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Richard Paul is an artist based in London; he is also Senior Lecturer in Photography at The University of the West of England, in Bristol. He was co-director of Hoxton Distillery, an artists'-run gallery in east London, from its inception in 2001 to its final exhibition in July 2004.
HEAVY METAL MOUTH is the title of this ongoing series of deliberately simple photographic still lives of everyday objects. The linguistic transformation in the title (borrowed from musician Elliot Smith) is intended to mirror the construction of the images. There is no such thing as a thing-in-itself; every object has a raft of connotations ready to set forth depending on context. Pairing two objects suggests a relationship, and enhances or even generates particular connotations/narratives. The appropriation of the photographic vernacular of the catalogue/packshot gives these images an alibi, allows them to be ‘possible’. And yet the catalogue format intensifies the contradiction between the deadpan presentation of objects and their implied mutual transformation in meaning, due to its supposedly transparent (unmediated) nature. The eponymous image “Heavy Metal Mouth” plays with the descriptive and the associative with a deliberate literalness – using the catalogue format and the kitsch mouth paperweight to nonchalantly gloss over the unconvincing ‘Greekness’ of the metaller’s hand. ‘Foley’ exploits the double entendre of executive toy whilst drawing parallels between the sound each object makes in motion; “Diver” desacrilises Durer’s praying hands, yet leaves open transcendent possibilities; “Crown” draws analogies between material and sound; “Rosewood” lays bare earlier techniques used by food photographers to ensure the perfect image of roast chicken, without confirming whether this chicken is or is not, in fact, cooked. My work is partly inspired by my experience as a catalogue photographer, and partly in response to ‘Stunning Eastern Design’ – a curious Taaschen publication of images of East German Products. The gist of the images in this book is that the obsolescence of the products was a portent or microcosm of the obsolescence of the state. With ironic split-colour backgrounds reminiscent of constructivism, and crude lighting, the images are a form of Western propaganda. The book’s status as a handbook for ostalgie, or (former) East Germans’ nostalgia for products which were their only link to an erased past is a greater irony. My intention, then, is to investigate our relation to objects via their most common depiction. Advertising certainly provides narratives for objects, but so do we, perhaps as a way of coming to terms with a world of things and images, and their part in our identity. But my work is also about photography itself – the formal possibilities latent in the supposedly ‘lowest’ genre. Links:
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