fade held  //  Essay by Rachel Tant

Commenting on his window displays for Simpson’s department store in London in 1936, the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy stated that ‘the impact has to come from the familiar object presented in an unfamiliar way’. In Martin Westwood’s installation, fade held, we are confounded by a multitude of images and forms that appear at once both familiar and strange. Scanning the room we register everyday scenes of retail, advertising and business, each populated by customers and company professionals engaged in moments of exchange or transaction. Figures like the car salesman and the suited executive are recognisable stereotypes of the commercial world. But they are depicted here with extreme anonymity. Flat, faceless, and constructed from sterile materials, they are rendered unfamiliar, lifeless and dysfunctional.

Martin Westwood detail from held 2005 © Courtesy the artist and The Approach, London

Martin Westwood detail from held 2005 © Courtesy the artist and The Approach, London

Commerce and its effect on daily life is a constant theme in Westwood’s work. The banality of corporate culture and the deadening effects of its streamlined and automated systems are at the heart of his practice. Slick business brochures, industry magazines and commonplace mass-produced objects from the office environment provide him with the raw materials for his complex and multi-layered work. Outdated photographs, newspapers, invoice sheets, paperclips and notice boards are removed from their regular habitat and recycled to form highly crafted components of larger installations. The impersonal nature of the media and Westwood’s methods of production set limits on his artistic role and perhaps redefines him as a participant in a larger network of processes rather than a sole, isolated creator.

Westwood’s remodelling of the corporate aesthetic generates visually compelling elements that subtly undermine the order and uniformity of their origin. For example, the idealised form of the balloon – a festive object commandeered as a promotional tool – is instantly recognisable. But here, inverted and formed of a solid membrane, it becomes peculiar and attention is drawn to the process of its manufacture. Handmade from shredded strips of paper meticulously pieced together as a papier-mâché object, Westwood’s balloon puts office waste to creative use. Shredded documents – sensitive or confidential data – have been redeployed in a new form to charge the balloon with connotations of secrecy, weight and petrification.

The idea that creativity finds little outlet in a bureaucracy is further explored by Westwood’s use of natural forms, such as the leaf. Machined from polished steel and resembling a company logo, Westwood’s thick, heavy leaves deny their organic origins. They highlight the tension between spontaneity and control, and make ironic comment on the corporate use of images from nature. The repetition of these elements throughout Westwood’s work gives them the force of emblems. Collectively they establish a distinct iconography with which the artist skews normality and disrupts expectation.

Human figures and gestures are also pivotal in Westwood’s work, and often underline the uneasy relationship between personal freedom and systems of control in a capitalist society. At the far end of the space, for instance, we notice a group of figures, laser-cut from stainless steel that resemble cardboard cut-outs from a shop window. On adjacent walls a credit card transaction takes place at a cash desk, and a car – symbol of success and prestige – is stencilled next to its prospective buyer.

The sanitised and anonymous representation of Westwood’s figures dehumanises them. In his work individuality is expendable, identity measurable only in terms of ownership and exchange. The notes and scraps of paper stuffed into the gaps and joints of the steel figures hint at hidden details and inner thoughts and heighten the sense of repression, the stranglehold of corporate goals over personal creativity. A feeling of emptiness and alienation dominates these scenes of commerce and disrupts the sense of order expected in such arenas.

Martin Westwood fade held 2005 Tate Britain Photo courtesy Marcella Leith enlarge image		Martin Westwood fade held 2005 Tate Britain Photo courtesy Marcella Leith enlarge image

With no discernible narrative to unite Westwood’s collection of figures and forms, our attention is brought back to the physical details of the installation. The raised floor, accessed via a ramp, compresses the space and provides the gallery with a sense of theatre. Two temporary curved screens extending around the perimeter of the room add to the impermanence of the spectacle. The dynamic contour of these screens and the geometric precision of other structural features make reference to Constructivism, an early 20th century industrial aesthetic. The flow of curvilinear forms here and the focus on profile over solid volume, for example, is reminiscent of Moholy-Nagy’s commercial designs for trade and exhibition stands.

Martin Westwood fade held 2005 Tate Britain Photo courtesy Marcella Leith enlarge image

The great variety of parts from which Westwood’s display is made up undermines the initial appearance of order and uniformity. This is an unpredictable, open-ended environment and the viewer is invited to explore many different path to make links between its constituent objects. As we advance through the installation our path is impeded by several spiral stairwells cut into the floor, each more abstracted and dynamic than the last. These structures perhaps suggest flaws in a system; they are at odds with architectural practice and the civilising idea of coordinated space. They resemble pie charts and remind us that the installation is constructed within an economic framework. Within the context of a national museum, such structures prompt us to consider our physical surroundings and question what might be beneath the surface of this temporary structure – or indeed behind the façade of the institution.

Westwood further explores the notion of a business-like approach to art in the circular table, like a display case, that forms the centrepiece of the installation. Encased behind glass, outmoded images of a man and a woman are held down by stone-like lumps fabricated from low-grade materials. The objects are given a new status and value by virtue of their being on display, and yet are at the same time made dead. A Venn diagram shape is repeated and solidified to provide the table top. Here it looks like an eclipse, but the two-tone glass from which it is made robs it of the romance associated with such natural phenomena. A transitional moment is held in check. Cast into darkness, the interaction between the figures below the glass surface, the suggestion of intimacy, remains hidden and contained.

Yet, as in all of Westwood’s work, the presence of an unpredictable and liberating force is detectable in the space. The stone that weighs down a sheet of paper on the table, strands of hair blown across a customer’s face, the scattering of fallen leaves across the floor: all these details evoke the free and disordering power of the wind. Westwood’s investigation remains open-ended. With normality disrupted, his installation functions as a psychological space, a stage on which a chain of fundamental contradictions of contemporary life are played out to allow a moment of reflection.

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