V22 ASHWINSTREET

Pat O'ConnorCaragh Thuring

Pat O’Connor’s Gregory Peck, James Stewart and Cary Grant

When it comes to watching sport on TV, I have a higher boredom threshold than anyone I know. However, when the sporting calendar is so dull as to force Grandstand to cover Triathlon, Water Skiing or The Great North Run, even I will occasionally flick over to BBC2. There I will find what I have always held to be the aesthetic opposite of televised sport: the matinee. I like to imagine that, on any given Saturday afternoon, the television-watching British public is divided into two factions: those who like watching sport and those who like watching old matinees. Those who have marked the contrast between the timelessness of the latter and the fleeting, onanistic vicariousness that televised sport inculcates will require no further substantiation of this claim.

According to devotees, there are five conditions that must accompany the watching of a matinee on a Saturday afternoon:
a) It must be raining.
b) Your husband must be either out (ideally lighting a bonfire) or doing something in another room.
c) It has to have been a not particularly good week, for the matinee must provide a sense of consolation.
d) You must have seen the matinee before, but not in its entirety.
e) A hangover is desirable – though a light head cold or period pain is better.

Ask any devotee of the matinee to rationalise these conditions and they will laugh in your face with the derision of one who knows that people who watch matinees are morally and emotionally superior to those who watch televised sport. For us sport bores, one of the pleasures of watching old matinees – and there are some pleasures, though none that compare to the cuing action of Peter Ebdon or Tim Gudgeon’s enunciation of the final scores – is trying to establish whether the guy who has just walked out on his fiancée is Gregory Peck or James Stewart, or in fact Cary Grant; whether the spurned fiancée is Lauren Bacall or Kathrine Hepburn, or in fact a cunningly made-over Martha Scott; or whether the malevolent mistress skulking in the pantry in anticipation of imminent triumph just might conceivably be Joan Vohs, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich…

Pat O’Connor’s Gregory Peck, James Stewart and Cary Grant (2006) seems to explore this confusion, presenting 20 gouache drawings of movie actors on a single sheet of paper. What apparently began as an attempt to distinguish Peck, Stewart and Grant from one another grew into something quite different, for alongside these actors appears a handful of silver screen icons – John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Victor Mature and others – not mentioned in the title. To confuse matters further, Peck, Stewart and Grant all appear two or three times, while these other actors appear only once. Initially, the drawing presents itself as a coherent taxonomy, progressing from one example to another. But there are two taxonomical orders at work here: we move from one actor to another only to return later to a different version of the same actor. O’Connor drafts in Hudson, Mature, Wayne, Mitchum et al as possible Pecks, Stewarts and Grants – in the same way that movie producers must consider several actors for a given role before making their final decision.

Unlike conventional taxonomists, rather than constraining our thought to a one-by-one consideration of a set of distinct examples, O’Connor allows it to wander: Is that Montgomery Clift or an emaciated Cary Grant with a moustache? Did Grant ever actually grow a moustache? Surely it’s not a misshapen David Niven? And what is Robert Mitchum doing wearing John Wayne’s cowboy hat? Are the two actors in the middle of the bottom row the same actor in different films or the same actor wearing different outfits in the same film? Or perhaps they are two different actors entirely, placed together to create deliberate ambiguity? Usually, visual representations of taxonomies tend to covet the examples they present, the individuality of each species appearing equally effulgent. Unlike the wall charts and suchlike that it initially seems to emulate, Gregory Peck, James Stewart and Cary Grant does not covet the individuality of each species, but rather allows a general – and somewhat melancholic – silver screen pathos to permeate the entire genus.

The consistent tonal and chromatic range underpins this permeation. The roseate light that bathes each actor’s face has a potentially different significance in each case: one face (Robert Mitchum’s?) appears to be reminiscing in the reflected glow of a raging fire, another to be blushing, or smarting from the well-timed slap of a cheated spouse. One or two faces are so garrulous and ruddy-nosed as to suggest advanced alchoholism – and one actor’s forehead is so scarlet it appears to have been ‘spammed’ by a thousand schoolboys. As with other of O’Connor’s representations of celebrity, a sanguine complacency quickly gives way to something less charitable, mordant even.

Sean Ashton
6th October 2006