Marcus Coates (1968 – )
Marcus Coates was born in London in 1968. He studied at the Kent Institute of Art and Design and the Royal Academy of Art, London.
He was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Artist Award in 2008 and the first Daiwa Foundation Art Prize in 2009. Coates has exhibited widely in the UK and overseas; solo exhibitions include Proxy, Kate Macgarry, London (2012); Dawn Chorus, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales (2012); The Trip, The Serpentine Gallery, Artist Studio, Londo (2011) and Psychopomp, Milton Keynes Gallery (2010). He was also included in the 2009 Tate Triennale exhibition Altermodern, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud.
Working in various media, including photography, sculpture and sound, Coates is best known for his performative films, which explore encounters between the human and animal worlds, a key theme throughout his work. He appropriates the language and behaviour of wild mammals, insects and birds as a means of deciphering our emotional and social conventions. He gained notoriety for his video installation Dawn Chorus (2007), in which singers are shown in their natural habitats of offices and living rooms, mimicking intricate birdsong.
Coates regularly appears in his films, often as a shamanic figure interacting with members of the public. Dressed in casual clothes and a selection of taxidermal headdresses, he channels animal spirits, using these encounters to offer insight into the problems of the human world. This interest in ‘becoming animal’ continues in a series of photographic self-portraits from 2013 in which the artist transforms himself into insects and molluscs by encasing his body in shaving foam, cotton wool, sugar and flour paste. Another transformation takes place in the film Human Report (2008), where Coates inverts the perspective of the nature documentary format. Disguised in a rudimentary cardboard costume resembling a blue-footed booby bird, native to the Galapagos Islands, the artist undertakes an observation of human life. The result is a funny, yet poignant critique of our desire to demystify nature.
Glossary
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Design
The arrangement of elements or details in an artefact or a work of art.
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Documentary
The term ‘Documentary’ was not coined until the 1920s, and then used by the British film-maker, John Grierson, to refer to moving pictures. It has a long and continuous history in British photography, reaching back to the invention of the medium. Many critics claimed that the documentary impulse, which can perhaps be best defined as the systematic recording of visual reality for the purpose of providing information and encouraging understanding of the world, is inherent in the medium itself. It was this view which came to be known as the realist paradigm - the belief that a photograph represents a ‘slice of reality’ easily understood by the viewer. This belief governed understanding of photography from the moment of its invention in the era of positivism in the 19th Century, until it was itself subject to interrogation in the 1980s.
Early British practitioners included John Thomson whose visual essay Street Life in London (1876) documented the life of the London poor, and Hill and Adamson who portrayed, in the mid 1840s, the customs and way of life of the fisher folk of Newhaven near Edinburgh. In the early 20th century, following the emergence of documentary film-making and Mass Observation (a study undertaken in the North of England by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson), this new aesthetic found its most persuasive outlet in the mass circulation weekly magazines, such as Picture Post and Life. In time, however, pressure from advertisers combined with the restrictions of group journalism and curtailed the independence of creative photographers, with only exceptional individuals such as Bill Brandt able to survive as both a photojournalist and an independent photographer. His images of Britain’s class-ridden society along with his more experimental nudes, portraits and landscapes had a profound influence on a younger generation and established Brant as a major creative force in the development of modernism in Britain.
Mass Observation was designed to emulate the radical achievements of the worker-photography movement which had arisen in Germany during the 1920s. It proved influential on the evolution of British documentary, especially on those photographers associated with the Side Gallery in Newcastle. The gallery fostered a regional, community-oriented form of documentary practice. Its philosophy was rooted firmly in the notion that an authentic document can only be generated by those familiar with the local community. Photographers associated with Side Gallery included Sirkka Konttinen, Isabella Jedrecyck, Graham Smith, Peter Fryer, Chris Killip and Julian Germain.
It was, however, across the Atlantic that the more enduring legacy concerning the ethics and status of documentary was to be found in the work of the photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration to document the plight of the American rural poor during the Depression. One of its outstanding photographers was Walker Evans whose use of signs and symbols (such as billboards and advertising hoardings) as images of desire created a text or narrative to accompany the careful sequencing of images. The direct inheritors of the photograph as social sign were the American photographers of the ‘social landscape’, namely Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus whose unsympathetic vision of the American landscape reflected the anxieties of urban life during the booming consumer decade - store fronts, billboards, graffiti and advertising. They chose to portray people, situations and artefacts in a casual and objective way that allowed the viewer to interpret the work freely; a strategy that became known as the ‘snapshot aesthetic’. One of those who experienced many of these developments first hand was the British photographer Tony Ray-Jones. His work was widely reproduced in the 1960s and his book A Day Off (1974) proved a particular inspiration for the generation of documentary photographers who developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Relevant websites:
The work of early documentary photographs can be found in the collections of the Royal Photographic Society www.rps.org)
The Mass Observation archive is held by the University of Sussex www.sussex.ac.uk/library/massobs/
The work of the Side Gallery can be seen at www.amber-online.com/gallery/
The archive for the Farm Security Administration is now in the Print and Reading Room Collections of the Library of Congress in Washington www.loc.gov/rr/print -
Film
A transparent, flexible plastic material, usually of cellulose acetate or polyester, on which light-sensitive emulsion is coated, or on which an image can be formed by various transfer processes.
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Installation
An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.
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Sculpture
A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.
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Video
Images recorded on videotape or on optical disc to be viewed on television screens, or projected onto screens. The medium through which these images are recorded and displayed.