KEITH ARNATT
by Francesca Gavin PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY THE ARTIST’S ESTATE & MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON breathing invisibly through a tube. There is a sense of slowness as the artist sinks. He walks the line between exposure and the hidden. There is something again very melancholic about the images beneath the absurdist laughs. A metaphorical representation of ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
In 1961 Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days was published and performed for the first time. The story, in the Irish writer’s typically absurdist strange style, focuses on an older woman Winnie, buried to her chest in the earth. At first cheerful, as the play continues she becomes increasingly morose. She is sinking into the ground. Only her head rests above the earth. Speaking of the play, Beckett said, “I thought that the most dreadful thing that could happen to anybody, would be not to be allowed to sleep so that just as you’re dropping off there’s be a ‘Dong’ and you’d have to keep awake; you’re sinking into the ground alive and it’s full of ants; and the sun is shining endlessly day and night and there is not a tree … there’s no shade, nothing, and that bell wakes you up all the time and all you’ve got is a little parcel of things to see you through life.” The play and Beckett’s ideas are an interesting pairing with Keith Arnatt’s artworks from the same decade. The late British artist began working with the idea of burial in the late ‘60s. Although he later became labelled as a photographer, at this time his focus was on sculpture and land art. Around 1967 he began to dig shallow holes in the ground and place boots in the ditches. “At the time he was living on the Yorkshire Moors,” he son Matthew explains. “If you came across the crest of the hill, you’d see this faint pink light or green light. Once you came closer you’d realize they were a pair of workman’s boots with light tubes. There was a combination of things to do with light and stringing things out across the landscape, then burying things inside the landscape.” This developed into mirrored boxed placed within the soil so they were entirely disguised until you stumbled across them - reflecting the ground and the sky in their sunken linear beds. At some point these insertions transformed into works about burying things deeper. Whilst working as an art teacher in Liverpool, Arnatt got his students involved. He lined up around 100 people along the beach in Formby, burying them up to their necks. The surviving image show their faces lifted as they tried to breathe. What at first appears humorous, also has an understated violence. Humanity trapped and helpless from the encroaching waves. “I don’t think he was a great reader of fiction,” his son recalls, “but I think he probably read a book by JG Farrell called ‘Troubles’. I think it starts with a recreation of the Irish troubles during the 1940s. It starts with something that apparently the IRA used to do, which was to take people who had assisted the British government out of their homes, and bury them at the tideline on the beach and wait for the tide to come in.” Dark inspiration indeed. Two years later Arnatt buried himself. In a series of images documenting the 1969 action, Arnatt is depicted in the deserted British countryside. In the murky landscape, the artist stands looking directly at the camera. In each consecutive photo he drops, until at the end, he is absent beneath a mound of dirt,
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‘Self-burial’ was originally transmitted as an interference project on German TV; an artwork inserted amongst the regular programming. How the television connection emerged is not definitely known but is suspected to be through his friend, the artist Charles Harrison, and perhaps funded by a collector. The images could only be taken by another individual, questioning Arnatt’s feelings about creation and what it was to be an artist. Off TV the work was presented as a group of 9 photographs. Their scale was surprisingly tiny—10 x 8 at the largest. If things were later enlarged by curators for specific shows, Arnatt himself had little input. The British Council would tour badly printed laminated versions around the world. Yet the original scale gives a sense of intimacy to the images. An artist removed, working privately on a small scale, examining his place in the world. The nine images feel firmly like a set. Grouping and placing things together grew to define Arnatt’s practice—with series ranging from cans to images of dog piss to crawled notes. It was a way of making sense of the world, highlighting its unexpected beauty, its innate poetry, and often its ironic comedy. “It wasn’t that he developed a kind of a wit as a defensive entry into the work. It might have just been a pragmatic thing. In the period of say Monty Python there’s a slightly John Cleese-y aspect to him as a whole. The nature of what he was doing that was picked up on and faintly weird,” Matthew notes. Arnatt’s pieces don’t come across as one-liners. It’s almost the humour is masking layers of serious thought. As Arnatt’s work moved on – just as he erases himself from the work in the self-burial – human figures are removed. “He probably didn’t realize what he was revealing about himself, relationships with other people, issues to do with the way he felt about his body.” Matthew considers. “He was plagued in the later part of his life from his middle ages on by certain types of depressions and anxieties. His own unhappiness. The work wasn’t a vehicle for him to address issues to do with how he felt about people or bodies or physicality or the human experience. I never heard him talk about those things.” Although it can be melancholic, as his work developed there was also a deep sense of beauty. Arguably his most haunting series was ‘Pictures from a Rubbish Tip” (1988-9). Ideas around 18th century romanticism, Samuel Palmer and William Blake emerge in these vibrant color photos of garbage. There is something quite obsessive or personal about Arnatt’s focus. His images are intensely beautiful, with their painterly sense of fluid disintegration. His son agrees, “When he becomes able to control the surface of the photograph they become very immaculate things. You have this fantastic obsessive control of detail. He’s making these images that come from noticing the quality of light playing over the surfaces of ponds the fact that they’re full of rubbish is almost irrelevant.” Although often accessible, there is nothing straightforward in Arnatt’s world which is perhaps the point. Despite our greatest attempts we can never really hide from reality or organise the world before chaos sets in. Keith Arnatt 1930-2008 His estate is represented by Maureen Paley