THE BOTTOM LINE

© The Artist

THE BOTTOM LINE 1986

Mark Wallinger (1959 – )

Details

Dimension
122 X 99.5 CM
Media
OIL ON BOARD
Accession number
P5482

Summary

The painting is built on the confrontation between two picture-postcard, value-loaded views of Britain. Tower Bridge, the Victorian emblem of an industrially controlled empire, is set between London’s booming financial quarter and its obsolete docklands (now converted into leisure centres and loft apartments for the wealthy). The image is intentionally anonymous, although in fact it was painted from a holiday snap of the artist as a child with his family. Counterpoised to this urban view is a rural idyll of the genre invented by Romantic landscape painters for patrons who had never experienced the degradation of peasant life, and later sold in reproduction to city people nostalgic for a golden age that never existed. Both types of image have penetrated deep into the national consciousness. We are asked to decide which image should be ‘top’ in a way that recalls the republican spirit of the Levellers and ‘the world turned upside down’. The Bottom Lineis a complex picture of the historical and the contemporary: poverty and wealth, the exploitation of one class by another, and the use of powerful myths to conceal the true state of affairs and keep the status quo. It is this true state of affairs that the violent crimson blot in the centre, disfiguring both images equally, asks us to confront and, Rorschach-like, interpret for ourselves.

 

Glossary

  • Genre

    In a specialised sense this term refers to the portrayal of everyday life, and refers to painting; more broadly it means the subject types covered by an artist.

    The 17th Century French Academy decreed that there were five main genres an artist should study. These were History, Portrait, Genre, Landscape and Still Life. History was considered the most important as it portrayed Man in his most noblest endeavours and in his relationship with God; Still Life the lowest as it dealt with the moribund and innate.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.