Roderick Bunter: go on—call in sick
Do paintings have a voice; are they able to speak to us? It seems that, today, communication and entertainment are intravenously absorbed. Comic books, digitalised music and computer-generated graphics present information in a quickly digestible form. As passive receivers of messages which have been sent (or at least intended), and yet others again which have gone astray, people today seem to have little time for, or desire to think twice about, this intercepted information. For several years now Roderick Bunter has been articulating this space between image and text. His images often marry improbable advertising slogans and logos with conflicting images. We are not permitted to read words such as "dry" in The Drive to Distraction IV (sign language) without noticing the accompanying tracks of tyres which seem to have smeared through pools of wet, black paint. The contrast is not particularly confronting nor humorous. We are merely asked to note the disjunction and then continue to look for something more.
There is always an uneasiness in works such as this, that the artist is simply presenting the finds of his "bower-bird"1 activities without any sort of critique. Bunter side-steps those issues of paedophilia, marriage separation and mass communication which are linked to the logos and symbols he employs, with all the charming naivety of someone complicit with 'the system'. Essentially his work thus becomes a pastiche or parody of the art system which produced it. As such, it is a symptom not a cure.2
Go on- call in sick, the title of Bunter's exhibition, draws attention to the layers of meaning in speech. One might well imagine the receptionist at the other end of the telephone meekly taking down