James Smith
2017
Memorability as an Image (2011 – 2016) is the governing title of four photographic studies, Heavy Simplicity (Patterned), Brutal Relics, Greyfriars Bus Station and Civic Stage. Together they examine the relationships between object, surface, fabric and materiality, extrapolating the narratives, and the structures of experiences in loss and vision, of a post war movement that refuses to disappear.
Memorability as an Image lifts an idea through photography, and offers a structural rhetoric of an Anglicised movement, which perhaps is now being viewed as an era of a ‘Brutal Romantic’, by means of verification, confirmation and comparison.
A line of enquiry that stemmed from research in 2011 observed form, object and/or structure through theories of Brutalism. That same year the journal October (edition 136) was published with Ben Highman’s essay “Image-breaking, God-making”: Paolozzi’s Brutalism, which featured this germane quote from the Smithson’s
“…Brutalism has been discussed stylistically, whereas in essence is ethical.” Ethics, here, is seen as a form of objectivity; “Any discussion of Brutalism will miss the point if it does not take into account Brutalism’s attempt to be objective about ‘reality”.
The essay also highlighted architectural critic Reyner Banham’s seminal description of his own coined term, New Brutalism.
1, Memorability as an image: 2, Clear exhibition of structure; and 3,Valuation of Materials “as found”. Remembering that an image is what affects the emotions, that structure, in it’s fullest sense, is the relationship of parts, and that materials “as found” are raw materials.
One of several works to emerge from this initial research period was Heavy Simplicity (Patterned), the title taken from a Brutalist design term; ‘an embrace of natural forms’, realising how climates of northern and southern hemispheres can effect peoples’ perception and opinion of the movement’s aesthetics.
A more recently produced work that pays homage to Banham is Brutal Relics. Presented as maintained objects against black voids, these relics are all that is left from the former neglected Brutalist structure Greyfriars Bus Station (the artist’s first study and reference point on Brutalism). They serve to inform a mood of the regressive thinking of media and local governance that left the site where the bus station stood until 2014 blitzed to nothing.
For Civic Stage, while still referencing Reyner Banhams’s ‘1,2 & 3’, the title is inspired by Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage, relating to an observer’s first immersion and apperception of a built landscape, found within itself but viewed entirely as surface.