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Sex, Lies and Turpentine

Throughout artist Michael Fullerton’s career, I have supported him by my writings. I contributed to his first catalogue (“Are You Hung Up?” Transmission, 2003), wrote an essay in the publication for the exhibition “Unreliable Witness” (Tramway, 2008), and a feature in “Map” magazine (Issue 16, Winter 2009). In 2005 I curated his solo exhibition, “Suck On Science”, CCA, Glasgow. Through this ongoing relationship I was commissioned to write his first monograph, “Pleasure In Nonsense” (MER Paper Kunsthalle, 2012). In this 8,000 word text I used Mieke Bal’s notion of preposterous history as a means to relate Fullerton’s work to some of its precedents, notably the work of Gainsborough. Mention of this relation between Fullerton and Gainsborough is commonplace, and I wanted to shed new light upon it. Bal, as well as Michael Baxandall and Michael Fried, suggest that conventional understandings of “influence” in art history fail to adequately account for the impact of the present upon the past. I thus wrote an essay on The Hon Mrs Graham, the subject of one of Gainsborough’s most celebrated portraits, in which research material relating to her family and her life, the socio-political situation of Britain and Europe during the later eighteenth century, and the economic significance of porcelain production during this period were woven into a convincing, but untrue, account of her life as a spy. This decision was not arbitrary, guided instead by my analysis of Fullerton’s work, in which themes such as painting as a repository of encoded information, sexuality and seduction, spying, and social class were identified. All such issues relating directly to Fullerton’s work were addressed in a series of 35 extended footnotes comprising approximately two-thirds of the essay, thereby inverting the normal relations between ‘dominant’ narrative (cf. Gainsborough) and ‘subordinate’ notes (cf. Fullerton).