Archive / Rhizomes

This essay was written by Lesley Guy to accompany the artwork Make Mine a Molotov. The text has been lightly edited for spelling, punctuation and formatting for online publication. The original argument and wording have been preserved.

As a child growing up in the 1970’s, Richard Bartle used to sit in holes he’d dug and wait for ‘The Bomb’. Bartle’s most recent work Make Mine a Molotov is a haunting reflection of that experience and an awareness of the inevitability and effects of such disasters, man made or otherwise.

Bartle uses the process of photomontage and a code-like composition to construct what seem to be prophetic or historic insights into socio-political events. In the 1970’s NASA sent images of a man and a woman into space. Similarly, Bartle is attempting what appears to be an aesthetic and symbolic communication with some higher power, using violent and iconoclastic images to do so. Perhaps the intention is to resolve the conflict between humanity and its creator, an attempt to show God what is being done in his name. Or perhaps the work simply creates a dialogue with its audience, who upon viewing the images are made aware of their position as subjects of political and religious hierarchies.

Bartle uses the mass media images that form part of our every day experience, sampling and transferring these into cellular panels, clustering them together to form savage new images, ‘visual tumours’. The rioting figure, a recurrent character, becomes an angry child fighting back against a malevolent State. Other cells, such as a shimmering golden effigy of the Queen appropriated from a pound coin, or the mouths of politicians, appear under siege. Power is transferred for the moment. The sceptre has become a brick and the artist its chucker.

The work, presented like a sliding panel puzzle, has a sense of transience - also mirrored in the textured, almost nostalgic surface that is created by the actual transferring process. Compositions that appear fixated upon one particular event become ephemeral - displaying the potential to be shifted or rearranged both physically and in the imagination. That which is depicted, though seemingly static, is therefore in a constant state of flux and appears at times beyond history or any given moment. An image of a 1960’s ice cream van seems thoroughly modern and memorable, perhaps even futuristic, within this context – while Saddam Hussain, on the other hand, may be in time forgotten, and rendered a mere bit-part-player in the overall Drama.

Bartle’s work at once feels like a premonitory dream and an historical document. Despite its often anger inducing and saddening subject matter, the work paradoxically offers a sense of pleasure and visual harmony. Through its manifestation the artist succeeds in creating order out chaos, as well as reconciling the bridge between a utopian and dystopian world - a balance is created in all our worlds.

Lesley Guy
Artist / Writer
2005