Jesus Christ in Goal

While the last World Cup was being played in Italy, Simon Patterson wrote the names of Jesus and his twelve disciples on a wall. This 'Last Supper', however, was not a traditional depiction of the thirteen men eating at table. It was thematically 'after Leonardo', but not formally so. Instead, the names were arranged as though they were a football team: The Last Supper Arranged According to the Sweeper System (Jesus Christ in Goal). Patterson takes diagrams and schematic representations of reality such as this football formation, the periodic table, star charts, a map of the London Underground or of an airline's routes, and 'personalises' them by substituting for each of their terms a person's name. In the case of the Last Supper, as with more recent work which identifies the various EC Commissioners with different constellations, the names form an identifiable and coherent group, but they are as often as not a wildly disparate assortment, connected only by the logic of Patterson's own mind. That is to say, he thinks of them, and the order in which they come to him is the order in which he writes them down. For example, a string of names runs round the cornice of a room. It is an odd assortment of people including politicians, monarchs, scientists, artists, entertainers, and so on. Sometimes adjacent names sound similar, sometimes their owners work in related fields, and on other occasions there is no apparent reason for the juxtaposition whatsoever. It could be taken as no more than a flight of fancy, a little mental diversion put to decorative good effect, but for a detail. What anchors the list firmly in reality is the siting of the escapologist Harry Houdini right above the doorway.

Patterson is constantly mapping his own mental make-up, but paradoxically, what this obsessive introspection reveals is the society of which he is part. In the figures who are memorable now, in the activities they represent and the historical preoccupations they signify, we can discern the shape of a culture. For an exhibition at Glasgow's Third Eye Centre in 1989, Patterson produced a book entitled Republicans. It contains nothing but people's names arranged singly, in groups or in lists on the page. In it we find the following:

Jackson Pollock

This is going to be a list of famous painters. Pollock is canonical, just the sort of figure who would come to mind when one was asked to name a major artist. Come to mind, that is, assuming one knew a little about art. Pollock is sufficiently well-known to be egregious, but he is not populist because he is irrevocably modern in a way that not even Picasso can manage. He signals an acceptance of the processes of learning about and induction into, the practice of art. Already, with the first term, there is a position taken up.

Claude Renoir

Renoir, yes, but Claude? He is not the Impressionist painter, nor is he the other famous one, the film director, so who is he? This is perhaps a portmanteau artist formed by eliding Claude Lorraine and Pierre Renoir. Freud considered the process of condensation to be one of the fundamental characteristics of mental life, seeing it as the first achievement of the dream-work, that process through which latent psychic material is transformed into the conscious dream. Like Molly Bloom's meditation in Ulysses which, as Brecht remarked, 'could hardly have been written but for Freud,' Patterson's lists bear the stamp of a similar surrender to interior monologue.1 Interpretation consists in unravelling the effects of this work.

David Smith

Now we are back on course; except that Smith, a contemporary of Pollock, was primarily a sculptor rather than a painter.

Ian Smith

Homonyms. Context is all: the word 'Smith' means one thing in the field of art, and something entirely different in the world of African politics. Patterson's large wall drawing, JP 233 takes as its organising principle the Delta Airlines route map. Its appeal to Patterson lay at first in a perceived connection between its sprays of lines and some of the qualities of Leonardo's whirlpool drawings. For the work, the towns and cities served by Delta have been reattributed with names which are, if not famous, at least in the public domain. Charlotte, North Carolina, Delta's home town, becomes Charlotte Rampling, and there are others like this (John Denver, Dusty Springfield). Remaining destinations cover a huge range of figures, although a certain sense of adventure and/or bellicosity, whether contemporary, historical or fictitious, predominates. JP 233 designates one of the bomb types used during the Gulf War, a conflict that was in progress when the drawing was first made at Glasgow's Transmission Gallery, and the context transforms the schematic diagram into an image. The map of North America - with a couple of lines linking it to Britain - can also be seen as a plan of Kuwait, the black blob of each flight destination and the arc leading to and from it reading as a spurting oil well. This is history painting, not because it provides a picture of an event, but because, through the way in which it represents that event, it self-consciously renders the ideological, economic and political forces in play within it.

Robert Mugabe

A confirmation of belief. Yes, it is that Ian Smith.

Idi Amin

Kenyatta

We are on a roll here, and consistency invites complacency, if not smugness.

Joshua Nkomo

Too easy: the unvoiced Jomo rhymes with Nkomo.

Fritz Lang

Robert Smithson employed geological processes as a metaphor for the workings of the mind - the sedimentation of ideas, the burying of memory under an avalanche of new information, and so forth. Patterson's generation of name lists provides evidence of the mental equivalent of plate tectonics. Areas of knowledge collide and ride up over one another. A respectable illustration of the linked yet disparate character that this list is taking on from film, the area into which we are now projected, would be provided by something like Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty. There a 'narrative' is constructed across otherwise unrelated scenes through the device of having a minor character wander out of one in order to become the protagonist in the next. In Patterson's case, a less elevated, though equally appropriate reference might be the visual gag at the beginning of Morecambe and Wise's The Magnificent Two, in which Morecambe, by following one young, attractive woman until another crosses his path and then switching to tail her, ends up at the same office door as Wise who has walked straight there.

Bertolt Brecht

'Realistic means: discovering the causal complexities of society/unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power/writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up/emphasising the element of development/making possible the concrete, and making possible abstractions from it.'

P.W. Botha

Pik Botha

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Archbishop Dr Runcie

This seems like touching base; a return to home territory and familiar surroundings. Without dogmatism, Patterson's work suggests both a place from which to speak and the means to orientate that speech. The Great Bear a reworking of London Underground's Journey Planner, that world-famous topological representation of the tube network. Harry Beck, the maps original designer, got the idea from an electrical circuit diagram, a fact which pleases Patterson since it allows the pattern of interconnecting lines to be seen simultaneously as an image of both social and mental space. The logic of the piece is simple: the stations on each line have been given names from a particular category - engineers, film stars, saints, footballers, philosophers, and so on. It is a system which works well at the periphery but approaching the heart of things, as pathways meet and become a tangle of intersections, it inevitably breaks down. One name cannot be found to fit into, say, a line of newscasters and one of planets, so a choice has to be made. The extraordinary, sometimes surreal juxtapositions that result - Bronzino next to Jean Harlow; Gummo between Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Kierkegaard - offer vast potential for future ratiocination.

C.P.E. Bach

The slight unease caused by an inability to rationalise or account for a name is a small, but adequate sign for the more grotesque manifestations of ignorance and fear within the social fabric.

Terry Waite

Begin

Some names come up again and again, being, as they are, deeply embedded in the formation of a world view. Patterson's early work included a series of diptychs, paired canvases on each of which a single name is screened. For example, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, or Watson and Crick. Patterson's use of text owes much to conceptualism, particularly that of Lawrence Weiner, for whom language has been a material as much as the means by which a critique of art and its forms might be constructed. It is conceptualism that allows us to accept a person's name as an adequate representation of themselves, but Burton Taylor is also a remake of Piero della Francesca's twin portraits of Federico di Montefeltro and his wife, Battista Sforza. These pairs also appear in Republicans, where the names lie on facing pages. The book lends another dynamic to a parallel series of triplets. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto faces Zia ul-Haq across a spread and over the page we find Benazir Bhutto. The passage is classically dialectical, a thesis and antithesis superseded both formally and historically. Sadat/Carter/Begin, while similar on the page to Bhutto/ul-Haq/Bhutto, is very different as a painting since the three names appear not on separate, portrait-format canvases, but on the same, landscape-format surface. It does not indicate a succession of terms, one following the other in historical sequence. Instead, this is an event, the congruence of the career paths of these three men at one point on the historico-political map.

Michael York

Canterbury to York via Israel.

Susannah York

Jenny Agutter

Robert Powell

Robert Powell once portrayed Jesus in a film. He also played Rlchard Hannay, Buchan's adventurer who had spent his early career in South Africa. Fact and fiction exist in Patterson's work not as distinct positions between which its terms oscillate, but as the twin axes defining a field of possibility. In the imaginary realm, the passage from abstract to concrete is an incremental one. It is true, too, of the entity we might think of as 'Simon Patterson the artist'. In addition to reviews by Andrew Renton and Stuart Morgan, his biography at the back of Technique Anglaise points us to articles by Adrian Doughnut and Ariadne Dorrit and to Reinhardt Krieg's 'Kunst ist ein Kunst?' in the June 1990 issue of Das Bömholz. The project he contributed to that book also demonstrates the same mix of weighty fact and amusing, or possibly fatuous, invention. It takes the form of two alphabetical lists. The first, drawn from a reference book, cites a number of endangered species. Since there isn't one of these for every letter of the alphabet, the second list tidies things up for us by filling in the gaps: there almost isn't a Lichtenstein's Hartebeest, so how much less believable is it to say that there might be a Rauschenberg's Ferret?

Richard Burton

In the light of the foregoing this is probably the film actor, although in the light of that which preceded the foregoing, it could be the explorer.

Leslie Howard

Frankie Howerd

The mixture of people to whom Patterson refers royalty, actors, historical figures, comedians, musicians, writers, fictional characters, and so on - erases distinctions based on a sense of aesthetic propriety. Inasmuch as they are all constituent parts of his mental make-up it is impossible to accord any of them priority since none are more present in his consciousness than any other. Yet the rhythm of their remembrance, the mental pulse that gives rise to them, reveals a validation which is cultural as much as individual. The way they come out shows how they went in in the first place. Education does distinguish between those things which are worth knowing and others which are trivial or merely diverting, and because the normative principles within the symbolic order are also made apparent, Patterson is able to use bathos to effect, rather than merely sinking into it. As in the pair Steve Biko,Phil Silvers.

Frank Zappa

Frank Stella

There might be grounds for thinking that this was really only the second term in the original list: Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella

Frank Auerbach

Artists whose first name is Frank. In Republicans Patterson cites all Russia's cosmonauts alongside America's astronauts. There are many more astronauts. He also names every American President, and quite by chance there have been the same number of Presidents with the forename James as there were Roman Emperors:

Julius CaesarJames Madison

Augustus CaesarJames Monroe

Tiberius CaesarJames K. Polk

Caligula CaesarJames Buchanan

Claudius Caesar James A. Garfield

Nero CaesarJames Carter

The rise and fall of ...

Franco Zeffirelli

Dino de Laurentis

Surely, though, it was Vincente Minelli who directed that film about van Gogh?