PORTFOLIO John Manton
The first four grids (1-4) outline my visual response to the archives and material traces of development, humanitarianism, clinical research, and infectious disease control in twentieth century West and Central Africa. This practice developed alongside my work as a historian and anthropologist, and moved from an initial impulse to record what I found, to using the camera as a means of selecting and 'quoting' the material arrangements and dispositions of layered pasts of development.
The final five grids (5-9) outline a drawing and painting practice undergirding both my compositional sensibility, and my attention to temporal readings of visual space. This practice predates and runs alongside my academic career, and it likewise relates to an interest in processes of layering, occluding, and revealing.
In my MFA practice, I want to explore the potential of a unifying concern across all of my visual practice: a concern with sequence and narrative, in relation to archival failure and persistence (as a political and material process). It feels to me as though the distinct forms of enquiry reflected in grids 1-4 and 5-9 can be brought together in a History Studio - there's an underlying convergence and an as yet unrealised visual form (or practice, or process) that I need some critical, technical, and theoretical guidance to develop.
1. Present fates of past development
These photographs come from a larger collection which acts as an archive of ethnographic encounters in the field, and an enquiry into the daily material life of science and development. They are exemplars of a photographic fieldwork practice attentive to repair and reuse, monumental building and maintenance, material repurposing and persistence, and project afterlives. This selection does not include photographs in which individuals are clearly identifiable.
2. After development: the aesthetics of past futures
A collective endeavour in art, design, history, and anthropology, the project "Memorials and remains of medical research in Africa. An anthropology of scientific landscapes, ruins and artefacts" (2011-2015) generated a series of performances, broadcasts, exhibitions, and colloquia and culminated in a collaborative monograph, edited with anthropologist and historian colleagues Wenzel Geissler, Guillaume Lachenal, and Noemi Tousignant, and produced together with visual artists Mariele Neudecker and Evgenia Arbugaeva, and designers Herman Lelie and Stefania Bonelli. Most of the photography reproduced on these pages is mine (apart from the cover photo by Mariele Neudecker, one Ayos 2005 photo, and one hand drawn map, both by Guillaume Lachenal); the text is mine, either sole or collective authored. Consent was secured for all photographs of individuals.
3. Archivophagy: the action of termites on paper
I use the term archivophagy to denote the governance and narrative effects of regimes/regimens which actively abet the decay of records, the fallow of memory, and the degradation of temporalities of collective endeavour. It also indexes the anxieties involved in producing narrative using destroyed or degraded record(ing)s. For Achille Mbembe, the chronophagous state consumes alternative histories and temporalities. Consonantly, the archivophagous state consumes the material bases for such temporalities.
This termite-eaten evidence of clinical research in West Africa has been destroyed since the photographs were taken in 2006. Here, identifying names have been obscured.
4. Archivophagy: the action of attic damp on film
These stills are from one of a number of 8mm film reels of humanitarian relief work in Africa and Asia, stored in an attic in rural Ireland for over two decades. Many of the reels are in poor condition, as are the audio reels stored alongside them, an archive of postcolonial transnational humanitarian enterprise. I've been aware of this collection since childhood, and it has been passed to me for safekeeping. The video has been digitised. For me, this material demands a creative and aesthetic response, and demands more of me than I've been able to satisfy as an academic historian.
My Metadrawings series comprise a long-standing interrogation (1994-2021) of shape, sequence, (distribution), measure, and colour as compositional elements, as representations of my visual field, and in relation to drawing as a temporal unfolding on the page. I regularly 'read' and re-read these drawings, following lines, conceiving ways of extending or completing the drawings, turning them around, reconstructing a potential order in which the marks were made. This re-reading often takes the form of a new drawing. As a collection, they describe a set of relations with perception, recording, and narrating which act as a ludic counterpoint to my historiographical practice. These are the key to unlocking an aesthetic response to temporal unfolding through and in spite of archival failure.
5. Metadrawings: shape
These drawings are from a mix of A5, A3, and 20 x 15cm drawing books. They can be read as arrangements of shapes, as sequences of mark making, or in relation to interrupted and discontinuous lines. This latter reading derives from my experience of diplopia (double vision) where edges and shapes double and fracture across my field of vision. For me, this mode of drawing is very anchoring - it helps me to reconcile with the world as I see it.
6. Metadrawings: sequence and distribution
In contrast to the work with shapes as compositional elements, my sequence work foregrounds the jittery process of selecting, counting, and grouping across a disturbed field of vision. These drawings are also from a mix of A5, A3, and 20 x 15cm drawing books.
7. Metadrawings: distribution and measure
These compositions were made using a number of choice and selection heuristics, including dice, coin toss, and word selection games. The first two pieces are on A3 paper. The remainder are from a 20 x 15cm drawing book titled 'Metadrawings. Everything is in place: the mechanical masterpiece vs the experimental next step'.
8. Metadrawings: colour
Most of these were sketches for or after three pieces executed on perspex (Suite for travelling players 100 x 75cm, 1995), now lost. The pieces, developed with composer and sonic artist Pedro Rebelo, were devised to represent notational elements of pitch, timbre, and rhythm. They were hung in parallel, in open space, and formed the basis of a performance by a pair of improvisational musicians, facing each other on either side. All sketches are on A3 paper: acrylic, ballpoint, felt-tip.
9. Large pieces
The first two pieces - 'self portrait' and 'wolf' are the oldest in the portfolio, dating from 1991 and measuring approx 120 x 90cm. They combine naturalistic elements from portraiture and from the New Mexico landscape, with layering of acrylic, poster, and household emulsion paint, ballpoint and pencil text and drawing, to foreground the sequencing of compositional decisions. The second painting, 'wolf', uses white paint to pull colour from an initial drawing with poster paint, echoed and complemented with colour selection in acrylic. The black area is highly active with pencil and paint drawings.
The sketches in Metadrawings: colour (grid 8, above) bridge the colour work in the first two and last two pieces here, acting as testing grounds for colour combination.
The third piece is entitled History Engine #1 (75 x 50cm, 2005). It plays with sequencing decisions and the order in which elements were painted, using oils and varnish, together with brushes, rollers, and knives to disrupt simple compositional readings.
The fourth piece is entitled History Engine #2 (100 x 75cm, 2007-20). It combines metadrawing elements of sequence and measure (grids 6 and 7) to distribute oil colour across a ground of household emulsion on poster paint. The rectangles are spaced and sized using three widths of masking tape, alternated using dice; they are coloured in relation to the colours pulled through from the overpainted initial sketch. A variety of metadrawings from the shape and measure themes (grids 5 and 7) guide the compositional overlay.
