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John
Miller |
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John Miller June
26 - July 25, 2004 Jeffrey Charles Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by John Miller. Miller has just completed two solo shows in the US "Everything is Painted Brown" at Metro Pictures, NY and "Total Transparency" at Richard Telles Fine Arts, Los Angeles. He was recently featured in Artforum: April, 2004 Portfolio/John Miller "Middle of the Day" Bob Nickas, pp. 132-137. This is his first solo show in the UK. The work that makes up this exhibition relates to Miller's on going analysis of on-line dating. The show consists of a group of 8x10" photographs superimposed with text from personals ads Also included are three large graph posters that plot analytical data gained from Miller's own research through direct participation with internet dating sites, and an accompanying essay written specifically for the show. The photographs show sites located around the vicinity of Jeffrey Charles Gallery, mainly in London postal code area E1. Central to John Miller's work is the modeling of social identification and representation. In the early 1990's a trademark John-Miller-Brown matter, that did more than just allude to excrement, typified the artist's sculptures and wall reliefs. This motif presented the artwork as libidinal consumer fetish. The game show paintings which followed featured the sets from TV game-shows, particularly The Price is Right. At the end of the 90's an installation The Lugubrious Game realized this theme as a life-size sculpture, offering a picture of the American dream vis-à-vis machinations of the art market. Recently Miller has used personals ads taken from the printed press as theoretical and concrete material for his art work. Previous works examined implicit social and hierarchical structures in ads from New York's Village Voice, Cologne's Stadt Revue and Karlsruhe's Sperrmuell. For a recent show in Los Angeles at Richard Telles Fine Art and for his project at Jeffrey Charles Gallery, Miller has turned to internet dating sites as a starting point for his work using Pierre Bourdieu's notion of social fields as an approach to his own analysis. An aspect of personals ads that Miller is interested in is their intermingling of public and private spheres. Therein arises the inevitable ambivalence between empirical objectivity and imagination, drawn from the anonymity of the advertiser who tries to package his/her individuality in a marketable form. The photographs in John Miller's show with Jeffrey Charles Gallery include: a church, a police station, a university, a bar, an abandoned house, a pedestrian underpass, and a main road. Various spatial codes sanction or prohibit sexual behavior in these places. Ads themselves or graphs plotting the analytical data are superimposed over the photographs. The images all contrast concrete space as a social form with the symbolic social space of the online ad. This combination, however, is rather oblique. The only common denominator may be a shared locality. Thus, the implications are murky. In terms of genre, they are both portraits and landscapes. The superimposition of type over an image suggests a screen or transparent layer. The type inevitably assumes the authority of a caption. "Classified
ads necessarily concern classification. I contend that personals ads inadvertently
reconstitute prevailing social hierarchies under the aegis of free subjectivity
or liberated sexuality. Of course, this is not all they do. In fact, this
tendency is at cross purposes with their nominal function. It shows a
conflict within social space. What graphing – even simply the decision
to graph – does is to show further the discourse of the personals
ad as a distinct social field. This makes its ideological basis more evident.
My affinity for this material is like that of an armchair sociologist,
an amateur inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu." John Miller's work focuses on cultural practices that serve as ritual markers to our collective identity. On-line dating and the internet are targeted as an information network that collapses distances while promoting life experience as a performance, game, or wager. Communication via these "dating services" suggests immediate gratification of one's desires, albeit an activity involving the machinery of a "middleman," profiting from the transaction. Miller examines the market-driven rationalisations that vie with the romantic concept of fate and character, reducing the external world to entirely subjective forces. In subscribing to these services, one attempts to play with chance in order to eradicate it. By describing thousands of people on-line, making character legible, administrative structure is imposed upon the unknown. Miller finds that the utopian impulse for total transparency, symbolised by this on-line dating activity, is revealed as a complete surveillance of the other, and may ultimately prove futile. He refers to all that is unknowable, including failure and impotence. Aspects of the unconscious, it is that psychic apparatus that ultimately defies containment of the sprawl of human thought and experience. "Those
of us who have followed John Miller's career over the past fifteen or
so years know that he is one of those artists who has worked in a multitude
of manners. He has painted scenes of everyday life that bring to mind
the works of the social realist artists of american 1930s; and he has
made other paintings, in the same very direct manner, of such stereotypical
or "stock" images as butterflies, fairies and devils--images
that look almost as if they were clipped directly from children's storybooks.
He has made simple pencil drawings of real estate, uninflected renderings
of the interiors and exteriors of a wide variety of abodes. Then there
are photographs, taken during the middle of the day when the sun is positioned
directly overhead, casting its unflattering light on a seemingly endless
variety of human activities and locales. He has worked with found objects,
covered in gold leaf, grouped together in assemblages and sometimes slathered
with, or buried in, a deep brown impasto." "From
the outset, he [John Miller] has argued in fact that artists have no choice
but to address sociopolitical questions and ideological apparatuses involved
in the production of cultural "artefacts." Along with such contemporaries
as Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, as well as Tony Oursler, Christopher Williams,
and Stephen Prina, Miller has synthesized a committed critique of representation
with a postconceptual shift towards the "real." Using stereotyped
genres such as figurative painting, travel photography, and landscape
painting, he has challenged - not without parallel to the work of Sherrie
Levine or Richard prince - the function of the author and the concomitant
artwork's loss of "aura." It became more explicit in Miller's
"brown impasto" works at the end of the 80's that this critique
was first and foremost a means of revealing the repressed aspect of the
ideological aggregates of day-to-day late-capitalist Western culture." John Miller has exhibited internationally over the last 30 years predominantly in the U.S. and mainland Europe. Recent solo shows have been held at Metro Pictures, New York, PS1, New York, Richard Telles Fine Art, LA and Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris. An earlier sculpture by Miller was shown in Mike Kelley: The Uncanny at Liverpool Tate. Changing contexts characterizes not only where Miller lives and works, dividing his time between New York and Berlin but also his dual roles as an artist and critic. In the mid 80's Miller worked as the U.S. editor of the British magazine Artscribe. He now contributes regularly to the Berlin based journal Texte zur Kunst. John Miller is represented in the USA by Metro Pictures, New York and Patrick Painter, Los Angeles and in Europe by Meyer Riegger Galerie, Karlsruhe, Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin and Cologne, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin and Galerie Prez-Delavallade, Paris
Saturdays
and Sundays 12-6pm or by appointment |
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