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ABSTRACT
This essay focuses on the work of one artist, the painter Cathy Lomax, and on the way in which various aspects of Lomax's practice – invariably informed by cinema – illuminate the theme of ‘the scene of the self’. The essay draws Lomax's work into convergence with the concept of glamour; interprets her prize-winning painting Black Venus; explicates her Film Diary series; and relates her work to one particular movie, Opening Night (1977) directed by John Cassavetes, as chosen by the author – hence the tone of this penultimate section unapologetically inhabits the ‘scene’ of the author's own ‘self’ as signalled by use of the first person ‘I’ and ‘my’. The essay then concludes by returning to a more objective and academic tone, while summarizing the ways in which Lomax's work illustrates a cinematically and theatrically informed sense of a twenty-first century self, as shared and confirmed by leading cultural commentators, philosophers and theorists.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Paul O’Kane is an artist and writer who lectures in histories and theories of art and culture at CSM (UAL) and at SOAS. His long-running seminar ‘Technologies of Romance’ (and recent book of the same name) encourages us to contextualize ‘new’ technologies in accordance with an unbroken history of technologies and their significant influence on the development of art. He also hosts seminars at Chelsea college (UAL) on ‘Uses of History in Contemporary Art’, ‘A World of Stories’ and ‘Walter Benjamin’. Paul's PhD in History (2009), supervised by Howard Caygill at Goldsmiths College, is titled ‘A Hesitation of Things’ and investigates temporalities in art, writing and history.
Notes
1. A phrase used in the title of another essay by Paul O’Kane and included in artist, curator and researcher Jane Boyer's book for the exhibition ‘This Me of Mine’.
2. Cathy Lomax also publishes a regular zine ‘Arty’ plus an arts journal ‘Garageland’ and is currently pursuing a PhD in Film Studies at Queen Mary College, London. In partnership with Alex Michon and Alli Sharma she also runs Transition gallery, London, programming and curating its exhibitions and events.
3. Here explicitly referencing Tenessee Williams, who might also lurk somewhere in the historical influences on John Cassavetes’ psychodramatic movie Opening Night (see below).
4. Cathy Lomax recommends: ‘Glamour: a history’, by Stephen Gundle, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008. And see also ‘A Note on Glamour, by Susan Wilson, in Fashion Theory, Volume 11, Issue 1, 95–108.
5. In the ‘Art’ chapter of his ‘Philosophy … ’ Warhol he writes of the ‘glamorous risks’ taken by artists in proffering and speculating on the new. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (from A to B and back again) by Andy Warhol, Penguin Modern Classics, London, 2007.
6. The Scene of the Self by Paul O’Kane, (in: ‘This “Me” of Mine: Self, Time & Context in the Digital Age’ Ed. J. Boyer, Pub Xlibris, 2013, 12–19.
7. See previous footnote.
8. See Silent Partners: Artist & Mannequin from function to fetish, exhibition held at Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK, 14 October 2014–25 January 2015, and at Musée Bourdelle, Paris 31 March–12 July 2015.
9. It is strangely appropriate then that ‘Black Venus’ is the painting that won Cathy Lomax the Contemporary British Painting prize, 2016, for which this essay is also being written.
10. In 2011 cinema theorist and historian Mark Cousins made The Story of Film: An Odyssey, his own reflective TV series (also available as a boxed set), based on the 2004 book of the same name, describing the complex arc of cinema's global history. The emergence of these two projects seems to signal the end of an era.
11. A technical notion exploited with comprehensive, creative, cultural and philosophical depth in: Death 24 x a second: stillness and the moving image, by Laura Mulvey, London: Reaktion Books, 2006.
12. Alex Michon wrote insightfully about Lomax's ‘Film Diary’ series in her article ‘Film Stilled’, in Garageland 14: Film, 35–38.
13. Suggestive of Gilles Deleuze's suggestions re cinema's influence on the possibilities of philosophical thinking in Cinema 1: the movement-image by Gilles Deleuze London, Athlone, 1986, and also: Cinema 2: the time-image by Gilles Deleuze, London, Athlone, 1989.
14. See: ‘I seem to have lost the reality of the … reality’, article by Cathy Lomax, in Garageland issue 19 – Self, 65–68.
15. In the final scene of the movie, the ‘fourth wall’ is even more comprehensively ruptured by the casual appearance on set of Cassavetes’ contemporary and/or mentor Peter Bogdanovich, who, six years earlier, constructed his own self-reflexive cine-masterpiece The Last Picture Show, which could perhaps be regarded as a cine-historical ‘bookend’ to Opening Night).
16. Here, I also think of the touching, compelling and inspiring movie ‘Notes on Blindness’ 2016, adapted with extraordinary sensitivity and invention by director Peter Middleton, from the book of the same name by John Hull.
17. Kaja Silverman, in her essay ‘Suture: the cinematic model’ (see: Identity: a reader, edited by Paul du Gay et al, published by Sage / Open University, 2000, 76–86) refers to the moment in Hitchcock's Psycho when the traffic cop, with large mirrored ‘shades’, does not remove his sunglasses. This evokes an ancient sign of foreboding, and suggests Lacan's concept of ‘The Real’, a terrifying state of human experience beyond language and yet nevertheless immanent. Cathy Lomax also mentions the repeated image of large sunglasses appearing in Alex Katz's paintings, as well as a prevalence of spectacles in the paintings of Luc Tuymans.
18. See: Legend, myth and magic in the image of the artist: a historical experiment, by Ernst Kris and Ottow Kurz; New Haven; Yale University Press, 1979.