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The Woman Bridging the Divide Between Art and Poetry
With her cerebral and charmingly lo-fi installations and videos, Heather Phillipson is leading the way toward a new emotional expressiveness in contemporary art.
ENTERING THE CAFE adjoining London’s Hackney Empire theater, the artist and poet Heather Phillipson was briefly engulfed by a pack of schoolchildren. The preteens had emerged from a matinee performance of the pantomime, a quintessentially British strain of musical theater mercifully confined to the holiday season. Having spent the afternoon bawling at a giant at the top of a beanstalk, they were now singing Harry Nilsson’s rendition of ‘‘Without You’’ — presumably the anthem of the pantomime dame. Phillipson, who is 37 and has auburn hair of the kind admired by pre-Raphaelite painters, picked her way delicately through the crowd.
Like the pantomime, Phillipson’s work is dramatic, immersive and emotional. Her most recent project, in Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle, looked like an exploding props department. At the base of the museum’s rotunda stood an enormous, slowly rotating polystyrene foot. A host of hand-drawn symbols dangling from the ceiling — heavily lashed eyeballs, wriggling spermatozoa, streaks of lightning — were joined in the firmament by tennis balls and rackets, hot water bottles, umbrellas and an inflatable killer whale.
Quiet but ardent, with a tendency to speak in lists, Phillipson leans forward so intently as she talks that, by the end of our conversation, I was pinned in my seat, very gently, between the table and the wall. She wants her installations to make visitors feel as if they are not in a museum, she explained, but rather ‘‘walking through a poem, a landscape, a body, a swimming pool, a screen, a search engine, a piece of music.’’
Growing up in London and then in rural Pembrokeshire, she was classically trained on the violin and the piano, and still applies the terms of music structures — counterpoint, texture, rhythm — to her work. As an art student, she began making experimental videos that combined musical composition, texts and images; in them, she found a medium that, as she puts it, ‘‘allowed me to be all the things I wanted to be.’’
Since enrolling in a creative writing course in her late 20s, she has also been a poet — and a much-heralded one. Encouraged by her tutor, she applied for the prestigious Eric Gregory Award for poets under 30, and won; in 2009, she had her first collection published by Faber. ‘‘You take something very familiar — your language — and you torture it until it becomes unfamiliar,’’ she told me about composing her poems, which are in fact less tortured than poignant and surreal. (‘‘On the concrete, a snail is a comma,’’ she writes in one, ‘‘or an apostrophe, depending on context.’’)
Phillipson likens writing poetry to editing her art videos or creating her installations; in each, she uses the technique of montage — or ‘‘ramming objects, images, words, sounds together’’ — that is now her absurdist trademark. Her videos’ unlikely layers — a ’60s girl-group soundtrack with the image of a loaf of bread on top of a disquisition on Abstract Expressionism, for instance — create what she calls a ‘‘gap’’ in the viewer’s understanding. ‘‘And something has to come in to fill that gap,’’ she continued: ‘‘the imagination.’’ Indeed, Phillipson’s work can seem a kind of aesthetic shock treatment for the viewer’s own creativity.
And yet for all their Day-Glo color combinations and frenetic edits, her videos, especially, have a lyrical, even confessional side. ‘‘Splashy Phasings’’ (which was broadcast on television in Britain amid the adverts following the evening news) describes the experience of watching current affairs to a soundtrack of sobbing. ‘‘Rebus’’ is a kind of multimedia breakup letter in which a voiceover names the images that appear in rapid succession onscreen — ‘‘Beak,’’ ‘‘Horse,’’ ‘‘There,’’ ‘‘Snow’’ ‘‘Udder,’’ ‘‘Wafer,’’ ‘‘Meet,’’ ‘‘Oooo,’’ ‘‘X,’’ ‘‘Press,’’ ‘‘Sit’’ — spelling out in the process a new heartfelt message: ‘‘Because-there’s-no-other-way-for-me-to-express-it.’’ ‘‘Serious Traction’’ relates a visit to the gynecologist in overlaid words, images and a skittering electronic beat.
THE ANARCHIC, LITERARY strangeness of Phillipson’s art has marked her not just as one of the most exciting of a new generation of artists — she has a solo show this spring at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and will do a commission for Frieze Projects in New York in May — but also as a pioneer for poets and artists seeking inspiration from each other. Following decades in which the literary and art worlds have maintained a decorous distance, poetry is bridging the divide, and readings have become a familiar part of many art fairs and biennials. For her part, Phillipson sees herself as belonging to a community of artists — including Mark Leckey, Cally Spooner and Ed Atkins, a close friend and collaborator — who use dense, poetic texts in their videos and performances.
One of the things Phillipson loves about the poet Frank O’Hara — who worked, incidentally, as a curator at MoMA in the 1950s and early 1960s — is the lightness of touch that belies his emotional depth; she likes a phrase of his, that the verbal elements of a poem are there ‘‘to keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious.’’ The D.I.Y. aesthetic of Phillipson’s art, and the fact that she makes not easily preserved objects but emotional experiences to be savored, might cast her as the embodiment of a new artistic idealism. From a studio in East London, where she works alone, she relies on the cooperation of curators and technicians to make her installations, particularly as she is not represented by a commercial gallery. As a consequence, she talks about artistic fellowship and collaboration with a sincerity that, in the art world at least, seemed to have gone out of style.
‘‘I still wonder if it’s unfashionable to think about emotion in art,’’ Phillipson mused, when I noted the difference between her tone and the irony and sensationalism people have come to associate with a previous generation of British artists. ‘‘My work runs in the opposite direction — you know, blood, sweat, tears, discharges, pleasure, vulnerability,’’ she said, adding, ‘‘I’ve never been very good at detachment.’’
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