In texts and contextual interventions shown alongside color and black-and-white photographic works of the ’70s and ’80s, there are surprising connections: facileness of analysis to contrast with a Beckettian poetics, repetition and excess, the totemic and beautiful, the sharply reductive; the individual, its breakdown in parts.

The work is a near paradoxical minimal thing, a materialized “now” that extinguishes any sensorial claim to isolate any condition of its experience. The “type-token” distinction is a formal distinction between “type” of a thing and its occurrences. Arnatt used the distinction in Type-Token Work to dramatize conceptual art’s contemporaneous analytic isolating of idea and object. Strictly speaking “now” is an idealization, there is no now to contrast with the idea of a now in the artwork. “Now” doesn’t index anything.

Pooping, shitting, defecating was a theme in early works intended to demystify the process of art making, theorizing art making. Defecation Piece draws attention to process as pseudo document and vice versa. A shit, found, perhaps done by one of his dogs, becomes visible and then prominent in a sequence of 6 images.

Defecation Piece (1969) is an early example of a contextual play between what Arnatt would describe as a “nominal” subject – a shit – and its environment, here a picturesque sweep in a forest road. In linear progression the 6 images uncover – as a metaphor for process in art – a process involving both matter as sheer product and matter as concentrated material of process.

By the mid-70s, the period of photographic work Walking the Dog (1976–77), there was a redirecting of earlier self-reflexive preoccupations. This was a shift to incorporate an informational (relating to Arnatt’s subjects) as well as sensual, spectral fullness in images. In works, this took the form of a kind of relaxed but specific pictorial encoding in images of the narrowed world around him, the twenty or so miles of the isolated rural and post-industrial fringes of west Gloucestershire and its Welsh border.

Throughout the exhibited works there is an interest in the tension between a type of formal directness, and reference, coded, to painting invoking the picturesque and Arcadian. On the one hand, there is the type of brutal or unflinching realism reflected in subject matter (as in Defecation Piece) and on the other, emphasized in the informational content of later photographic works, a type of interest in and deference to art historical subject matters as almost classically encoded. In this respect Arnatt’s interest in landscape directly relates photographic works at root to histories of uses of imagery in the art tradition.

Unlike in the majority of the related series, The Forest, relaxes from a rather specific subject matter into more abstracted imagery deploying mannerisms as he saw them associated with pictorial depictions of neglect revealed in rural and decaying industrial architectural detail. Similarly, in Reece’s Yard (c. 1987), there is a completely embracing silver light lying on top of everything: lorry tire marks, part-built breeze block walls, the mud. Arnatt never treats anything as detritus; everything has a value.

Color photographs – from the darker Howlers Hill (1987–88) (Howlers Hill was a landfill site in the Forest of Dean) and from Pictures from a Rubbish Tip (1988–89) – sublimate aspects of that valuing and, richly suggestive as they are, float distant from a notion of depicting as in any way directly serially reducible, not to be seen as particulates for which one took a heightened, divisible responsibility.

Describing Howlers Hill in his catalogue essay for Arnatt’s 1989 retrospective exhibition, Ian Walker writes of “A particular combination of blue, tawny brown and gold [that] recalls Venetian painting, a swirl of black plastic has a baroque opulence of form. Arnatt gets close up now; he is in there with the rubbish, filling the frame in a vertical mass . . . ” Throughout the works, the Edenic encompasses the ugly as special too and is recast as a visual ache, for loss in the reconstitution of the self as consciousness of one’s knowing effect on the fullness of things.