Roderick Harris on Michael Simpson

To think is to speculate with images.

-Giordano Bruno. (1)

In 1991 Michael Simpson was teaching on the painting course at Bath College of Higher
Education. As a preffered alternative to presenting slides and delivering a formal talk on
his practice he organised a group visit to his studio in Wiltshire. What I remember most
about this visit was a clear intent on his part to dispel the notion of art as romance and a
belief that student practice should be more rigorous, reinforced by a memorable
enthusiasm for a “clocking – in system of some kind” within college studios. Michael
embodied this notion of rigour in expressing with a directness and scalpel precision what
he thought and felt with regard to objects as well as attitudes. Seminars were
thoughtful and engaging, on occasion interrogative even. He became associated in my
mind with Lautremonts “Le Chant de Maldoror” after loaning out his first edition copy,
word subsequently spreading of underwater shark affairs, melancholy hermaphrodites
and malevolent hair lice.

Simpson has said that despite the apparent austerity of his painting he is essentially a
Romantic painter. He states, “I began making the bench paintings at the end of
December 1989. My intention from the outset was to attempt, for many reasons, a
homage to Giordano Bruno the renegade Neapolitan philosopher; to find a way of
depicting the circumstances surrounding his death and to examine, in more general
terms the infamy of religious history.”

Simpson’s recent “bench paintings” are implicitly romantic – according to a way of

thinking, a sensibility, and web of thematic preoccupation. Throughout earlier work
persisting themes are emerging or present, albeit in a language that evolves from early
surrealism or magical realism reminiscent of De Chirico, later - the occasional
appearance of a pop inflected absurdist neo – expressionism with paintings such as
“Tenir en Lesse” in which a yeti like figure appears in what looks like a gas mask and
freakishly thick skin or costume in a thick acid yellow, mapped by a dense grid or cage.
Later books - then babies falling across dark monumental canvasses, many of which he
decided to destroy. An avid collector of books his studio doubles as a library of Avant-
Garde often obscure experimental literature of the Twentieth Century.

Simpson’s approach to painting and thinking about painting bears relationship to Bruno’s
writing in that it is essentially connective, imagination - capacity for intuitive insight,
brought out of the mist through an equally rational and analytical rigour. Bruno’s natural
temperament was eminently suited to his living within the thick of the Renaissance, a
rationalist, mystic, philosopher, scientist, and free-thinker – an uber-smart detective of
his own psyche and time, who unsurprisingly;

“Wrote about a form of unification, a coagulation of all disciplines to create an

overarching vision, just as Leonardo had before him and Newton would after him.”
“Was not a specialist, not a genius of a single discipline. Bruno’s was an intelligence of
the kind that sought out challenging, dangerous ideas and found links between them…”
(2)

Giordano Bruno was imprisoned almost eight years in Rome during the Vatican’s
extermination programme. Charges included blasphemy, immoral conduct, and heresy
concerning basic doctrines of Bruno’s philosophy and cosmology. Bruno was guilty of
the crime of asserting and flatly refusing to un-assert the universe as infinite and
containing infinite worlds. If this were not enough to inspire execution through burning,
he also had the flat nerve to suggest we were “no more the centre than any other point
in the universe” and had plenty to say about the possibility of intelligent extra-terrestrial
life, a fairly stunning strain of heresy for 16thCentury Europe pouring from the mind of
an ex-priest. His favoured cosmology was essentially a type of pantheism that regarded
all matter as consciousness – an interesting bet for today’s climate, the science of
matter not resembling mysticism so closely since it were, absurdly enough – mysticism.

A similar tendency toward the orchestration of what are often viewed as distinct - even
opposing philosophical, psychological tendencies appears appropriately, an ambition of
early Hermetic Art;

“With their thought –pictures they attempted, according to a motto of the Rosicrucian
Michael Maier, “to reach the intellect via the senses.” To this extent, their highly cryptic,
pictorial world can be placed under the heading of one of its favourite motifs, the
hermaphrodite, as a cross between sensual stimulus (Aphrodite) and intellectual appeal
(Hermes). It is aimed at man’s intuitive insight into the essential connections, not at his
discursive ability which is largely held to be a destructive force.” (3)

In formal terms Michael’s “bench paintings” occupy a space that is neither fully that of
the traditional European picture, nor that of entirely “freed” twentieth century
abstraction (i.e. late Mondrian or Newmann) Indulging neither a gushing “vital”
Romanticism, nor the flat myth – phobic absolute rationality (or irrationality) of the
“pure” modernist , persisting by the latter’s criteria in allowing and even embracing the
“pollutants” of metaphor and poetic charge as welcome assistants lending leverage to
the case. In this sense they retain a dual character and neutrality crafting a space
where temperature, tone and setting are comfortable and engaging enough to spend
time without excess of theatre, distraction or extra furnishing - a quiet but thinking
presence as distinct from silence as absolute emptiness. They do not so much enact this
space as construct it as a gradual tracing of personal obsessions and instinctual
preferences.

A pictorial and ethical question potentially triggered by these preferences is in what

sense or light exactly is the subject matter of these paintings “painted”? What relation
does their rendering bear to subject? Any representation morally/emotionally charged
thus is inevitably problematic – the problem being inevitable aesthetic intervention
mythologizing or sanitising through “taste” and gravitas of one kind or another, or
equally risking failure or even damage through ambiguous counterfeit or Kitsch. We are
unjust in blaming art for this – with just a slight extension borne in mind - artifice, much
of the panic might dissolve (affording critical awareness some real space) Though in a
sense this is to state the patently obvious, It’s not a distinction we appear especially
skilled at - however potent and necessary, even our most direct means of making
images become aesthetically knotted with the realities whose surface evidences once
lay before their shutters. Hence the need for reminders from holocaust literature and
analysis that Auschwitz did not exist in black and white or sepia tone and was not played
out to a dramatic soundtrack, or any soundtrack other than that performed by the camp
band. Perhaps all we can ask is to retain as much perspective as possible with regard to
the currency of pictures as well as our personal theatres of emotion. The root of this
might be - I feel, not only inevitable and habitual association or even simply seduction –
the comfort of dramatisation spinning out lazy and convenient substitutes for
inexplicable, difficult, and less entertaining realities - but instinctual.
“Everyone knows that a photograph of their mother is not alive but will still be reluctant
to deface or destroy it ….. In short we are stuck with our magical, pre-modern attitudes
towards objects, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these attitudes but
to understand them”. (4)

Despite their subject matter these pictures are not concerned with transmitting a
moralised high pitch of terror, insanity, or tragedy - even less theatrically asserting
themselves, but with an intense kind of personal contemplation and broader, slower
meaning. Terror does not last indefinitely – the mind, through assimilation or burial re-
gathers its defences, the “trivial” plane of the everyday returns and we are thrown back
- left to ponder in a more sober light the implication of experience, imagination, terror,
and injustice glimpsed in it’s tragic dimension quite likely, at least for a time - as
lament.

In a sense Simpson’s bench’s navigate this territory in a slightly odd, if not perverse
manner – one by which we are left with an ambient range of expression more usually
associated with the solemn and death affirming, the bathos banishing and
authoritatively stern religious mindset that is paradoxically up for condemnation and
ridicule. Like a Hirst vitrine with cows head, flies, and (as in “Bench no. thirty-one”) -
insectecutor – we see Simpson’s case encaged in an austere language that appears in
these respects indistinguishable from it’s target, though not here as Hirst’s fleshy
carnival of psychotic laughter but with all it’s attendant hushed solemnity and reverence
for the symbolic. In these paintings this appears to work precisely through confronting
the (guilty) subject with a tone it may recognise and have to acknowledge, a similarly
moral and solemn tone, but one born of an individual and humanistic outrage rather
than a ready-meal piousness or “passive” rage of a herd morality.

Bruno was no rambling mystic – he was a mystic, but he was also highly rational, a
philosopher, who understood very clearly the implications of his position and possible
fate – a fate that can be seen as unequivocally tragic, in part precisely because of this
presence of reason. Tragedy requires it as much as it requires mystery; if either is
absent the struggle between light and shadow upon which it depends cannot take place.

‘The “tragic sense of life” – in Hegel, in Kierkegaard, in Nietzsche – goes quite beyond
the idea of didacticism, which was the official Renaissance view, (…..) quite beyond
Goethe’s or Coleridge’s view of Hamlet (the plant in the fragile vase, the man too
thoughtful for the world.) It implies rather, that our situation is necessarily tragic, that
all men exist in an evil situation and, if they are aware, are anguished because they are
aware’. (5)

Looking and thinking with these somewhat resistant paintings spawned a growing
awareness of a web of associations embedded within them, yet they are quite stubborn
in refusing to actually answer their position relative to the questions they provoke -
though to claim they refuse is to lend a compliance that is unfounded, dialectically they
are not in the business of actively refusing (thus asserting) anything, they are vocal
catalysts but remain in a final sense mute, if they insist on anything it is their own
silence and the crucial responsibility of the viewer to form and regard their own
response. Their explosive subject matter “the infamy of religious history” via what must
qualify as one of it’s most nonsensical and appalling details (in the sense that Bruno was
one of an estimated execution of one million men, women, and children –a staggering
estimated one in two hundred people on earth at that time) is crucial and yet
concurrently Simpson is keen to assert the formal primacy of these works in relation to a
passion for the beauty of early Flemish painting, something that makes compelling
sense in light of his understanding of the Latin term “vanitas”.

The delicate skins of pigment with which Simpson models these forms tend to suggest
something denser than stone or marble - their proportions, light and texture suggest
something like Kubrick’s obelisk from “2001 A Space Odyssey”; an inhuman precision
and severity of surface uncanny and ominous in itself. This is at its simplest in the most
recent painting where the “benches” – become essentially architectural sticks, de-
materialising into Kapoor-like portals on a scale through which we might sense a slight
ergonomic dwarfing – not the gargantuan scaling of large church or cathedral rendering
our bodies bug-like, but enough to create a degree of confrontation and to feasibly invite
(or threaten) an imaginary physical passage, like cosmic letterboxes.

Hovering before us they invite synesthesic interpretation. I venture they might effuse
something like a low hum or even an organ chord, or the kind of opening/closing chimes
on a track by somebody like Autechre. There is something similarly final, sermon-like
about them, transcendentally tinged but mourning and protesting to a cinematic pitch,
insistently statically levitating themselves above merely human sentimentality or
melodrama. Simultaneously hot and cold.

Whatever chords are struck for us they will vibrate somewhere between their surface
structure and the subjective patterns we bring to them. It’s a heroic and ambitious
project, one that is inevitably precarious and vulnerable to bathos and failure in myriad
ways, but Simpson has steered a highly committed, focused and uncompromising course
over a number of years and in the process arrived at painting subtly stunning in its
density, sensitivity and austere formal poise. It occurs to me that apart from the benches
relating to sci–fi obelisks, sites of judgement, cages, tombs, chimes and silences, that
what they also resemble via all these associations plus subject are resurrections of
crucifixion images in humanistic (and metaphysically persuasive- if not conclusive)
terms. As Simpson has it - elegy’s to organised religions infamous history of
inhumanity, a nugget of that history exhumed from between dusty covers and laid out,
somewhat obliquely but with passionate regard, personal intent, and austere formal
sophistication.

“Despite the subjective inferences in my work, I believe a painting must move beyond
it’s subject. In this sense I am primarily concerned with the mechanics of painting”.

Michael Simpson.

1/2. White, Michael. “The Pope and the heretic – A true story of Courage and Murder at
the hands
of the inquisition.” Little Brown
2002

3. Roob, Alexander. “Alchemy and Mysticism – The Hermetic Museum”. Taschen

2001.

4. Mitchell, W.J.T “What do Pictures really want?” October. Summer 1996. MIT
press.
5. Leech, Clifford. “The Critical Idiom - Tragedy”. Routledge 1989