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Paul Greenhalgh
Michael Flynn

James Joyce famously suggested that the imagination was no more than memory. Memory for Joyce, of course, implied not simply the memory of an individual, but also the collective memory of a culture. Nevertheless, at first glimpse, it is a statement that seems initially to limit the idea of the imagination, to pin it down to the banality of things we already know, and places we have already been. But it implies far more than this. Through memory, the whole of human experience – a vast and almost infinite reservoir - is available to us as a source for art. The function of the imagination is not to invent things to one side of, or separate from, this reservoir, but to delve into it, into the collective past, in all its complex glory, in order to say something about the world as it is, and as it will be. In this sense, the imagination is actually no more than a device for editing and explaining human experience.

Whenever I muse this way, I immediately think of the work of Michael Flynn. More than most contemporary practitioners in any medium, he has the ability to show us things we have never seen before, through the manipulation and transformation of things we already knew. Perhaps that is what the greatest artists do: they show us anew what we have already seen. Over the last thirty years or so he has continually developed his vocabulary, while, it seems to me, remaining focused on a set number of themes and methods. He has worked in a number of media, but his true idiom is the ceramic and porcelain figurine; he has made big things for public squares, but his métier is domestic, his arena is table- top scale; he has used a wide range of techniques, but at heart he is a modeler; he has dealt with a range of subject-matters, but his core subjects are the human figure and animal in motion. These chosen themes and methods have allowed him to explore in an extraordinary way the complexity of human foibles.

This is best illustrated through the work itself. A number of the current pieces deal with a group of nude figures in motion,



a common theme in the artist’s oeuvre over the last decade. Gods on a Sofa (2010..) and Overgrown (2010), for example, share the same subject matter. Gods on a Sofa is a group of figures, cavorting, kissing, and embracing in a dance of life. A dog sits in the middle of the group in the middle of the sofa, and a snake crawls across its back. All of this is taking place on the kind of sofa that your grand-mother might perch on, or that you might buy second-hand in a thrift store. Flecks of red connote lips, nipples, vulvas and fingernails; flecks of blue make the dog into a Dalmatian; the sofa is red; the rest resonates with the timeless density of porcelainous white.

This is a monument to Dionysian rites, and to the unfettered physical energy of the Bacchanal. As such, it places us with Titian, Correggio, the Italian Mannerists and Tiepolo. Further on, it dialogues with the Rococo, and the first European artists to produce porcelain figurines in Germany, France, Poland and Scandinavia. Further on still, the treatment of the features and flesh of the participants place the whole firmly in the twentieth century, somewhere between Realism, Surrealism and Expressionism. Michael Flynn is an eclectic artist. But the history of art is only a vehicle, not the subject of the piece. It always seems to me that the core subject of the artist, the one he returns to continually, is the relationship of mythology to everyday life, of the mythic to the real. Here we obviously have a classical theme, with Christian symbolism overlaid (in the best Neo-Platonic tradition). The dog, presumably, represents veracity, and the snake evil: opposite forces in the moral universe. And all this is enacted out in the everyday banality of the contemporary domestic interior. The gods are on a sofa. This sexually-charged dance is an archetype, and timeless, but rooted in the here and now. And as in much of Flynn’s work, the energy and joy of this rampant sexual encounter has an underlying brutality to it, a cruelty that counterpoises the carefree heat. As in all classical legend, the Bacchanal always has consequences, and rarely are these nice.

A relatively new theme in the artist’s oeuvre is the forest. I find


this a fascinating development, and one, I think, that relates closely to the artist’s love of mainland Europe. He confirmed this to me in talks I had with him recently, and expresses it elegantly in his own words in this catalogue:

The whole of Europe was originally covered in dense forest and although much of it has been cleared over the centuries, the forest remains at the core of many of the religious and social rituals which underpin modern European sensibilities. The forest is alive within us despite so many attempts to expunge it.

The artist has spent much of the last decade in Germany and Poland, and has become deeply interested in the whole idea of mainland, middle European culture. By osmosis, it has penetrated into the heart of his work. In many respects, he is a quintessentially European artist. Perhaps also the literary tradition of Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland has been a major influence here. The works belong somewhere in the ethos of the magical realist writing of the last thirty years.

Extraordinary pieces like Forest as Theatre (2009..) or First Stirrings (2010) are not only visions of the forest, but they also say much about the artist’s outlook with regard to nature. To say the very least, this interest is not in any sense straightforward. In these two pieces, for example, the forest is an historical phenomenon, a force that mediates people’s lives, and remains as a memory in the minds of people long after it has been replaced by roads and shopping centres. It is an ancient site, that when expunged, to use the artist’s own term, remains an element in modern consciousness. His forest is not one easily described in a wildlife television programme; it is far more the forest of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or of Fuseli’s Gothic imagination, a place that harbours and breeds gods and goddesses, monsters and angels. It is place that makes history, and is also re-invented by history. It was always part of human consciousness: it supported and challenged the ancient tribes of Europe; it received human sacrifices so that it would remain compliant; and it fought industrialization to the


death.

The Forest as Theatre gives us a group of trees, stripped down to their trunks, with a bacchanalian event at its centre. Following the title of the piece, the group is framed by the forest, so that the whole appears as a staged event. The trees appear almost to be cast from branches, and have graphic floral decoration drawn onto them in selected places. They have the feel not so much of trees as of grouped, tattooed arms, a brutalized but still-mystical backdrop to human activity. First Stirrings gives us the same stripped tree-trunks, but this time in a tall, gothic format. On the ground, at the bottom of the piece, three strange figures hold large masks, in an unexplained, but somehow threatening way. The masks are at the same time juvenile, ghoul-like and frightening. This could be a scene from Lord of the Flies, a tableau of impending ritualized violence. Again, the white of the porcelain is broken up by flashes of colour and floral graphic imagery.

A number of major pieces orchestrate all of the above imagery and ideas, in a way that quintessentially reflects the artist’s vision of things. Buehnenbild (2010..), Forest as Backdrop (2010..), and Stage Set (2010..) pull everything together by placing the sofa in front of a forest backdrop. Thus nature meets the manufactured world; the interior meets the exterior; theatre meets reality; and the domestic the public spheres collide. The artist is an orchestrator of multiple and disparate things. If these latter pieces were music, they would be opera.

The overall treatment in most of the current work, exposes one of the underlying ideas – and tensions – everywhere in Flynn’s oeuvre: that of nature and artifice. At many points in the European tradition, artists have been interested in the transformation of nature into artifice, into something that appears unnatural, in order to explore the function of humanity in the natural environment. It was a powerful theme at various times in the classical period; the great Rococo artists were obsessed by it; and most powerfully,


the great Art Nouveau artists and architects at the fin de siècle based their idea of style on it. Many of these were interested not so much in directly depicting nature, despite their obsession with it, as in its transformation through art. In this way, nature was made into artifice, into a component of culture, and as such, it is made into part of the human story. In Flynn’s work, the tension between nature and the human form leads to the transformation of both, into a fabricated world, a theatre in which the artist can explore and expose both.

Michael Flynn’s new work, as always, reveals the artist moving on into new terrain, in an intellectual and artistic exploration of consummate energy and courage. At the same time, it shows him also to be an artist who rarely rejects or forgets anything, but who has generated a powerful sense of continuity in his oeuvre over the decades. His work is about his own memories; about the memories of place, about history, about the history of art, and about the history of human foibles. James Joyce would have been proud of him.

© Paul Greenhalgh March 2010. For the catalogue of the exhibition, "Bez Powrotu", held at the Gallery for Glass and Ceramic,. Wroclaw, Poland.


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