Museum of No Fixed Agenda

Work by Sarah R Key, June 2010 onwards

The Museum of No Fixed Agenda is a new conceptual framework for paintings, June 2010 onwards. The idea of a museum as a platform or an imagined environment within the paintings is a development growing out of the works’ previous encounter with very specific (and bizarre) examples of taxidermy in Walter’s Attic (2008-09: ISBN 978-0-9554095-6-1). Source material for this new work draws heavily from photographic images of colonial game hunting. History collapses into the dreamlike (or nightmarish) in these paintings by the intrusion of the anthropomorphic characters, who are themselves prey animals and whose power relationships are ambiguous. Within the paintings they are often positioned in uncompromising situations as well as in formal display.

The armature for the paintings has developed from earlier work, in particular from The Archaeology of Warren’s and Other Habitats (2009-10), where the grounds become increasingly formal (in painting terms) and ambiguous in their relationship to the pictures’ main protagonists. The museum (orig. Greek), denoting a place set apart for study and the arts, suggests that the paintings are not only an exploration of potential narrative content and contextual difference; but also of themselves, as paintings/ as artefact. Naturally the term museum also opens the works’ shifting ambiguities back onto the source material for the work; imagery gleaned and transformed from the 2008 edition of Peter Beard’s extraordinary book The End of the Game1. As with prior work these new pictures attempt to absorb and transform some of life’s absurdities, but fundamentally the paintings do not trust humans to deliver this message. Anthropomorphically, the idea here is that of an ostensibly human ethical code being transplanted onto the beings that inhabit the paintings, staring out of the pictures through different eyes – in varying states of confusion, accusation, or alternatively obscuring their activity from the viewer. So the dreamlike quality of the paintings also has a political foundation that underpins and motivates them. The hijacking of cultures that occurred through colonialism becomes a suggestive element that hints at the political undercurrents embedded in the works’ conception, but that are deliberately ambiguous in its reading. This complex metaphorical narrative is played out through the mistrustful and potentially misanthropic creatures that inhabit the paintings: And the strange and particular references they may occasionally point to. These creatures may well be travelling through memories, imagined and real, to reveal a bemused and dangerous legacy. They do not obey rules, they have no identifiable history; they have no fixed agenda. They do have questions.

1 This title, quite by chance, poetically echo’s ‘the death of painting’ – critical debate on painting predominant in the early 1980’s