DREAMS deferred: Recent projects by Jamie Shovlin

Jamie Shovlin: A Dream Deferred, Haunch of Venison, London 2007

‘Those who expected the illusion of their own inherent goodness to last forever are still freaked. Others, who pay less attention to the rhetoric of a cultural revolution, say they had a good time. Putting it all together reads like America’s pulse now. After all, we not only make beautiful music, love and beadwork; we pay our pigs to exterminate Black Panthers, we fry Vietnamese in their own homes and we elect Spiro Agnew to govern our lives.

It was over. No explanation was needed, only a feeble plea for someone in America to clean it up. The stirrings of a young but growing movement to salvage our environment. The job of cleaning up Altamont, as America, is still up for grabs. America wallows in the hope that someone, somewhere, can set it straight. Clearly nobody is in control. Not the Angels, not the people. Not Richard Nixon or his pigs. Nobody. America is up for grabs, as she sinks slowly into Methedrine suffocation with an occasional fascist kick to make her groan with satisfaction.’

George Paul Csicsery, ‘Altamont, California’, The New York Times, 8 December 1969

On 6 December 1969, just a few months after almost 500,000 so-called Flower Children had gathered in the mythical mud at Woodstock, The Rolling Stones headlined a free concert at the disused Altamont Speedway in Northern California. As the Stones played ‘Under My Thumb’ a young Black American called Meredith Hunter was stabbed and kicked to death by Hell’s Angels within view of the stage.

Altamont is often positioned as the end of ‘The Sixties’. In popular myth it is the moment that a certain hopeful idealism died, or at least received a mortal wounding. For in truth The Sixties – and all that they represented – didn’t die there and then. In the US the ideals of liberal permissiveness, free love, Civil Rights and Freak Power had been in retreat since at least the year before, when Martin Luther King and JFK were assassinated and there was a ‘police riot’ at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. 1968 was the year the tide can be said to have turned. It was the year of Night of the Living Dead and Planet of the Apes, films that depicted societies in crisis.[1] As Peter Fonda’s character Wyatt put it in Easy Rider (which was filmed in 1968, but not released until the following year), summing up a widespread feeling of disillusion: ‘You know Billy, we blew it.’

The ideals of The Sixties – aka the counterculture – limped on. While some might say that they were finally laid to rest sometime in the mid-1980s, amidst mobile phones, shoulder pads and stadium rock, in fact the long hangover from that mythologised decade continues, and it is this that Jamie Shovlin’s project, A Dream Deferred, explores.

Here the past is, to borrow LP Hartley’s famous phrase, ‘a foreign country.’[2] Shovlin portrays an English history – one formed in the suburbia of the Midlands – that is culturally saturated by a particular strain of Americana. America – and particularly the post-Sixties pop culture of the American west coast  - is the tint that colours everything. Here is a hall of mirrors. Look back at 1980s suburban England – as Shovlin has done - and you find strange reflections of Woodstock and Altamont, the Sunset Strip and the American Dream. ‘Hotel California’ still plays on the pub jukebox at closing time…..

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Jamie Shovlin is perhaps best known for a series of ambitious projects, including Naomi V. Jelish (2001-2004) and Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-81 (2003-6), in which he constructed extensive archives, which were then revealed to be elaborate fictions.[3] The Jelish archive consists of drawings, newspaper cuttings and other ephemera relating to a 13-year old prodigy who had disappeared with her family in mysterious circumstances, along with notes and inventories made by John Ivesmail, a ‘retired science teacher at Naomi's school [who had] unearthed a collection of the teenager's remarkable drawings’ (both Naomi V Jelish and John Ivesmail are anagrams). A second archive, ‘curated by Jamie Shovlin’ and purporting to document the activities of a German ‘experimental noise band’ from the 1970s, Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-1981 (2003-2006) contained cassette covers and posters apparently made by the band’s supporters, fan reminiscences, a filmed interview with one of the band members, and even short samples of Lustfaust’s music. When these works were shown at Riflemaker and the Saatchi Gallery, London, Freight & Volume in New York and in Beck’s Futures at the ICA, Shovlin was hailed as an art-world hoaxer par excellence, a reading which perhaps foregrounds the extraordinary technical facility involved in producing the work but which sidelines the seriousness of the undertaking.[4] Such works in fact represent a profound meditation on truth and doubt, and the subjectivity of interpretation. Lustfaust’s story is one of creativity, idealism and eventual conflict and failure – dreams broken and deferred – and the Jelish material evokes a tragic and disturbing narrative. Both works herald a major theme which runs through all Shovlin’s recent work: loss. The loss of innocence and the failure of dreams and idealism is evoked by the unreliability of memory, the fractures that appear in any account of the past, the flawed logic inherent in any system of classification. In Shovlin’s world the past is retrievable only as a form of simulacra,  inherently doubtful. It is another country.

Shovlin’s Fontana Modern Masters project (2003-2005) extended the artist’s interest in exploring such ideas, investigating an absurdist premise: that intellectual achievement can be ranked or scored according to a points system. Fascinated by the ambition and appearance of Fontana’s series of books, ‘Modern Masters’ (which proposed to examine the thinkers ‘who have changed and are changing the life and thought of our age’), Shovlin constructed a system – set out in the Fontana Colour Chart (2003-2005) – which would allow him to ‘accurately’ produce the covers of the books which Fontana had announced it was to publish but which, for whatever reason, had never appeared. Thus the existing books were analysed, and the colours used in the cover designs were assigned values derived from the amount of space they occupied, the percentages being taken from the intellectual ‘score’ of each ‘Modern Master’ (a total arrived at by a series of seemingly arbitrary criteria). Working from the covers of the existing books Shovlin was therefore able to extrapolate the appearance of non-existent books about such heavyweights as Adorno and Lacan. Painted in watercolour, the archetypal medium of the amateur, the drips and runs of paint that grace these new cover designs return us to an awareness of the flawed nature of Shovlin’s proposal.

For his exhibition at Tate Britain in 2006, In Search of Perfect Harmony, Shovlin created work which appropriated the conventions of museological display. Using drawings, collage, text, sound recordings and projections, the installation juxtaposed his mother’s subjective view of the wildlife in her suburban garden with the scientific rigour of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, as set out in The Origin of Species (1859). These concerns were more comprehensively explored and set within a wider context of knowledge – indicated by an installation of OS ‘Landranger’ maps sourced on eBay - in the large-scale touring exhibition Aggregate (2003-2007). These exhibitions suggested that scientific enquiry and speculation presents a form of flawed idealism. It purports to render the world knowable yet cannot. In the gaps between biology, anthropology and taxonomy Shovlin evokes art and poetry; Darwin’s theories explain the motivation for a Sparrowhawk attack in his mother’s garden, but not the metaphorical implications of such an event.

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 From even such a cursory examination of Shovlin’s recent work it is apparent that his artistic preoccupations are wide ranging. He is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory. And failure is a key theme.

A Dream Deferred, advances many of these concerns. It is a subjective exploration of recent American history, politics and culture, taking as a framework his parent’s record collections; the US-dominated soundtrack of his early life. The project includes paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and sculpture, as well as filmed interviews with his parents. A series of large-scale paintings appropriate imagery from the covers of records by Bob Seger, Hall & Oates and the Eagles but are painted using techniques associated with modern American masters such as Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella. Taking these as his starting point Shovlin creates a complex web of allusion and association, mixing family history and autobiography with references to the 1968 Mexico Olympics, Playboy, Woodstock, Sharon Tate and Charles Manson, Abbie Hoffman and the Unabomber, and drawing on a personal art history dominated by Robert Gober, Lawrence Weiner, Bruce Nauman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, William Eggleston and Ed Ruscha. The soundtrack is the music of the ‘denim navel-gazers and cheesecloth millionaires of the Los Angeles canyons.’[5]

The exhibition presents a narrative of hope and disillusion. Shovlin’s title  - which is taken from Langston Hughes’ poem, Harlem, of 1951 - points to the ways in which the ideals of the 1960s (when his parents met) were alternately compromised by commercial imperatives, buoyed up by the music and then broken and abandoned. As Jack Nicholson’s character says at another key moment in Easy Rider, ‘It's real hard to be free when you're bought and sold in the marketplace.’

A Dream Deferred offers a distanced view of America, filtered through music, art, movies and the arbitrary structures of the internet. In doing so it offers us a view of middle England in the 1970s, 80s and 1990s. The past may be another country, but it is one in which the language, obsessions, problems and hopes – and crucially the music - are uncannily familiar.

[1] For a useful overview and international perspective see Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, London, 2004

[2] LP Hartley, The Go-Between (1953): ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’

[3] See www.naomivjelish.org.uk and www.lustfaust.com

[4] See, for example, Nigel Reynolds, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Hoaxer’, The Daily Telegraph, 2 July 2004

[5] Barney Hoskyns, Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the LA Canyons 1967-1976, Fourth Estate, London, 2005