David Sylvian
Perspectives
Is photography an art?
This boring question will be asked and argued over as long as cameras click. It seems difficult to believe that a recording machine made of metal and glass, clever though it may be, can produce art. However, it has been said that in the hands of an artist, better pictures do emerge. And it seems to me that David Sylvian is certainly an artist. I am not speaking about music. His position there is already secure. It is this exhibition of his work in the visual arts that we are concerned with here.
David makes no claim to have invented the photo mosaic idea. We have seen David Hockney's experiments in this medium, and also the fashion pictures by de Jaeger in the French magazine L'Officiel, and although I thought that this method of photography was not really suitable forr illustrating clothes, both have produced riveting images. And now David Sylvian.
I have no idea what came first. It is tempting to think that some photographer with a handful of polaroid prints, frustrated by the inescapable dicipline of the square of paper with its white border, tore them upand threw them on the floor and lo and behold - a picture - with no border, no confines. However, it is clearly not as easy as that; it needs the trained eye. This was demonstrated to me while taking part in a video made to accompany David's single "Red Guitar". The video is based on a forty year old picture of mine of Flora Robson emerging from a desert landscape. During one of the long waits which seem inevitable during filming, David said that he wanted to take a photograph of me for his coming exhibition. And there and then, click, click, click; his camera spitting out exposures one after the other; David weaving a complicated dance with his lens over me and the landscape around me; laying out the result on the bonnet of our car in that windy field in West Wickham, under the shadow of that extraordinary church with its golden ball, and making, in a moment, first one, and then another, quite different, and quite fascinating, pictures of me. I was astonished.
Since then I have seen a collection of proofs from this forthcoming book, and my admiration is confirmed. The technique seems most suited to portraiture; a means of getting deeper under the surface, a way of lengthening the all too short moment of the snapshot. One of the pictures reminds me inescapably of Marcel Duchamp's famous picture "Nude Descending a staircase", though the camera, by its very nature, cannot achieve pure abstraction.
Perhaps we are seeing a movement to free the photograph from its frame, as William Burroughs seems to be trying to free litterature by cutting up writing and putting it together again in an apparently arbitrary fashion, but for me, at least, with less success.
Perhaps I have been writing a lot of "guff"; an old man's struggle to come to terms with the young. But one thing is quite clear. David Sylvian's photographs reflect, as does his music, a beautiful, gentle and charming personality.
Angus McBean/June 1984