Points on the Patri/Arc: Andrew Kötting’s ‘In the Wake of a Deadad’

Some Thoughts on a Project and its Process

‘I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together’
from ‘I Am the Walrus’ by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Desire, loneliness, the wind in the flowering almond; surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects – Louise Glück

Whether in his film, gallery, publishing or explicitly cross-platform projects, Andrew Kötting has never sought an easy, simply-decked monotone to his idiosyncratic meditations on family, place, social ritual and the artesian threads of narrative, rumour, custom and sometimes dubious tradition that link such territories. An often melancholy humour, an absurdist physical pranksterishness has carried, informed and even shaped the most personal of material. The awareness behind this attitude - that the lusting, entropic vessel of the body and its prime cargoes (the restless intellect with its wide roving eye and the anxious, rifted heart) somehow seem to survive, through the application of a particularly perverse will and a constantly creative call-and-response, vast swathes of what by reasonable assumption they should not – is what makes his work so refreshing, engaging and rewarding.

The above elements and their imperatives manifest perhaps most keenly in his latest cross-media exploration. ‘In the Wake of a Deadad’, seeded by the passing of Kötting’s father, is at once an elegy to, autopsy and exorcism of a troubling essential presence, as recalled and reimagined through topography, pornography and the associative reflections of others close and removed. Acknowledging and embedding the central qualities of memory - especially when such remembrance is felt in the body – namely, its provisionality and elusiveness, the project tellingly concentrates on the body of the father and those bodies that he remotely desired or rather, called into the orbit of his desire through consumption. (Even when the texts created by others are considered, it is important to note that they were initiated by the mailing out of photographs of the dead father, with his physicality the leading aspect of those images).

 

The prime organising structure of this project is around the conceit of the trinity, most obviously Kötting, his deadad and his deadad’s deadad. Such a numerical ordering is not essentially religious, although it is worth noting that the father, son and holy ghost (here, perhaps memory, a collective sense of the deceased) of ‘In the Wake of a Deadad’ are not so far in their ambiguous relations from the more widely known grouping.

The trinities here, however, continue, from the material manifestations – filmed inflations, pornographic decoupages and writings – to the intellectual triangulations. ‘In the Wake of a Deadad’ is built around the tangled relationship between place, the body and what we might call (aesthetic) re-memory, the public incarnation of memory in an artefact. Similarly, the sense of sitings (sightings), the body as a zone in its own right, the positioning of that body (whether Kötting’s or his inflated relatives) in a landscape or environment and the final placing of the resultant work, in the gallery or simply public consciousness by any means, serve further to underline how the triangulation of emotion generated by the material is encoded directly into the means of its representation.

And yet, despite the persistence of this schema, perhaps it is more accurate to describe the inter-relation as closer to that of the single surface of a moebius strip. In the twisted continuum of such a model, one finds the deep indivisibility of self from family, of generations from each other and of artistic form from content clearly encapsulated.

This way of conceiving fundamental associations is also helpful in considering how  Kötting, yoking together what might seem disparate strains – filmed inflations in 65 important family locations, treated ‘found’ pornography and the textual contributions – seeks to test the limits and tensions in his source material, whatever its scale (the fact that he finds or places himself, actually or digitally, in this material provides a crucial ‘embodiment’ of the point to be made). Indeed, it might at first appear that the opposite of the Faroes (the most geographically removed site) is the wardrobe where his father’s ‘glamour’ magazines were found, or that the counterpoint to ‘The Day of the Dead’ (exotic ritual of a major moment) is a 1970s three-piece suite.

Instead, examination reveals that such seeming oppositions, such measurements of his project’s parameters, are much closer than first appears. It is in this proximity that the lasting and wider resonance of this autobiographical installation lies. For, at its heart, ‘In the Wake of a Deadad’ looks to investigate, and ultimately to celebrate, whatever its emotional fallout or legacy, the power of aura, the potency of people and things and their impact on others and, by association, the remarkable fact of being alive, of being sensually perceptive, in the phenomenal world.

Whether it is the map’s edge, the Ultima Thule, the visceral, even fearful thrill of encountering previously unknown co-ordinates and islands, or the similar intimation of overwhelming vistas that open to an adolescent male on first viewing (and never forgetting) the iconic promise of the sexual as captured in the permanent imminence of pornography, and especially the anticipation within its thin narratives, what works in common is the profound charge both afford. Offering a kind of Blakean immersion in the physical moment of viewing, the heightened materiality of the ostensible subject (here realised via the devices of larger-than-life inflation and decoupage) and in the often emotive writings of colleagues, family and friends, the work seeks to collapse the distance between these apparently challenged elements to reveal a single intensity that flows moebius-like between all components in the puzzle, one revealed (à la ‘Magic Eye’ patterning) by a concentration of looking, an appreciation that seeks revelation and connection.

The fact that such aims are realised simultaneously in conceptual, organisational, aesthetic, material and thematic ways makes ‘In the Wake of a Deadad’ a genuinely satisfying and stimulating project. An ambitious experiment in creating prismatic  auto/biography, it will likely appeal to those audiences receptive to prompts towards their own multihued make-up; an audience who, having followed Kötting through his past and present tenses, might be inclined to name their journey, ‘In the Wake of a LiveLad.’

Gareth Evans, 3rd July 2005