spirit of excess – of references and allusions, of voices, sentiment, details; of materials. Words like “morbid” and “macabre” – those twin markers of the 18^th century Gothic – didn’t quite fit the bill, although they might incidentally have been applied to some of the works in the show. More important was a sense of overload: so many clues, so many narratives, that (as with the prose of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto) the mere act of navigating your way through them in itself became a kind of horror story.

The clearest example of this tendency was George Bolster’s Bullet with Butterfly Wings, a work whose meaning is inseparable from its intricacy. Perhaps the easiest way of thinking of Bullet is as a cultural miasma, a fog of representational conventions. In its clearest form, the work is a mater dolorosa, the Crucifixion observed by Christ’s sorrowing mother. True to form, Bullet is constructed as a diptych, although it is actually drawn on three panels rather than two, a pair of these being given over to the Crucifixion and a single panel to the Virgin.

The diptych / triptych nexus is the least of the work’s problems, however. Bolster’s Madonna is borrowed from ukiyo-e woodcuts, her drapery stylised rather than representational. (The Japanese non-articulation of the Virgin’s body also, and I suspect not coincidentally, carries echoes of the pre-Quattrocento Gothic.) At the same time, her face is European, round-eyed, her upward gaze that of the Madonna in a conventional pietà. And beyond this again, some passages of her clothing – the pearl-studded obi, for example – are drawn naturalistically, while others – the bands that form a border to the work – are stylised into abstraction.

What we see in Bullet, in other words, is a collision of Ruskin’s Gothic changeability with the ambiguities of a Floating World. As we’ve seen, the key to the Gothic is excess; but even this unlikely cultural overlap is not enough for Bolster, who adds an additional political reading to his work. The tatouage of his Christ-figure elides everything from First Dynasty scarabs to 20^th century biker gangs: in an unexpected way, Bolster’s scarified saviour is made omnipresent, timeless. He is also – in absolute contradiction of Western convention – nude, the usual loincloth disguising the inconvenient fact, here laid bare, that Christ was born a Jew.

Bolster’s cultural overload also expresses itself formally in the aura of hatched lines, like a crown-of-thorns, that surrounds his Madonna. These lines are generated as tangents from the curves of the figure’s outline, as though excess, an inability to stay within limits, is Bullet’s dynamising force.

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