Park Lives
The camera almost never lies
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up pictures postwar London gripped by a mythic sense of freedom but pictures the period with a twist. It’s a plot inspired by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar and his short story collection Las Babas del Diablo (1959) where reality and technology bid farewell to the past. It’s also central to a series of new paintings born from a Photoshop plug-in.
Thomas (David Hemmings) is a young charismatic photographer who believes his pictures to be emphatically real. Call it self-belief. One afternoon – and several female models later – he leaves his Chelsea studio and heads to a local park where he stumbles upon two lovers meeting in secret. He takes their picture from behind a tree but they soon spot the camera and plead for him to handover the role of film. Having refused, it’s only later when Thomas is in the darkroom that he realises he may have stumbled across something far darker in the park and the figure of someone lurking in the bushes staring at the couple. At first he believes his presence prevented a crime from ever happening but later realises he only delayed the inevitable: a photograph at the end of the film roll revealing a lifeless body at the foot of a tree. But does it really? Does the camera lie?
That lifeless detail is shared on several occasions with P P P Picnic, an exhibition at LOWW by the Tokyo-based duo TUHEADS and paintings made with a mix of ChapGPT and photoshop collage collectively stumbling through disjointed scenery and the aftermath of an event you never see. Paintings are openly distorted, faces bloated and blurred, cushioning the woodland scene. The scene is the opposite of Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park, a series of documentary photographs shot during the 1970s under the cover of darkness with an infrared flash and monochrome film to catch the exchange between lovers, strangers, and an unforgiving procession of male voyeurs.
TUHEAD’s paintings and Yoshiyuki’s photographs, feature a cast of unreliable characters that speak of an awkward relationship between technology and experience: reacting to unimaginable encounters.
“The Continuity of Parks” 2023, from P P P Picnic takes its name from one short story by Cortázar written in the 1959. In the short, the narrator trades places with the author as the protagonist searches for a point of reference. In the film Thomas frequently turns to his camera as a source of truth but time and time again that camera is the most unreliable character of all when one minute photographs suggest a dead body and the next it doesn’t. Yoshiyuki’s own subjects are plunged in darkness and the camera exploits the image of loneliness as images search for quiet companionship in the darkness of Tokyo. And what of Yoshiyuki himself? Did he go unnoticed tiptoeing between the bodies as he waved his camera in the dark hoping to catch something or someone or was he hidden being the muffle of rustling leaves and fumbled clothing?
For TUHEADS, unreliable characters are a product of their making. At first they are typed into the chatbot and generated forms are then stitched together in Photoshop. Thomas on the other hand is formless and suspicious, acting impulsively in the hope of giving meaning to his own restlessness — at one point he buys an antique boat propellor (I need it, he exclaims) as he attempts to buy the shop for no real reason, a shop he knows he can’t afford.
Despite his erratic behaviour, the couple he spy’s in the park still haunt him and while driving is convinced he sees the young girl by herself. His Silver Cloud Rolls Royce convertible grinds to a halt as he jumps out, loosing her in a club filled by an almost silent crowd watching The Yardbirds brood on stage. Guitarists Jeff Back and a pre-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page perform as if caught in the light of oncoming traffic, only breaking concentration when their equipment fails with amps collapsing in a sea of static. Beck flings his guitar into an unmoved audience before Thomas who makes off with it for no apparent reason. The girl is still nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps one motivation for TUHEADS is the idea that objective truth is less reliable than, say, the camera or an AI chatbot. As Thomas would argue, truth is only interesting when it is seen subjectively.
Blow-Up hints at this. The film opens as Thomas leaves a local doss-house and homeless shelter where he spent an undisclosed period of time taking shots of lost souls. “I’ve got something fab for the end (of the book) in the park. It’s very peaceful, very still. While the rest […] will be pretty violent.” But Thomas seems more lost than most as he gravitates from images of squalor to an image of luxury. As he leaves his Rolls-Royce, parked quietly around the corner, he narrowly avoids colliding with a group of mime artists tearing through the streets. They finally pull up outside a tennis court in the park and start playing an imaginary game of tennis, free of the things that make tennis a sport of rules, of etiquette and of expensive attire. At the same time Thomas wanders through the park having realised everything he previously thought to be true was most likely a trick of light. The group playing make-believe hit their imaginary ball in his direction. Thomas hesitates weighing up the situation before motioning the phantom ball back in their direction.
While Thomas might believe his life to be a frivolous existence without meaning TUHEADS react to painting as a product of a frivolous culture in environmental decline. P P P Picnic is partly a response to the history of painting and the mechanical production of images, partially removing their authorship and placing it in the hands of a computation device. But does the audience or viewers notice any difference? The comatose crowd watching The Yardbirds soon woke up when they realised instruments were loosing a grip on their sound. Thomas even convinced himself of something lurking the darkroom buried in the noise of his negative.
TUHEADS has managed to produced a scenario where images are both humorous and horrific depending on the way they’re seen. This begs the question: does their camera ever lie or does it will an image into existence?