Red-Chequered Antwerp — Derek Hampson
Red-Chequered Antwerp
2019
Oil on wood panel
20 x 23 cm
This work is one of a number of paintings that were exhibited under the title The Aviary at the 1795 Gallery, Nottingham, in 2019, the inspiration for which was Plato’s dialogue the Theaetetus (allegedly a favourite of Marcel Duchamp). In the Theaetetus Plato likens our memory to an aviary, where all our past experiences are stored in the form of birds. One of my aims was to make Plato's image “come alive” in the exhibition, by re-imagining the gallery as an aviary, and the paintings as the birds contained within it.
Red-pied Pouter from Robert Fulton’s Illustrated Book of Pigeons (1880)
The Greek word that Plato uses for “aviary” is peristereon, which means “pigeon-house”. The birds I chose to make paintings of were pigeons. The works are based on Robert Fulton’s Illustrated Book of Pigeons (1880), which depicts in lithographs all the varieties of fancy pigeons then extant in the United Kingdom. Fancy pigeons are birds that have been specially bred to emphasise particular aspects of size, shape, colour and behaviour. These traits are reflected in the equally fancy name given to each, e.g., “Red-pied Pouter”, “Flying Tumbler”, “Scotch Fantail”, and others.
Rather than reproduce these images in my paintings, as specimens of the different types of fancy pigeon, which is the aim of Fulton’s book, my intention was to make works that give us something of the actuality of these birds, i.e. how they are in life. I approached this by thinking of my paintings not as images but as schemas. A schema stands between what something is, i.e. its concept, in this case a bird of the genus Columba, and its species, the illustration in the book. The genus is universal, all these fancy birds are in the end just pigeons, while each illustration divides up the genus into different instances of the species.
Scotch Fantails from Robert Fulton’s Illustrated Book of Pigeons (1880)
It is only with the addition of the schema that our experience of an instance can come alive. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in a seminar on Kant given on 4th April 1978, calls a schema a “rule of production”; it is how we understand something living from its interaction with its environment. We can see the environment of the pigeon in Fulton’s illustrations, it is principally the loft in which it is at home; even when it is in the sky the pigeon is on its way home. Consequently, the schema of the pigeon is the wood of the ledges and rooftop of its loft. This idea is embedded in the painting, it is in the painted grain of wood, which extends into the body of the pigeon, the frame of the artwork and the wood of the panel onto which it is painted. There is a further process of schematisation at work in this artwork, the painting alludes to itself as a painting, the grid-like structure behind and on the body of the pigeon refers back to woven canvas, the literal ground of painting.
