THE SELF-ISOLATION RESIDENCY 27th FEBRUARY 2021: DAY 335

Desiderata. The Unreliability of the Extended Context:
Books-by-the-yard, Ring-lights and Andy Warhol.

(The Unreliability of the Extended Context: Books-by-the-yard, Ring-lights and Andy Warhol.

Today I’m going to take a slight sidestep away from my ongoing text regarding ‘the search for the sublime’ to begin to consider how the area, which I have referred to as the ‘extended context’ of portraiture during my recent notes, has suddenly taken on a new significance due to the Covid lockdowns. As I have previously expressed, the idea of the extended context has been well known and understood within the arts for centuries; indeed I myself, in what might even seem to be somewhat prophetic circumstances, utilised it in an extreme manner when it became to central focus for my self-portrait painting ‘Desiderata, things desired’ (above)  in which my chair substitutes anthropomorphically for my person.

The notion of the ‘extended context’ although not known by that title, or indeed, probably widely recognised at all previously, has not only become better understood by the general public but it also become something of a fashionable talking-point during 2020 due to the sudden pervasive use of Zoom and other such video conferencing media. Whereas the concept was previously used almost exclusively by artists to give this greater depth of ‘background colour’, accurately or not, to the personality of their subjects, it is now being used by politicians, business people and even egocentric social media users to do the same.

MPs sit in front of rows of well-thumbed volumes as they stare gravely at us from our TV screens (another interesting thing I’ve noticed during this time is a growing business in online companies selling second-hand-books-by-the-yard) suggesting that they have read and digested them all. Businessmen in expensive suits sit at even more expensive, gleaming, minimalist desks, only adorned by the latest and most outrageously expensive, high-tech gadgetry, partly there to facilitate the Zoom meetings but mainly there for appearance. Even home cooks on Tic-toc have taken to buying ring-lights to illuminate and give life to their rows of stale herbs and spices and to make the most of their, normally seldom used, culinary spaces.

Perhaps this is finally Andy Warhol’s famous 15 minutes of fame? If so it is perhaps not only a fleeting but also a sham fame. Can we trust what we see? Can we ever believe in what this extended context tells us about personalities when it can be just bought online by the yard? Could we ever trust it? How many of those painted noblemen that we see in art galleries, quill in hand, could actually write?