Keith Arnatt-research

Keith Arnatt, I’m A Real Photographer

29^th June – 2^nd September 2007, The Photographers Gallery

Duncan Wooldridge

Article for Untitled Magazine, Issue 44

Half of Keith Arnatt’s famous Trouser-Word Piece of 1972 welcomes visitors to his retrospective at the Photographer’s Gallery: ‘I’m A Real Artist’ says Arnatt on his sandwich-board as he stands against a nondescript wall looking at the camera.  Philosopher John Austin’s accompanying quotation (the second half of the work) is nowhere to be found, and more and more urgently it becomes necessary to stare at the image alone for clues of its meanings.  This is one of many surprises in a show that boldly displays half of a work, in a retrospective that decisively severs (and favours) the more straightforwardly photographic output of the artist from the more complicated authorial plays of the photographic-conceptual, and claims, despite or perhaps as a result of this, to being able to communicate the existence of a conceptual underpinning in Arnatt’s later work.  Complicating this further is the curatorial hand of David Hurn, a documentary Photographer with Magnum, who steers the exhibition firmly towards the nomination of Arnatt as a Photographer-convert from conceptualism.  More or less unintentionally, this question of nomination hangs over the exhibition, becoming a burning issue that threatens to overshadow the work itself. 

A certain amount of doubt about this naming is justified in the earliest work on display.  The exhibition begins, after the severed Trouser-Word Piece, in 1974 with Arnatt’s series The Visitors.  Here Arnatt is the Photographer (In Trouser-Word Piece he is not).  Maintaining a kind of numb descriptiveness, Arnatt depicts the arriving tourists at Tintern Abbey in a style reminiscent of both the straightforward documentation format of his earlier work and, in a cunning parallel enacted in the titling (effectively Tourists), the work of August Sander, who recorded in his project People of The Twentieth Century the different social classes and occupations.  Both a conceptual ploy to reveal people in the act of being photographed and a nod to the peculiarities of the British tourist (a social group of its own), Arnatt retains allegiances to both camps. 

However, Arnatt soon falls into a photographers trap, ‘objectively’ composing a kind of Sanderesque typology in the series Gardeners (1978-9).  Once again plain descriptive images place a subject in the landscape, this time next to the fruits of their labour, in a manner which narrowly defines the group (‘these are what Gardeners look like’), but which goes no further than a simple act of denotation.  A.O.N.B (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) from 1982-84 looks at the nomination of official beauty spots, but plays on the old documentary trope of rubbish-strewn streets and fails to reach into the curious need for an aesthetically certificated landscape.

As Arnatt adopts colour in 1986, all notion of a conceptual approach seems to recede.  Powerful and simple, they are contemporaneous with the rise of a painterly photography (in Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Simon Norfolk in particular), whilst being jarring, disgusting and beautiful.  Miss Grace’s Lane 1986-7 and Howler’s Hill 1987-8 are among the highlights here.  As photographs, theses images surprise and inform – conceptual gestures they are not.  Later works, such as the hilarious Canned Sunsets 1990-1 and Notes from Jo 2001 suggest a turn back towards the conceptual because of their invocations of humour and the text-image, but this is to forget the increasingly pared down aesthetic, which remains coherent with the distinctiveness of Arnatt’s photography. 

In many ways it is the nomination of Arnatt as a Photographer by Hurn that is the biggest complication.  For Hurn wants the work to be as conceptually vital as the older work (to be critically validated as Art), but to be strictly photographic, the work of a Photographer.  And so the conceptual is brought out as a strategy of validation, when there is in fact a decisive break to be understood.  These images, decisively photographic in their intention and style, are arguably not the work of the same artist.  Of course, this is Keith Arnatt, but this is an Arnatt of different intentions, of different aims and complexities.  Nothing is mentioned of how Arnatt fell from the top of a ladder whilst living in Tintern, and was never the same: how he went from being ambitious and extrovert to quiet, evasive and introverted.  The effect of such a trauma is open to question, but the work speaks for itself.  This is now Photography, and should be read as such. 

Despite the brutal yet daring display of Trouser-Word Piece, despite the clamouring appropriation of Arnatt as a Photographer, Arnatt’s images really do succeed as photographs, and it is here, as a Photographer from Outside that the insular world of Photography expands and develops.  Whilst there are irreconcilable differences between his earlier noted conceptual work and his later photos, Arnatt nevertheless manages to expand the definition of being an artist, and enlarges the range of being a Photographer.