What the critics say. 3 writers: Iain Sinclair, Martin Herbert, Cherry Smyth

1. IAIN SINCLAIR - MAKING PRETTY: EMILY COLE AS URBAN TOURIST - Published in E8: Hackney's Heartland, Transition Editions London 2007

Iain Sinclair is a writer and filmmaker with a particular interest in the psychogeography of London. He has written non-fiction books such as London Orbital (2002) and novels such as Downriver (1991). Cole worked with Sinclair on a project entitled 'E8 The Heart of Hackney' about the area of London with the postcode E8.

On the grey stone slabs of Warneford Street, an interestingly unresolved tributary of King Edwards Road in Hackney, someone has chalked a grid of hopscotch figures: all of them E9. Thereby making a chessboard of the narrow pavement - and, by extension, of the city. Dangerous additives. On other sites this assertion of identity, the branding war between E9 and E8, would be a tribal challenge akin to slinging a pair of trainers over sagging telephone lines. The precise definition of territorial boundaries can become a matter of life and death.
Chalk is mortal, it crumbles in the mouth. Cemeteries of ancient marine life become the quarries of southern England, sculpted into retail parks, off-highway Bluewater shopping oases. The enamel-stripping shriek of chalk on blackboard. Heritage schoolrooms where we learnt by rote, by copying meaningless formulae. And chalk was the medium of the first seascapes by Tacita Dean that I came across, walking south from Hackney, exhibited in a city bank. Chalk celebrates the possibility, the inevitability, of its own erasure. It invokes that rubbed out Willem de Kooning drawing: there and not there, always there. A smeary action-gesture of strategic removal. Chalk symbols and faked York-stone pavings, coming together in Warneford Street, demonstrate a potent urban myth. The temporary-permanent intervention of an anonymous artist and the permanent-temporary nature of civic improvement (slabs breaking up before they are laid in place). 
Without this random equation how would a stranger locate herself in a constantly shifting East London geography? Old-time tramps and vagrants chalked symbols on pavings and doors, their private code: generous, mean or dog-threatening households. Now unsponsored artists sign the city. Their practice is about recognition rather than aesthetic colonialisation. You like it, you sign it. There is no requirement to bring anything home. No collaboration with the commissioning process (which has become the principal art form of the Blair era). No armature of curatorship, grant application, ludicrous explanations of future events (that will never come into being). No tyranny of political correctness. No value. Until, of course, in zones hysterical with self-consciousness, guerrilla art is puffed into cash art. Trashed buildings and disregarded walls are prepared for property speculation by the imprimatur of a Banksy stencil. And then you have the ironic spectacle of cleansing operations (compulsory in over-budgeted, upwardly mobile development areas) being taken to task for the vandalism of painting over earlier vandalism – which itself covered up some faded Edwardian trade sign for violin repairs, barbering or the cure of love’s wounds. The age of the scavenger is over and rubbish is just rubbish: unless you can persuade a gallery to give it floorspace.
Emily Cole is a product of East Anglia; born in Ipswich, educated in Cambridge, living and working in Norwich. Her car has a hook on the back to drag a trailer with a canoe on board. You see at once, by the way she navigates the discriminations of Hackney, that she is happiest with water, with parks (those ‘green lungs’ bestowed on the urban poor). The problem of positioning yourself between E8 (this season’s show) and E9 (last season’s booklet, available on request at the Hackney Museum in Reading Lane) is hideous. Emily’s London A-Z has no truck with cultural contour lines. The speed and fret of the city disorientates her. She’s willing to make a painterly grid of E8 – if she can find it. Her awkwardness with mapping is justified, original settlements grew up around natural features such as the vanished (suppressed) Hackney Brook; E-numbers are arbitrary inventions of bureaucrats and politicians carving up territory.
She suffers. On Brick Lane, a mild ruck develops between some young Asians peddling mobile phones and a man with a camera. You have to learn, very quickly, about the paranoia of image making. Cameras are more threatening than guns (which are now accessories). When Emily, struggling to get a fix on this E8 thing, this shapeless wilderness, used an old prose journey of mine as a guide, she got as far as Dalston Junction before the presence of her digital camera provoked a direct confrontation. As the whole borough has become a CCTV movie, logged on monitor screens in a former library, so the citizens – in revenge – have turned on humble analogue technology, the flash of the amateur topographer. A woman taking a photograph of a car shunt on Kingsland Road was punched in the mouth and told by the police that it was her own fault. Image making, it apears, is a more serious form of assault than some good old-fashioned GBH. Images are also property. And property, in E8, is the ultimate value. If you have it, you can’t afford it. If you don’t have it, you never will. You don’t belong and it’s time you moved out. To Dagenham, Grays or Hackney-on-Sea (aka Hastings).
The initial research undertaken by Emily Cole is in some ways the most intriguing part of her project. She wandered the streets, accosting strangers at bus stops, on benches beside the canal, and inscribed her notes on the large-format digital portraits. She did not paint from the motif or make instant sketches. She carried her photographs back to the safety and calm of her Norwich studio. The human figures – a junk dealer with a fondness for music hall, a celebrity mum with a son marooned on Love Island – vanish. They don’t make it into the final E8 grid. They are effectively banished like the lowlife that once animated Jock McFadyen’s paintings of Limehouse Cut and Bethnal Green. Personality is subsumed into place. With some relief, Emily decides to structure her work around sites the E8 denizens drift towards as a retreat from pressure, from dirt and noise. She stakes out Victoria Park, that fabulous narrative, a blot of lush greenery ceded by Hackney to Tower Hamlets. An act of pure folly forced on a hapless and indigent council. Like the giving up, by the French, of Alsace-Lorraine.
Those research tools, the digital photos and cyberspace retrievals of a virtual Hackney, are bigger than Emily Cole’s postcard-like blocks of paintings. She works in units of six: reminding me of the paving stones of Warneford Street, as if they had errupted into ecstatic colour. A ‘zingy’ acrylic base with overpainting in oil. The scheme built around lively pinks and greens. Cole’s pink is like Caladryl lotion splashed on sunburnt grass and post-nuclear brick. She decided to manoeuvre around the fixed geometry of monuments, celebrating their obscurity, the fact that they were now memorials to a loss of memory, amnesiac stalagmites. Worthy causes, forgotten battles, suspended charities: all gone, time-absolved, erased like chalk inscriptions on wet pavements.
The texture of Cole’s paint is anti-chalk, it’s strident, eye-gouging. She sets herself to redeem blight, to ‘make pretty’. The brick plinth on which Victoria Park’s damaged guardians, the ‘Dogs of Alcibiades’, sit, doesn’t appeal to her – so she fleshes it into a liquid, cocktail pink. The demonic addition, 666, gifted by some juvenile occultist, has been cartooned in Loony Toon colour. The park’s lakeside café is squished into an ice-cream cone yurt, its concrete surround rendered as a cadmium-flush beach. One of the stone igloos, removed from old London Bridge, is revamped into an arbour with a young lady perched on the bench (which the artist has tactfully restored). Here is an improved city, an arcadia wrestled from gritty particulars. An old, arthritic borough ready to be face-painted in provincial gloss. E8, in the hands of Emily Cole, is a suburb of itself. ‘Where are the green places?’ she asks me. ‘Where are the statues?’ The surreal Pearly Kings and Queens. The black marble tributes to murdered policemen. The horse troughs full of Coke cans and ring pulls. 
Checking out the Alcibiades legend, the Norwich artist discovers some business about docking the dog’s tail – so she runs this conceit through to a local mutt, presented on the canal bank, beside the boho owner’s narrowboat. Cole’s E8 is ‘rescued’, returned to its bucolic origin of market gardens and grand houses with estates running down to the lost Hackney Brook. When these brightly painted panels move beyond the recording of specifics into free-flowing abstraction, they echo Ivon Hitchens. They become ambiguous, otherworldly, tunnels of wild light. Thrusting stone memorials are hermaphroditic upthrusts with mammary decoration. Fountains are dry. Nature is de-natured. The most reflective of the drawings, pitched towards sepia, like friable photographs found in a street market, are made with sump oil; a lovely marriage of grunge and water-light. Impressionist subject matter revisited in a machine age. 
Alcibiades the Athenian, whose dogs have been vandalised in Victoria Park, faces smashed, overpainted with the devil’s number, was himself accused of mutilating statues. Androcles fabricated evidence against him when all the heads of Hermes within the city, perched on their plinths, were damaged overnight. The Eleusinian Mysteries had been profaned. Alcibiades, before standing trial, sailed away on a military expedition. He was a convinced advocate of an aggressive foreign policy. Statues topple, regimes change: the need remains for somebody to paint the postcards that send back hot news from the ravished city.

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2. MARTIN HERBERT - PLATFORM ALTERATIONS - Published in firstsitepapers 2006

Martin Herbert is a writer and critic based in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. He is a London correspondant for Artforum and a visiting lectuer at the Royal College of Art, and his art criticism has appeared in numerous publications including Frieze, Art Monthly and Modern Painters. 

On a bright and blowsy morning in the winter of 1811, John Constable walked out towards Flatford Mill, a kilometre to the southeast of his home in East Bergholt, Suffolk, and set up his easel to paint the oil sketch subsequently entitled Flatford Mill from the Lock. This composition of architectonic certitude, modelled on a seaport study by Claude, anchors a wild sky via receding lines of farmhouses and foliage that surround a diamond of motionless freshwater. Its tenor is quietly tempestuous; the rapid dashes of paint that we read as greenery in the forefront skid across a deep brown ground that also glints behind the clouds. This is a study in vivacity but also in provisional coherence, the speedy medium privileging an undertone of Constable's art: that the vista he is painting barely hangs together, is bound by energy, and is both frozen and recognised as fluctuating through the painter's art.

One hundred and ninety-five years later, Emily Cole descended from a train at Manningtree Station, on the eastern periphery of what images like the one described above helped define as Constable Country: a realm, now, of changeable proportions of concrete and clover, only limitedly accessible by a railway line built a quarter-century after the painter's death. From Manningtree a bus route chugs towards Flatford, but the bus didn't arrive that day and so Cole, whose art is enmeshed in both landscape and the contingencies of those transportation systems that determine our movements through it, tramped off the road and across the marshes, ending up somewhere close to Flatford Mill, down the road apiece, near a car park and a characterless suburban house flying a St George's flag. Here she took a series of photographs that later gestated several paintings, collectively entitled "Suffolk Pink" after a traditional wash put onto houses in the area.
The eponymous tone, a neon intensity that sits uneasily within traditionalist conceptions of landscape, is Cole's dependable base colour in these paintings just as warm, natural brown had been Constable's. The facade of the house is pink, though of a discomfortingly high-keyed variety; so, too, are the national flag's once-crimson crossbars. In the foreground is a wavering tree, its purpled branches arcing across the picture plane, painted wet-in-wet and dissolving into the cloudless sky. A wooden bird-box hangs halfway up the spindly trunk, to the left of which the painting plunges into a vegetal chaos of half-recognisable trees, topiary, and thick swipes of deep green that might be foreground flora. But there really is little foreground or background here, certainly nothing of the alternating bands of light that Claude used to inject recessive spatiality into the flat technology of the painted landscape. Cole's painting originates in a photograph, a secondary mediation of a nature already thoroughly mediated by humankind, and it feels like it: as in Cézanne, but without any imbued sense of modernist mastery, everything is pressed up onto the surface. To some degree, however, for all the indexical qualities that their evident origins in photography infer, Cole's against-the-clock technique causes her paintings to sing an old song: for here again is a world charged by changeability, its constituent parts constantly rearranging in relation to each other, sustained on a wing and a prayer. What was implied, a couple of centuries ago, in a sketch has become overt in an avowedly finished painting, albeit one that is still partnered by similar images seen from a slightly different viewpoint, which suggest that there is no definitive reading of this environment.
Images such as this travel simultaneously at several implied velocities. There is shutter speed. There is the speed of painting, slower but still relatively swift. And there is the speed of looking at a painting that enfolds a snapshot of disequilibrium between chaotic nature and the phosphorescent fingerprint of culture, in which two rapidities and a fundamental, faintly melancholic instability are subsumed in the unhurriedness of an observer's gaze. This effect is more strongly felt when Cole paints, as she often does, views of the mutable landscape between Manningtree and London's Liverpool Street Station, photographed through the window of a moving train. The eleven examples on show at Firstsite, from the 2005 "Hinterlands" series, have a taxonomic spine that clarifies Cole's affinity with the American artist Ed Ruscha: simply by pointing the camera, it seems, she constructs an essay on the tectonic shifts in this region's landscape. This hour-long journey, which Cole would have us read, anticlockwise in the gallery, as from London outward, takes one through a steadily thinning but never extinguished dominance of land by industry: rail workers clad in bright orange (the base colour, along with an acidic lemon, of a number of these images, here revealing a wry structural purpose), signal boxes, factories, waiting jetties nosing into silent creeks, and wide panoramas of pale green fields.

At 70mph some of these facets are evanescent flashes, barely registering on the naked eye; but a camera can catch them, and paint can embed and complicate them. The ominous twin structures of Silos would share something of Bernd and Hilla Becher's deadpan categorising of industrial landmarks had Cole not painted them with buttery slipperiness; had the sky's tone not been echoed on the siding of an outbuilding so that the fields around it seem suddenly, weirdly, to disappear, air and ground reversed; were there not a radioactive yellow glow behind the overpainting. In transit we don't quite see the oddity of such structures in the landscape, because we barely apprehend them; but we know that they or something like them are there. Cole asks us to look at a meeting of the half-seen and chancily grasped with the manipulating possibilities of her final medium: her images, in this respect, merge the frailties of perception with the countermanding potential of painting. They also ask us to consider how we see what we see, and what has determined its specificity. The price of corralling such images is the regularly present framing device of the train's window-bar; and, often, the flattening and the particular slanting viewpoint, as keyed to a modality of looking as is Ruscha's oblique perspective, that come from photographing a vista at an angle through a window.
Whereas her Romanticist forebears who engaged the encroachment of the Industrial Revolution into the landscape reflected the temper of the age - which was, as has been remarked, to deplore the temper of the age - Cole additionally seems drawn, if not fully to view industry's traces as beauties, at least to recognize that they are central to modernity's warp and weft; and the materials with which a contemporary landscape painter, dealing with our changing experience of the subject, must contend. Diametrically opposed, meanwhile, to the practice of an earlier painter such as Constable's key influence Jacob van Ruisdael, who would manipulate and collage his views in the pursuit of a contemplative ideal, Cole's tendency is to begin with the defective real and pursue it as it modifies. During her residency at Firstsite, she asked visitors to describe their favourite journey to somewhere and their preferred mode of transport, which information she plans to use as the basis for excursions of her own. The most popular destination, it turned out, was that supposed shopper's paradise, Oxford Street.

It seems possible at this point to suggest that landscape in Cole's art may be a cynosure for other concerns. Here is a very public and even performative project that asks where painting's boundaries are - where it should be considered to begin and end - and to what extent the painter should submit to (and, to the extent that it is possible to do so, systematise) an evacuation of autonomy. While undermining the primacy of her ostensible final platform and revealing the stratagems that led to its generation, Cole indicates a desire not only to reflect but to channel attributes of the modulating world around her: witness High Voltage, the woozy view of railway workers on a siding - the green organic disarray around them organised (a compositional gift to the painter, if not to ecologists) by the network of electrical cables strung through it - that she initially hung, unprotected and lit at night by an ultraviolet strip-light, outside the gallery. The painting is both an endpoint for a sequence of procedures (travelling, photographing, remaking) and the instigator of encounters which, as in Cole's polling of the public, overtly realign her ongoing productivity in a feedback loop. The art slips outside the artist's purview not only when the camera steals a barely-glimpsed speeding view, not only when liquid paint fortuitously mutinies as it is manipulated, not only when a new silo appears on the old horizon and not only when the bus doesn't turn up. These processes, tinged by happenstance and each with their own inbuilt capacity to angle the result, evolve Emily Cole's art; arguably they are her art.

And then, as Constable would tell you, there is the weather to contend with.


3. CHERRY SMITH - HINTERLANDS SERIES - Published in ‘Stay’ catalogue 2005

Cherry Smyth is an Irish poet, born in Ballymoney, County Antrim and raised in Portstewart. She has written two collections of poetry, a poetry pamphlet as well as a book, essays and reviews on contemporary visual arts. She has also published short fiction.
She also writes for visual art magazines: Modern Painters, Art Monthly, Art Review and Circa. She has written essays on Jane and Louise Wilson, Orla Barry, Salla Tykka and Dirk Braeckman, among others. She was a visiting critic at Braziers International Art Workshop, at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Castello, Spain and at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2005. She was a curatorial adviser for 'Axis' online showcase, Open Frequency in 2006. An essay on photographer Thomas Flechtner was published in a book on his work, 'Bloom', Lars Muller Publications, 2007.

On a Sunday morning in 1967, Ed Ruscha flew over movie studios in Hollywood to take aerial photographs of their empty parking lots. Like mappings of routine and convenience, patches of engine oil showed which parking spots were the most used - all those nearest to the entrance of the building. These photographs of black spills were pictures of labour, time, machinery and its little failures.

Emily Cole’s paintings remind me of Ruscha's ‘34 Parking Lots in LA’. Ruscha’s images presented the utterly familiar in a previously unseen way. Cole too, is interested in making the unnoticed register and resonate in a way it hasn’t done before. Working from digital photographs taken from a train, she chooses an image in which the composition of the ‘view’ says something about transience, travel and looking at landscape. She usually works from an intensely bright ground - fluorescent orange and pink for the neon cityscape and a lush green or pungent turquoise for the rural landscape. In her paintings, the ground really matters. What is often hidden or minimised is gloried in as she welcomes the seepage of lurid ground into the narrative, making us question what elements should be focused on or studied as ‘view’.

In this series, ‘Hinterlands’, Cole records the train journey from Norwich to London, once the main line of the Great Eastern Railway formed in 1862. Her palette reflects the changing landscape and mood as the urban recedes and the view becomes semirural. The sequence begins with a dense black and orange painting of the platform at Liverpool Street Station, showing an empty, expectant train, its doors hanging open. The image is packed with a sense of imminence but we’re unsure why exactly - it is more than just the half-open doors: is it the orange buffers at the end of the track under the low dark station roof? Or the passenger moving off left and the digital clock frozen at 12:30.29? The image offers the immediacy of travel, being taken elsewhere. It’s vibrant with the thrill of departure. There is a distortion of time - this is a snapshot but it took time to paint - the freeze frame recorded exactly in that moment becomes an elastic fraction of a second travelling through time in the painting and in the viewer’s mind.

This is what Cole’s work does - takes an urban railway station, a place we rush to leave, and makes a fleeting image hold. She creates a quick gestural brushstroke and gives it body and depth. She captures transience - the slight blur of movement and a loss of bearings, until the paintings contain you, give you a place.

Cole uses acrylic like watercolour, reinvigorating the landscape tradition and giving some of the works an underwater feel - like the group of railway signalmen standing on the sidings. It’s a murky and gritty suburban scene. The edge of the track cuts a diagonal through the right-hand corner of the image, going on somewhere else, leaving these workers, this view behind. The industrial cables, brackets and boxes lend perspective and control to the composition. The postures of the three men are casual yet concentrated - one has the proprietorial air of a foreman, leaning slightly forward, while another seems to have his hands in his pockets, his weight on one bent knee. Cole makes us pause in a richly gloomy wasteland we would normally ignore. The platform where the men stand seems to be awash, a river of blue-green-grey, as if the whole landscape is moving as the train and we, the viewer/passenger, stay still. Like much of Cole’s work, it’s both melancholy and robust. It’s loose and considered. She deromanticises the pastoral and makes the dismissed urban appealing.

Most of us now experience the countryside as a snatched view from the car or window of a high-speed train or from media images. Cole takes the incidental - the smudge of dark wet on the tarmac, a functional yellow signalbox and makes it shine. As American photographers like Robert Frank invented a visual iconography from American freeways and gas stations, so Cole creates a new British iconography out of what is overlooked on the way to somewhere else: the non-spaces of warehouses, derelict sheds, deserted sidings, reminiscent of the Belgian school of Luc Tuymans and Koen van den Broek, and the underground carpark and factory floor paintings of German painter Magnus von Plessen. What was perceived as ugly or banal is rendered emotionally engaging and we look again to locate what it is that has caught us off-guard, like a memory you didn’t know you had. She refreshes our lazy habit of not looking. 
As a train moves into empty space and greenery, our eyes adjust and in Cole’s paintings of the rural landscape, the apple green ground leaks into the carriage itself, expanding the light and giving the effect of staring into open fields. There’s that sense of expectancy again, of time slowed down. The empty seats. The table with a newspaper on it. The sky seems daubed with café au lait brown as if raw earth is reflected in it. The train windows echo TV screens and the movie of the landscape plays outside. The frame reminds us that this is a mediated image, taken from a digital photograph and reframed within a painting. The train reaches Manningtree, with its lake, or estuary, its smoke stack, its warehouses and silos. But no hard lines. Only soft buttery strokes that make our gaze soft, the view loved. The mood is jaunty now. She’s teaching us how to measure a skyline, reconsider the sublime. These are diaristic, rushed and anti-sublime paintings, but there’s a reaching spirit in them that is optimistic and non-judgemental. Her approach seems informal but there’s a pleasing symmetry of line and form. The fenced railings echo the direction of the track as does the overhead cable. There’s an inevitability of destination, the suspense of arrival. This is sensuous, unfussy painting that celebrates the ordinary and makes the garish gleam with a surprising beauty.


Garageland 4, article "Studio Secrets"