Globalization (as communication, expanded capital markets, a breakdown of borders, movement of people, and shifting of identities) has become a platitude. While it has perhaps been temporarily rethought as a result of certain ‘Volcanic activity,’ the distinction between what is local and what is global remains precarious. (Indeed, Rotterdam is also Turkey, Morocco, and Surinam.) How then, have the signifiers of ‘place’ shifted? And what new possibilities have opened up for the production of national or cross-national cultural identities and subjectivities?
For three months, London-based artist Craig Cooper has been inhabiting a constant state of migration on a three-part tour of artist run spaces in The Netherlands, France and England. Along with his person, he has brought with him the frame of a landscape painting by John Constable of his birthplace. While it hardly needs saying that Constable is an icon of English national identity, in this project we are asked to transpose this identity (and by extension the ways in which it is reproduced) onto a local context at variance with it. Cooper takes up Constable’s mode of looking at things anew, who said “when I sit down to make a sketch from nature the first thing I try to do is forget that I have ever seen a picture.”* In this way we are asked to imagine the frame containing something else and to look anew at the possibilities – to work without a subject in order to produce a new one, rather that a better informed version of an old one. The frame, both empty and full, grounds the local and global together in each of its manifestations and lends itself to metaphors of absence, presence, mapping and narrative present elsewhere in Cooper’s work. Spaces are folded, divided and overlapped: at once emptying out and renegotiating ways of relating to a place.
Text by Angela Johnston* John E. Thornes. John Constable’s Skies, (Birmingham: University of Birmingham press, 1999)
.
this project in collaboration with SEVEN ATLANTIC Rotterdam
t
