Breakwell is perhaps best known for his Diary
works.
Originally, from the mid-1960s onwards, these took the form
of entries variously written, drawn, photographed or collaged, and then
published and exhibited in gallery spaces; subsequently, in 1984,
Breakwell himself adapted the format for television in Ian Breakwell's
Continuous Diary and the follow-up Christmas Diary for Channel 4. It is
important to understand that Breakwell's 'diaries' are not personal
recollections being made public, nor are they records of significant dates
in the diarist's life – quite the opposite. Indeed, many of the texts
are written in the third person, rather than the first person as one might
expect; rather than enjoying the confidences of the author, the reader is
forced to imagine the motives of this often detached and sardonic observer
– as Breakwell puts it, 'you can get a mirror image of the person
behind the Diary based on what he chooses to comment on'. A not untypical
entry from the written reads:
17.11.1972
Travelling in a taxi past London Zoo. Over the wall is a big cage, in
the centre of which is a tree without leaves. Two men in boiler suits are
crawling towards each other on their stomachs along the branches on either
side of the tree.
The archetype of Breakwell's diaries is the tableau: everything
resolves itself into an image. As much in his writing as in his other
work, Breakwell tries to present daily life with the sudden violence of a
snapshot; his writing aspires to illuminate, like a flash of lightning,
the contours of the frozen habits and societal masks he sees all around
him.
19.9.1973
The woman in the blue trouser suit walks around the thickly carpeted
Bond Street art gallery, inspecting the expensive prints on the wall. She
ignores the small, long-haired dachschund which grips the bottom of her
right trouser leg with its teeth. She drags the dog along the carpet as
she moves from print to print.
In fact, the Diary began in 1964 as a purely visual sketch of the day's
events and many of the most striking pieces are those originally exhibited
in galleries. In The Walking Man Diary (1979), Breakwell produced a series
of collages based around photographs of a man who passed regularly and
inexplicably beneath his Smithfield flat window; beneath each photo was a
description of the man's route ('past the windows filled with automatic
tea makers'), the calm observations punctuated with occasional
interjections ('mad as a brush!').
One precursor to Breakwell's
Diary is Mass Observation, the group founded by Tom Harrison, Charles
Madge and Humphrey Jennings in 1937; aiming for 'an anthropology of
ourselves', they and their recruits turned the instruments of
anthropology, usually reserved for quasi-colonial studies of the third
world, upon the inhabitants of Bolton and other British towns, cataloguing
their work and leisure activities. The resulting 'reports', characterised
by their elaborately alienated descriptions of quotidian British life,
became a kind of conduit for European Surrealism into provincial
England.
What Breakwell particularly shares with the Mass Observers
is a hostility to rigid scales of value. In one episode of his 'Christmas
Diary', he gives a '1984 Review of the Year' in which, mocking the glib
convention of the annual round-up of notable events, he concentrates
solely on the ups and downs of his own year (breaking for a moment the
impersonal tenor of the Diary). Similarly, his video piece 'The News'
(1980) has a television newsreader solemnly delivering absurdly trivial
items fashioned in the style of the most provincial local newspaper.
If some of these television pieces, including the Diaries, seem
less successful than his other Diary work, it is partly because they don't
offer the same rigorous relation between word and image as his other work,
too often merely reenacting scenes from the written Diary. Perhaps too,
they are affected by the rise of the video diary, which has radically
recast the whole diary tradition within which Breakwell is working, albeit
oppositionally. But even so, these experiments in television led directly
to Public Face, Private Eye (1988), Breakwell's subsequent essay series
for Channel 4, which marked a new direction in his work.
