As a society we have a fetish for the singular, the best or the most perfect. The search for singularity is born out of the tradition of repeated making, the honing of skills and craft and the subsequent production of multiple versions of the same thing. It also begins with a concept of beauty embodied within a single object; a turned wooden bowl, a sculpture of David or a painting of an English landscape. Objects are judged by their success in defining the idea of the thing they represent. The most boot like boot or a perfect rose. Yet conversely it is from the creation of many versions of something that an idea, an archetype or cliché, is arrived at.
This is where we begin with Ben Cain’s Companions at the Grundy Art Gallery; with multiples and tropes from art history, with nudes and night scenes and interiors and men on horses. In the first gallery, Cain presents a selection of works from the Grundy collection grouped by subject matter. These choices are more than a discussion of exemplars or repetition. Amongst the paintings and sculptures there lurk texts, analysis of artists’ approaches to their subject. There are enriching discussions on the realism of Millet and the formalism of Morandi’s still lives, but the inclusion of these texts is less didactic captioning and more pertinent footnote to the wider question being posed by the exhibition as a whole. Cain is asking us to think about the value of what an artist does. Millet spent much of his life striving for a truer representation peasant existance and Courbet was persecuted by the state for his art. Yet they are significant because their images have come to shape the way we understand the world. Through their devotion to subject they frame it, not because they are accurate but because they have created a definition, be that of a farmer in the field or an artist in his studio.
This first of three rooms in the exhibition is a primer to the conversation between the following two. In the furthest gallery Cain has made another selection of paintings from the Grundy Collection. It’s an unusual grouping. A caricature of the magician Paul Daniels sits alongside a rural scene by Millet, next to a self portrait of an artist in the studio. What links this disparate selection is both a familiarity of their subjects and the functionality of objects within them: a bowl, a wheel barrow or a hat stand. Taking these objects as source material, Cain has worked with local artists and crafts people to create life size replicas from the paintings. These new objects are displayed in the central gallery, not as finished things or even copies, but more as ideas or symbols of things they represent. It is making archetypes manifest and continuing Cain’s investigations into both materiality and the nature of production. Finally, the installation is dominated by a pastel silk curtain which hangs ceiling to floor at the back of the room printed with an image of an artist’s studio. The thinness and colour of the fabric make it hard to read; yet the clichéd representation of the creative space is there, familiar, echoing the Courbet from the first gallery.
Companions is a show which could have been staged in any number of galleries or museums with collections up and down the country. But it is appropriate to find it in Blackpool, itself and archetype of so much British culture, because Cain’s exhibition co-curated by Rose Lejeune and The Grundy is an elegant reflection on the relationship between reality and representation. It is also a timely reminder that in a world of mass production the concept of a single best version is little more than marketing spin. There’s nothing wrong with multiples, it’s how they’re made that’s important.
Ben Roberts is Curator of Public Programmes and Education at Modern Art Oxford
