Bad faith
Mark Webb's paintings in this exhibition were concerned with a postmodern vision of History. In postmodern terms History can only be a text, it can never exist in itself.1 History, if you like, is always an abstraction, a bit like Reality. Which is to say, we can only ever understand History (or Reality) by making some kind of model, a necessarily artificial model. The trouble is we then take our model to be the Truth.
The postmodern conception of History as text is an attempt to remind us not to take our model-making too seriously. That is to say we should always be prepared to look at the model again, we must be prepared to rewrite the text. There is absolutely no reason why we shouldn't do this because the "object" that is History is something which can never be fully grasped, it can never be fully conceptualised, it is always open to new perspectives, and it is always intermeshing with a continually changing present.
The list of clichéd comments about art (e.g. "The beautiful is always beautiful") which Webb used in the handout for the exhibition is a clear indicator of his concern to demolish fossilised or petrified conceptions of art - which might entail the demolition of a fossilised Art History.
In his paintings, archetypal images of Greco-Roman architecture are superimposed one upon the other, or are made to fade into a misty haze, or a miasmic darkness. Such Greco-Roman images are icons of the birth, or origin, of our Great Western Civilisation. They are clichés, like the 125 clichés Webb lists in the exhibition handout. These great monuments become signs of enduring presence, symbols of an
Mark Webb, Abstract Painting (Tradition and Authority), detail, 1987
