DAVID SURMAN: Inside While Outside

When I was a child I would enjoy nothing more than spending long periods indoors alone, watching cartoons and playing video games and drawing. Opportunities to do so were few and far between, because I had four siblings all younger than me. And so I would go and hang out at my friends' houses, where we could dedicate long stretches of time to the latest movie or game. I was looking for escapism, to put a fire in my imagination. I grew up on the western British Isles, first in Devon on the south-western coast, and then later in the West Highlands of Scotland. The emphasis on 'western' is not without cause-the wealth and opportunity of this country are concentrated in the south east. A certain austerity drives the imagination to search for stimulation.

The rural working-class world I was part of took great interest in animals. Horse riding, dog walking, chicken feeding. Nature all around-it was always there, still is, but for me at that time, inside, the screen held the greatest draw. The latest cartoon, movie, videogame. The latest graphics, gameplay. I was a sissy in a macho rural world. I loved aspects of it but didn't fit in-art and screens gave me an escape route. My work as an artist involves these entangled worlds of memory and imagination.

The wild world out there, the world of pure novelty inside on the screen—this was the primary aesthetic tension in my childhood. The mainstream culture of television held very little appeal for me because it was filled with prosaic imagery and concepts that were tied to the aesthetics of the previous generation. When animation and video games from Japan and music from America started to come into my world by way of subculture magazines and mail-order catalogues I found a rich seam of material that fired my imagination and desire to be an artist of some description.

The visual culture of the UK in the 1980s and 90s was caught up in a kind of grotesque goofiness and toilet humour that had long been anodyne but was still being reproduced for primarily nostalgic reasons. When I first saw Japanese animated films like Akira and Castle in the Sky and later Ghost in the Shell my entire sense of direction changed. The future was somewhere else, and if I couldn’t get there at the very least I should try to emulate its values in order to participate in that scene. 

I studied to become an animation director, seeking to cleave as close to the worlds of my imagination as I could while living in the UK with its limited opportunities. After finishing my training in animation I became intensely aware of the limits of commercial animation, that was utterly genre bound in the British context. I knew then that my expectations and thoughts were that of an artist looking to perpetually question and step outside of the commercial structures that presented themselves as opportunities. 

What I wanted was a purer and more direct connection to the sensation of discovery that I had experienced as a consumer of subcultures that were totally alien to my parents’ generation. After spending several years working in animation and video games my desire to push the image pointed back to painting, and the capacity of the canvas to act as a receiver and transmitter of ideas.

With my background in screen-based cultures my approach to painting has been to continually play with the expectations and taboos of the medium. I bring an emphasis on body and pose and movement to my figuration that comes from the language of animation and video games, but the connection is more profound than that. The suspension of disbelief and immersion in this media is predicated on an idea of being that changes how we think about art. The image is not just a representation but a kind of being, a surrogate self, a mask for a user, a player-character, a non-player-character. The representation is thus loaded with possibilities that have not henceforth existed. 

I create paintings mindful of the aesthetic and emotional language of the present. I try to paint with the structure of my perception. In her book ‘Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting’ Sianne Ngai has pointed to the historically and materially specific nature of the aesthetics of our period, and the emerging languages that predominate in the post-post-modern visual culture of today. Whereas the art of the past might seek to emphasise notions such as sublimity or classical beauty, in the attention economy of today new categories come to the fore. In both my painting and writing of the past twenty years I have emphasised the role of cuteness in the circuit of engagement created by the work of art.

My paintings of animals are made with an intentionally intense affective emphasis on the gaze and the pose. This formal ambition is always there. I want the work to have the charge and pull of vital presence. Cuteness is the protective expression of a certain victimhood. Mike Kelley once said victimhood is the religion of today. The cute baby mammal elicits an affective response of protection from adults. Its vulnerability is open-ended and calls to us, and at the same time we are encouraged to see ourselves as victims deserving of protection. Though this is considered an acutely kitsch stimulus it is nonetheless powerful in directing people’s energy to certain conclusions about the work. Cuteness can overwhelm other aesthetic considerations, and this eruptive power is interesting to me.

I have opposed cute energies with those of gestural and expressive painting which attempts its own kind of surface dominance through sheer vitality. I use the marks of neo-expressionism and action painting to create the animal figure. The subject and the content of the work are then caught up in one another without resolution. The animal form and the painting’s surface vie for attention. My goal is to create a sense of being, that it simultaneously engages us and deconstructs into constituent marks. 

As our emotional cognition attempts to put the picture together, our perception pulls it apart, blurring figure and ground, gesture and subject, and context. The painting works on its viewer as the viewer works on the painting, forming a kind of feedback loop. I’m a believer in the agency of painting.

In my animal paintings cuteness is brought to bear on the history of expressive brush marks, and a certain painterly materiality delivers quasi-cute subjects. This ambition is inextricably linked to me as a queer artist who seeks to expand the possibilities of the form through propagating a certain uneasy mix of subject and method. The conventional populist realisms and associations with artistic labour associated with working-class and middle-class taste are deliberately contradicted. While gestural painting has been wholly absorbed into the language of bourgeois taste, and cuteness pervades children’s and internet culture, their combination in this ongoing body of work formulates a kind of original, unstable, affective world that reflects social reality as I see it.

 -  David Surman, March 2023