For Men Only – Starring MM and BB, one of Peter Phillips early works, created while he was still a student at the Royal College, demonstrates Phillips’ familiarity with technical design and the graphic arts, as well as with the conceptual power of collage. On a wooden panel of monumental proportions meet media icons and cultural emblems, disparate and strikingly contradictory. In a manner parallel to that of Peter Blake’s, Phillips adroitly incorporates into a single framework the photographic representations of the age’s stereotypical sex symbols, movie stars Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe, snapshots from performances of a famous stripper of the time and traditional symbols. The image of the hare is borrowed from a Victorian game and it bears the words “she’s a doll” followed by the stripper’s name.

The work’s title reinforces the stereotypical meaning imparted to symbols that are to be represented and introduces the element of irony with regard to the new codes of sexuality that were being formulated at the time. Multiple images, whose representation departs from the original, differing in terms of both content and viewpoint, seem to be oscillating between the critical and the humorous. Phillips presents us with a hybrid image that does not exclude tradition. On the contrary, in being a token of the artist’s academic background it draws the image of the two famous stars inside a schematic framework that is reminiscent of religious icons, while the elaborate composition as a whole shares a common structure with pre-Renaissance woodcuts. Phillips had great respect for the historical tradition of western art and experimented with juxtaposing it to contemporary developments. In a way he was a precursor of the hybrid semiotics that the discourse of postmodernism examined at length and promoted.

For Men Only – Starring MM and BB best illustrates the influence exerted on Phillips’ work by that of American contemporaries such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers. Phillips’ own perception of the artist’s initial intentions when setting out to create a work of painting echoes Johns’ view regarding the act of creating a “semblance” of the image by means of semiotic stylization. Like Johns, Phillips was also interested in the problematic concerning the relationship of analogy between representation and the original; for him representation should not necessarily denote a copy, but rather a surrogate for the original. It is in fact a conceptual game through which methods adopted and interventions made produce change, variation in and transference of similarities. In the end, the work’s content can also assume the function of form, while technique can ultimately prove to be what the work is about.*

Margarita Kataga
May 2010

* Fred Orton, «The Object After Theory», in De-, Dis-, Ex-, Excavating Modernism, edited by Alex Coles & Richard Bentley, published by BACKless Books in association with Black Dog Publishing, London, 1996.