the corners of our eyes
The paintings of Johannes Phokela
Greenwich University- Summer 2005 by Paul O’Kane

“The cosiest spot in my grandparents’ house was in the kitchen by the tiled chimney piece with the magnificent black iron hearthplate.

I often sat there at dusk on my grandfather’s knee while he told me tales about the pictures on the tiles. There was a pair of elegant knights on stout horses ... Just a little further on, a pair of richly favoured ships sailed on a turbulent sea , and sea-monsters heaved their horrible bodies out of the water. Grandfather, who had himself been to sea, would tell stories of travels to mysterious lands far away. He would speak of storms and shipwrecks, of Negroes and Eskimoes, (sic) of sea serpents and mermaids. This would go on until grandmother lit the lamp and began to lay the table for supper.”

Delft, like Sevres, or Staffordshire, is a name with a ceramic ‘ring’ to it, its famous tiles, often illustrated with everyday scenes, speak of a complacent early bourgeois existence. They seem perfect, not only for dispersing the heat of a homely hearth across a broad cooling surface but for simultaneously arresting the complacent mind from roving on to considerations of some iniquitous sources of 17th and 18th century European wealth. The baked, luminescent surfaces and their seductive, sedative, blue illustrations, provide a charming distraction from some unpalatable realities which yet yearn for exposition and redress.

But for Johannes Phokela to paint in the style of Delft tiles today (e.g. Testing Equipment (2005), Apotheosis (2004), or Clockwise (2005) is not only to bring into view the privileged, colonial culture that the tiles once charmingly mediated and assuaged, it is also to draw attention to imagery in general as a distraction from a possibly greater truth.

Long after the heyday of Delft tile production we remain surrounded by diverting genre scenes. Wall upon wall of exemplary images now hem-in our cosy, consumerist mentality, carefully mediating or denying anything which might oppose its model. And so, we live in a kind of citadel, a pretty one, who’s walls are elaborately decorated on the inside . The ‘grandfather’ figure in Korf’s reminiscence above, endures for us in the form of a reassuringly authoritative media voice telling enchanting tales before ‘supper’ while soap operas and Reality T.V. emulate 19th century novels or 17th century genre paintings by enabling neat slices of lucid life to secure a moralising point-of-view. In this exhibition, paintings like Prozac (2005) Customs and Exercise (2005) or the Clockwork (2005) series satirise and scramble these reassuring traditions.

The deep umber grounds often found in Johannes Phokela’s paintings imply that events are free to float up from the murky depths of every furtive History or selective memory and bathe in the warm light of painting’s surface. Meanwhile, via his regular reference to frames and grids, Phokela might also invoke the mechanism of Knowledge as a procedure which attempts vainly to catch and tame effervescent experience by imposing orders, establishing connections and making ‘odious’ comparisons. When Knowledge -most comfortable when digging depths or soaring skyward- submits to painted representation, its structures and trajectories encounter a withering infinity of endless returns to a persistent, precious surface. Similarly, when History roves across events plucked from their towers, processions and tombs to be recomposed by the painter’s mercurial hand, it modestly transforms itself into a Geography.

Knowledge and History therefore become acquainted with surface only by first swallowing their pride, but they must also suspend any presumption to morality. The painter is, after all a trained illusionist who shares an affinity with the ice skater as a maestro of surface, thus, though paintings may jostle to capture our gaze and Historians X-ray their depths, all this attention is inevitably diverted horizontally as paintings thwart penetrative desires for possession, essence or profundity and offer instead a series of subtly connected modules forming a tissue of wishes and lies.

Delft tiles are a demure variety of objet d’art designed to provide a background or context for other objects and events. Any attention they do attract is soon dispersed across their hygienic surface in such a way that we might be tempted to call them peripherals and not ‘objects’ at all. Their corners usually carry a decorative fleur de lis or ‘ox’s head’ motif which, while locking the whole into a grid, assists this horizontal dispersal. The motifs turn toward the tile’s central image but in compositions, key with their neighbours, thereby operating as connectors who’s presence, purpose and identity is always fractional and contingent .

In 1960, for a MOMA exhibition, William C. Seitz removed frames from Monet’s paintings and sunk some of them flush into the gallery walls . This late-modernist gesture illustrates the degree to which frames contradict a certain idealism central to modern aspirations wherein both architecture and painting aspire to pure rectilinear forms independent of the frame’s objection to their dream of homogeneity. Jacques Derrida’s 1978 discussion of ‘Parergon’ meanwhile, could be taken as paradigmatic of a post-modernity, as in Derrida we find no dismissal of the frame but a deconstruction which, rather than attempting to deny tradition, resuscitates arcane nuances of the frame’s value which may have been suppressed by a prejudicial modern agenda .

Under Derrida’s influence, the apparently meaningless corner motifs of Delft tiles might today reassert themselves in spite of their secondary or peripheral status. Furthermore, exposing the conventional distinction between central, ‘meaningful’ image and supportive, secondary motif might subtly illuminate an Islamic influence within the tiles . The Islamic prohibition of images could be said to unnerve Christianity’s cosseting image-emporium by implying that images profane or falsely grace a divine, mathematical truth . The corner motifs in Delft tiles frame and decorate the more ‘meaningful’ pictures that they surround, and yet -given these Derridean and Islamic implications- may subtly undermine, supplant or supersede the images by referring to an invisible, un-representable truth that lies necessarily elsewhere, everywhere implicated but nowhere present, a truth of fractions which form wholes only in evental, contingent encounters.

As a form of revisionist painting that boldly remixes History to its own ends, Johannes Phokela’s reconstructions inevitably sting and provoke an antithetical, conservative paradigm wherein a would-be secure representational frame-work holds in place and makes retrospective sense of events that are thereby ideologically justified. But painting’s conscious attentions to frame, support, figure, ground, object or subjectivity are invariably haunted by peripheral, subsidiary values which appear only ‘in the corners’ of our eyes, only ‘in the corners’ of History and Knowledge where, what might be dismissed as marginal can always be found to determine the necessary connectors, distributions and dispersals constitutive of another kind of sense .

If, along with Johannes Phokela, we dispute or refuse a conservative, retrospective sense, this might amount, not to a loss or end but to a relinquishment, and the motive for such a relinquishment might be that we have no wish to adhere to any self-conscious sense which serves and secures convictions in the manner of those which justify oppressive, territorial, perspectival and exploitative colonial powers. However, we can only responsibly perform such a relinquishment as long as we suspect, believe or have faith in another sense that we do not consciously ‘make’, a less conscious, more peripheral sense that is not soporifically attuned to captive images but is alert to unexpected dispersals and ways of escaping conventional orders.

Finally, trusting in such an alternative sense might allow us to access powers of our own that we do not wield in the ways of the powers we contest . Obviously our own powers could never directly oppose those which promote themselves as formidable enough to threaten the extinction of our very hopes and wills, but they might nevertheless operate obliquely, as peripheral powers, transmitting, transporting and pointing away from the point, to what lies beyond the comforts of the sure, Known and familiar, towards a world which is never that of “Negroes and Eskimoes, sea serpents and mermaids” nor of any mythologised and conveniently orienting past, place or culture, but which might nevertheless be the “mysterious lands” of an accessible, justifiable future.

END 1400 Words

13See Maurice Blanchot The Unavowable Community Station Hill Press New York 1988 pp.27-56 in which ‘powerless power’ is a concept used to describe the strategy, fate or predicament of revolutionaries in May 1968 who were unwilling to emulate in any way the (state) powers to which they were opposed.

 

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