Paul Eachus
The Agency Gallery, London
Summer 2014
by Paul O’Kane

 Colour of Chaos

Required to write in response to Paul Eachus’ work it is hard for me to avoid harking back to one of my favourite texts – Foucault’s Preface to The Order of Things. In this little theoretical gem –largely, it has to be said, the responsibility of Jorge Louis Borges from whose story Foucault took inspiration – we find a vertigo-inducing description of a world deprived not only of any recognisable order but devastatingly bereft of any foundation or context upon which or within which we might even begin to construct or arrange an order.

Eachus’ large-scale colour photographs depict a limbo-like realm somewhere between studio and domestic space (and thus between art and life), stuffed and littered with paraphernalia, any of which might, subject to certain processes and procedures, become constituted as recognisable works – collages, combines or objects. However all of this is left as a latent provocation for our eyes and imaginations as the viewer is offered the task of imagining the possible or potential artworks available here and of thus making sense of apparent chaos.

But like Foucault and his inspirations Borges it is not enough for Eachus to challenge us with mere taxonomic confusion, closer scrutiny of a work like Tremor (2008) reveals that the very floor upon which these wildly disorganised and heterogeneous collections might be supported is often in unreliable disarray. The kind of reassuringly flat surface now so celebrated by major white cube galleries in the form of a highly polished concrete floor is not considered here to be a prerequisite for the making or displaying of art. Instead Eachus’ floor is seriously disturbed, ensuring everything that tries to rest upon it will be destabilised. It thus reminds us (as do Foucault / Borges) of the ultimately arbitrary, imaginary, mythologised and delusory reliance upon any particular orientation or reality to which we adhere in the course of conducting more or less pragmatic, common-sense or hum-drum lives.

In truth, like a scene from a David Lynch movie, the chaos of the universe threatens to open up just beneath the few inches of carpet and planed timber that we think of as the limit of our home or studio and whose fragile structure is at least symbolic of the foundation of our life and culture. Meanwhile, just behind the safely coded wiring of every clean white plug socket, beyond and within these conduits and the pipes that lead from our shining taps and glittering modern appliances we are likely to encounter elemental, unformed and ancient forces. Meanwhile wars fought over such sources of powers and energy regularly and all too easily lead to the levelling of whole cities to rubble and dust.

Photography’s notoriously prurient and vicarious tendencies here invite us to peer into a quasi-private space in which the artist may seem to be enacting a form of ‘dirty protest’, complaining demonstratively and obsessively about their incarceration within capitalism’s commodified spaces, their immersion in a bewildering sea of consumerist clutter that obstructs the path to a more meaningful way of life.

The artist, discovering, through long, serious and often solipsistic consideration, disturbing challenges that ultimately confront our most commonplace truths is entitled (we might say ‘duty-bound’) to give some response - albeit fleeting, temporary, existing perhaps only in and as a photograph, a kind of event - and thus to communicate (as Paul Eachus does with vivid clarity) that which they have discovered on an idiosyncratic journey behind the surface, behind and within the scene (as Jean Baudrillard loved to call it) of everyday experience.     

Perpetuating, as best they can, the legacies of the bohemian and avant-garde today’s persistently progressive thinkers and makers surrender any personally contrived comfort to reveal all that is hidden by the increasingly dominant image or meta-concept of ‘normality.’ It becomes the philosopher’s, the writer’s and the artist’s role to make ‘counter images’ opposing those that maintain complicity with this ‘spectacle’(as Guy Debord christened it in the 1960s.) Eachus’ photographs are an example of such a noble quest but they are not just works of art they are simultaneously art at work, artwork-in-progress, images of ‘work’ per se, and a particularly persistent, urgent form of work at that, not unlike that of a bird or insect anxiously building and rebuilding its nest. The arch-Victorian/ capitalist painting ‘Work’ by Ford Maddox Ford might be worthy of comparison, but only as a kind of utilitarian antithesis. In support of Eachus’ activity we might instead call upon one of his heroes, Marcel Duchamp, who, in perhaps the most enigmatic, compelling and provocative of all his enduring questions asked artists: "Can one make works which are not works of 'art' ? "

In Eachus’ work – also manifest as drawings, collages, books, free-standing assemblages or sculptures - we are consistently confronted with the kind of refusal to deny the terrifying potential for disorganisation that the artist Robert Smithson termed ‘entropy’, but while Smithson read the greatest expanses of time into elemental forms of geology Eachus decodes a blizzard of commodities and media as so much gibberish and interference, above, around and beyond which a human mind is yet capable of seeing and thinking.

The failure of the project of modernity which began with that great abandoned bourgeois plan The Encyclopaedia (lampooned in Flaubert’s own unfinished novel Bouvard & Pecuchet), returns us conveniently to Foucault, Borges and their own disruptive visions. We only have to consider the subtitle of Foucault’s book: ‘An Archaeology of the Human Sciences’, to feel, not the pro-fundity of his venture but what we might call its a-fundity, noting that foundations must be the very first target for any such enquiry. Given Foucault’s aim to use History to undermine and destabilise modern institutions, every word of that subtitle should arouse fear in us, albeit of the kind that also provokes sublime, sensual excitement, as even our bodies, in playing their modest part in forming our precious human selves, rely only precariously upon what Deleuze & Guattari - after Antonin Artaud - described as a representational ‘organ-isation’.

Eachus’works imply manifold hurried activities carried out in a state of continuous becoming that denies us the reassurance of coherent, extensive form and leaves materiality swirling in intensity as all becomes potential, virtual -in the Deleuzian sense of awaiting actualisation. But while unpredictability may be interpreted as replete with promise it also becomes the locus of our fears, compounding our recently acquired inability to know. To encounter Paul Eachus’ work is thus to look into the mind of someone brave enough to ‘bring home’ such critical disturbances and conduct the daily ritual of art practice without aspiring to the commonplace of a satisfactorily bounded resolution or insincerely celebrated achievement. Instead Eachus refuses to deny the open-ended implications of apparently innocent acts and small gestures – the tearing of paper, juxtaposition, the mere moving of an object from one place to another, the exploitation and exhaustion of commandeered objects and materials.

Nevertheless Eachus’ works also reward us with joyful colours and an array of forms over which our avaricious and acquisitive eyes are invited to wander as if exploring a carnival or theme park where chaos has itself become normalised. 21st Century, capitalist, consumerist life, for all its indignity, shame and anxiety is, for the visual artist, in one sense redeemed by its effusive deployment of colour. It is therefore perhaps significant that the destroyed cities we find illustrated within our weekend newspaper supplements become like a painter’s palette on which all has been carelessly mixed, as whole neighbourhoods, entire cities, deprived of form and organisation by the force of high explosives become the uniform muddy grey of a base matter, the modern equivalent of a primeval stew from which a new society and civilisation might yet hope to re-emerge.

Eachus’ enthusiastic use of colour might then remind and reassure us that behind the incisive de-con-structions of Nietzschean anti-philosophers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deluze lies the mischievous intentions of the imaginative artist/trickster Borges. Faced with chaos and volcanic volatility and abandoned by knowledge we are as likely to laugh as to cry, as likely to play games as to descend into barbaric fighting, and as we lose our balance in a self-induced disorientation we still have the choice to either cry out in panic, whistle or to sing, grimace or grin or simply to arrest our fall by adapting our gravitational tendencies into some form of dance. To help us negotiate a 21st century complexity that leads us from an object-based paradigm into a more event-ual paradigm Deleuze attempted to revive the vocabulary of the 17th century Baroque wherein apparent ‘failure’ might, through infinite twists and turns inevitably turn to a continuous ‘becoming.’ Thus the loss of one order gives rise to a less familiar, more complex and yet more appropriate order, allowing us to inhabit a virtual state on the threshold of a future we had previously believed to be inaccessible.