Angus Fairhurst

Angus Fairhurst (born October 4, 1966 in Pembury , Kent , † March 29, 2008 in Bridge of Orchy , Scotland ) was a British artist and was one of the Young British Artists . His oeuvre includes installation, photography and video.

Angus Fairhurst: A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling .

Life and work

Angus Fairhurst was born in Pembury, Kent. He attended The Judd School between 1978 and 1985. He later studied at Canterbury Art College from 1985 to 1986 and later moved to Goldsmiths College , where he graduated in Fine Art in 1989. His class also included well-known representatives of the contemporary art scene, such as Damien Hirst , Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas . Fairhurst had a longstanding relationship with Sarah Lucas. In February 1988, Fairhurst organized one of the first exhibitions of his work with fellow art students. It is regarded as the forerunner of the exhibition Freeze organized by Hirst in July 1988 , which led to the breakthrough of the Young British Artists. Fairhurst and Hirst became good friends in the course of their careers and cooperated on many projects.

Fairhurst's work was often dominated by visual illusions and fake jokes. He also worked with different media, including video art, photography, painting and sculpture. His gorilla sculptures are particularly well known.

death

Fairhurst exhibited at the Sadie Coles HQ gallery in London. On March 29, 2008, the final day of his third solo exhibition at the gallery, Fairhurst was found dead, hanging from a tree in the Highland Forests near Bridge of Orchy, Scotland. Fairhurst leaves behind his mother and brother.

Fairhurst's oeuvre

Gallery Connection

In 1991, Fairhurst landed a coup in the London art scene with Gallery Connection in the early 1990s. The contemporary art gallery scene in London was limited at the time, limited to around ten to eleven institutions. Fairhurst called these galleries and put the phones together and connected them. The thus involuntary call partners did not want to take any responsibility for the origin of the phone call. The reactions were from annoyed to amused. Fairhurst repeated this prank several times in the 1990s - a "running gag" that worked again and again.

Gorillas and bananas

The figure of the gorilla plays a central theme in Angus Fairhurst's oeuvre. These were created in the 1993s using a wide variety of materials and media, including drawings, costumes and bronze sculptures. Another motif in his work is the banana. These emerged a little later in the artistic work of Fairhurst, from around the 1998s. Both groups of works have similar design elements and thematic content. They are particularly characterized by Fairhurst's grotesque humor, which is considered special. In the works "Banana Skin in The Hall of Mirrors" (1998) and "A Birth of Consistency" (2004) the topic of human identification through one's own reflection is thematized. Often times, both the gorilla and the banana are symbolic of his animal alter ego. Furthermore, these works are characterized as icons of the cartoon, from which a recurring fascination for Fairhurst emanated. In particular, the banana peel, a well-known slapstick classic, is presented in his works in a new design language, from the comical, melancholy depiction to the absurd.

Gorilla motif Within Fairhurst's oeuvre, which is repeatedly assumed not to be a “signature art”, the gorilla is a frequently recurring motif during the 1990s. Various works also contain his typical black humor.

In his work “ Pietà ” he equates the gorilla with Maria. To him, he's a compassionate, altruistic, and emotional being. An animal that is equal to humans. He is the metaphor for everyone.

Fairhurst on "A cheap and ill-fitting gorilla suit":

"Underneath this big hairy masculine thing, there I was in the end, a skinny lanky geezer."

Examples:

Performance : “A cheap and ill-fitting gorilla suit”, 1995. Photography : “ Pietà ”, 1996. Installation : “Bodies”, 1995.

Low lower lowest expectations

Angus Fairhurst's recurring work title low, lower, lowest Expectations denotes different works in the British oeuvre.

performance

The performances of Fairhurst found between 1995 and 2001 instead and were Abandabondon presented by Fairhurst`s band. The series started with the first performance "Low Expectations", it continued with "Lower Expectations" and then with "Lowest Expectations". The appearances had essential characteristics of a rock concert. As a music performance, the musical is emphasized, but the temporal moment of the structuring and the action are in the foreground, so that the performance is overriding the actual piece of music. During the performance, tapes are only played. The instruments are drowned out by the audio recordings, a band performance is only represented by facial expressions. During the act, the tapes are played canonically until a non-identifiable audio mix is ​​created. The constant repetition does not lead to infinity, however, but comes to an end after about 30 minutes.

Aluminum panels

The aluminum panels were commissioned by Fairhurst from 1996 to 1997. It is a computer-generated pattern that was transferred onto aluminum panels by sign painters. The pattern was initially simply reproduced and then superimposed in a canon-like manner. There are twelve increases within a sample template. Low Expectations is the black and white pattern, lower Expectations works with blue, red and black and lowest Expectations adds yellow. The basic colors also create mixed colors. The stencil-like superimposition of the patterns creates a dense, almost indistinguishable pattern structure.

Animations 1995 to 2001

Angus Fairhurst developed various animations between 1995 and 2001. Two of them were presented to the public for the first time in 1995 in the exhibition "Brilliant! New Art from London" organized by the Walker Art Center. The "BODIES" exhibition, which took place at the Sadie Coles Gallery in London at the end of February 2015, was ultimately dedicated to Angus Fairhurst's animation. They were played there on eight large monitors in chronological order from 1995 to 2001 in a continuous loop. Overall, they comprise a 14-minute cycle and show hand-drawn gorillas, human body parts that are placed on top of each other in an unnatural way and sometimes balance in empty space, as well as male and female genitals. Glowing color fields in the primary colors blue, red and yellow as well as the complementary colors green and purple served as the background for the animations. The animation videos often served as the backdrop for performances by Angus Fairhurst's band "Abandabandon", which was active between 1995 and 2001. The band played parallel to the repeated videos. The large format of the monitors emphasized the contrast between the drawings and the luminous, unchanging color fields.

Strange Loops 1995/1996

In Strange Loops is the first four animations that originated around 1995 and the 1996th Each of the videos also has a subtitle that relates directly to the corresponding video.

content

The first video Strange Loops - Catching and Dropping, which was made in 1995, shows a sketch of a gorilla in profile against a light yellow background, who is catching a falling naked man with his arms. The gorilla then moves a few steps forward with him and back again. Finally he drops the man again and turns his back on the viewer.

In the second animation, Strange Loops - Stripping , also created around 1995, the drawings are again shown in sketchy form against the same light yellow background. You can see a gorilla again, this time pulling off the skin of an equally naked man from head to toe like a banana. Thereby he reveals another, identical naked man under the skin.

The third animation, Strange Loops - Dissecting, from 1996 also shows a gorilla, but this time in the form of a costume, which can be recognized by a zipper on the front. The human figure that is tucked into it faces forward and swings its arms slightly. This time the figure is colored and less sketchy and the light yellow background has been replaced by a bright yellow. Black horizontal lines, which appear from the right in the picture, finally break up the body into five rotating anatomical cross-sections, so that the flesh and bones of the figure become visible. After the position pauses for a moment, the pieces dissolve horizontally into patterned layers referring to Angus Fairhurst's series of paintings, Low Lower Lowest Expectations . Finally, the layers come together again to form the figure in the gorilla costume.

In Strange Loops - Turning , also from 1996, the lower bodies of a female and male figure are placed on top of one another, starting with the stomach, so that the upper part replaces the upper body, especially the arms. The lower bodies of both figures are naked. The figure now balances haphazardly on its limbs, similar to a handstand, and rolls over several times. It almost seems like some kind of fight is going on. Here, too, the drawing is similar and colored. This time the background of the animation is a strong purple.

similarities and differences

The most important thing the animations have in common is that the actions in all videos are repeated in a loop, which refers to the title Strange Loops . You are thus dominated by a constant "up and down".

The drawings in the first two animations are more sketchy and less comic like in the two following ones. In addition, they are still colorless in 1995, while they were colored a year later. Not only the colors of the drawings, but also that of the background has changed: the light yellow has been replaced by stronger colors.

Strange Loops - Dissecting is the only video that has audio. The music in the background, reminiscent of a rock band, is believed to have come from Angus Fairhurst's band themselves.

All four videos depict humans and / or monkeys in some way. If both are represented together in an animation, it seems that the monkey always has power over people and not the other way around. The human figure appears passive and uncontrolled in the videos.

Another motif that can be seen in all four animations is that of nudity. In Strange Loops - Dissecting the human being is exposed, so to speak, in that we get to see the inside of the body and in the other three videos the human figure is always shown naked. In other of his animations, Angus Fairhurst also confronts us with nudity in the form of drawn genitals.

The anthropomorphic element in Angus Fairhurst's work is particularly well reflected in his animations. He plays with our expectations by creating new identities in the form of unequal pairs of bodies and repetitive events. Angus Fairhurst's handling of the loop and overlays can be understood as a metaphor for the absurdity of everyday life.

Web links

• Literature by and about Angus Fairhurst in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ^ Angus Fairhurst: Gallery Connections 1991-6 , Tate Gallery [accessed August 20, 2016].
2. ↑ Here is a video about Angus Fairhurst and Gallery Connection in the retrospective.
3. ^ Sacha Craddock, James Cahill: Angus Fairhurst . Ed .: Sadie Coles HQ. Philip Wilson Publishers, 2009, pp. 11 .
4. ^ Angus Fairhurst, 'Pietà (first version)' 1996. In: Tate. Retrieved September 14, 2016 . 
5. ^ An impression thanks to an amateur recording of a performance in the Anton Kern Gallery in New York on September 19, 1996.
6. ^ Angus Fairhurst - Westphalian Art Association. In: www.westfaelischer-kunstverein.de. Retrieved September 14, 2016 .