The images in Michael Batty’s most recent works appear as the aesthetic offspring of a marriage between existentialism and poststructuralism — rich in rampageous details, thrilling to the faculties and elusive in their sensibility. The viewer of these achromatic works certainly encounters meanings, but they are meanings which are understated, suspended, deferred, prorogued; meanings which have been put on ice, meanings which come without guarantees. In contrast to the attitude — which has tended to dominate Western art-making in the second half of the 20th century — that art should be issue-driven and have an agenda, Batty’s images are aesthetic and philosophical renderings that refuse to make the pompous claim that behind them there lies an Idea with a capital “I.” Instead of immediately apprehending an intended message, the viewer of Batty’s works confronts the cut-through surfaces to find the points of light that appear to rest beyond, which in turn provide a vantage point from which to see into the future.
In this process, viewers are pushed to consider what lies behind these surfaces, and indeed all surfaces. But this is not done in the simple-minded manner which argues that behind superficial surface is deep structure. Rather, Batty positions himself within a more poststructural tradition with his futuristic works — largely edited of colour and dramatically interrupted by incision — which destabilise the opposition between surface and depth, tugging the viewer to consider both these notions and always at the same time. His work shows that he knows that surface is key and that surface and depth are inextricably linked. First, it is the surface of a work that attracts the viewer, then, impelled by this experience, the viewer goes on to discover its depth, even when, as is often the case, this depth appears to offer up its deep meanings grudgingly, if at all. If, as existentialism teaches, the human predicament is that we must face the seeming nothingness which permeates our social existence, this lesson also comes with the exhortation to make meanings, despite the void. Batty, as artist, and through his art-making practice, instructs us likewise, showing us his way to do this by his activating of the void with images that appear both within and beyond his control.
The control in his work comes from a decade and a half of art-making, much editing and a career that has included four years at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and three separate Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops, where he was to meet and be influenced by, among others, William Perehudoff, an artist who is also represented by the Douglas Udell Gallery in Vancouver, as is Batty. It was Perehudoff’s art-making by-products — discarded tape and the like — of which Batty recognised the potential and used for his own art-making, inspiring a 1993 collage series titled Sixteen Collages (for William Perehudoff) which was later to comprise his first show at the Douglas Udell Gallery in 1996. At another of the Emma Lake workshops that he attended in 1994, Batty produced a body of work titled Standards (for Dennis Burton) and this body of work was first shown at Newzones Gallery of Contemporary Art in Calgary in the same year. By using this jazz metaphor, Batty summons up those who have influenced his work, while at the very same time editing out the past “masters” — distancing himself somewhat from those who had influenced him so as to become himself. In the field of jazz, musicians come back to a standard again and again, but always by offering their unique renditions of these standards. With this current body of work, Batty has now come to this place.
It is in this body of work that Batty feels he has found his signature. Batty is now at that stage of his artistic career that once one has seen an image of his, one will from then on recognise any others one may see in the future as Batty pieces. Batty talks about his arrival at a “signature” as a process of “giving up everything you have known to become yourself.” This discovery process is ongoing and non-linear. One edits only to find that the trace of what has been erased has reappeared, indeed, given rise to the eternal return. This signature of self is never static. There is always a behind. The ghosts remain.
This signature of which Batty speaks he finds with something new, with a break — by creating his art within the tension of control and spontaneity, where his performative success is never guaranteed by a formula, but remains open to the contingencies of his newly selected techniques of cutting and pouring paint. Batty exults in the very physicality of this method of painting and sees his art-making as bringing him into the presence of his life, as he, as artist, in turn makes his images present through what he has made absent in them. For Batty, what is present means more, the more he leaves absent. By doing less, he is the more active. Indeed, he speaks about his art-making as “coming out of making” and as the “development of meaning through the producing of work.” It is an art-making process in which artistic expertise appears — in the poststructural tradition — to be deferred. Batty says that he watches as much as he does in the art-making process, and that the results he finds himself with leave him full of wonder.
In poststructuralist mode, and as Lucio Fontana has done, Batty, by using the non-traditional tool of a knife rather than a brush, further explores the tension between disruption, on the one hand, and attentiveness, on the other, juxtaposing the hard edge of the cut with the soft run of the paint. Like Fontana, Batty too is concerned with the concept of space and movement and with a rejection of the traditional picture format, using this tool of incision to escape the more usual flat surface stretched tightly over a wooden frame. Both artists evoke a sense of infinity. But, Batty moves, too, to an interest in the unforeseen, the unprogrammable effects of how paint settles on the surface he has prepared with his incisions. This happens within the prevailing set of conventions but also beyond them, allowing for a dramatic reinvention in the artwork and a radical image of a far-off future. The viewer perceives in Batty’s work a sensibility similar to that in the work of the Futurists, in their attempt to capture movement, depicting it so as to convey a sense of the dynamism of the contemporary world. Thus, by bringing to his work what he has learned from those who have gone before him and what he himself has learnt from his 15 years of artistic practice, he, as well, and at the same time, allows himself and his work to remain open to the effects of chance, thereby facing his void — activating it with the incisions that now mark him, as much as the work he produces.
But as with all signatures, while the images in this new series can be discerned as having been created by the same person, no one piece in this current series is like another. Following the work of history of consciousness theorist Donna Haraway, there are replications but never repetitions. Each image with its cicatrix seems to deal with the physical world and to evoke a scape, but is it the urban scapes and the lights of the ultimate postmodern city of Los Angeles? Or an icy landscape of rural Canada? Or trees ahead viewed from a clearing? The images, all done quickly once Batty embarks on the actual physical procedure of making the images, speak of a physicality, but they give no easy name to their places. The images tell viewers that they can see from there, but the images only hint at what it is that is to be seen from that position. While all good art demands audience reception to make its production complete, some artists and works seem to trust their viewers more than others. This current body of work by Batty, which pulls its viewers in to collaborate with its creator in producing its meanings, is just such art. With Batty’s work viewers are continually and intentionally reminded that there are always elements in any text that drop out of view, to return, and that one of the tasks of both producer and receiver of the artistic text is to see behind and to help bring these into view. In Batty’s work the artistic creation is an open-ended play of traces in which his work gives up a new kind of beauty, albeit a beauty that is difficult, slippery, mobile and ultimately elusive.
© S Fuller 2011