Look and Learn

'It could be said that the coloring book accurately depicts almost everything that could be said to exist in the mind of a child, and thousands of children each day gravely apply a color to each face, to each item, to everything that fills a space on the pages of the coloring book in much the same way that it occupies, visually at least, a space in real life... In the coloring book, it must be pointed out, these details, these things are merely outlines. A child will see the outlines of the bathroom with eyes that can still accept the universality of all bathrooms.

In the coloring book, people, everyday sort of people, go about their everyday sort of life... feeding the dog, the baby, the husband, the tropical fish, themselves, thereby acknowledging a need, not necessarily questioning the need, although they may ponder why... why must they feed the tropical fish and the baby and the husband. This in turn leads people to question other things.'

Walter Abish, The English Garden, 1975

What is it that makes a thing recognisable, identifiable as something? In books for very young children, things are often depicted in a tangible yet generic form. C is for cup. The cup certainly looks like a cup, it has all the attributes of 'cupness' that one would expect; but it is not my cup. Nor is it the cup with the chip on the rim, nor the cup with the transfer of a wheat sheaf that looks like the one on the toaster. To a greater or lesser degree, depending on their intended purpose, illustrations and representations of things play a balancing act with specificity and generality. At either end of the spectrum are very different genres of depiction. At one extreme are schematic, almost symbolic images, while at the other are forms of optical verisimilitude. Most images are somewhere in between, borrowing from several different conventions of representation at the same time. A plant might be depicted as a botanist's cross-sectional line drawing, a coloured pencil illustration in an amateur gardener's sketchbook, or as an almost topographical accumulation of paint in a Manet. All three are recognisable to anyone used to the conventions with which the images are represented; all three tell us something about the thing, but not necessarily the same information. What gets left out is up to our memory and imagination to reconstruct. Some images allow more space to do this than others.

For a child, images offer enormous possibilities of imaginative investment and projection into the spaces that their creators would, perhaps, never have conceived. What is the first image you remember? C is for cup. It is a pale blue mug, the thickness of its sides slightly exaggerated to give a sense of permanence and security to a mind that still isn't sure whether the cup will be on the table tomorrow morning, but, at the same time, needs it to be there. It floats against the white background of the paper, anchored by a dishwater-grey shadow that attaches it to the page. Although there is nothing around the image except for its name, the table, the plates, the bottle of milk and the humid kitchen are all contained within it. This is an image that is within the realm of everyday experience; it is easy to extrapolate the semblance of a more or less plausible reality. But what happens when there is no direct experience to draw on? Imagination is prolific and what material there is in a child's memory can be expanded far beyond the realms of possibility, with nothing to contradict the rooms, places, countries and worlds that an image may generate.

Every image in picture books, stamps, magazines or encyclopaedias provides its own microcosm. The faraway, the unfamiliar - whatever is outside direct experience and memory - becomes a focus for imaginative projection and reverie. Martin Honert's Cigar Box Picture (1988) is an image of a South Sea landscape of improbably dense and varied vegetation, with a view through to a beach and a turquoise sea beyond. Surrounding the image is a white border, which, together with the intense detail and featureless filmy surface of the paint, suggests that the image has been printed. Its support extends beyond the edges of the white border for some distance and is made of a pale, fine-grained, exotic wood that evokes the crisp, surprisingly light timber of a cigar box and its characteristic smell. What was once a tiny image inside a receptacle for children's treasures has been enlarged dramatically to over six feet in length and massively intensified in incident. The foliage in the landscape is varied in extreme with dozens of different species crammed up against one another. It is as if a botanical illustrator on one of Captain Cook's voyages to the 'New World' had attempted to cram every unfamiliar species recorded into a single composition. Above this jostling throng of plant life, the leaves of the palm trees wave animatedly but benignly in a breeze that is not reflected in the calm surface of the sea. There is a notion of 'adventure' and an invitation to enter into the landscape.

In many ways, Cigar Box Picture is typical of Honert's approach to the image. Honert works with representations of things; images both as receptacles for the imagination and as dredgers of memory. They are focused and manipulated in a way that allows adults to reclaim something of a child's ability to be surprised by and project into the worlds they depict. This balancing act between generality and specificity requires skill: in Cigar Box Picture the presence of the box itself is not important but its texture and the evocation of its smell are. Size matters - blown up, the image is no longer particular in the sense that it could be seen as one of the many cigar box labels in the world. That would allow it to be recognised too easily, to be ignored. Instead, it is overwhelming in its intimacy. The picture itself, intensified, synthesised from a variety of images, with its detail and fullness exaggerated, no longer resembles a cigar box label, but evokes the memory of all cigar box labels, pirate story illustrations or National Geographic photographs of somewhere lush, warm and not of the Northern Hemisphere.

House (1988) is a portrait of a house that sits somewhere between a model of generic post-war German functional Modernism and the particular house that caught Honert's eye every day on his train journey. Presented high on a plinth like a bust, as with many Classical portraits House has had its minor imperfections removed to focus more clearly on its essential character. The signage that once adorned the downstairs shop space has been removed, as have all the stains of weathering. In this sense, like Cigar Box Picture, it is an image taken out of time. Some details remain: the net curtains in the upper windows of the living space remind us that this is a house and not a building and intimate the activities that may go on within its interior. The texture of the building materials remain too and this is odd; the roof and the walls have a miniature, rough facture that fights against a reading of the house as an architect's model or toy - it is too real in the most surprising ways. Yet, in the reduction of its scale, the house has become more of a thing. It is as if House, with all its detail, is being viewed from the air.

Continuing this play with genres of representing things and the differences between a thing and the image of a thing is Starling (1992). Here too the importance of scale becomes apparent. The image of the starling is modelled in relief and mounted on the wall. The bird is huge. Based on the type of illustration that can be found in an ornithological book, the bird looks like a starling but no starling you are ever likely to see. It embodies all the descriptive characteristics of the species: every colour in its feathers is clearly visible, as are the shape of the beak and the carefully positioned claws. The bird grips a branch, which is abruptly and surprisingly uncoloured, though carefully modelled. It is like the passages in botanical or zoological illustrations where the illustrator has had to make a decision as to where importance ends. In a reference book, the branch would perhaps only be sketched in, delineated but uncoloured. While many books of this type now use photographs of the birds, insects or animals they catalogue, earlier in the century it was considered that line drawing or more graphic forms of illustrative technique allowed a more accurate representation of the essential characteristics of the subject. That is to say, they allowed, to a degree, an erasure of specificity.

Railway Hut (1992) plays off different realities in a similar way. A nondescript utilitarian form of architecture whose bland functionality is so severe that its architects have invested it with unnecessary, almost domestic detail, the only function of a railway hut is to be entered. There is just enough space for one person inside. But it is always locked and thus becomes a container of enormous fascination for the imagination. Honert's Railway Hut also locks the viewer out, but in a different way: it is too small to enter. Precisely detailed and weathered, its octagonal exterior has an air of optical truthfulness that says it might be real. But the ring of grass that surrounds it, like the branch on which the starling perches, belongs to a different language of representation. Oddly stylised, it resembles a moulded plastic model of grass; a cursory suggestion of place.

The last in the series of three works that comprise Honert's series 'Fallow Land ' is Fire (1992). Like the other works in the series, Starling and Railway Hut, and as the series' title implies, these works depict things that all occupy a no-man's-land between different realms of functionality: the urban and the agricultural. This is a domain where adventure may happen, a formless place where things are not clearly defined. It is a place that is not visited, merely glimpsed through the window of a train passing by or a car speeding on the motorway. In its neglect it offers a malleability that can engage an active imagination. There, things are abandoned with their histories, or built and seldom used, and occasional events take place - like a bonfire. Cast 'life-size' in fibreglass, Fire is like a picture in a children's book. As with Starling and Railway Hut, Fire combines extreme detail and particularity within the form and colouring of the flames to create a sense of representedness that is unnervingly not of the real world. The detail is absorbing and in this is analogous, though in a fundamentally different way, to the captivation that draws the eye into the flames of a real fire. The painted surface of Fire is flat, dry and cracked like the crazed embers of burning logs. The whole sculpture is illuminated from within, but this light, too, is an image of the thing it represents; static and cold, the light makes it clear that Fire is not a fire.

Honert's most recent work, A Model Scenario of the Flying Classroom (1995), exhibited at the German pavilion in last year's Venice Biennale, brings together many of these enquiries around image, representation and memory. The tableau - it is not an installation - is in one sense literally illustrative: it depicts a compressed scene from Erich Kästner's book The Flying Classroom of 1933. Conceived as a Christmas story, the book itself toys with genres of literary representation, placing a self-contained play within the narrative of the novel and thus setting up different levels of reality. The scene on which Honert has chosen to base his work is the moment when the fiction of the narrative (which purports to be description of real events) collides with the theatrical space of the play-within-the-novel. The play itself is staged in the manner of school plays and pantomimes; illusions are presented unadorned, forcing the audience to round off the rough edges in their imaginations.

At one moment, the protagonists of the play are in the South Pole, the next they are in Egypt with the Pharaohs, and, with another opening and closing of the the aeroplane's cardboard door, they are in the presence of St. Peter; jumping through time and space with the facility that only children have. In a revealing incident, the children plead with St. Peter for the return of one of their companions - a girl who was lured into the pyramid and left for dead. St Peter duly returns her to them, but on the understanding that they take no photographs; for photography is the great deceiver that purports to present reality. The work abounds in such play between representation, image and thing: a map of the South Pole projected on a section of the globe; a stage set-like pyramid and a flattened volcano in relief; an aeroplane massively foreshortened in perspective. Everything is more or less the same scale: big things are smaller than life, small things are larger than life. Everything is tangible, not as itself but as its image - the figures are real, but like real toy figures, flattened and standing on bases like pre-war tin soldiers. In a final act of exposing everything to be a spectacle of images, the figure of the rescued girl lifts off her blonde pigtail wig to reveal that she is a he.

Underlying this complex intertwining of remembered things, real things and images of things, there is a strong atmosphere of post-war industrial Germany, the world in which Honert grew up and in which his memories lie. This is visible in the desire for escape to an unspoiled world of warmth and unrestrained nature manifest in Cigar Box Picture; visible in the wistful practicality of Railway Hut; and in the modest utopianism of House. There is a sense of nostalgia in all of this, but its specifics are not important. It is not so much a nostalgia for a time as for a state of mind in which things could offer more than what we know them to be as adults, who have seen, photographically, far more than we have experienced. Stepping between what things look like, how they are remembered and how we perceive what we do not know, Honert's imagery draws extraordinary things from the mundane world; moments of incident which drive the imagination and reside in the memory for years to come. Things whose potential for transformation and projection, whose ability to make us think of other things, has not yet been extinguished.