The Endless Variety With Spice - Alex Linklater
[published in The Herald, 12 May 1997]
Alex Linklater focuses on the work of a multimedia artist who has a particular obsession with Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson and the Spice Girls.
When the IRA declared their ceasefire in 1995, public attention was momentarily deflected from Pamela Andersons enlarged breasts to her engorged mouth. In 1994, when the Bosnia Crisis was at its peak, Pam had allegedly spent $4000 on her lips. So why, in 1996 (just as a fragile peace was breaking out on the streets of Mostar), did she decide to bury her idealised corollae under a ton of lip-liner?
The answer, according to Glasgow-based multimedia artist David Michael Clarke, was that having gone to so much trouble to perfect herself Baywatch's Barbie-Bardot then had to make herself imperfect, to signal her humanity. While OJ Simpson was evading the electric chair Pamela Anderson was underlining her mortality.
David Michael Clarke is obsessed by the indiscriminate manner in which we absorb media images; the way everything - from TV politics to pop-paraphernalia to our own holiday snaps - disappears down the same optical tubes. Last year he devised a performance work which measured world events, including moments in his own life, against the defining stages of Pamela Anderson's career.
You could call it proportional representation. Slides illustrating the dimensional developments of the world's most famous body were rapidiy intercut with news images from Bosnia, pop icons, pictures of infant girls murdered in Pakistan, a surreally recurring Geisha girl, and photos of Clarke's ex-girlfriend.
Finding out all about love - Street Level, Glasgow - 1997
It made comic, disturbing sense. Appearing both at the Glasgow School of Art and the newly-opened Java Cafe, Clarke talked laterally around such images like a cross between Clive James and the American monologist, Spalding Gray. The hectic commentary investigated, but didn't pretend to rise above, media absurdity. It all came down to the difficuity we have prioritising horrific world events over semi-pornographic gossip: "Its not our fault," is Clarke's line. "We're not to blame. We're apathetic, but we're not guilty. There just isn't enough energy to go round these days."
Now he has turned his attention to another focus of imminent political import. As we survey the events of 1996 one question sidelines all others. Which Spice Girl do you like best?
At the Glasgow School of Art on Thursday, alongside poetry readings from Donny O'Rourke, electoral patter will meet pop gossip. Clarke's second slide-show explores the political philosophy driving Britain's most famous female five. First performed last month as part of the Transmission Gallery's "Hong Kong Island" project, and entitled "1997: Blueprints & Pipe Dreams", it proclaims: "At the end of the day the question posed in the NME - 'which one's your favourite?' - is pretty much the same question as the one on the ballot paper." Clarke sets out to explain why.
If you like spice girl Victoria, you'll vote for Blair; if your favourite's Emma, it'll be Major; and if it's Geri, then Paddy Ashdown's your man. This interpretation of the politics of personality takes a surreal bent as Mel B is revealed as a simulacrum of Ian Paisley and Mel C of Alex Salmond, but, as Geri herself has pointed out, the Spice Girls are political animals: "If we're grabbing the publics attention by them looking at me topless, or looking at Vicki's legs, then great. We're getting peoples attention. And then we hit them with the message!"
David Michael Clarke's message, however, is that all media images can become either serious or trivial depending on how you fit them together. The new show flits from his girl-power heroines to Euro '96, from the Olympic Games to the Stone of Destiny, from Douglas "Myra Hindley" Gordon's Turner Prize to Tony Blairs hair-style ("tough on fluff, and tough on the causes of fluff"). Its an idea of performance - part conceptual arrangement of photography, part monologue - which Clarke has made uniquely his own.
It's a style, however, he stumbled on purely by accident. A sculptor turned photographer, Clarke's first big show was a series of enormous prints exhibited in the St Enoch centre as part of Glasgow's 1995 Fotofeis festival. The idea for a performance based around photographs only came last year when he won the Richard Hough Bursary for Scottish photography, and even then only just as he was being interviewed for the award.
Instead of going through the conventional process of discussing his work with the judging panel and proposing a future project, he walked in with a bunch of slides and began talking about Pamela Anderson. Once he had finished he declared; "This is not my new work, but it is the context within which my new work is being made." And after what Clarke describes as "a big debate about truth and lies and fiction and reality and media manipulation", the bursary was his.
The idea to approach a previously conventional photography prize in such an oblique way came, he says, "when I started collecting magazines and media images. My parents had given me an old slide-projector in which they'd accidentallv left pictures of their honeymoon. And my girlfriend had just dumped me by post with letters that were so poetic that I had to re-read them to check I'd really been dumped."
"What I wanted to do was blanket my perception and mix in my own life - family and friends - with magazine personalities. And whether it was real experience or some kind of mediated experience 1 would treat it all the same."
Something that was originally conceived merely as an interview presentation, however, went on to become a work in itself and Clarke having once thought of himself as a photographer, has found himself with a reputation as a multi-media performance artist.
The most recent fruit of Clarke's experiment with the Richard Hough Bursary is his contribution to an exhibition in Newcastle's Zone gallery. Photographs of a couple at various stages of breaking up are accompanied by text directly or indirectly quoting lyrics from such bands as Heaven 17, Orange Juice, and Spandau Ballet, and such singers as Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison.
The links between Pamela Anderson and world events, the Spice Girls and our most intimate secrets may be closer than we wish to imagine. "When a relationship cracks up," says Clarke, "I believe we live as much in pop-songs as anything else. I feel like Orange Juice wrote the soundtrack to my youth."