Things fall apart
Dark images of cultural interrogation were blue-tacked to THAT's white brick walls in late August. Sheets of litho paper glossed with supermarket enamel gridded works in an "ideologically correct" gesture of inbuilt potential ephemerality. Across the bottom of the central work of cultural despair, Things Fall Apart was written in hasty and fugitive chalk. With perhaps unintended irony, reference to Chinua Achebe's novel of cultural disintegration and hegemonic relations also referenced the subversion of the art object.
Philip Dean underscores slices of history with temporal frigility, but overlays a sense of permanency by drawing on an "old master" tradition. Postmodern quotation is considered by the artist as "a tendency towards the single proposition that nothing is original" (P.Dean, "Against Silence", THAT Contemporary Art space Newsletter, August 1987.) Yet Dean's use of quotation is not unadulterated or disaffected. In the Economic Interest usurps authority from Northern European altarpieces, in particular from Grünewald, and the resultant cohesive triptych could be an in-focus 1980s Beckmann. In this work especially, the quotation is not specific. Rather, it moves towards the syncretic. Philip Dean's urban crucifixion is braced at left by a jaundiced St. Sebastian beneath a factory skyline, and at right by a woman twisted with crutches, both full-sized figures compressing a doubled-over naked Christ figure whose contorted gaze beneath a barbed-wire crown fixes the viewer. The bonding of commerce and worker martyrdom is emphasized by the truncated bureaucratic "patrons"/voyeurs at bottom, and by junk-mail crosses and jewel cut-outs masquerading as sources of celestial light. An inscription further directs meaning.
In his verbal statement, "Against Silence", Philip Dean argues for art to "be meaningful (sic) on the larger stage of culture", for art to
Philip Dean, In the Economic Interest, 1987
