Third Text

5 January 2024

Paul O’Kane

Janette Paris has made a book, illustrated with her own digital drawings, accompanied by captions that each tell a tale, and with a transcribed interview with Gilane Tawadros, director of The Whitechapel Gallery, London. ^[1]  I tend to resort to the adjective ‘deadpan’ when referring to Parris’s approach to art, and perhaps her approach to a certain kind of literature. The digital drawing process that she has been perfecting over many years is as unadorned as her intentionally straightforward prose. Together, words and images read as succumbing to, and as strongly influenced by our technological environment, but also informed by a certain kind of impoverishment, as a result perhaps of capitalism’s and consumerism’s relentless and barely challenged rationale to squeeze and extract profit from everyone and everything.

Along with every writing style, every drawing style – from fine baroque silverpoint to Parris’s crystal-clear digital outlines – is a particular mode of representation that informs and influences that which it reveals. Parris unashamedly aspires, and simultaneously succumbs to, a personal aesthetic deemed appropriate to her project. At the book launch event for her book, when finally handling a copy of the real thing, I was surprised to discover just how stocky it is. Previously I had encountered and evaluated it only as a virtual text on a computer screen but now noted that the pages are unusually thick, almost like our very first children’s books. Parris’s unnumbered pages therefore add up to a formidable tome with a strong protective cover. As a bit of a book designer and publisher myself, I notice that these creative and strategic decisions chime with the writing’s all-caps, chunky font (apparently custom-made by the editors and designers of Montez Press). It also seems appropriate to the book’s stark, emphatic and uncompromising drawings. These might represent past and waning institutions – shops, theatres, places of work, a college, a sports stadium, etc, many now closed and repurposed, most of them in the downbeat part of East London where the artist grew up.

The aesthetic values of this book can also be allied with some of the artist’s responses to questions about her work made during the launch event. These sometimes offered (in early Warhol or early Dylan-esque fashion) surprisingly blunt but thereby thought-provoking one or two-word answers. Hearing these it became clear that the style of this book is true not only to the artist’s ‘voice’ but even to their thought and speech patterns, proving that this is an authentic, sincere, long-hewn and hard-won document that marks a mid-career moment of reflection while also recording a certain sense of achievement.

Fortunately, not just artists but all those who can be counted within the broadest interpretation of the term ‘culture’ can find ways to affirm and explore even the least promising and least auspicious of environments. Hence, in Parris’s ‘non-memoir’ (we will come back to this negation), fast-food cafes or local pubs can become scenarios for significant if highly personalised experiences, as do cinemas, dancehalls and more humdrum retailers, chain brands and local institutions. Subjected to Parris’s attentions, these constitute a subjective hinterland, a kind of backstreet to that hegemonic, fast-changing, superficial consumer spectacle of the ‘high’ street that aspires to capture our gaze in its illuminated screens and windows, and compel us to prosume when prompted.

Janette Parris, This Is Not a Memoir, ‘Granada TV’, 2023, digital drawing, courtesy and copyright of Montez Press and the artist

Coincidentally, I was born above a ‘parade’ of shops myself, on an Essex council estate (why local councils, from the 1930s to the 1950s, called groups of shops ‘parades’ I still don’t know). I recently wrote about this and spoke with students about the way in which the ‘parade’ might have shaped my own culture and subjectivity. Thus, I found some timely empathy in encountering Parris’s book, as well as a feel for the artist’s references, observations and vocabulary. I recall being one of a group of kids (my own family consisted of seven in a two-bedroom maisonette) who lived above the shops, and who consequently had special access to the delivery yards at their rear. And so we had a strangely privileged sense of access to the ‘backstage’ of the consumer spectacle. We got to know truck drivers and even helped them load and unload.

While drawing out these personal memories, assisted by Parris’s reminiscences, I was also reminded that Walter Benjamin – as well as flaneuring around Paris arcades in the interwar years, while writing about urban experiences in Naples, Moscow and Marseille, plus his Berlin childhood – also constructed a piece of art writing titled One Way Street. There he used the modern, urban consumer’s daily procession past a row (or ‘parade’) of shops as a means by which to structure this piece of writing. He responded to the peculiarly heterogeneous experience of passing shop after shop, each containing sometimes wildly differing products and services. Today, I can find echoes of this project both in my own memory writing and in Parris’s This Is Not A Memoir. ^[2]

Aside from this empathy, I want to support and celebrate Janette Parris as a fellow traveller on the special journey of what I have come to call ‘class-migration’. This Is Not A Memoir might be a milestone on that journey, a substantive cultural contribution, made manifest and set down in expectation of a critical response. It could be said to be an appeal for recognition and understanding, though Parris herself would surely balk at this slightly heroic description. I can hear her modestly batting these florid thoughts away in her usual, uniquely sceptical and dis-aggrandising manner.

Despite much well-meaning rhetoric and well-intended initiatives, it is still not illegal to discriminate on grounds of class. Thus, such discrimination still abounds within otherwise progressive societies. This is partly, it could be suggested, because ‘class’ is so difficult to define. Nevertheless, it remains rare and unfair to find, in the self-proclaimed ‘artworld’ (surely there are many such worlds, and worlds within worlds) genuine working-class voices achieving positions of visibility and audibility, let alone gaining managerial power and institutional influence. Perhaps this is because that ‘artworld’ (the one that assuredly knows what it is, who is in it and who is not), in constantly cultivating and subtly supervising taste, style, cool, trend, etc, determines and maintains (insidiously, if not esoterically) the cultural boundaries (often intangible and invisible, like the well-known ‘glass ceiling’) between one class and another.

In this way it might leave artists from genuinely working-class backgrounds – like myself, perhaps, who left school at sixteen with just one ‘O’ Level (Art, Grade B) and went straight into decades of labouring and unemployment – in a peculiar limbo. We are always trying to learn the codes and join the artworld and middle-class clubs, ever trying to answer the puzzle of how to behave, who we are, what we need to do and what to expect in return; always driven to strive for excellence; always hoping for a champion who might recognise our talents and our value, and perhaps rescue us; always wondering to what standards we should aspire, and who exactly it is that we are ultimately trying to please and satisfy. None of this, of course, is explicitly referred to or demonstrated in Parris’s book and wider oeuvre, but it is there, latent in the pages, for those who are able to detect it.

This Is Not A Memoir is an inviting and accessible book that can be picked up and skimmed through quickly, gaining a lot of information in a short time, a little like a narrative imparted by a stained glass window. But it also rewards more patient scrutiny. It is perhaps most strikingly original in its unprecedented combination of stark typography and equally emphatic and vivid digital imaging. Together, these seem to deliver a representation of a unique subjectivity, one whose tales are told in an inexpressive voice without ever boosting, romanticising or dramatising what is nevertheless a lifelong attempt to assume a position, believe in a self, and eventually find a seat within the grand game of musical chairs that determines middle-class profession, competition, achievement and recognition.

Janette Parris, This Is Not a Memoir, ‘Granada TV’, 2023, digital drawing, courtesy and copyright of Montez Press and the artist

As Gilane Tawadros points out in the interview that accompanies the artist’s words and images, there are some especially beguiling images here; ones that, rather than neatly framing a certain shopfront or other recognisable institution, leave a lot of information out. It is as if the artist, at these odd moments, is looking awkwardly up at the sky, or down at the pavement. They are a little like photographs accidentally taken by a camera dangling from the artist’s hand. However, these most enigmatic pages also provide interesting questions for the reviewer. They might raise an underlying question of the relationship between drawing, photography and digital imaging in Parris’s process. Then again, they may point to moments of profound forgetfulness that interleave more specific or established memories. Perhaps they are not memories at all but possibly point to the reason that this is – as the artist claims – ‘not’ a memoir? They might even reveal the distracted and wandering mindset of an artist who confesses in these brief asides or noises-off to not always focus on the neatly framed and prescribed reality provided on our high streets but finds their mind meandering away from the call of consumerism to enter a more wayward realm of thought and experience.

After all, aside from our reliable ‘parade’ of familiar, slowly processed, relatively clear and often formative memories, we surely store up more murky, less retrievable memories (like dreams half-recalled, then dissipated). Some might even become what Sigmund Freud called ‘screen memories’, falsely standing in for and obscuring events that we might not be capable of confronting. Thus, these strange exceptions to the book’s rule become a necessary addition, and alternative to, the main run of pictures. They help confirm the book as an explorative and speculative project, a work of contemporary art as well as a product of culture.

But just what is a memoir, and why is this ‘not’ one? On my desk, as I write, I can see copies of books by Edouard Louis, who writes harrowing descriptions of adolescence as a young, white, gay man growing up in an impoverished and harshly intense white working-class French community. I can also see Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux’s book The Years (2008), a beguiling read that shackles a middle-class, left-leaning woman’s intimate recollections to those of the French nation state and its own formative ‘years’ of development. I must admit I once developed a crush on the memoir genre and recall being floored by finding, for example, John McGahern’s exemplary, and simply titled, Memoir (2005). At that time, I was learning about the many categories and genres into which I might pour my otherwise general passion for writing. Memoir promised a reasonably accessible form; after all, for memoir, the self is the rather handy locus of our research, a conveniently close-to-hand place where emotive personal and cultural issues can be called up, combined and crafted in satisfyingly aesthetic ways.

For me, however, the main attraction of memoir was, and perhaps remains, an opportunity to show things about myself that I need (ever more urgently as middle-age descends) to show to others, whether they are interested or not – if only to try to arrive at and reveal a certain truth about myself and to myself; as if to state my worth and to describe both my own particular disadvantages as well as displaying any talents or privileges I might also have.

This is, of course, also the realm of ‘identity’, an arena most of us must discover at some point (although there may be some who never feel the need to give it time). Identity will always be with us, but there are times in life when it seems especially urgent to pursue, or perhaps pass through, albeit like a crossroads, at the heart of which stands a trickster offering complicated advice. Some of us seem to remain procrastinating there, perhaps honing and learning to present a certain image of a self, but always one that proves too fickle and motile to cling to as any kind of constant and reliable confirmation or support. And if our memoirs are always inaccurate and incomplete, this only serves to undermine any promise they might provide – once proffered – to be an important part of the answer to troubling questions we might have regarding our value, status, role and position. ^[3]  But again, Parris’s negation of memoir in her own title could be said to refute the foregoing and point to some more sophisticated and less familiar strategy – a new genre perhaps?

During one of my own romps in memoir-land a friend advised me that ‘… you cannot write unless you have read Proust’, which I dutifully, slowly and somewhat arduously proceeded to do. Proust may be the memoirist par excellence, of course, but what interests me here and now – given Parris’s prompt – is the way in which his superlatively florid sentences, with their fine millefeuille-like layers effortlessly engaging the reader’s expanding mind, contrast with Parris’s resilient blocks of capitalised words, joined like bricks in a wall, so as to be anything but Proustian and yet nevertheless insist, in a crystal clear tone, that this different writing, this different life, this different identity and this different, nay ‘non’ memoir, is valid, possible, warranted and wanted today. Thus, Parris’s book becomes a liberating exercise, a revolutionary calling into question of an established and perhaps elitist genre. It thereby expands the possibilities of literature (again Parris would balk at the grandeur and at the praise). We might then put Parris’s emphatic insistence that her own work is not a memoir down to the fact that this book is more than (mere) memoir, and that the artist wants to avoid all possibly pretentious associations that the memoir genre might have – sounding, as it might well do to some ears, too posh, too French and too middle-class to frame and deliver this generous wedge of working class, East London memories.

Another reason for Parris to produce a non-memoir may also be one we may have previously considered regarding certain other works of art titled not this and not that – for example, the wonderfully self-reflexive Iranian film director Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not A Film (2011), or the band Public Image Ltd’s more belligerent This Is Not A Love Song (1983). To qualify as a speculative work of art, it seems that all of these examples need to ‘not’ be the something known and familiar that we might assume them to be. Thus, they enter the realm of contemporary art, where all, after all, must be suspended in question and suspected as questionable.

Finally, this project certainly involves memory, but also – if only inadvertently – concerns history and the past. Today, with the encouragement of contemporary artists like Pablo Bronstein, Folkert de Jong, Tacita Dean, Cao Fei, Sigrid Holmwood, Yu Hong, Hew Locke, Michelle Williams Gamaker, and many more, as well as the influence of creative and progressive historians, we have come to see our own ‘little’ histories as expressions of cultural, social, national, or otherwise abstractly conceived and more conceptual ‘big’ histories. Meanwhile, none of us are willing to claim to provide the accurate or definitive account of any past day, moment or time. Parris shows in her book how one person’s memories and experiences might enfold or trigger the different, equally resonant and valuable recollections of others. This Is Not A Memoir communicates its own humble sense of recording the life and times, places and spaces of a slightly Quixotic historical protagonist, and by collecting experiences in this form Parris invites a form of equality, a relativist and arbitrary valuation of all memory, all histories, all stories and all people. Thus, this is not so much a memoir as a series of prompts to the present, and provocations to the broadest of audiences, who might use the texts and images here to revisit and examine our own equivalents: childhood memories, local haunts, our milieu or psychogeography, always implicating the wider world and our shared and particular socio-economic system. As a result, we can use This Is Not A Memoir to reflect upon the grander schemes of time and change, the beguiling mystery and strange persistence of the past as it is folded within the present. It also calls upon us each to return, rejuvenated, to the task of finding our own appropriate way, form and means by which to represent a peculiar and particular life.

Janette Parris, This Is Not A Memoir, edited by Emily Pope and Hasti and designed by JMMP – Julian Mader, Max Prediger, is published by Montez Press, London, 2023, in a limited edition of 230

^[1]   Parris recently launched the book with an accompanying gig by her band The Parris Experience at South London Gallery. A selection of the book’s images and captions were also shown at Whitechapel Gallery’s ‘Life Is More Important Than Art’ exhibition, curated by Gilane Tawadros and Janette Parris, and featuring work by Ahmed Abokar, Amaal Alhaag, Rana Begum, William Cobbing, Sarah Dobai, R.I.P. Germain, Rahma Hassan, Susan Hiller, Jerome, Matthew Krishanu, Martin O’Brien, Elmi Original, Janette Parris, Gaby Sahhar, John Smith, Nadine Stijns, Alia Syed, Mitra Tabrizian, Mark Wallinger and Osman Yousefzada

^[2]   Benjamin seems to have been influenced in turn by Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant of 1926, in which the Surrealist conducts an imaginatively forensic investigation of a procession through a Parisian arcade; see Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, Boston, Exact Change, 1994 

^[3]   It might go without saying, then, that I retain, in my unruly archives, a variety of hard-to-locate memoir bits and memoir pieces, nothing comprehensive or sufficient, but a favourite of which is titled Candy Floss and Diesel. This is a chapter of a heterogenous little book that variously explores numerous encounters between romance and technology. My memoir chapter there concerns special nights, in adolescence, when fairgrounds would visit and briefly bless my godforsaken Essex council estate.

Paul O’Kane is an artist, writer and senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins (CSM), University of the Arts London (UAL). He also teaches at SOAS, University of London. His book, History in Contemporary Art and Culture, was published by Routledge in 2023. He has also published numerous professional pieces, including articles, essays, reviews, and a group of artists' self-published books. His writings have appeared in Third Text's refereed journal, as well as Third Text Online and numerous other platforms, including Art Monthly. His long-running seminars ‘Technologies of Romance’ and ‘A Thing of the Past?’ (on history in contemporary art) contextualise the impact of today's ‘new’ technologies on art, life and culture, while attempting to use history to see, interpret and theorise our times.