The Glass
Using reworked found images and sounds, aspects of the complex relationship between the west and the ‘developing’ world – political, social and economic- are explored. Developed as both an interactive CD-ROM and an exhibition. Produced as part of Mphil project at the University of Derby.
A shockwave version that combines images and sounds is available here.
Introduction to The Glass
by Giles Peaker
It might come as a surprise if I call Geoff Broadway’s work realist. Realism as an idea has not had a good time lately, or indeed for the last forty years or more. It is now a commonplace that any image is a re-presentation, that seeing is not believing. We look suspiciously at any claims to tell us ‘how things really are’, and the ‘realistic’ is a style that we recognise and recognise as a style. But these works that I would claim to be realist are hardly ‘documentary’. They are the very height of artifice, fragments of found images brought together in the pixellated space of a computer screen, texts sewn together from a multitude of sources; and they do not hide their construction, even as they form one image.
What kind of realism is it in which commercial graphics, advertising images, stills of TV footage, historical objects, passages from novels, official statistics and so on, are placed together?
In some ways, this work calls upon the history of photomontage and looks to the cut up photographs of 1920s Berlin Dada and the anti-nazi magazine covers of John Heartfield in the 1930s. Those works came from a recognition that, as Bertold Brecht observed, a photograph of a factory can tell you nothing about its reality, the relationships that make up its workings. Reality cannot be shown in a ‘documentary’ photograph, because reality is not just things. Things are only the traces of reality.
However, the techniques of photomontage are themselves now a commonplace, surrounding us on advertising hoardings and television. From the start, photomontage workers recognised that the image was becoming a large part of everyday experience. Now that tendency has saturated every part of our lives with images which demand our attention. The surprising juxtaposition is as good a means as any.
Montage is a part of the world we experience, the array of images and information that passes through us – images of fantasy, distance, desire and banality. But in these constructions, montage works to make us aware of those images as traces of reality – a reality which can’t be ‘pictured’ but can be thought. There are certain techniques used to move us beyond the images. Similarities between things, which we are used to seeing separately, remove the familiarity with which we view them and cast them in a new light: An ancient culture’s sacrifices to a terrible and demanding god echo in their descendent’s servitude to a distant and mysterious market in financial futures; a tribal necklace half turns into the symbol of a multinational corporation which lays waste the homelands from which it came. In other places, images which are incompatible or contradictory, yet are of the same thing, are placed together. The dream-like Sheik of Araby gallops through a 19th century study of motion – the traces of a western fantasy of erotic mystery that is present in T.E. Lawrence as well as Valentino. Rudely burning into this reverie are the well head fires of Kuwait and the brutality of regimes whose role is to keep the oil flowing through the gulf. Both of these versions of the arab are laid over a 12th century timepiece, a reminder of the history of a complex civilisation that is still visible through the images that try to cover it. Familiar dreams and immediate images reveal their contradictions and open onto something else.
Technique is not all – the same ways of constructing images sell us cars – but these works rely on our ease of reading montage in order to undermine it. The parts are brought together but do not form a single whole, we cannot forget where they come from and their easy meaning, even while that meaning is changed by their combination. Between the charming 18th century fan and the cosy exoticism of the Brooke Bond tea picker lies a history, marked by the barbed mouths of the leaves, which stretches from the East India Company to the present.
Geoff Broadway’s realism is a realism of the world we live in everyday. But it is not just a picture of that world. The shifting images, which are things, are only the trace of reality. In their juxtapositions and sometimes unnerving transformations, these constructions open up the reality which left these traces – a complex one, but one that can still be thought. A reality which is not just here, now, but has been and is being made. In the end, these are not just pictures, they want to be part of that reality.
Giles Peaker 1997
