• Jacqueline Nurse, 2009

“Strange though this may sound, not knowing where one is going, being lost … reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance.” (i)

Patmos and the War at Sea is not the kind of work you can approach with all interpretive guns blazing — expecting meaning to pour out of the composition in a steady flow from the work of art into you and out into the world. Or, rather, you can approach the work in that manner, but you will find yourself confounded. In an age where enlightenment — or something resembling it — is realised by the mere click of a Search button, artist Alastair Whitton has forced the viewer to work a little harder for elucidation and has presented a reflective commentary on interpretation and our attempts to make sense of language.

In the face of bewilderment, you might find yourself returning to the very roots of your education in the arts, however it may have been gained. But you may have to put aside the tomes of art-historical knowledge you have absorbed in your lifetime, or the meanings extracted out of every other work of art that you think might bear on your interpretation of this work. It is not that these things are irrelevant in this case, but rather that it is necessary to start at the beginning, because Patmos and the War at Sea will not easily reward those who read it with preconceived ideas of what it should mean.

Each individual image in Patmos and the War at Sea resembles an open book. The right page is a black-and-white photograph, instantly recognisable as documentation of World War II—from film and archival material. The left page bears the hand-stamped title in the top left-hand corner — Patmos and the War at Sea — and a passage of text in Braille. It would seem, then, that this latter element means that a person blessed with sight may not be able to access the meanings in that passage, and that an unsighted person incapable of viewing the work itself will fare better. However, on closer inspection, the Braille turns out to be a red herring: rather then being embossed and raised from the page toward deciphering fingertips, the tiny spheres have been laser cut into the page, rendering the passage completely unreadable. Whitton has not, however, left the viewer — or, more appropriately, the reader — out in the cold completely: hiding out among the indecipherable Braille signs are letters of a familiar alphabet, which at first appear to be randomly appointed. After not a little mind-bending, the letters are revealed to be an anagram for the title of the image on the opposite page.

The titles and the photograph, then, are the only immediately comprehensible elements of the heavily loaded — and heavily coded — work. All of these signs point towards acts of war and the secrecy involved in wartime communication. Each photograph has been sourced from film and archival documentation of war scenes. Whitton himself was trained for war, his father served in the British army and both his grandfathers fought in World War II. Unlike some of the soldiers he trained with, however, he was fortunate not to have experienced the horror of actual conflict. Hence his personal experience of warfare is accessed through memories not his own but rather through those of his forebears and peers who survived. It is significant, then, that the war images in Whitton’s work are not simply cut and pasted from found material, but emerge through a method of deconstructing and reconstructing. The images are vigilantly cut, re-composed and re-shot, sometimes several times in a process that the artist describes as ‘an attempt to make sense of what has been seen and recorded … not dissimilar to how one might analyse and dissect a prophetic text in order better “to see” it.’[ii] This re-imagining and re-imaging through the piecing together of fragments is not dissimilar to the operations of the memory. ‘The power of memory is prodigious,’ observed Saint Augustine. ‘It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain?’[iii]

The references here to ideas of the archive and memory—or of memory as archive, or archive as a repository of memory—are important. One view of the archive is that it is ‘a space where things are hidden in a state of stasis, imbued with secrecy, mystery and power … impenetrable without the codex which unlocks their arrangement and locations.’[iv] Similar things can be said of the functions of memory. Similar ideas can be brought, in fact, to any decoding activity, which is a fundamental element of Whitton’s work.

Whitton has compared the Braille passages to code created by the Enigma machine—a piece of equipment that functioned as an almost invulnerable envoy during World War II. In the title is another direct reference to World War II, the Greek island of Patmos being first an Italian and then a German territory during the war. However, the significance of Patmos goes beyond this: it is also the place ‘where the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation in AD 96, after being exiled to the island by the Roman Emperor Domitian for preaching the Gospel at Ephesus.’[v] Herein lies a possible clue for our own code-breaking. When it is discovered that the translated passages are taken from that same apocalyptic Biblical text, the Book of Revelation, the motif of war is elevated to the spiritual realm.

In referring to apocalypse, Whitton directs attention to a war that is not only spiritual, but tinged with the undertones of the sublime. The notion of the sublime has been explored by many thinkers throughout the ages, but Edmund Burke offers an explanation that is particularly apt here: for Burke, terror is the foundation of the sublime experience, which threatens to annihilate the individual. Hence, the sublime is imaginatively linked to thanatos, or the death-impulse.[vi] For a work that revolves around the idea of warfare, the implications of this in the physical sense are obvious. In the spiritual sense, this terror or confrontation offers transcendence.

Whitton seems to be suggesting to the viewer that the key to transcendence lies in the deciphering of the messages that, if we allow ourselves to look sensitively, are all around us. In the same way that the parables of Christ communicate messages through allegory or deliberate obfuscation, Whitton’s meanings are layered one upon another, forming a complex map of the spiritual front. Some information is left clearly in view, while other pieces of the puzzle are deliberately concealed from the viewer who is drawn into a multifaceted maze of a work to engage with the artist in a subtle process of hiding and revealing.

This is not a guessing game, however. Each work resembles a book lying open, but all the works in the series can also be found together, contained in an artist’s book. The viewer has only to look for the clues, take time with the puzzles and not, as is so often the case, expect that the answers will be immediately apparent or that the work will be merely ‘entertaining’. What is required is reflection, and no shying away from the hard work of interpretation.
Whitton seems to reject outright the tendencies of the lazy viewer. He has little interest in the wonders of Google or the marvels of cyberspace. Rather, he has returned to the ‘book as a container of thought made visible; a site of exploration and a landscape in which to walk.’[vii]

Our own lives, Patmos and the War at Sea seems also to be suggesting, can be likened to a book. We may be at war with our personal demons but, like a story in a book or an encoded message in a parable, if we are sensitive enough in our looking and patient enough in our reading, the key to our transcendence might be found. And if transcendence is going too far, then at least some satisfaction may be derived from really seeing.

[i] Gerhard Richter, ‘Notes, 1962’ in The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings 1962–1993, edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and translated by David Britt. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
[http://www.gerhard-richter.com/biography/quotes/]

[ii] From a conversation between Jacqueline Nurse and Alastair Whitton, 10 June 2009.

[iii] Cited in Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude. 1982. London: Faber and Faber, 1989, pp. 88–89

[iv] Sue Breakall, ‘Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive’ in Tate Papers, Spring 2008.
[http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/08spring/breakell.shtm]

[v] From a conversation between Jacqueline Nurse and Alastair Whitton, 10 June 2009.

[vi] Edmund Burke, ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’. 1757. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001, pp. 150–151

[vii] From a conversation between Jacqueline Nurse and Alastair Whitton, 10 June 2009.