”Keen
melted, burned and blew up objects around him to realise his art....
[He] revelled in a wild spirit of anarchic play, revealed a
fascination with Surrealism and demonstrated true love for pop
culture. ”
-
Gallery guide
Secret
Origins
I
thought I knew Jeff Keen.
After
all, I'd been there. From the Eighties, up until
his
untimely death last summer, I'd attended his semi-regular
series of gallery shows and film nights. He'd throw up works, crosses
between action paintings and graffiti art, often on shaped pieces of
cardboard or other extemporised materials. Like some irrepressible
force of nature, he'd often churn these out during
the event. Once I saw him drawing live on the screen while a film was
still being shown.
These
always felt like bright bursts of fresh air against the
post-conceptual codswallop that normally passed for the Brighton arts
scene. If the 'artwar' schtick, the day-glo bursts of popular culture
sometimes seemed a little one-note, it was a good
note.
As
it turns out, I didn't know the half of it.
To
see his earlier works was, to borrow one of his recurrent phrases,
like discovering his Secret Origins. Pen-and-ink work from the
Forties and Fifties, such as 'Agonised Figure in
Landscape' (1949) are influenced by Surrealists such as
Miro but put through an English filter, like Spike Milligan's Goonish
doodles. They look spontaneous, automatic drawings, the framed pieces
scarcely different from the open sketchbooks placed by them.
Admittedly, those influences are a little too clear-cut for Keen to
emerge as an original at this point. But patience, reader...
Poetry
in Flames
As
befits British culture, it was the Sixties and Seventies that brought
colour to Keen's work. He seems to strike at the canvas with every
weapon available - the graffitist's spray-can, Pollock's swirling
trails of paint, the mass-producer's stencils and his own
hand-lettering. Yet the superimposed images somehow never fell into
clutter, were always impactful. Check out for example, 'Secret
Origins 1' (1967, above). Through using these various media
all at once, there's no clear distinction between Keen's paintings
and his collages, such as 'Atomic Rayday' (below).
Ever-ambidextrous,
Keen was also a surprisingly good cartoonist with a strong and
effective line. A work like 'Laff' (1966, below)
prefigures the bold iconic style later taken up by Kaz, Peter Bagge
or Malcy Duff. It's pure comics – less a drawing
than a cutaway map of a figure, displaying a tangle of vibrantly
active but entirely imaginary body parts, a spaghetti junction of
innards.
Now
developing a distinct line, these days that seems the goal of every
emerging alternative cartoonist. Yet, while excelling in this, Keen
clearly also loves the commercially produced nature of comics. He
reproduces the perfect outlines, the bold flat colours, so at odds
with the human touch insisted upon by the art world. Commercial
comics have a strange interaction between hand-made and
mass-produced, perhaps best summed up by the perfect signature - such
as Disney's elegant swirl, simultaneously handwriting and act of
branding. Notably Keen imitates this in 'Jeff Keen
Photoplay' (1972, below).
Yet,
however much comic fans will find themselves propelled into his work,
Keen was never likely to become a full-fledged comics artist. There's
something always slightly off, slightly distorted
about he way he takes up their language. And as so often in art, what
is wrong comes out as what is right.
He sometimes fixates upon the grammar of comics, dividing a work into
panels, crossed with arrows and strewn with sound effects - such as
'Secret Origins 2' (1967, below).
The
withholding of narrative throws emphasis on the formal elements,
which are normally passed over by the reader - as unobserved as
punctuation in a novel. Interestingly, this paralleled developments
in the then-current world of underground comics, with artists like
Victor Moscoso or the early art spiegelman. (Meanwhile, to
pursue an earlier argument, an artist like Lichtenstein
eliminates the grammar of comics the better to make them appear
illiterate.)
And
even when he uses characters, they work more like recurrent motifs. A
work like 'Dr. Gaz' (below) reminds me of the
home-made comics I churned out as a kid; characters ceaselessly
invented and as-soon discarded, never quite lined up into storylines.
In the best possible way, Keen never really grew up, he was always
able to pull up pails from that bottomless well of imagination.
'A
Mythic Universe'
Perhaps
one of the key underpinnings of Keen's work is his omnivorous
multi-media approach. When the show says “he combined film
screenings with live performance and poetry,” 'combined' is key. He
wasn't a painter and film-maker and
zine producer and poet. Like his overlaid images
and rapid-cut films you need to take them all together as components
of a greater whole. You need to drink deep from Keen, not sip at him.
His
paintings worked like posters to his films, his zines spin-offs, and
they were often intended as precisely that. Like some one-man
marketing campaign for his own imagination, he also produced objects
from his characters, mid-way between promotional items and medieval
saints relics, such as 'Vulvana's Fingernail'
(1970).
In
fact one of my few critiques of this show would be the way the films
are largely segregated into a room at the end. Though this was
probably down to practical limitations, it still doesn't seem in
Keen's spirit and has led to me concentrating more than I should on
his visual art here.
Yet
one feature of his film work which should see mention is how much of
it's actually video work. Of course low-budget
film-makers everywhere soon migrated to more affordable video. But
with Keen there's an extra element. If Modernism was about
accentuating the form, finding what could uniquely be done in
painting, sculpture or architecture and pursuing it, Keen pursued
video - emphasising it's pixellated graininess, it's off colours. It
looks simultaneously verite, video being the delivery medium of the
news, and murkily otherly. It seems his primary approach was to try
out whatever the manual told him not to, an
approach programmers call (rather deliciously) 'video illegal'.
Hero-Warriors
Above
all, much like Blake, Keen had his own private mythology. And like
Blake you would go mad before you gleaned any of it. Comics
scribe Tim Pilcher and Keen's former assistant Damian Toal
gave a
talk at the Museum which unpicked some images and did
manage to shed some light into Keen's mind. (For example, the way he
associated airplanes with Apollo; look back to 'Secret
Origins 1'.)
Yet
you'd never get that on your own. You sense it's all there,
in the same way something in your ear can discern that a foreign
language has more structure than mere chatter. But foreign the
language remains. Better to let those recurrent phrases linger with
their irreducible mystery - “the breathless investigator”,
“poetry in flames,” “the shorthand typist in the wilderness.”
Seemingly
paradoxically, that non-approach might even take us closer to the
heart of it. Keen was insistent his films should be paced too fast to
follow. Having served in the war, he constantly used war motifs, such
as rounds of staccato machine-gun-fire as soundtracks. Yet though
seeing war might have informed his worldview, his 'artwar' wasn't a
commentary on war or of media presentations of it. It was more based
around the way we now live in a state of information
war, and have learnt to exist among sense bombardments like
soldiers in trenches. His art was both response and contributor to
that ongoing war.
But
mostly, in
another reprised theme for this blog, the exhibition shows
the sheer inadequacy of the term outsider art. The exhibition
comments how Keen “distanced himself from existing movements in the
London arts scene and the wider world of avant-garde cinema.” True,
he was never an outsider artist in the formal sense, and even
attended Art College! Yet his work has so many elements from what we
assign to that category, such as the private mythology or tendency to
work with the 'wrong' materials such as cardboard over canvas. The
show describes him as “emphasising his role as a lone
hero-warrior,” taking the two-fisted comics protagonists as
avatars, self against surroundings.
It
seems strange if not downright disrespectful to suggest someone's
death might contain an upside, but at the same time it's
retrospectives which tend to put the art world in gear. Keen's
already had a
film-showing at the Tate's Tanks, and there are rumours
that this exhibition might go on to tour. Let's hope all this is a
springboard to him becoming better-known. Shoot the wrx!
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