The
artist Tom Phillips has produced a series of paintings which enlarge and subtly
modify postcards incorporating municipal park benches. The first and best known
of these is Benches (1971), the material for which has been reworked and
adapted in a number of other works including Ma Vlast (1972) and The Flower
Before the Bench (1973-74). Benches interlaces a number of apparently
insignificant details from similar postcards of people sitting or strolling in
parks in Battersea, Harrogate, Bournemouth and Brighton.
The
main focus of the painting is the people who inhabit the parks, and who are
often at the margins of the original postcards but are placed in the centre of
Phillips’s work. Unlike the more posed shots of family albums, these postcards
bring unsuspecting strangers together, forcing them into a relationship with
each other at a moment frozen in time for public consumption. As the French
cultural theorist Maurice Blanchot writes, one of the reasons the everyday
evades analysis or perception is that it is ‘without a subject,’ so that when
we live the everyday ‘it is anyone, anyone whatsoever, who does so’. The
subjectlessness of these postcards gives a sense of both commonality and
isolation: of a civic life suggested by benches, paths, well-kept lawns and
other public amenities, but also of countless isolated, anonymous and
interchangeable selves moving within it, what de Michel de Certeau calls that ‘multitude
of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river
of the streets’.
Phillips
notes elsewhere that postcard images tend to ‘deceitfully inhabit their own
eternal summer’ and, once the tinting process has done its worst, have a much
higher proportion than in real life of brightly-coloured clothes and cars with
the shiny newness of die-cast models. In the postcards used in Benches, though,
this artificial sunniness comes up against the blandness and uniformity of the
public parks, their carefully arranged flower beds, neatly trimmed foliage and
ubiquitous concrete. We see not an idealised spectacle but a random moment of daily
life, in which the faceless individuals in the postcards could easily be
replaced by other people. Reminding us that the people pictured in postcards
are sometimes dead by the time the card is purchased, Phillips describes Benches
as ‘a plea against dying’ and includes a stencilled quote at the bottom of the
painting from Isaiah 40: ‘All Flesh is as Grass … the Grass Withereth.’
Mundane quote for the
day: ‘There
it was, your life of everyday, with its duties and its meals, its small
comforts and its upholstery, and wordy goings on; with its fragile and often
unexpressed affinities, homely jests and intrusion of the infinite.’ - Pamela
Bright, The Day’s End (1959), p. 183
The blogs of JOE MORAN are always nice and easy to read. I used to follow his blogs and like to read the things related to his life. The story of this bench is very sweet.
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