Rachael Whiteread: Nissen Hut
I sometimes think that all representations are like spectres or ghosts. So what do I mean? There are various overlapping issues here. For instance representations are frozen at the point of their making, whilst the things represented carry on changing and ageing and they eventually die or wear away. Although the representations are also wearing away, they often take longer to fade out of existence than the thing represented, hence they become rather like ghosts of former things. For instance I have photographs of my father and mother, both died some time ago, but their representations, although now faded, are still with me.
Ghost image of my father
My father died of a heart attack. He was cutting the lawn when it hit him. It was of course a tragic moment but once I had processed the fact he was gone, I needed to then accommodate or find a place for his death by making images about it. Perhaps this is one of the blessings of being an artist, in that you can externalise your feelings in moments like this. I ended up with an image that perhaps on reflection I tried too hard to embed layers of symbolism into; the hourglass/mower handle has broken, the grim reaper is now a lawn mower and my father's face, moon like is being eclipsed, all suffused in spectral white's and greys, the result of colour being selectively removed from the image. It was a necessary thing to do though and at the time I made several versions, some watercolour and ink, others using digital print processes to suggest the representation of something having gone or being removed by using the 'replace colour' function of Photoshop and replacing each chosen colour with 'white' or 'grey'.
Rachael Whiteread's 'Nissen Hut' extends the idea. She makes a mould from a still existing Nissen hut and then presents this 'ghost' or shell, as a white spectre of its former self. The Nissen huts were a common feature of 1950s landscapes, often built for army barracks during the war and then converted into cheap housing after it. I had several friends who lived in them when I was a boy. The Second World War is itself now a ghost, long gone, but during my time of growing, it was only just over. My father had been in the army and he learnt many of his ideas of fatherhood from his time in service. My father and the Nissen hut were both shaped by war and therefore you could say, so was I. The world of the 1950s is now also a black and white ghost. Photographs and films from the time frozen in a colourless world, one that exploded into technicolour during the 1960s, and on the advent of the Beatles, was coloured in as new aspirations began to appear as if by magic in front of our very eyes, life becoming a Magical Mystery Tour rather than a grim reality.
Father enters the land of the dead, still pushing his lawn mower
Ghost mower: 2nd version
There are other ways to think about images as ghosts, one is in printmaking when after you print off a plate, there is usually some ink left on it. If you print again what you get is a “ghost print”, a much paler version of the original. In drawing you can do something similar. If you make a drawing in chalk or charcoal, you can place a damp sheet of paper on top of it, smooth it down to make a good contact and then peel it off. You now have a ghostly image of the original in reverse, which is called a counterproof. You can also use image transfer techniques such as using acetone to dissolve the ink used to print an image, which allows you to lift the toner off a printed image and apply it to another surface. As the image is transferred it leaves behind a fair amount of ink resulting in a more transparent image than the original, that can feel very ghostlike.
Rauschenberg: Image transfer
By pushing a sheet of paper into oil paint once it has been manipulated to form an image, an artist can pull off individual prints by either burnishing the back of the paper, or if the image is painted into a metal sheet, by sending the plate and paper through an etching press. The final result is often an image with a 'ghostly' feeling, as it is a trace or fainter impression of the original. Degas was a noted user of this technique, as he found it a very good way to 'discover' imagery, when he was thinking about possibilities for painting.
Degas: Mono-print
Perhaps all images are ghosts, faint impressions left over from encounters with reality. Derrida would argue that we are all haunted by the return of old ideas that rise up out of the past like ghosts. He calls this aspect of our lives, 'Hauntology' and he explains how it works in his 1993 book 'Specters of Marx'.
The older I get the more old memories seem to arise unbidden, again like ghosts they begin to haunt my everyday reality. In particular my old hand puppet, 'Sooty' has begun to arise unbidden into my thoughts about what is going on now, it slides ghostlike into view, turning my thoughts into snapshots from some sort of long gone stage-play or silent cinema.
The ghost of Sooty engages with a cinematic world
See also:
Vanessa Baird: Also some thoughts about images made on the death of my mother
Western World A book concerning the ghosts of a cowboy past
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