Michelle Cotton on Babak Ghazi

 

A chair that looks like it was born out of a 1970s design intersection, between consumer modernism and Croydon cottages, is warped and tarnished in a way that bears witness to time spent in the skip and studio. Wedged between the rusting tubular frame and faded floral upholstery there is a square mirror and an acetate with an instructive image from the 1976 illustrated manual The Joy of Sex. how-to-do-it (2004) proposes itself both as sculpture and object of utility; inviting the user to emulate the position that the couple adopt symmetrically in the photograph by straddling the chair, adding another layer of visual information to the mirror. This ambiguity also holds for You & Me (2004), an austere, black, metal floor lamp with a microphone taped to its hood. The light is angled at the floor and the microphone poised for vocal encounter. The piece appears to be at once a live invitation to speech and silencer, the microphone left unplugged and the halo of yellowed light preventing us from mistaking it for a make-shift microphone stand.

 

how-to-do-it and You & Me set up platforms for individual action; they both refer to symbols of emancipation Ð the sexual revolution and the notion of free speech Ð and neuter their potential. The anachronistic appearance of the image from The Joy of Sex, botched by photocopying and imperfections in the silver of the mirror, signal the mass-commodification of sexual practices. Its faded optimism chimes with the references to the corruption of Bauhaus ideals or even the wholesome lifestyle envisioned by 1970s suburban home-makers. You & Me invites speech but does not offer any form of amplification, overwriting the act by obstructing the view of the speaker with light. Both pieces, of course, appear to us in the prohibitive context of the gallery environment where their status as sculpture prevails.

 

The central contradiction that occurs here (to be repeated and elaborated on in other works) is the status of the individual as a free subject, sanctioned with the rights to expression and secure in a culture of liberal pluralism and the way in which this experience is organised by social and economic structures.

 

Two images of Bill Gates are displayed side-by-side, a narrow seam between them. They are photocopied from the same image although in the first the lower part is in dark shadow, whilst the upper part appears over-exposed. The tonal split is reversed and re-doubled in the second. Good Bill Bad (2005) uses as source material, a photograph from a series taken for the Wall Street Journal in 1985 to mark the release of Microsoft Windows Version 1.0. Other images from the shoot feature a thirty-year-old Gates going to extraordinary lengths to appear casual, posing with elbows propped on a computer monitor (bearing the company logo) or sat on the desk tossing the software discs into the air in a limp frisbee action, so extraordinary in fact that a recent internet hoax claimed they were taken as pin-ups for the American magazine Teen Beat[1]. Good Bill Bad uses a close-up shot of Gates holding up the Windows disc, staring piercingly into the eye of the camera, lips curled in an uneven smile. He's a picture of ordinariness, wearing a homely, cream, wool sweater and a plaid shirt but his brazen self-assurance is nothing short of heroic[2].

 

Ghazi has distorted the photograph through a manual intervention in the photocopying process. The first image, a journalistic legend of success is counter-balanced by a second which removes all traces of facial character and ordinary geek clothing to leave only eyes staring eerily out from the darkness and the word 'Microsoft', a symbol of power synonymous with the figure in shadow. There is an obvious dualism here, the title aligning the positive / negative divide in the diptych with an idea of virtue and its antonym. Yet the purity of this division is marred by the contemporary application of the image. In the context of Ghazi's work the narrative of the Microsoft entrepreneur as a modern hero is underwritten with a fear of the power wielded by a corporate architect of technology structuring production, communication and thought across industrial, geographic and cultural divides.

 

The contemporary significance of this image goes beyond the Microsoft corporate history to imply the virtualization of work and its associated global impact on production. Previous to Good Bill Bad, Ghazi began an ongoing series of collages that utilise fragments of broken CD discs on glossy magazine advertisements for luxury goods. In most of these untitled works the CD fragments mask designer sunglasses creating a reflective mosaic. The collages refer to the advertisements as a genre and the collective impression of the products unified by this rude decoration ghosts our encounter with the advertisements in their everyday context.

 

In the magazine collages the CD fragments appear as a material, a means to clone and circulate the products of intellectual labour literally broken down to their physical reality and present as a familiar throwaway item. In Good Bill Bad the floppy disc, now practically obsolete, stands in for an idea of an original version of a now ubiquitous operating system. The narrative between these works refers to different stages in the reorganisation of labour and the role that technology has played in generating what Antonio Negri has called "forms of life", everyday life "organised on the basis of production" and "used to generate profit"[3]. Moreover they point to how this reorganisation affects our access to knowledge, now placed at the centre of production and the subject of increasing legislation and corporate control.

 

In Ghazi's work forms of life refer also to consumption and the way in which identity is expressed through material goods and life-style choices, co-opted and defined by market forces. The magazine collage series parades an exhaustive range of consumer options ('Chanel', 'Fendi', ÔGucci' etc.) that add up to no choice at all. In writing about his work and curatorial projects Ghazi often refers to Slavoj ŽižekÕs critique of Òliberal totalitarianismÓ. Žižek has argued that in western, liberal society "we 'feel free' because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom" reasoning that the ideological terms of choice are devised in such a way as "to mystify perception" instead of allowing us "to think". Žižek ventures the suggestion that "our freedoms themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom"[4]. For Žižek the only true and radical choice "is a choice in which I do not merely choose between two or more options WITHIN a pre-given set of co-ordinates, but I choose to change this set of co-ordinates itself"[5]

 

Ghazi's recent work has focussed on a succession of cultural icons emerging from the late 1970s through to the early 1980s that collectively represent an attempt to invent self-determined forms of life through creative output. Figures that emerged through the music scene and were effective in creating sub-cultures around their self-styled identities (David Bowie, Steve Strange, Bryan Ferry) or projecting an image that consists in ambiguity, flirting with the frailty of cultural norms or linguistic order (Grace Jones, Prince) recur in material sourced from magazines or the internet alongside references to cultural products that share a status based on alterity (graphic design for bands such as Spandau Ballet, New Order, Kraftwerk, magazines such as i-D and The Face). Through a proliferation of images and associated media Ghazi re-casts this iconography within his discourse on the creative individual, "free to choose his way of life"[6].

 

Whereas the individual figures tend to stand for a belief in transcendence through the mutability of codes, a kind of splendid glitch that is a source of influence beyond its own design, there are darker undertones to other works. Creative Review (2004) is comprised of four issues of the design manual arranged so that the signature right-angled, title graphics join to form a swastika. Other works exploit the fascistic references at play in the formulation of identities for Spandau Ballet and New Order[7]. Beyond forms of life, history evidences attempts to "format life", Nazism being "the most extreme example"[8]

 

These works function within the logic of subculture, requiring initiation to the terms of reference through an acquisition of knowledge that parallels fandom. The viewer becomes complicit in a culture of elitism through a process of decoding the artwork; in fact the artwork predicates this in the terms by which it would be read. Mirrors behind acetates, tinted Perspex plinths and vitrines, tinsel curtains, foil make repeat appearances in these works, transmitting fragments of the viewing subjectÕs own visual identity, short-circuiting concentration and confirming the viewerÕs role in the production of meaning.

 

Production of meaning in Ghazi's work involves an oscillation between the reality of the artwork, its material content and intellectual paths cut within a symbolism that refers to material that is historically distant and a return to a notion of immediate reality, centred around a personal projection of selfhood and investment of knowledge. The fiction of the artwork is interrupted and the codes of the gallery space scrambled, by the ambiguity of works that perpetually constitute and elaborate on their own language whilst proposing their immediate use value.

 

Bertolt Brecht once remarked that he found it "unspeakably ridiculous" that a spectator was "sshhh'd" for exclaiming astonishment at a gesture performed by the Chinese actor Mei Lan-fang during a death scene, "they behaved as if they were present at the real death of a real girl". Brecht famously admired Lan-fang and his contemporaries in Chinese theatre for raising the creative process to a conscious level, externalising emotional or psychological events through a symbolic language of gesture, creating a separation between character and performer so that the audience is engaged in observing the character from a "socially critical" rather than empathetic perspective. Brecht favoured a technical expertise that placed emphasis on performance as a "version" or "actor's account" of a character rather than a trance-like portrayal "in character" claiming that "in this way the performance becomes a discussion (about social conditions) with the audience he is addressing". Brecht insisted that incidents should be played within the context of a fixed point in history rather than attempting to naturalise their universal relevance. The present-day should occupy the same space of detachment to the overall end of interrogating events and actions with "the idea of man as a function of the environment and the environment as a function of man"[9].

 

For Brecht, an active, intellectual involvement with the work meant that the audience response could be out of sync with the characterÕs mood or indeed other members of the audience. The actor and audience can update historical events as they move from dramatic narrative to moments of contemporary relevance and self-reflexive recognition. The work is at once a product of social and economic conditions and its meaning consciously constructed by an individual at a fixed moment in history.

 

The oscillation that occurs in Ghazi's work is produced in this space between quoting history and an updating that unfolds through our involvement with Ghazi's version, moving back and forth between meaning encrypted in the object and its role as an active component in real time. Even if we could sustain an engagement with the content of the object, the work anticipates rupture, hopeful of an individual investment that could produce something extraordinary or even new. Ghazi makes reference to spheres of culture that are by definition consistently reviewed for an updated version of the present; pop music, design, technology, fashion. Citing moments of cultural return Ð and historicising material from a contemporary popular memory of revivals, themselves quoting from a fictional version of a more distant past Ð Ghazi delivers us back to the present, co-ordinates bent slightly out of shape but perhaps not so easily reset.