Preface

A version of this long essay on the artist Ken Kiff was originally written for the catalogue of what was intended to be a major exhibition of his work in the RWA’s galleries in Bristol. Sadly, what would have been a very substantial exhibition of a major figure in recent British painting failed to materialise. I did not attempt to publish that essay, both because of its length and because I had hoped that, at some point, a similar exhibition opportunity to which I could hope to contribute might appear. That now seems unlikely. So, rather than leave many months of work “on file”, I have decided that I will put a version of that original essay online here in instalments. When putting the first section of this essay on line I wrote:

‘There is, of course, a major disadvantage in having to “publish” it in this way: namely that, unlike when reading a catalogue, you cannot turn to the images about which I write. Some of these can be found online, others are included in catalogues and books devoted to the artist.  I hope you will take the trouble to hunt out at least some of these’.

Subsequently, through the good offices of John Talbot who had read the first two essay sections and is in touch with the Estate of Ken Kiff Ltd., I have been given copyright permission to reproduce images of the work of Ken Kiff. I am very grateful both to John and the Estate for this, since it clearly makes an enormous difference to be able to include Kiff’s images here.     

N.B. All images reproduced in this and subsequent sections are copyright and reproduced here courtesy of The Estate of Ken Kiff and Hales London and New York. ©The Estate of Ken Kiff. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. No image should be reproduced in any form without the permission of the Estate of Ken Kiff Ltd.  

Introduction.

Ken Kiff Old man being sick, comforted by a large man rising out of the ground (Sequence 27)

Ken Kiff’s small painting Old man being sick, comforted by a large man rising out of the ground (S27), dates from 1971, the year he began The Sequence, arguably his major work. The painting’s various elements – the men of the title, the large expanse of green, the woman in the purple dress, the trunk of a tree, the narrow strip of blue sky with a single grey cloud – are loosely painted but very carefully placed within the off-square support. Glimpses of white paper, along with traces of paint on the brown margin of tape that originally held the support to a board, reinforce the sense that this image evokes rather than represents. Despite the scene’s strangeness, the way the larger man cradles the older one is as matter-of-fact as the tree trunk in the middle distance. Yet the presence of the larger man rising out of the ground is ambiguous, thinly-enough painted for us to glimpse the green behind him through his head. Is this an uncanny event glimpsed in peripheral vision, a dream, or is it simply an evocation of compassion? Who’s to say, yet it has the strange and compelling matter-of-factness of a folktale or a Catholic retablo painting.

This essay sets out to explore the resonances of such images, the visual poetics that animate them, and to indicate the wider context in which I would suggest they now appear.   

Although deeply engaged in making paintings, drawings and prints, Kiff was endlessly curious about all the arts; as interested in Wallace Stevens or Mozart as Braque, Nancy Spiro or Sigmar Polke. His curiosity extended to the world at large, an important factor in a quiet radicalism entirely without the self-conscious rebelliousness that Guy Debord links to an acceptance of the status quo for the simple reason that dissatisfaction itself has become a commodity. To explore this, I will start from Garner Tullis’ notion that Kiff was a poet without a tongue, someone who by-passed Western modernity’s categorical distinctions between the different arts, between its high culture and other post-colonial, “subaltern” cultures, between consciousness and the subconscious, and between reality and imagination. A visual poet who combined a concern with the radical possibilities inherent in the “language” of early modern painting, and with “the Feminine” understood in a broadly Jungian sense (as linking the conscious and unconscious realms and so able to disrupt the deceptively tranquil surface of everyday social, familial and domestic lives). Also, perhaps most fundamentally, with the richness inherent in our proximity to what, in Irish, is termed an saol eile (“the other life”), a phrase reductively paraphrased in English as “the unconscious”. All of which led him to visualise how complex internal worlds and multi-faceted selves are manifest in the everyday world.

Kiff‘s images employ highly evocative colour to figure the mutuality of the mundane and “other” world in ways that are constantly surprising. As such, they also serve as a tacit critique of the extent to which Modernist and post-Modernist art largely fails to connect with or inform any common life. Kiff’s approach to the body is fundamental here. The poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill observes that, in the Irish language, orifices and excrements are understood without prudishness or purulence as “an nádúir”, or “nature”, a source of humour rather than of shame or embarrassment. Questioned about imagery that included such things, it became very clear that Kiff felt the same.

Ken Kiff Excrement-1 (Sequence 57)

Kiff’s work has, in my view, been under-appreciated, particularly since his death in 2001. There are a number of possible reasons for this. His work is not easy to categorise. It builds on a view of the ongoing value of the “formal” lessons for the language of painting of the early twentieth century. A view at odds with mainstream art historical notions of “progress” and perhaps closer in orientation to the work of some of Kiff’s near-contemporaries working in India, rather than to artists in the West. Furthermore, Kiff shared Gaston Bachelard’s view that  the image cannot give matter to the concept and that the concept, by giving stability to the image, would stifle its existence. A view very much at odds with the analytic and conceptual preoccupations of academic art discourse and art oriented to them.

In what follows I will begin by taking up the issue of categorisation, provide some brief biographical information, and then outline the basis of what I see as Kiff’s quiet radicalism in relation to his concern with “wholeness”. I will discuss his “psychic realism” and indicate the adverse conditions under which he managed to develop it. I will then turn to particular clusters of images: The Sequence, those made to accompany folktales, the Goddess images, and Acceptance and related works. In the final section I consider the wider context in which his work now appears.