In 'The Summit', Ian Breakwell's first published
piece of writing, a passer-by glimpses an indistinct colony of creatures
on a mountaintop plateau, but assumes this is 'an everyday occurrence';
later, realising that he may be the only person ever to have seen this
summit, 'this chance observer – was now forced to think again about
something he might otherwise have forgotten'.
Recollecting the
piece years later, Breakwell observed: 'It's a parable because the words
can't quite capture what it is [that the passer-by has seen], so inset
into the publication is a colour transparency of a painting called Summit
which illustrates the story visually. It's a good example, early on, of
saying, 'What can you do in words and what can you do in pictures?'
That Breakwell has never settled on an answer to this question is
clear from a body of work comprising films, videos, books, paintings,
collages, performances and installations - each borrowing freely from
one another. And although he was associated with the London Filmmakers'
Co-op from its beginnings, he was perhaps the earliest among his
contemporaries to make inroads as a gallery artist. If one thing unites
all his various activities, it is the standpoint of the 'chance observer':
the curious eye alert to the marginal, the trivial, the absurd -
everyday events which might otherwise have been forgotten, or never
noticed in the first place. In fact, the category of 'the everyday' itself
is what much of Breakwell's work contests.
Breakwell detests the
humdrum procession of time, the thoughtless repetitiveness that desires
- as a slogan in one of his painting series puts it - to 'keep
things as they are'. He looks askance at the minutiae to which habit and
social decorum usually blind us, reframing them so they appear ridiculous,
shocking. The anarchic and absurd aspects so prevelant in Breakwell's work
are almost invariably drawn directly from elements of his everyday
environment - in this sense, he could fairly be characterised as a
surrealist.
In his early film Repertory (1973), a camera circles
the outside of a closed theatre while a voice reels off a daily programme
of 'imagined presentations': a domestic interior covered in melting slabs
of butter; an old aeroplane, an illuminated fish tank, etc. Extrapolated
partly from Breakwell's frequent visits to Nottingham Playhouse in the
late 1950s, the film plays out with peculiar effectiveness his interest in
the relationship between words and pictures. He has subsequently published
the script separately, as something self-contained, but this doesn't imply
the primacy of the text; rather, the flat formality of the images is in
constant tension with the barely-plausible descriptions of the
'presentations'.
The walls of the theatre are bare and decrepit,
but voiceover helps to suggest a figurative importance for them too: they
are, so to speak, the limits of dramatic licence. Theatre audiences
suspend their disbelief only because they are in the theatre: what, then,
are the magic qualities of this shabby building? The dialogue's insistence
on noting, for each day, whether the curtain and footlights are up or down
emphasises that even the wildest stagings are still under the same
'conventional proscenium arch'. With its unresolved tension between the
image on screen and the voiceover, Repertory remains ambigous; theatre is
presented as at once a healthy eruption of the absurd into drab daily
life, and at the same time an arbitrary confinement of it.
