224. Raphael
224. Raphael, 2025, oil on linen, 40 x 30cm, (Darryn Ansted)
This painting shows a situation I experienced but I was largely unaware of two of the three people directly in front of me at the time. This is another painting from the night of the Easter fire in Geseke. As with the previous painting, I don’t know who the two children are. They were just in the background when I took a photo of Raphael, who was taking a photo of Miriam standing in front of the fire. I was pleasantly surprised to discover them in the photograph because they had such a great pose. I would never in a million years have thought of getting people to give each other a piggy-back (Huckepack) for a painting but it nonetheless seems to perfectly generate one of the things I am seeking. The piggy-back is so tangible. I knew that if I painted it properly the viewer could feel the weight, tension, comfort and fun of the entire procedure of giving a piggyback or receiving a piggyback. Most of us leave it behind with our youth but the entire social contract is present in the piggy-back, and it counters the spectacle of the huge bonfire here with sublime, creative efficiency.
Maybe something else that has been standing in plain sight in my ‘Situations’ project is the silhouette of Situationism. I read Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’ over 20 years ago. I liked some of the things it generated in art, such as the artistic concept of the ‘dérive’ (basically going for a walk that is premised not upon taking the shortest route but rather upon taking the most unusual route). Perhaps my artistic practice owes something to this impulse. Other aspects of Situationism were less interesting to me, for example, the ‘détournement’. I am not interested in overthrowing anything. A recent article by T.J. Clarke in the London Review of Books sums up Situationism thus:
“Spectacle, as a concept, was accompanied by the idea of ‘the colonisation of everyday life’. That meant several things. Pervasive surveillance. The monetisation of more and more of the species’ so-called unproductive life. The recruiting of more and more of us to the task of providing our masters with ‘information’ about our every doing. The shrinkage of time out. The commodification of play. But perhaps what the situationist theorists most saw in the ‘everyday’ – most regretted as they saw it vanish – was the body clock, the lapse of attention, the recalcitrance of the organism, the idle interest in what someone else was doing, was feeling, was like. Bodies spoke a different language from that of their leaders. They were a reservoir of insubordination. They looked up at the pyramid or the Statue of Liberty and shrugged.”
When was the last time you gave or received a piggy-back?
