Ed Bats’ Policy of Violation

Commissioned by Page Galleries on the occasion of Ed Bats’ exhibition Don’t mind if I don’t.

Ed Bats cites graffiti removal specialists among their artistic influences, a tribute at once antagonistic and flirtatious, directed to the civil servants whose job it is to enforce the official codes of the city by a former street artist whose role it was to violate them. As one of the few statements the artist has made about their fine art practice, this claim announces an ongoing allegiance to street culture, and though the comment rings mostly teasingly, fitting with the attitude of that culture, the influence is unmistakable in the canvasses presented in Don’t mind if I don’t, a collection of the artist’s recent work at Wellington’s Page Galleries.

Ed Bats, *Is your garage locked*, 2021, acrylic, enamel & aerosol on canvas, artist frame (white oak), 81 x 135 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Page Galleries. Photo: Michael Mahne Lamb

The rhythm of violation and enforcement percusses through the paintings. In Is your garage locked? (2021), the acrylic, enamel and aerosol paints are built up patchily, resulting in a wrought surface that resembles a wall or phone pole upon which posters have been successively and exhaustively pasted up then ripped off. This rhythm, pendulum-like, is only one of the city’s overtures to which Bats is clearly attuned, characterised by similar fluctuations as between rush hour and the still hours that come before it, or between alleyways neighbouring overpasses. Present too is the impersonal cacophony of the city, which Bats’ works mimic in their layeredness—a paste up for someone’s [lost dog/stand-up gig/climate rally/maths tutoring hustle]—so many appeals and gestures crammed so densely on top of one another, that none really counts for itself anymore; no mark is indexable to itself, only its part in the accumulation. The graffiti removal workers, within this exchange, are then not agents of the bureaucratic code, but sentinels of a rare quiet, who humbly clear away the clutter to make space for more and new impressions.

While Bats’ work and commentary conjures the phenomena of urban life, and while it is seductive to be swept away in those, the statement is most notable for how it figures the act of removal or withdrawal as itself a form of mark making, the strange way this parallels Bats’ insistence on their own anonymity, and the new phase of their work that it might signal. Their anonymity, in many ways, is another homage to street art, not least because the pseudonym, Ed Bats, was first adopted by the artist as their graffiti tag. Discretion is the occupational (and legal) necessity of the street artist, but to about the same degree, indiscretion and self-promotion are the occupational necessity of the fine artist, for whom positioning oneself as an exchangeable product, able to accrue capital both economic and social, is taken to be a given of creative labour. Anonymity, in this context, seems like a way to withdraw from those things, and withdrawing from those things, as for the graffiti cleaners, has to it a distinct politics and poetics.

Withdrawal recurs throughout Bats’ practice, in how paint is applied to create absence, and in the works’ titles—many of which are pithy statements in the sense that they feel spat-out with some distaste. This show includes Smart sounding word, Slice of strife, and What’s better than overcast (all 2021). Don’t mind if I don’t, the exhibition’s title, is the consummate expression of this attitude, which is ironic, a bit boyish and mostly disinterested, even, it seems, in their own creative practice. Or at least, in having to talk about it.

But there is also another possibility worth considering, that this dismissiveness signals Bats’ fatigue, not with the arts establishment—which would be predictable—but with the ideal of the city itself. Like love letters about falling, slowly and sadly, out of love, the works out forward an uneasy inquisition: is the clamour and incessantness of contemporary urban life growing sour and schizophrenic, emptied out by the same things that fill it? And what does that mean for an artist for whom those things have been such a generous wellspring and constant touchstone of their creativity?

Rem Koolhaas’ essay “The Generic City” is a manifesto for the city gone the way of pure kinesis: contemptuous of nostalgia, staunchly perennial, boom-and-bust and sprawling, in the architect’s words, “like a mangrove forest.”(1) Markedly, identity is obsolete in “The Generic City.” It is, according to Koolhaas, a response to the question “What are the disadvantages of identity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness?” that figures ‘blankness’ as “nothing but a reflection of present need and present ability [...] it is ‘superficial’—like a Hollywood studio lot, it can produce a new identity every Monday morning.” “The Generic City” is also then, a model for the city gone the way of pure, obliterating anonymity, where that marks, not a loss, but an organismic, orgasmic quality in which a city’s blankness means it can be home to and (re)fashioned by anyone, rather than held in a centralised, historical identity, which trades transformative energy for that of maintenance, and saps, therefore, any instinctive kinesis.

Koolhaas was intoxicated by a ruthless kind of urbanism that much of Ed Bats’ work, too, can seem to enshrine. He describes “The Generic City” as “a place of weak and distended sensations, few and far between emotions,” amounting to “a trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences,” which gives off the same apathy and ambient queasiness as the artist’s work and attitude. “The Generic City,” however, is a city idyllically free from gentrification. It is not free from impoverishment, which is shared equally and which it figures as a ploy against the outward creep of wealth and the spreading and tightening of the “straightjacket[ed]” city. But it cannot concede that wealth may be creeping nonetheless, nor does it wish to see the aggressive blankness of this creep.

Ed Bats, *There's health food in hell*, 2021, acrylic & oil stick on canvas, 200 x 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Page Galleries. Photo: Michael Mahne Lamb

Slightly less intoxicated than Koolhaas, or perhaps already hungover, Bats is, in these works, sensitive to gentrification and its signifiers.Instead of Koolhaas’ pure, wild, kinetic genericness, we have something akin to Kyle Chayka’s AirSpace, wherein ‘the generic’ refers, more conventionally and pejoratively, “to the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live/work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go,” where it is possible to “get a dry cortado with perfect latte art at any of them, then Instagram it on a marble countertop and further spread the aesthetic to your followers.”(2) There’s health food in hell (2021) is long and thin, coloured cynically, in the preferred palette of this AirSpace, like a greying cucumber.

Chayka proposes that all this signals public space’s move inwards, its commitment to an ideal of frictionlessness that “limits experiences of difference in the service of comforting a particular demographic […] falsely defined as the norm.” Bats’ Blind (Blue and Orange) (2020), a large electric blue canvas to which is affixed a venetian blind—a construction method the artist has returned to repeatedly since around 2018—might be read as a reflection on this: is to be blind the same as choosing not to see? Again, we have the figure of withdrawal, here in the act of drawing down the blinds, here a mark of space enclosed and foreclosed.

With this growing ambivalence, Bats has moved away from the street artist’s mode of surly subversion for its own surly sake, and toward a more careful discernment of urban life and how to paint it. Increased experimentation with architectural features like that of Blind (Blue and Orange) are one outcome of this—unconventionally shaped armatures that in turn allow for a more dynamic and street-like treatment of gallery space. Eat what’s left before it’s gone (2021) comprises two panels fixed together disjointedly, across which are repeated the same simple geometric gesture; and across which the eye moves like a footfall descending a staircase in a hurry. The short moment of suspension somewhere between, above, out-of-contact with, its two parts counts as much to the experience of the work as the painted surfaces themselves, their simplicity disturbed by this involuntary, staccato movement.

The other shift this collection marks, and the more unlikely one, is the artist’s increased attention to local artists and art history. It’s unlikely because that art history is so myopically fixated on landscape painting traditions, with the ‘cosmopolitan’ artists, like Louise Henderson and Milan Mrkusich, never quite receiving comparable recognition, or receiving it belatedly. This omission is an admission of sorts to a widely shared feeling of our cities’ mediocrity, of which Bats’ long-held preference for international post-War, post-Minimalist painter-sculptors like Sven Lukin and Blair Thurman, is itself arguably a symptom. Surprisingly, Mrkusich, whose work explored architecture and design through painting, is not one of the artists Bats cites among his local influences, instead including Ralph Hotere, Don Driver and, again surprisingly, given he is one of our foremost landscape artists, Toss Woollaston. Bats makes a tribute to the latter in this collection with Sir Woolly (2021), which features bars of earthy colours painted, in Woollaston’s manner, with brushstrokes fast and chunky like crayon drawings. More, but a more relaxed, momentum is the result, gained here by stepping away from the city, or at least the most globalised, cybernetic and neurotic version of it.

As a counterstrategy to the takeover of AirSpace—whose product is the globalised, cybernetic, and neurotic city—the appeal of the local is clear. As the local entails an identity, as character unique to place, it also moves into conflict with Koolhaas’ euphoric notion of the generic, which averts identity, because the stronger [this is], “the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.” With Don’t mind if I don’t, Ed Bats throws Koolhaas’ contention into question, seeing the specificity and history of place as substance to be expanded, re-interpreted, renewed and contradicted. But they also throw with it the anonymity by which they have heretofore withdrawn themselves from view, revealing more of who they are, where they come from, how they work and what they care about. For the artist, as for the graffiti removal specialists, blankness is only ever the threshold for more expression.

Footnotes:
(1) Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), 1239-1294.
(2) Kyle Chayka, “Welcome to AirSpace,” The Verge, 3 August 2016. https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification.

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