Lisa Barnard 32 Smiths Square Photographic Commission

8 Paddock Road Lisa Barnard Lewes East Sussex BN7 1UU 32 Smiths Square Mob: 07796 374 237 Photographic Commission Web: lisabarnard.co.uk MAGGIE 7 OF 8 32 Smiths Square The old conservative party headquarters at 32 Smiths Square is synonymous with Margaret Thatcher smiling and waving gleefully out of the window on the 2nd floor, after winning the elections of 1979/83/87. The building was the home of the Conservative party from1958 to 2003 and thus represents an important period within our political history. It is common knowledge that Thatcher took a vehement stand against persistently contested European integration and hence the photographic representation of the space will perhaps suggest a degree of satire –the building will re-open as ‘Europe House’ in October 2010. The symbolism of the dulled shades of blue, peeling paintwork and iconography of past alliances will inevitably draw comparisons between the previous use of the building and the hope and importance of the buildings future inhabitants. The building had a notorious reputation for being partly responsible for the demise of the conservative party with its ‘rabbit warren’ style layout, encouraging descent and backstabbing. It is well documented that Michael Howard, during his brief time as leader, made it a priority to move the Conservative Central Office to an environment more ‘aesthetically pleasing’. Lord Parkinson –chairman of the Conservative Party from 1981 to 1983 and again from 1997 to 1998-, said: “a distinctly shabby feel at Central Office was encouraged by the then-treasurer Lord McAlpine, to create a parsimonious air to encourage donors to be generous. McAlpine had a huge hole in the carpet when you went into his room and when a benefactor offered to give him a new carpet, said: ‘Over my dead body. That hole is worth thousands’.”1 The images of Margaret Thatcher are parts of discarded ‘snapshots’ taken at a conference after she was prime minister. Found within the building during the ‘clear out’ the photographs had become stuck together and the photographic chemicals had started to ‘eat away’ at her image. Her aura is still very clearly present despite the repetitive and exhaustive nature of presenting an ideal of oneself to the masses, and despite the perceived limitations of the photographic medium. The eerie surfaces and the echo’s of history that reverberate in each blue room, present an individual production, and the imaginary scene that unfolds, sings to a specific political tune. The objects and ephemera found within each of these spaces represent, in part, the legacy of ‘Thatcherism’, a story of her fiscal policy and the encouragement of individualism, materialism and consumerism. Cameron made a speech in 2009, before he became prime minister entitled; “We need popular capitalism”! The images of the found ephemera, photographed on blue velvet within a sterile, studio environment, represent this ideology. In a Brechtian sense, I am encouraging a feeling of alienation from the presented aesthetic and a reflection on our own relationship to the objects both as photographs and as representatives of reification. From the weights used to hold the curtains in place during the IRA bombings to the deflated “In Europe not run by Europe” balloon, we are encouraged to look closely and reflect on our own recent political history. 1 Daily Telegraph article By Christopher Hope and Jonathan Isaby Published: 12:01AM GMT 09 Feb 2007 SPACES TWO DOORS ROCKET LIFT STUDIO LOBBY STAIRS CONFERENCE ROOM DYPTICH WASHINGTON BUSH MAGGIE 8 OF 8 9 OF 15 OBJECTS HOUSE OF COMMONS BELL ARTICLES EXIT GHOST By Max Houghton. Editor Foto8 Lisa Barnard’s photographs are empty stages awaiting actors to enter through the myriad doors, emerge from behind spectral blue curtains, or even to appear hologram-like through a blank screen or a gaping rent in a wall. The theatre, located at 32 Smith Square, London, is presently between productions. The final curtain for the last show came down in July 2004, though its glory days ended seven years earlier on 01 May 1997, though some would say the precise date of its demise was 28 November 1990, when its leading lady, one Margaret Hilda Thatcher, announced she would no longer take the stage. It will be evident by now that this now empty building was once the Conservative Party headquarters. A famously squalid building on the inside – a state encouraged by the party’s then treasurer Lord McAlpine to attract benevolent benefactors – it was the setting for 50 years of Tory election victories, as well as the site where party faithful learnt of the memorable loss of Michael Portillo’s Enfield seat to Labour’s Stephen Twigg that fateful May night. For many photographers, the chance to make a project in a building so redolent with recent political history would be a gift. But for one with a critical practice (anyone who saw Barnard’s Virtual Iraq at the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2008 will know that her work engages with the political), to perpetuate photography’s passionate affair with disused spaces would have been an opportunity wasted. Barnard has brought something else to the frame; an eye that doesn’t linger over the aesthetics of decay, but rather draws the observer’s attention to the poetics of space. With her cool blue interior shots, she creates the necessary distance for abstraction, moving through this new register of perception to a different spatio-temporal plane where the political and the performative, and the past and the future collapse into each other It is as though Barnard is using documentary photography to take the observer beyond the real. Although on the one hand she is simply documenting the last vestiges of an old regime, yet in the same frame she is offering up the possibility that what she is documenting is not real, was never real, just a political chimera, all surface, no depth. To paraphrase Roth, the smallness of politics is crushing. So many doors offer the promise of a way out, yet all the time the observer feels claustrophobic, hemmed in by walls and industrial pipes, waiting for the low polystyrene ceiling to bear down at any moment. Thus trapped, we are invited to consider not just the space/the stage but its lost objects, its props, and the sense of disquiet they engender. A folk doll is photographed, along with other recovered oddments, almost as a fetish object, as though for a rather surreal catalogue. It – she? – is so pitifully abject, the smallest of capitalism’s useless commodities; a diplomatic gift, perhaps, from an eastern European country. Two disembodied arms hold what the police might term ‘Tory paraphernalia’ – a flag and a scarf of the variety worn by the UK’s first female Prime Minister – literally at arm’s length. The inclusion of a silver spoon carries with it the unpalatable taste of privilege. Barnard has photographed these objects in a style reminiscent of her earlier body of work Care Packages, a project devised by the Blue Star Moms of America, as a kind of grief kit for bereaved parents of dead soldiers. Removed from their original context, these objects, like the Nestle mini marshmallows or Hershey kisses, are rendered absurd, unfathomable, redundant. These are the props of Conservative politicians, who, after 13 years off Broadway, are now waiting fractiously in the wings to take centre, or should that be centre right, stage in May 2010. Barnard has been commissioned to photograph the building by Pringle Brandon, the architects working for the new owners, and these photographs will comprise part of the final exhibition, which will take place when it opens in its new guise. Though we see evidence of a – seemingly fraught – relationship with the US in the scratched out BUSH sign, or a tiny door tag that reads Washington, there is no sign of the infamous Vive Le Quid posters, or the Keep Britain Out of Europe slogans that characterized the Conservative Party’s loathing of the EU (formerly the EEC) at that time. Which makes it all the more ironic that these same rooms will soon house offices of the European Parliament and the European Commission. As Churchill said: ‘We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ Photoworks presented 7 images of Maggie with an accompaning essay by Sarah James Maggie, Maggie, Maggie The pinched lips of seven cloned Margaret Thatchers smile unnaturally in unison, eyes fixed narrowly. Although a Thatcher far from her 1970s heyday, her rigid, manic expression is unchanged. Each portrait is almost identical, her manner performative, her gaze unflinching. With only the smallest variations in pose or posture, together they form a strange serial portrait of the woman responsible for changing Britain forever, and rubbishing the society she perversely claimed no longer existed. These images form part of Lisa Barnard’s project 32 Smith Square, arising out of her ongoing documentation of the former Conservative Central Office, commissioned by the building’s current architects, Pringle Brandon. Like an archaeologist excavating the remains of Thatcherism, Barnard has examined the building – unoccupied since the Tories left in 2004 – twice each month since August 2009. Some of her images picture the building’s strange, decrepit corporate blue spaces, stained carpets and cracked plasterboard; others its surreal wasteland of diplomatic gifts, dishevelled election posters, rosettes and un-blown-up balloons. But it is the portraits of Thatcher, unearthed in an old cupboard, which bring together these works and define the project. Her iconic image is synonymous with the twisted moralities of the free market, the capricious exploits of buccaneer capitalism, privatisation, the debtor economy and age of banking that has defined Britain’s politics and reconfigured its culture since the 1970s.

Load more