When you first look at John Goto’s photographs, you think immediately of the distinctive work of the American photographer David LaChapelle. But where La-Chapelle’s cartoon-like aesthetic is expressed in fashion, pop and street photography, Goto’s lurid, brightly coloured, glittering pictures feature frozen moments in a rambunctious circus. A ballerina poses at the top of a tower of animals, trapeze artists zoom through the air, the clowns’ painted faces have a certain menace. The colours are stingingly intense.
“Someone once guessed my pictures were the work of a gay man in his mid-twenties. Well, I’m old and straight-ish,” Goto laughs. As pizzazzy as his pictures might be, they have a dark undertow: this is a circus of nightmares. The bearded faces that loom over the stage seem familiar: they’re mock-ups of Saddam Hussein. Two clowns pull a Saddam-like statue from a pedestal, re-enacting one of the landmark images of the Iraq War. The exhibition is accompanied by a soundscape of circus noise by composer Michael Young.
Goto, furious at Bush and Blair’s policies in Iraq, has produced a savage political work with a sugary coating. The title, New World Circus, is a deliberate play on the New World Order that Bush and Blair hoped would prevail in Iraq. Goto himself plays the manic scarlet-tunicked, waxed-moustached ringmaster. “I must be one of the few people to use Photoshop to make myself look more overweight, sweatier,” he jokes.
Goto, 57, whose day job is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Derby, is attracted to “the slight air of pathos about small travelling circuses. They’re almost families. I wanted to draw a kind of analogy between the family and the state of international affairs. It may sound odd, but there are parallels — in both you get alliances, arguments, wars, reconfigurations.” Indeed, the models in his astonishing photographs are his wife Celia, daughters Zoey and Jade, his mother Kay Glithero, friends and neighbours.
In one shot, the crowd looks horrified — for this, Goto asked his models to impersonate an image of traumatised Iraqis. In another, they look triumphant — they are impersonating a photograph of Bush and Blair. In another shot to highlight how humans are casualties of war, Marines blast their guns towards the audience. To show “America’s history of violence”, he re-enacts the 1937 lynching of an elephant after she had trampled her trainer.
“I first got really interested in circus when I was 15,” says Goto, who speaks very quietly and precisely. “I was in Brittany, travelling abroad for the first time, and came across this small-town circus. The climax was a motorbike balancing on tightropes with a beautiful young lady hanging below the bike. There’s a romanticism to the circus that I have always engaged with and a curious sexual energy. All the bodies on display — humans and animals — are rippling and glossy.”
He would always sit on the front row to take pictures and would often be chosen by the clowns as a stooge. “I had to stand on one foot and hit the cymbals at the right moment. I was covered in water, had strange ladies sit on me.” The strange animal acts he witnessed also made an impression. “I saw one hippopotamus in Portugal which did nothing but eat melon in the most salivatory way. I remember the sweet, perfume-like smell on the tigers in Paris and in Austria a herd of cows, performing in synchronised movement.”
Goto emphasises circus’s influence on art: both involve “acts of daring and creativity”. He notes the influence of circus on Picasso (the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona) and the work he did inspired by the Circus Medrano. “The most perfect parallel between circus and visual art is in Picasso’s Pierrot and Harlequin (1918),” he says of two adversaries side by side drawn with one pencil line. “The dexterity and magic of the artist matches the dexterity and magic of the performer.”
Goto also notes the influence of commedia dell’arte on artists, which prefigures circus; and Fellini’s fascination with the circus as played out in his movie La Strada, featuring Anthony Quinn as a cruel circus strongman. “There’s an element of the grotesque in the circus,” Goto says. “You think of it moving from town to town during the night full of mystery and foreboding.”
In Goto’s work that foreboding is also avowedly political. One image of the finale of a boxing match, the loser wearing a hood, his arms flailing over the ropes, was inspired by a video of an Allied hostage being executed in Iraq. Again and again, the pictures emphasise how war has become — in our 24-hour news culture — spectacle, entertainment even. “Along with a large part of our nation, I have an absolute horror and disgust at what we have done in Iraq. I went on the marches, for all the good they did.”
Why tackle it using such camp satire? “In Britain, there’s a grand tradition of poking fun at grave situations. The absurdity is befitting to what are extreme times. I’m very pessimistic about Iraq so hope the pictures have a certain poignancy.”
Goto muses that his political engagement may derive from his great-grandfather, a communist docker from Clydeside. “Also, the Sixties, when I grew up, was a time of different political choices.” It wasn’t an artistic household; his father was an engineer. Goto was dyslexic as a child and turned to art to express himself. One formative influence was comic books. “I loved caricature, distortion and anthropomorphism — how Rupert Bear was a bear but also human.”
He went to art school and then studied photography in Paris before living in Prague. In 1989 he produced an episodic photographic work, The Scar, which used the metaphor of a love affair ending with the demise of communism in Czechoslovakia.
In 1988, after his father died of fibrosis of the lungs, Goto distilled his grief and a sense of “marauding anger” into a series of works which also focused on the big cultural issues of the late 1950s: the atomic bomb, the “angry young man” as emblemised in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and the first stirrings in the (now-endless) debate about high art and popular culture, in the work of writers such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams.
“I find it hard to look at that work because it’s so steeped in my dad,” says Goto.
In the early 1990s, teaching at Oxford Brookes University, Goto began “to look over my colleagues’ shoulders” when computers and new computing design techniques took off. “At that point, I was making cut and paste collages, but I soon realised computer programs were a dream come true for the montagist.”
Goto says the digitally manipulated image is “utterly suited” to our time: “Thirty years ago, in the era of conventional photography, there were clear boundaries, the world felt a much simpler place. Now there is far more interpretation, questioning, the old boundaries and certainties are dissolving. This kind of art echoes that. Susan Sontag once said that photographs were taken and paintings made, but now photographs can be made, too. That’s what fascinates me.”
The ingenious thing is that, despite their scale and bravura, the images are made from not that much. Goto has a 3ft high circus model with some plastic audience figures. He kits out his family and friends in slightly faded, threadbare circus fancy dress from a costumier’s closing-down sale. He has a very small studio with a very high roof. He lights model and humans in the same way, mocks up the image on his computer, shoots crowd members individually, then fiddles electronically to create the whole.
In another set of photographs, Floodscapes, Goto’s collaging and digital techniques come together. Here, a set of teenagers set off down the Thames, which has been vastly swollen by climate change. Some of the pictures reference works of classical art — Turner’s Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, Homer’s Odyssey, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa — though, unlike the circus images, the flood pictures seem to hint at salvation. By the end the waters recede, salt marshes have been established to sustain new ecosystems, wind turbines hum on the hills. Goto’s concerns seem to be moving towards the environmental: next he’s planning to use Google Earth and aerial views of the earth to “move the geography of where we live around”.
Goto’s work is so of its time that it is surprising when he says he feels a kinship with the grand painters who began with sketches, then roughed out their work, then took away and added new elements before committing paint to canvas. “I do the same thing, though electronically,” he says. The National Gallery remains his greatest inspiration, as it was when he was a student, for the landscapes of Poussin and Claude Gellée.
“My ambition is to make art, without inhibition, which tells people how it was to be alive in the time I live in,” Goto says very, very seriously. “I should probably lighten up,” he admits. “I swim but I rarely take time off. This is what I do.” If politics really is a circus, then Goto makes the perfect subversive ringmaster.
John Goto’s New World Circus is at Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, until Sep 3 (www.harrogate.gov.uk 01423 556188), Focal Point Gallery, Southend Central Library, Southend-on-Sea, Sep 9 to Oct 21 (www.focalpoint.org.uk 01702 534108), and touring. See also www.johngoto.org.uk
