THE BUILDER'S DAUGHTER: RICHIE CULVER

Richie Culver and the art of noise

Noise is a rupture between what has been and what may come. Perhaps even at times, noise in all its glorious forms, is the ringing of revolutions. There is ample documentation of the response to noise by those who encountered the introduction of the machine into the workplace, or that of mechanical travel in the train and then car, let alone the airplane. The regimented assembly line structured by time and motion studies brought forward a new din that punctuated the everyday. Songs around the hearth or down the pub took on a contrast against which to mediate and then eventually integrate the new. Post-Fordist’s machinations are far more silent and subtle in their relation to our labours. The keys I stroke now–stroke is not the verb, but I can hardly say I am banging this out on keys or a machine that responds to me in anything other than the whispers of 21st century alienation–are not given to a noise or sound I can identify with my labours. I might identify more with my fingers tapping against the desktop at which I sit. Sound and art that attempts to do something other and connect us to a sonic sphere not divorced from the body and its movements resists all that. When at sea, one cannot separate vision from sound let alone touch. Wind and wave interact if not commune with cheek, hair, hand, sail and hull. One must be quiet in order to appreciate all this and the necessity and vibrantly essential value that resides in listening. This is true of a worker and machine, or a sailor and their boat. So too for a partner in life who understands this and is quiet when it matters.

Richie Culver is an artist born by the sea. Hull, a ‘northern coastal town’, is a signal location and city that has rolled in the ebb and flow of Britain’s economic and cultural fortunes and remains a magical place to see and experience. Hull was a maritime powerhouse through whaling, shipping along the coastal and inland routes, and then after WW II, industrial levels of fishing took over before the Cod Wars of the 1970s that ushered in economic precarity. Culture took hold on the back of the shift from prosperity to impending industrial decline. Production echoed the economic context with the nascent experimental, industrial and avant garde sonic scene emerging from Hull in the form of the eventually named Throbbing Gristle, a nod to the local slang for a male member. The city’s connections with Europe and beyond through trade no doubt added fuel to its cultural thrust. Richie Culver emerges from this context of grit, precarity and advanced consciousness. This exhibition, I feel and would offer, consolidates his extended practice in painting, sound and word, through assemblage and collage. Worlds held apart seemingly collide. The fierce materiality of the works produced here are offered to supply a sense and experience of their origin as emerging from just such a precarity of bare life and then a fierce fight back through noise and a post-industrial context for culture. I prefer Noise to any other qualifying title to the sonic output of the type Culver produces and this has a connotation that has to be elaborated on in order for one to apprehend what I am on about in my choice of nomenclature. Noise is soul music as produced by Culver. It is direct and still draws on its broader economic and cultural contexts. At the same time, it has a narrow purpose with an important rejoinder–to allow a participant in the noise to go somewhere else psychically while not letting go of the context from which it stems. Noise is escapist–never. So is the visual expression of his art.

This, I think, you will feel in what you see of the works Culver has made here for The Builder’s Daughter. Culver reclaims a context and soundscape that all his work should be received in. There is a privileged offer to considering the broader equation that feeds into his practice. Practice equals Techno, Industrial, Noise, Paint, Film, Collage, Photo, Word. Or, P = T + I + N x P + F x C + Ph x W. An artist’s practice is best approached as such an equation. Ideally, the best do. No one should want to be reduced to a product and be even further subservient to forces largely beyond our control. In the work before you here, the sonic and visual collide. You can take from the sparks thrown up just how the sonic has informed Culver’s visual practice, output and social context. Throbbing Gristle, Straight Panic, Gay Death, Rainbow Snuff. There is a line of danger expressed there in those names that speaks to the semiotic slippage between not only sign and that signified, but also too our preconceptions and ingrained presumption to understand and then an epiphany of enlightenment and newly won apprehension. An embrace predicated on letting go of assumptions and received ideas in order to fashion new and empowered wisdoms follows. To be reduced to something, one thing, is a violence to which no human should submit. In The Builder’s Daughter, Richie Culver thanks his local origins and those areas of support that have provided a soundscape and network from which his production has grown. Care is there and also an aesthetic challenge that redeems suffering and pain. Such is the art of noise.

John Slyce