Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
Fort/Da, 2009
These 14 large-scale paintings draw upon Freudian insights to investigate the process and pleasures of painting. They reference what Freud termed the Fort/Da game, in which a child throws away – then retrieves – a cotton reel on a string, exclaiming, ‘Fort!’ (‘Gone!’), when the reel is out of sight and ‘Da!’ (‘There!’), when it is back in view. The analyst suggested the child’s enjoyment of the game stemmed from his mastery of the situation and related it to the lack of control he would have had regarding the absence and presence of his mother. It was a way of turning trauma into pleasure. To create the works, Cumberland played the game in reverse, first establishing the ‘da’ by covering the canvas with semi-abstract renderings of hands, arms and breasts, painted as a black outline, using a brush. He then obliterated many of the images under a coat of Day-Glo colour applied with a roller, with the aim of delivering pleasure to viewers by involving them in the ‘there’ and ‘not there’ state of the imagery, and the presentation and erasure of colour. The Fort/Da paintings were selected by an independent jury for inclusion in the 2010 John Moores Painting Prize and exhibited at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (18 Sept 2010 – 3 Jan 2011).
Please see accompanying portfolio for full documentation of research dimensions.
Like the New York artists Christopher Wool and Carroll Dunham, Cumberland is intrigued by Freudian psychology. All three address the painting tradition from a critical perspective. So, with Fort/Da, the artist calls into question Romantic notions of the artist as producer of unique, brush-based works, by layering on colour with tools that eschew the refinement of a painterly approach. With these works, Cumberland invokes a psychoanalytic framework as a means of shedding light on the pleasure that painting has historically been able to provide – and thus to help explain its survival in an age when many considered it an anachronism. For Freud, sublimation was a necessary part of the individual’s progression from infantile self-centredness to a mature understanding of their relationship with others. Yet the analyst maintained that artists never complete the arc of sublimation, so painting inhabits the messy world of infantile sexuality. Thus, the engagement of the audience with a painting is very much a physical one and, arguably, the messy physicality is what attracts people. Alone in his studio, Cumberland could experience the pleasure of exerting mastery over the ‘there’ and ‘not there’ state of his images. The works offer a physical presence – in Freudian terms, a painting may be thought of as a body – while containing the ability to signify absence. In this respect, they provide a mechanism for understanding the satisfaction the process of painting provides for the artist and also the way that satisfaction for the artist might translate into pleasure for the audience. Cumberland fully expects that, when confronted by his crudely rollered surfaces, viewers might respond: “My kid could have done that!” The response may be a negative one, but the work has engaged them nonetheless.
