Contents
- Ice – A Distilled Life Robyn Base
- Respondent: Ben Millar
- Respondent: Lucy Griggs
- Andrew Lawson
- Respondent: Hamish Carr
- Respondent: Mila Faranov
- Lucy Griggs
- Respondent: Ben Millar
- Respondent: Mimmalisa Trifilo
- Hamish Carr
- Respondent: Robyn Base
- Respondent: Kem Shimizu
- Nicki Wynnychuk
- Responent: Mila Faranov
- Respondent: Hamish Carr
- Mila Faranov
- Respondent: Lucy Griggs
- Respondent: Andrew Lawson
- Ben Millar
- Respondent: Robyn Base
- Respondent: Nicki Wynnychuk
- Ken Shimizu
- Respondent: Mimmalisa Trifilo
- Respondent: Andrew Lawson
- Mimmalisa Trifilo
- Respondent: Ken Shimizu
- Respondent: Nicki Wynnychuk
Ice – A Distilled Life Robyn Base
Icebergs Nos. 1-9, Robyn Base
Respondent: Ben Millar
Grounding Lines: It all relies on the subject
Grounding Lines are the point at which ice sheets reach the ground creating the major difference between the ice sheets and icebergs. One is grounded and immobile, the other is afloat and without a point of contact.
Ice – A Distilled Life
Robyn Base: Paintings and Works on Paper
“Spaces are invested with all sorts of meanings; they are a place of potential, of creativity and of spirituality.” (i) (Freshwater/Psychodynamic Practice)
In January of 2007, Robyn Base took a trip to Antarctica. This trip would inform her current practice of a prehistoric nature disintegrating in front of her eyes. A life so fragile in the weight of current political issues it takes on the form of abandoned icebergs in a sea of black.
With an up coming election you cant help but notice the indolence of the liberal party with promises broken too often and a knowing that the party’s interest lies in economical growth and does not concern the crisis of global warming. Another issue that arises is the disintegrating belief in our prime minister and his ever failing IR laws campaign.
The weight of these issues immobilized in paint, Base depicts an interest in finite sculptural forms photographed and recaptured in the studio. Icebergs are a symbol of global warming and affirm Base’s considerations of the Antarctic as a dessert wasteland in crisis. How is this crisis explained? On entering the gallery, the paintings appear to be in groups, or the canvas of one image broken into numbers. Togetherness is created but of an outer experience, one the viewer may see but not take part in. Is the viewer being led to presume something about the icebergs?
“It has become very clear over the past five years that these sheets are not losing most of their mass through melting. They are losing it because the ice is flowing into the ocean faster than the snow is replacing it.” (ii) (Brahic/The New Scientist)
Icebergs are rising in number and the ice sheets that make the Antarctic are breaking up. Through painting, the message becomes a horrific depiction sliding into a blind spot of seduction through the luscious layers of paint. Are the bergs helpless and lost at sea? Is Base offering a lesson or is it too late?
The paintings are reminiscent of the work of Peter Booth. Representation full of richness and colour through the build up of tone and covering past layers of paint, almost the complete opposite of the icebergs themselves imagined to be melting away.
Although the subject of these paintings is landscape the genre is more like a still life or portrait of melting bodies. Forms within forms appear to be alien, upside down, eerie, anorexic and unknown. The bodily forms become apparent like an early surrealist painting that compels you to find the body parts.
What surrounds these bodily forms is a massive black. Like that of a dominant interest, that black dominates the foreground of the paintings and extends around the entirety of the icebergs. In the context of global warming what is the question raised about this constant black foreground, full of depth, murk and gesture?
The boundaries between the different types of space are illusory and arbitrary…In defining; the reflective space reminds us it is indefinable. It seems there is a natural curiosity about the spaces in between things, perhaps even more so than the things themselves. (iii) (Freshwater/Psychodynamic Practice)
The isolation of each iceberg surrounded by black emphasises an observational detachment. The gap between becomes a ground for contemplation, a sacred space where you’re imagination can explore the meaning of these sombre figures.
Is land as permanent as it seems? Metaphysically, the depth of black in the pictorial foreground continues out of the picture plane and encompasses the gallery. The sublime nature, the appropriated and exaggerated skies, the emphasized blacks and an eerie translucent blue, how comfortable are you meant to feel when looking at these monsters? What is beneath the dark surface and why does this dark surface approach the viewer?
Again, the space between takes shape as the beginning.
The tip of the iceberg is a small percentage of mass in comparison to what lies beneath. Emphasising the blacks purpose even more, it is difficult to understand its entirety. The subject quite alien is reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing, a tense story of isolated individuals who must group together to defeat a creature form outer space, but who is the creature?
“in 1995 Larsen-A, an 11,000-year-old, 2,400-square-kilometer section of a floating ice shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula, collapsed and disintegrated in just a few weeks. Seven years later, the 3,400-square-kilometer Larsen-B shelf collapsed as well… The collapses did not affect sea level directly, since both shelves were floating before they disintegrated. But such shelves usually buttress adjacent land-based glaciers or sheets of ice grounded on the sea floor, and their removal can accelerate glacial ice discharge.
the long-term consequences of substantial Antarctic warming would be much graver [than the North Pole], because the region contains vastly more ice. Its most-vulnerable-to-melting area, West Antarctica, holds enough ice for about seven meters of global sea level rise.” (iv) (Young/World Watch)
The severity of global warming is dire, and if it were to be real, the effects are already in motion. One of the arguments states if global warming did turn out to be real, then it would take an extremely long time to heat the earth and an even longer period to cool it down. If this were to be the case Base’s images are a romantic vision. Like the story of Young Werther (v) (Goethe, 2004), the subject of these paintings twisted, and in need of recognition for their failing state. An exploration of the finite captured in a motionless array. Change immobilised and displayed as the consequence of an all-consuming passion.
(i) Freshwater, Dawn., The poetics of space: researching the concept of spatiality through relationality Psychodynamic Practice, May2005, Vol. 11 Issue 2, p177-187
(ii) Brahic, Catherine., What's behind the big meltdown? The New Scientist, Volume 193, Issue 2596, 24 March 2007, Pages 16-17.
(iii) Freshwater, D., ibid.
(iv) Young, John., Black Water Rising World Watch, Sep/Oct2006, Vol. 19 Issue 5, p26-31.
(v) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, The sorrows of young Werther, New York : Modern Library, 2004
Grounding Lines are the point at which ice sheets reach the ground creating the major difference between the ice sheets and icebergs. One is grounded and immobile, the other is afloat and without a point of contact.
Ice – A Distilled Life
Robyn Base: Paintings and Works on Paper
“Spaces are invested with all sorts of meanings; they are a place of potential, of creativity and of spirituality.” (i) (Freshwater/Psychodynamic Practice)
In January of 2007, Robyn Base took a trip to Antarctica. This trip would inform her current practice of a prehistoric nature disintegrating in front of her eyes. A life so fragile in the weight of current political issues it takes on the form of abandoned icebergs in a sea of black.
With an up coming election you cant help but notice the indolence of the liberal party with promises broken too often and a knowing that the party’s interest lies in economical growth and does not concern the crisis of global warming. Another issue that arises is the disintegrating belief in our prime minister and his ever failing IR laws campaign.
The weight of these issues immobilized in paint, Base depicts an interest in finite sculptural forms photographed and recaptured in the studio. Icebergs are a symbol of global warming and affirm Base’s considerations of the Antarctic as a dessert wasteland in crisis. How is this crisis explained? On entering the gallery, the paintings appear to be in groups, or the canvas of one image broken into numbers. Togetherness is created but of an outer experience, one the viewer may see but not take part in. Is the viewer being led to presume something about the icebergs?
“It has become very clear over the past five years that these sheets are not losing most of their mass through melting. They are losing it because the ice is flowing into the ocean faster than the snow is replacing it.” (ii) (Brahic/The New Scientist)
Icebergs are rising in number and the ice sheets that make the Antarctic are breaking up. Through painting, the message becomes a horrific depiction sliding into a blind spot of seduction through the luscious layers of paint. Are the bergs helpless and lost at sea? Is Base offering a lesson or is it too late?
The paintings are reminiscent of the work of Peter Booth. Representation full of richness and colour through the build up of tone and covering past layers of paint, almost the complete opposite of the icebergs themselves imagined to be melting away.
Although the subject of these paintings is landscape the genre is more like a still life or portrait of melting bodies. Forms within forms appear to be alien, upside down, eerie, anorexic and unknown. The bodily forms become apparent like an early surrealist painting that compels you to find the body parts.
What surrounds these bodily forms is a massive black. Like that of a dominant interest, that black dominates the foreground of the paintings and extends around the entirety of the icebergs. In the context of global warming what is the question raised about this constant black foreground, full of depth, murk and gesture?
The boundaries between the different types of space are illusory and arbitrary…In defining; the reflective space reminds us it is indefinable. It seems there is a natural curiosity about the spaces in between things, perhaps even more so than the things themselves. (iii) (Freshwater/Psychodynamic Practice)
The isolation of each iceberg surrounded by black emphasises an observational detachment. The gap between becomes a ground for contemplation, a sacred space where you’re imagination can explore the meaning of these sombre figures.
Is land as permanent as it seems? Metaphysically, the depth of black in the pictorial foreground continues out of the picture plane and encompasses the gallery. The sublime nature, the appropriated and exaggerated skies, the emphasized blacks and an eerie translucent blue, how comfortable are you meant to feel when looking at these monsters? What is beneath the dark surface and why does this dark surface approach the viewer?
Again, the space between takes shape as the beginning.
The tip of the iceberg is a small percentage of mass in comparison to what lies beneath. Emphasising the blacks purpose even more, it is difficult to understand its entirety. The subject quite alien is reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing, a tense story of isolated individuals who must group together to defeat a creature form outer space, but who is the creature?
“in 1995 Larsen-A, an 11,000-year-old, 2,400-square-kilometer section of a floating ice shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula, collapsed and disintegrated in just a few weeks. Seven years later, the 3,400-square-kilometer Larsen-B shelf collapsed as well… The collapses did not affect sea level directly, since both shelves were floating before they disintegrated. But such shelves usually buttress adjacent land-based glaciers or sheets of ice grounded on the sea floor, and their removal can accelerate glacial ice discharge.
the long-term consequences of substantial Antarctic warming would be much graver [than the North Pole], because the region contains vastly more ice. Its most-vulnerable-to-melting area, West Antarctica, holds enough ice for about seven meters of global sea level rise.” (iv) (Young/World Watch)
The severity of global warming is dire, and if it were to be real, the effects are already in motion. One of the arguments states if global warming did turn out to be real, then it would take an extremely long time to heat the earth and an even longer period to cool it down. If this were to be the case Base’s images are a romantic vision. Like the story of Young Werther (v) (Goethe, 2004), the subject of these paintings twisted, and in need of recognition for their failing state. An exploration of the finite captured in a motionless array. Change immobilised and displayed as the consequence of an all-consuming passion.
(i) Freshwater, Dawn., The poetics of space: researching the concept of spatiality through relationality Psychodynamic Practice, May2005, Vol. 11 Issue 2, p177-187
(ii) Brahic, Catherine., What's behind the big meltdown? The New Scientist, Volume 193, Issue 2596, 24 March 2007, Pages 16-17.
(iii) Freshwater, D., ibid.
(iv) Young, John., Black Water Rising World Watch, Sep/Oct2006, Vol. 19 Issue 5, p26-31.
(v) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, The sorrows of young Werther, New York : Modern Library, 2004
Respondent: Lucy Griggs
Ice – A Distilled Life
Whilst the subject matter of Robyn Base’s art changes markedly from series to series, a common theme running through all of her works is the use of rich symbolism, which, in each case, eloquently captures the zeitgeist of the time. Robyn’s previous series featured the birka, a headscarf worn traditionally by Muslim women. This image clearly related to questions of Australian identity at a time when the Western world was reacting hysterically to a so-called war on terror and the threat of ‘queue-jumping’ refugees. Australian’s were asked by the Prime Minister to be ‘alert but not alarmed’. Overtly Islamic symbolism was met in Australia with distrust and sometimes animosity.
Robyn’s most recent body of work features new and different symbolism, but again relates to the most engaging and relevant issues on the Australian (and international) socio-political landscape - striking at the heart of what it means to be alive in the world now. That issue is our environment and how it can be maintained (or stated another way, how the impending global catastrophe can be subverted).
This body of works (oil paintings, prints and drawing) are the result of Robyn Base’s intrepid travels to Antarctica, one of the last parts of the world, which could truly be described as wilderness – a final frontier in a world that has been transformed by human existence.
The gridded works and their placement on the walls transform the gallery into an interior of a ship (or submarine) where we (the passengers) stand to look, view and experience icebergs, vicariously through Robyn’s painted (or printed) windows.
I can’t help but make a connection to a charcoal drawn animation/live action performance work by South African artist William Kentridge, ‘Journey to the Moon’ 2003, whereby Kentridge takes the viewer on a surreal journey through outer space via his studio (the external space for exploration and the interior of a rocket-ship).
In the same way that the canary down the mineshaft warned miners about the deterioration of their environment and that they were in danger (1), Robyn Base’s paintings of icebergs represent a stark and poignant reminder of the fragility of the planet in the grips of a global warming crisis.
In addition to the poignant use of symbolism, Robyn’s work also contains a distinct anthropomorphic quality. That is, the icebergs in Robyn’s paintings seem to take on a human form. The viewer, when engaging with the work, soon identifies human features in the ‘non-human’ masses of ice such as eyes and ears, others resemble teeth and bones. In this way, Robyn questions the nature of seeing; the nature of viewing art.
James Elkins in his text, ‘The Object Stares Back’ states:
‘When we are confronted with an unfamiliar object – a blot, a funny smear, a strange configuration of paint, a mirage, a frightening apparition, a wild landscape, a brass microscope, a building made of brick and rock – we seek a body in it; we try to see something like ourselves, a reflection or an other, a doppelganger or a twin, or even just a part of us – a face, a hand or a foot, an eye, even a hair or a scrap of tissue. In other words, we try to understand strange forms by thinking back to bodies. Even odd bodies, things that are manifestly not human, get referred back to human bodies when we try to understand them.’ (2)
; and
‘If we look at something genuinely confusing – an abstract painting, for example – we will see body metaphors and body echoes: uprightness, the breadth and height of a body, the symmetries of a face, the texture of skin, the warmth of an embrace, the position of one person near another. This happens even if we know there are other things going on in the picture, and it happens with decidedly uncorporeal forms such as graphs and charts. It is our inescapable, habitual way of coming to terms with things that are not bodies.’ (3)
Furthermore, whilst the forms suggest humanity, they (icebergs from Antarctica) are not familiar; they are foreign, almost alien, unhospitable forms where human life is tenuous and society does not exist.
In my view, the ‘zeitgeist’ type symbolism of the iceberg (in the midst of a global environmental disaster - which is staring us all in the face) is combined brilliantly with Robyn’s anthropomorphic elements. In this way, Robyn is able to ask the viewer to take a look at themselves, and to see themselves as a part of the problem and perhaps even as a part of the solution. We are the problem and have to be the solution, if there is going to be one. At a time when the future of the planet and civilisation as we know it is in the balance, these ‘melting body’ paintings help to personalise the issue and endow it with a ‘soul’. Perhaps in this way, these works are a protest (or a call for change) to the apathy, economic rationalism and political obstructionism that are all still the order of the day.
(1) The oxygen levels were becomng critically low
(2) Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996, p.129.
(3) ibid., p.131.
Andrew Lawson
Andrew Lawson
Respondent: Hamish Carr
Andrew Lawson Installation
It’s paramount to consider the way in which Lawson presents his work. He has not merely presented works on paper, four paintings and some ready made objects. Careful deliberation has taken place in the appearance of this installation. Lawson is making a direct statement regarding not only his thoughts but his art-making process. Lawson is reverting back to the very essence of his work: its origin. If we were to read his work from left to right as Western interpretation suggests, we are first presented with a tiny image reproduced on a photocopier with the text ‘me’ and the drawing of a shelf. This not only initiates the install but establishes the subject, the self-referential element we cannot ignore. The introduction leads us to four of the artist’s paintings followed by his works on paper. These works on paper are miniaturized versions of his paintings and drawings, which are presented as if they were frames from a film reel, snippets from the life of Lawson. The size and number of these re-productions exhibited, reinforces references to his thoughts, along with a need to clarify and record them. These coloured and black and white re-productions force us towards the corner of the gallery where we are presented with four drawings blown up through printing to roughly AO size, somewhat exploding out of the film reel and demanding our attention. This climax then trails off, back into the film reel, the artist’s thoughts slowly dissipating. Amongst the larger works we are introduced to the shelf and perhaps one of the more significant elements of the install, for on these shelves the artist is allowing us insight into the making of his work and its origin.
Through protruding shelves Lawson provides reference to a pseudo alchemy - they are not supporting superfluous ready-mades but relate to the works creation. Pens, brushes, scissors all refer to the art-making process. Compact discs with lyrics that the artist so often uses as the text in his work are placed underneath a small cauldron. This placement was not random but positioned to represent the process the artist utilizes in the making of his work. The voices, repetitive thoughts, his feelings that are defined by some of these lyrics hold a significance to the work and are presented as such. And it is in this way that the cauldron symbolizes his visualization of this thought process: the transferring of his consciousness to the work. Having these shelves surrounded by larger scale works exemplifies their importance.
Although these works on paper are photocopied re-productions you cannot escape the artist’s hand. At first glance references can be made to Jean-Michel Basquiat or Richard Lewer, however under closer inspection a language that is unique to Lawson emerges. The combination of text and image is of utmost importance to this artist; he communicates his intentions at times with word association then reinforces it with the pictorial and vice versa. It could almost be interpreted as a crude form of advertising, but its expressive nature prohibits such an association. Although these works are child-like in presentation there is a definite control. Lawson is very aware of what he wants to express and how best to achieve it.
It is hard not to sense a certain melancholy when looking at his work; text that reads ‘ loneliness is such a drag’, ‘mediocrity’, ‘down the drain’ and ‘vacant’ to name a few all exemplify this notion. These word associations may not seem so despondent if they were not placed alongside text that referred directly back to the artist. Thus the self-referential cannot be overlooked with text that reads ‘me’,’my’, and ‘I’. However despairing some works may look they are juxtaposed by elements of the artist’s appreciation - thank-you notes to other people who have helped the artist through some form of collaboration pop-up throughout the film reel. This notion of the collaboration or the need to share his work is promoted through the artist’s colouring books placed on a shelf. The promotion of interactivity is obviously an element that feeds the creative process and one that the artist is grateful to acknowledge.
Lawson has presented the mechanisms which contribute and define his art practice. The association with the film reel portrays a need to document and clarify his thoughts, to somehow record his inner life. The installation leads us through his art practice to its origin. It is in the origin that we are presented with the tools used to produce and inspire his work. His constant reference to the self helps authenticate this process and is further defined through the use of text. Combining text and the image provides the means to directly transfer his stream of consciousness to his work. And it is in this transfer that Lawson operates.
It’s paramount to consider the way in which Lawson presents his work. He has not merely presented works on paper, four paintings and some ready made objects. Careful deliberation has taken place in the appearance of this installation. Lawson is making a direct statement regarding not only his thoughts but his art-making process. Lawson is reverting back to the very essence of his work: its origin. If we were to read his work from left to right as Western interpretation suggests, we are first presented with a tiny image reproduced on a photocopier with the text ‘me’ and the drawing of a shelf. This not only initiates the install but establishes the subject, the self-referential element we cannot ignore. The introduction leads us to four of the artist’s paintings followed by his works on paper. These works on paper are miniaturized versions of his paintings and drawings, which are presented as if they were frames from a film reel, snippets from the life of Lawson. The size and number of these re-productions exhibited, reinforces references to his thoughts, along with a need to clarify and record them. These coloured and black and white re-productions force us towards the corner of the gallery where we are presented with four drawings blown up through printing to roughly AO size, somewhat exploding out of the film reel and demanding our attention. This climax then trails off, back into the film reel, the artist’s thoughts slowly dissipating. Amongst the larger works we are introduced to the shelf and perhaps one of the more significant elements of the install, for on these shelves the artist is allowing us insight into the making of his work and its origin.
Through protruding shelves Lawson provides reference to a pseudo alchemy - they are not supporting superfluous ready-mades but relate to the works creation. Pens, brushes, scissors all refer to the art-making process. Compact discs with lyrics that the artist so often uses as the text in his work are placed underneath a small cauldron. This placement was not random but positioned to represent the process the artist utilizes in the making of his work. The voices, repetitive thoughts, his feelings that are defined by some of these lyrics hold a significance to the work and are presented as such. And it is in this way that the cauldron symbolizes his visualization of this thought process: the transferring of his consciousness to the work. Having these shelves surrounded by larger scale works exemplifies their importance.
Although these works on paper are photocopied re-productions you cannot escape the artist’s hand. At first glance references can be made to Jean-Michel Basquiat or Richard Lewer, however under closer inspection a language that is unique to Lawson emerges. The combination of text and image is of utmost importance to this artist; he communicates his intentions at times with word association then reinforces it with the pictorial and vice versa. It could almost be interpreted as a crude form of advertising, but its expressive nature prohibits such an association. Although these works are child-like in presentation there is a definite control. Lawson is very aware of what he wants to express and how best to achieve it.
It is hard not to sense a certain melancholy when looking at his work; text that reads ‘ loneliness is such a drag’, ‘mediocrity’, ‘down the drain’ and ‘vacant’ to name a few all exemplify this notion. These word associations may not seem so despondent if they were not placed alongside text that referred directly back to the artist. Thus the self-referential cannot be overlooked with text that reads ‘me’,’my’, and ‘I’. However despairing some works may look they are juxtaposed by elements of the artist’s appreciation - thank-you notes to other people who have helped the artist through some form of collaboration pop-up throughout the film reel. This notion of the collaboration or the need to share his work is promoted through the artist’s colouring books placed on a shelf. The promotion of interactivity is obviously an element that feeds the creative process and one that the artist is grateful to acknowledge.
Lawson has presented the mechanisms which contribute and define his art practice. The association with the film reel portrays a need to document and clarify his thoughts, to somehow record his inner life. The installation leads us through his art practice to its origin. It is in the origin that we are presented with the tools used to produce and inspire his work. His constant reference to the self helps authenticate this process and is further defined through the use of text. Combining text and the image provides the means to directly transfer his stream of consciousness to his work. And it is in this transfer that Lawson operates.
Respondent: Mila Faranov
Andrew Lawson Installation
Lawson’s work is a kind of visual poetry. Contemplative sentiments are formed through the simplicity of the drawn line and the written word. I am captivated by a sense of intimacy. Andrew Lawson’s work is about interiors. I walk around a wall of thoughts and spaces.
Headspace and heart-space, private space, personal space all become a public space. There are miniature pages in concertina rows on a small shelf set just above my sight line, which compels me to strain a little bit in order to peer in. I feel as though I am taking a sneaky peak, even though the work is there to be seen.
I am struck by the contradictory elements I find in Lawson’s work. The ad hoc non-precious immediacy of his work is belied by the littleness of the cut out pages. Self-contemplation, and self-deprecatory introspection is a private thing. These are the thoughts of an individual man. By making his self-contemplation public Lawson has invested in the viewer a sense of egalitarianism.
The objects and moments he has chosen to record reinforce this notion. Upon absorbing Andrew Lawson’s work the title of a book comes to my mind: The God of Small Things. I have not read the book, but for me the title echoes a sensibility that prevails through out Lawson’s work: that is the consideration of that which is often overlooked or ignored. I, me, my, The Angel of Sweep It Under the Carpet, one of the small canvases included in the installation, is a potent and poetic example of this capacity. There are recurring motifs in Lawson’s work. Lawson finds beauty in the incidental. He privileges the mundane. The inconsequential nature of a bread tag or a plastic hook is often re-assessed. One can draw something to remember it, to see it, but also to give it potential and consideration. The object or moment is not only the subject but also the decision to draw it.
The same mini page appears twice, at the beginning and at the end of the display. It is a big M little e small person on a shelf, on display. Andrew Lawson is on display. It is a phonetic representation sort of like MMMMMeee. Is he putting his life on display or on the shelf? Is he on the shelf? There is a wry sense of humour in Lawson’s work, which often represents the incidental yet precarious and precious nature of life and existence. Works such as Half a Person Here, and Once in a While I look Up (fan) present us with a sardonic take on being. Again a visual poetics in the juxtapositon of a laconic text and a simple image, in the former case half a coat drawn and the words ‘half a person here’ where the rest of the coat would be.
Lawson’s work is often endearing and whimsical. In one canvas a peaking up of cats ears on to a gold ground with leopard spots floating above reminds me of a song that
starts:
It is my own personal musical reference. I like having found one of my own, knowing that Lawson often uses music and lyrics as an inspiration for his work. I am reminded of this inspiration by the small shelves that are installed as part of his work. On one there is a CD of Bob Marley and Wailers and another of Bob Dylan (I think). Tiny pages, a jar of pencils and brushes, an old pot containing incense and ash, some trinkets that have appeared in Lawson’s drawings suggest to me another type of private space brought out into public. The smell of the incense suddenly infiltrates my nostrils as I approach. It is meant to be calming and meditative. It reminds me of someone’s personal space, someone’s home.
Lawson has incorporated both tiny and giant replicas of his journal in this installation, which remind me of Alice in Wonderland. It has a sense of fantasy, and theatricality, and punctuates the space. The smaller works, like a sentence lead you on. In the corner the larger ones surround you like wallpaper, you pause, step back, look in at the shelves, then move forward along another chain of thoughts. Lawson’s work takes us on a journey. We journey as a Flaneur of the mind, of Lawson’s mind. As consequence we reflect and take our own journey. We encounter ourselves. One of the larger works, I (o) no not you again is like a textual mirror – a thought space for self-examination and self-confrontation. Nearby there is a depiction of a spider in a cage suggestive of the conundrum of self -circumspection. There is also what appears to be an image of a man made out of paper sheet/ or cards. Like a house of cards, vulnerable, prone, it can easily fall apart.
“Death to Mediocrity!” says Lawson. Absolutely, I say, by having a consciousness and awareness of life.
(i) Looking for My Leopard, Joel Veitch, Rathergood.com
Lawson’s work is a kind of visual poetry. Contemplative sentiments are formed through the simplicity of the drawn line and the written word. I am captivated by a sense of intimacy. Andrew Lawson’s work is about interiors. I walk around a wall of thoughts and spaces.
Headspace and heart-space, private space, personal space all become a public space. There are miniature pages in concertina rows on a small shelf set just above my sight line, which compels me to strain a little bit in order to peer in. I feel as though I am taking a sneaky peak, even though the work is there to be seen.
I am struck by the contradictory elements I find in Lawson’s work. The ad hoc non-precious immediacy of his work is belied by the littleness of the cut out pages. Self-contemplation, and self-deprecatory introspection is a private thing. These are the thoughts of an individual man. By making his self-contemplation public Lawson has invested in the viewer a sense of egalitarianism.
The objects and moments he has chosen to record reinforce this notion. Upon absorbing Andrew Lawson’s work the title of a book comes to my mind: The God of Small Things. I have not read the book, but for me the title echoes a sensibility that prevails through out Lawson’s work: that is the consideration of that which is often overlooked or ignored. I, me, my, The Angel of Sweep It Under the Carpet, one of the small canvases included in the installation, is a potent and poetic example of this capacity. There are recurring motifs in Lawson’s work. Lawson finds beauty in the incidental. He privileges the mundane. The inconsequential nature of a bread tag or a plastic hook is often re-assessed. One can draw something to remember it, to see it, but also to give it potential and consideration. The object or moment is not only the subject but also the decision to draw it.
The same mini page appears twice, at the beginning and at the end of the display. It is a big M little e small person on a shelf, on display. Andrew Lawson is on display. It is a phonetic representation sort of like MMMMMeee. Is he putting his life on display or on the shelf? Is he on the shelf? There is a wry sense of humour in Lawson’s work, which often represents the incidental yet precarious and precious nature of life and existence. Works such as Half a Person Here, and Once in a While I look Up (fan) present us with a sardonic take on being. Again a visual poetics in the juxtapositon of a laconic text and a simple image, in the former case half a coat drawn and the words ‘half a person here’ where the rest of the coat would be.
Lawson’s work is often endearing and whimsical. In one canvas a peaking up of cats ears on to a gold ground with leopard spots floating above reminds me of a song that
starts:
Oh, I. think I’ve lost my leopard,
Where can he be?
Well my leopards probably somewhere
Looking for me… (i)
Where can he be?
Well my leopards probably somewhere
Looking for me… (i)
It is my own personal musical reference. I like having found one of my own, knowing that Lawson often uses music and lyrics as an inspiration for his work. I am reminded of this inspiration by the small shelves that are installed as part of his work. On one there is a CD of Bob Marley and Wailers and another of Bob Dylan (I think). Tiny pages, a jar of pencils and brushes, an old pot containing incense and ash, some trinkets that have appeared in Lawson’s drawings suggest to me another type of private space brought out into public. The smell of the incense suddenly infiltrates my nostrils as I approach. It is meant to be calming and meditative. It reminds me of someone’s personal space, someone’s home.
Lawson has incorporated both tiny and giant replicas of his journal in this installation, which remind me of Alice in Wonderland. It has a sense of fantasy, and theatricality, and punctuates the space. The smaller works, like a sentence lead you on. In the corner the larger ones surround you like wallpaper, you pause, step back, look in at the shelves, then move forward along another chain of thoughts. Lawson’s work takes us on a journey. We journey as a Flaneur of the mind, of Lawson’s mind. As consequence we reflect and take our own journey. We encounter ourselves. One of the larger works, I (o) no not you again is like a textual mirror – a thought space for self-examination and self-confrontation. Nearby there is a depiction of a spider in a cage suggestive of the conundrum of self -circumspection. There is also what appears to be an image of a man made out of paper sheet/ or cards. Like a house of cards, vulnerable, prone, it can easily fall apart.
“Death to Mediocrity!” says Lawson. Absolutely, I say, by having a consciousness and awareness of life.
(i) Looking for My Leopard, Joel Veitch, Rathergood.com
Lucy Griggs
Treescape Silhouette (Wall Drawing #7)
Respondent: Ben Millar
A Hut For Happiness
No one has to be talked into the satisfactions of the hut. It is architecture's inner child. Many people who wouldn't know or couldn't care where a design began or ended have built a fort from a box, or put a house in a tree, created a workshop in a garage or covered a porch to make a room. (i)
No one has to be talked into the satisfactions of the hut. It is architecture's inner child. Many people who wouldn't know or couldn't care where a design began or ended have built a fort from a box, or put a house in a tree, created a workshop in a garage or covered a porch to make a room. (i)
The inner child that Lucy Griggs offers is charismatic and charming yet somewhat indefinite or impermanent. The hut Griggs has built is simple – escape - what happens if someone makes treetops from a wall?
Wall Drawing is a story for the desire of simplicity. The fascination with the uncomplicated becomes a world of all things beautiful. When first entering the gallery, the room was still in motion. A large ladder up against a blackened wall, a piece of cardboard with paints, brushes, and a big swizzle stick stuck in a paint tin. A lady (Lucy Griggs) in overalls says, ‘oh yeah, the light changes!’ as she enters the room.
Was it even about the lighting? The wall was black and will either suck up the atmosphere or get bright spots covering what was there to be seen. There is something there in the figures, the treetops to be precise.
Griggs has a small pillow that cushions her knee against the cement floor as the image is being made. A delicate attention to detail counterpoints the fact that there is only one colour being used. The paints surface shines with gloss and flattens out with a matte. I see a portrayal of the artist at work as Griggs continues on.
The difficulty to view the image with Griggs working, at first appeared as performance. A ladder that stood to the ceiling was never in use becoming a lonely and sombre figure that was part of the actual space. Could it be, when no one is around, the ladder comes to life? Was it Griggs implement to reach new heights, as if she could have her own head in the clouds? Was this interplay with the room a trickery or illusion, and part of a magical event of the mundane? Would this constitute for magical realism?
The performative added a touch of magic to the conventional and everyday scene but the wall drawing was the real feature. Could it be a dreamscape captured on the wall? Does it run parallel or counter to our social traditions or codes of living? There were no indications as to whether the silhouette acts as a mask or decorative element to the trees. The trees could be from anywhere and the dream like state came with no grounds, no point of reference to understand the roots. This simple hut Griggs has built appears more complicated, simplicity becomes some point of reference but what’s become of the foundation?
There is a lack of body but a presence
Dreams are not at bottom bizarre and meaningless, but, on the contrary, that they are orderly, logical, and if we know the history of the individual, almost predictable. We must admit immediately that if we take the dream at its face value, that is, read the words that the dreamer puts down as a true report of [their] dream, it is a creature of fancy in the wildest sense of the word. (iii)
What are the words Griggs has put down? There are birds that appear to be having a conversation but we cannot hear them, in fact, we cannot see them apart from the silhouette and again everything is masked.
If houses are interventions in the landscape, huts are interpreters. They are like musical instruments or box cameras. A window goes up and the outside comes in, like wind entering a flute. A door opens and the inside walks out. One sees by the light of its picture. (iv)
It is as if the audience can only see what the artist puts out. The rest is up to the audience to create the scene. Openness is essential for the audience to complete the picture Griggs has intended. The reliance upon the audience participation is suggestive and only if accepted as part of the work. It becomes a question of ‘how do you look at a work of art?’
In short it is a wall painting of treetops. To make treetops from a wall is Griggs’ own hut for finding happiness.
Wall Drawing is a story for the desire of simplicity. The fascination with the uncomplicated becomes a world of all things beautiful. When first entering the gallery, the room was still in motion. A large ladder up against a blackened wall, a piece of cardboard with paints, brushes, and a big swizzle stick stuck in a paint tin. A lady (Lucy Griggs) in overalls says, ‘oh yeah, the light changes!’ as she enters the room.
Was it even about the lighting? The wall was black and will either suck up the atmosphere or get bright spots covering what was there to be seen. There is something there in the figures, the treetops to be precise.
Griggs has a small pillow that cushions her knee against the cement floor as the image is being made. A delicate attention to detail counterpoints the fact that there is only one colour being used. The paints surface shines with gloss and flattens out with a matte. I see a portrayal of the artist at work as Griggs continues on.
The difficulty to view the image with Griggs working, at first appeared as performance. A ladder that stood to the ceiling was never in use becoming a lonely and sombre figure that was part of the actual space. Could it be, when no one is around, the ladder comes to life? Was it Griggs implement to reach new heights, as if she could have her own head in the clouds? Was this interplay with the room a trickery or illusion, and part of a magical event of the mundane? Would this constitute for magical realism?
The performative added a touch of magic to the conventional and everyday scene but the wall drawing was the real feature. Could it be a dreamscape captured on the wall? Does it run parallel or counter to our social traditions or codes of living? There were no indications as to whether the silhouette acts as a mask or decorative element to the trees. The trees could be from anywhere and the dream like state came with no grounds, no point of reference to understand the roots. This simple hut Griggs has built appears more complicated, simplicity becomes some point of reference but what’s become of the foundation?
There is a lack of body but a presence
Dreams are not at bottom bizarre and meaningless, but, on the contrary, that they are orderly, logical, and if we know the history of the individual, almost predictable. We must admit immediately that if we take the dream at its face value, that is, read the words that the dreamer puts down as a true report of [their] dream, it is a creature of fancy in the wildest sense of the word. (iii)
What are the words Griggs has put down? There are birds that appear to be having a conversation but we cannot hear them, in fact, we cannot see them apart from the silhouette and again everything is masked.
If houses are interventions in the landscape, huts are interpreters. They are like musical instruments or box cameras. A window goes up and the outside comes in, like wind entering a flute. A door opens and the inside walks out. One sees by the light of its picture. (iv)
It is as if the audience can only see what the artist puts out. The rest is up to the audience to create the scene. Openness is essential for the audience to complete the picture Griggs has intended. The reliance upon the audience participation is suggestive and only if accepted as part of the work. It becomes a question of ‘how do you look at a work of art?’
In short it is a wall painting of treetops. To make treetops from a wall is Griggs’ own hut for finding happiness.
(i) Hamilton, William., You Can Be Happy Living in a Hut, The New York Time, July 9, 1998, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
(ii) Watson. John B., The Psychology of Wish Fulfilment The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 5. (Nov., 1916), pp. 479-487.
(iii) Watson, John., ibid
(iv) Hamilton, William., ibid.
(ii) Watson. John B., The Psychology of Wish Fulfilment The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 5. (Nov., 1916), pp. 479-487.
(iii) Watson, John., ibid
(iv) Hamilton, William., ibid.
Respondent: Mimmalisa Trifilo
The black tree
Darkness is falling
As the remnants of light disappear
Nature begins to retreat
The end of the day has come
Withdrawal
Winter
Contemplation
The silvery gleam of the moon
On the trees’ branches
Shadows cast by street lamps
The birds have finished their song
They gather on the branches
Disappearing before the day begins again
Delicate silence
Night
A gradual transformation
The Seasons change
The Earth grows silent
Dormant
Ready to regenerate
The light finally unfolds
One cannot help but respond intuitively and subjectively to Griggs’ work. The viewer is drawn into a black on black depiction of a winter landscape through its sheer scale. The image of a deciduous tree and birds comes to life through the simple act of changing your position within the space and watching the light stream through the doors. As the light shines on various parts of the painting throughout the day, there are subtle changes in the shades ranging from black and silver to sepia and back again. Griggs’ mirror onto the world appears to be in an ongoing state of metamorphosis. The onlooker is left to meditate on the nature of reality and existence. It is almost as if Griggs’ world is a replacement for the real world as described by Boyd (1962) in Plato’s Parable of the Cave:
Think of men living in a cave under ground. This cave has a long entrance that stands open to the light along its full width. The inmates have lived there from childhood with their legs and necks in stocks, and have had to sit without moving so that they can only see what is in front of them. Some distance back, above their level, burns a bright fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a roadway with a low wall along it that serves as a screen….They (the prisoners) have never seen anything of themselves, or of one another, except the shadows the fire casts on the side of the cave opposite them, and the same thing is true for the objects behind the wall. If the prisoners could talk to each other they would take the shadows for the real things and give them names; and if an echo of speech of the carriers were to come to them from the wall in front they could only imagine that the voice belonged to the passing shadows. In fact, the shadows would be the only realities for them. (i)
The melancholic mood of Plato’s Cave extends into Griggs’ painting. There is a sense that the darkness engulfs the onlooker. We are confronted by our own mortality amidst the moment of stillness and reflection. Black also represents a lack of colour, void and emptiness which does not necessarily mean that it has negative connotations. It evokes mystery and a sense of possibility and potential. In Buddhist art, black paintings have been used by the artist to conjure up visions of mysterious transcendent worlds. “Blackness signifies the darkness of hate and ignorance as well as the role these qualities have to play in the awakening of clarity and truth”. (Kumar, 2004-2007) (ii
In the symbol of yin and yang black is associated with the earth and the passive and receptive feminine force. Griggs’ use of white in her previous installations has been substituted by black in this particular painting, further enhancing its connection with nature. “White and black transform into each other as in nature: the black clouds bring white rain and bright flames leave charred ashes.” (Chetwynd, 1993, p.92) (iii) Nothing is ever the same. A tree is aware of the difference between day and night, summer and winter.
Trees have been significant symbols throughout history. The tree is a representation of the bare processes of life, the notions of life and death. In Griggs’ painting, the tree at first glance, seems to be associated with the idea of death. There appears to be no outward signs of life, no fruit and no leaves. But amongst the bare branches the three birds are clearly apparent. Perhaps they are messengers of hope after a relentless winter. Beyond the physical realm, the tree can be seen as the intermediary between the Earth and the conscious mind. In this context, the birds could be a representation of our conscious thoughts. (Chetwynd, 1993, p.404) (iv)
Darkness is falling
As the remnants of light disappear
Nature begins to retreat
The end of the day has come
Withdrawal
Winter
Contemplation
The silvery gleam of the moon
On the trees’ branches
Shadows cast by street lamps
The birds have finished their song
They gather on the branches
Disappearing before the day begins again
Delicate silence
Night
A gradual transformation
The Seasons change
The Earth grows silent
Dormant
Ready to regenerate
The light finally unfolds
One cannot help but respond intuitively and subjectively to Griggs’ work. The viewer is drawn into a black on black depiction of a winter landscape through its sheer scale. The image of a deciduous tree and birds comes to life through the simple act of changing your position within the space and watching the light stream through the doors. As the light shines on various parts of the painting throughout the day, there are subtle changes in the shades ranging from black and silver to sepia and back again. Griggs’ mirror onto the world appears to be in an ongoing state of metamorphosis. The onlooker is left to meditate on the nature of reality and existence. It is almost as if Griggs’ world is a replacement for the real world as described by Boyd (1962) in Plato’s Parable of the Cave:
Think of men living in a cave under ground. This cave has a long entrance that stands open to the light along its full width. The inmates have lived there from childhood with their legs and necks in stocks, and have had to sit without moving so that they can only see what is in front of them. Some distance back, above their level, burns a bright fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a roadway with a low wall along it that serves as a screen….They (the prisoners) have never seen anything of themselves, or of one another, except the shadows the fire casts on the side of the cave opposite them, and the same thing is true for the objects behind the wall. If the prisoners could talk to each other they would take the shadows for the real things and give them names; and if an echo of speech of the carriers were to come to them from the wall in front they could only imagine that the voice belonged to the passing shadows. In fact, the shadows would be the only realities for them. (i)
The melancholic mood of Plato’s Cave extends into Griggs’ painting. There is a sense that the darkness engulfs the onlooker. We are confronted by our own mortality amidst the moment of stillness and reflection. Black also represents a lack of colour, void and emptiness which does not necessarily mean that it has negative connotations. It evokes mystery and a sense of possibility and potential. In Buddhist art, black paintings have been used by the artist to conjure up visions of mysterious transcendent worlds. “Blackness signifies the darkness of hate and ignorance as well as the role these qualities have to play in the awakening of clarity and truth”. (Kumar, 2004-2007) (ii
In the symbol of yin and yang black is associated with the earth and the passive and receptive feminine force. Griggs’ use of white in her previous installations has been substituted by black in this particular painting, further enhancing its connection with nature. “White and black transform into each other as in nature: the black clouds bring white rain and bright flames leave charred ashes.” (Chetwynd, 1993, p.92) (iii) Nothing is ever the same. A tree is aware of the difference between day and night, summer and winter.
Trees have been significant symbols throughout history. The tree is a representation of the bare processes of life, the notions of life and death. In Griggs’ painting, the tree at first glance, seems to be associated with the idea of death. There appears to be no outward signs of life, no fruit and no leaves. But amongst the bare branches the three birds are clearly apparent. Perhaps they are messengers of hope after a relentless winter. Beyond the physical realm, the tree can be seen as the intermediary between the Earth and the conscious mind. In this context, the birds could be a representation of our conscious thoughts. (Chetwynd, 1993, p.404) (iv)
(i) Boyd, W., 1962. Plato’s Republic For Today. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd
(ii) Kumar, N., 2004 - 2007. Black in Buddhist Color Symbolism [online] U.S.A.Religion Facts
Available from: http://www.religionfacts.com/buddhism/symbols/black.htm.
[accessed 16 August 2007]
(iii) (iv) Chetwynd, T. 1993. Dictionary of Symbols. London: Aquarian Press, An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
(ii) Kumar, N., 2004 - 2007. Black in Buddhist Color Symbolism [online] U.S.A.Religion Facts
Available from: http://www.religionfacts.com/buddhism/symbols/black.htm.
[accessed 16 August 2007]
(iii) (iv) Chetwynd, T. 1993. Dictionary of Symbols. London: Aquarian Press, An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Hamish Carr
Hamish Carr
Respondent: Robyn Base
Four large untitled canvases, all rough-edged, and approximately the same dimensions, are stapled to two intersecting walls, creating an uneasy corner of shifting red landscapes. The disquiet is partly due to the incompleteness of the images and the almost exclusive use of a prickly red hue. There is also the apparent undermining of the carefully considered, finely controlled, rendering by seemingly random smudges, lines, scribbles and marks that appear over and under the intricately detailed landscapes. Like an aberration they seem to mock the cleanliness, order and pristine qualities of the trees, shrubs and foliage.
The landscapes, or fragments of landscape, recall Claude Lorraine, or Nicholas Poussin’s ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ or even a Constable’s ‘The Haywain’. The works of such artists reflected a type of yearning for an idyllic past and the romantic idealization of nature’s perfection. Referencing this European reverence for beauty and fascination with the natural world, Carr stylistically mimics the printed ‘dot’ technique evident in prints and etchings of the 18th and 19th Century - especially manifest in the many botanical and anatomical studies. There is also a Capability Brown aspect to Carr’s scenes – despite, or perhaps because of, their fracturing. Man’s guiding hand could fashion the land to suit his own ideal. So the subtle artifice of Brown’s designs resulted in a moulded, changed landscape to suit the tastes of wealthy clients, and royalty, desirous of scenic vistas, rolling parklands and amusing follies for their viewing pleasure.
Carr also fashions his landscapes, for his images too, are an artifice. His canvas’s have large areas of bare, empty space and yet, other areas are packed tightly with meticulously detailed vegetation. There seems to be no obvious narrative in these paintings. The viewer’s eye moves back and forth, from one to the other, connecting them up but being confounded by their disconnectedness. Rather, the works are open ended, like an installation with bits and pieces of idyllic wilderness scattered throughout white and off-white space. They are linked up -with edges of hanging threads suggesting an attempt at interwovenness - but there is no end and no beginning. Sometimes the viewer approaches to examine closely the finely detailed red texta dots and marks, only to be confounded again by the crude roughness of the painterly gestures.
The canvas on the far left has a vague, shifting uncertainty about the landscape, as though there was something hidden there. Half of the surface is blank, almost untouched, except for the floating enigmatic ’M’. What does it stand for? Black lines and marks feature in this work, suggesting that perhaps all smudges, smears and marks are intentional even to the raw open-edges of the canvas. And what of the colour red? Does it signify pain, blood, lust or love? In nature red is a warning sign. Of what danger is Carr warning? Are the landscapes hot or burnt, like an Australian desert or a Dante’s Hell?
Circular white markings, like those of a child, are applied over the landscape of the canvas, second on the right. These intentional gestures seem to ridicule the painstaking effort made to complete the work beneath. Placed at the height or level of a child their presence raises questions about the role of children in these works.
Carr’s previous paintings dwelt on themes of loss - of missing children, of sight and seeing. The painting on the far right revisits this sense of loss and of a presence felt but not actually there. A ghostly image of a human leg - like an apparition - suggests that a man or woman was perhaps standing amongst the foliage, but is now gone. Maybe Carr, like Brown, is leaving his own mark on the land, like an imprint or a trace left behind. There is also an imprint of a large stone - a red, rocky outline on chalky white markings. It is an empty shape, cartoon-like and with no substance. Yet the swiftness and ease in which Carr is able to draw this rock-trace, undermines the arduous neatness of the work surrounding the leg-trace.
These subtle subversions are reinforced in the second and most worked canvas. Like a sentinel, a tree reaches from an imaginary border at the bottom of the painting to the imaginary or artificial border at the top. Where does the work start and finish? Soft grey and pale green smudges blur the left hand vertical edge. In this way, Carr sets up and defines his own boundaries and then proceeds to break them. This is true not only with his borderlines but also with his mark- making. The swirling psychedelic patterns at the foot of the tree reference a kind of 1960’s flower power – a mind-bending hallucinogenic state of transition. Contrasting with the static and formal rendering of the tree, the swirl-like vortex pulls the viewer into a mysterious mist, a white netherworld. The ground moves and is unstable, undermining the tree’s reassuring solidity. Once again Carr discreetly subverts expected norms because even the enduring romance of his established tree is, in close-up, a restrained grouping of red dots, mere pinpricks of colour, that float on a sea of white, in space, in emptiness.
The exhibited works of Hamish Carr
Romance and restraint emerge as both recurring and sparring themes in the paintings of Hamish Carr. Sometimes playfully and at other times with serious intent, these concepts jostle for visual prominence on the flat painted and unpainted surfaces. Although having been filtered through the work of Ugo Rondinone, these partial images of landscape hail from a romantic and glorious past. However, their rendering is restrained, precise and highly disciplined. Conversely, the ‘breaking out’ gestures of defiance – the free, unfettered marks and drawings - are romantic gestures in themselves. Perhaps Carr’s works are a continuation of the tenuous balance between the Classicism and Romanticism traditions of painting.
Four large untitled canvases, all rough-edged, and approximately the same dimensions, are stapled to two intersecting walls, creating an uneasy corner of shifting red landscapes. The disquiet is partly due to the incompleteness of the images and the almost exclusive use of a prickly red hue. There is also the apparent undermining of the carefully considered, finely controlled, rendering by seemingly random smudges, lines, scribbles and marks that appear over and under the intricately detailed landscapes. Like an aberration they seem to mock the cleanliness, order and pristine qualities of the trees, shrubs and foliage.
The landscapes, or fragments of landscape, recall Claude Lorraine, or Nicholas Poussin’s ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ or even a Constable’s ‘The Haywain’. The works of such artists reflected a type of yearning for an idyllic past and the romantic idealization of nature’s perfection. Referencing this European reverence for beauty and fascination with the natural world, Carr stylistically mimics the printed ‘dot’ technique evident in prints and etchings of the 18th and 19th Century - especially manifest in the many botanical and anatomical studies. There is also a Capability Brown aspect to Carr’s scenes – despite, or perhaps because of, their fracturing. Man’s guiding hand could fashion the land to suit his own ideal. So the subtle artifice of Brown’s designs resulted in a moulded, changed landscape to suit the tastes of wealthy clients, and royalty, desirous of scenic vistas, rolling parklands and amusing follies for their viewing pleasure.
Carr also fashions his landscapes, for his images too, are an artifice. His canvas’s have large areas of bare, empty space and yet, other areas are packed tightly with meticulously detailed vegetation. There seems to be no obvious narrative in these paintings. The viewer’s eye moves back and forth, from one to the other, connecting them up but being confounded by their disconnectedness. Rather, the works are open ended, like an installation with bits and pieces of idyllic wilderness scattered throughout white and off-white space. They are linked up -with edges of hanging threads suggesting an attempt at interwovenness - but there is no end and no beginning. Sometimes the viewer approaches to examine closely the finely detailed red texta dots and marks, only to be confounded again by the crude roughness of the painterly gestures.
The canvas on the far left has a vague, shifting uncertainty about the landscape, as though there was something hidden there. Half of the surface is blank, almost untouched, except for the floating enigmatic ’M’. What does it stand for? Black lines and marks feature in this work, suggesting that perhaps all smudges, smears and marks are intentional even to the raw open-edges of the canvas. And what of the colour red? Does it signify pain, blood, lust or love? In nature red is a warning sign. Of what danger is Carr warning? Are the landscapes hot or burnt, like an Australian desert or a Dante’s Hell?
Circular white markings, like those of a child, are applied over the landscape of the canvas, second on the right. These intentional gestures seem to ridicule the painstaking effort made to complete the work beneath. Placed at the height or level of a child their presence raises questions about the role of children in these works.
Carr’s previous paintings dwelt on themes of loss - of missing children, of sight and seeing. The painting on the far right revisits this sense of loss and of a presence felt but not actually there. A ghostly image of a human leg - like an apparition - suggests that a man or woman was perhaps standing amongst the foliage, but is now gone. Maybe Carr, like Brown, is leaving his own mark on the land, like an imprint or a trace left behind. There is also an imprint of a large stone - a red, rocky outline on chalky white markings. It is an empty shape, cartoon-like and with no substance. Yet the swiftness and ease in which Carr is able to draw this rock-trace, undermines the arduous neatness of the work surrounding the leg-trace.
These subtle subversions are reinforced in the second and most worked canvas. Like a sentinel, a tree reaches from an imaginary border at the bottom of the painting to the imaginary or artificial border at the top. Where does the work start and finish? Soft grey and pale green smudges blur the left hand vertical edge. In this way, Carr sets up and defines his own boundaries and then proceeds to break them. This is true not only with his borderlines but also with his mark- making. The swirling psychedelic patterns at the foot of the tree reference a kind of 1960’s flower power – a mind-bending hallucinogenic state of transition. Contrasting with the static and formal rendering of the tree, the swirl-like vortex pulls the viewer into a mysterious mist, a white netherworld. The ground moves and is unstable, undermining the tree’s reassuring solidity. Once again Carr discreetly subverts expected norms because even the enduring romance of his established tree is, in close-up, a restrained grouping of red dots, mere pinpricks of colour, that float on a sea of white, in space, in emptiness.
Respondent: Kem Shimizu
Perceiving perception
Rendered in a pared down palette is a truncated drawing of a projection of an etching that is interrupted by and adorned with unmitigated mark making and symbolic drawing.
As an inquiry into the nature of perception, this work speaks with in the confines of the language of painting and drawing. Drawing the confines that frame the work, not physically, but aestheto-linguistically one can access the intentions of the work. Where are the borders of this inquiry?
The work travels from 2-dimensions into the realm of the three dimensional, but stops at the level of pointing to the canvass as object through the ruffles created by stapling.
The palette ventures from reds to pale green traversing through burnt umber and the raw canvass yellow, but never to blue. The coolest tone is the raw gesso.
CONFINES OF THE WORK
The range of mark making remains in the realm of lines. Never to shading as can be made by charcoal or graphite (or god forbid painting).
The range in the arsenal starts with 19th century etching styles and its dissipation into naïve drawing. Alternatively, the work remains with in a western idea of illusionistic representation and its subsequent devolution.
What remains within these confines is a categorical documentation of an inquiry into the nature of line, and its capacity to hold information.
Through tampering with and dissipating a representational print of nature, the work litigates the source –the etching- of it’s possibilities to hold information, and through this action enhances its communicative qualities.
Categories of drawing involved in this work can be listed as following:
-Absence of marks posit the canvass as an object and its material presence is accentuated by the stapled application on to the wall
- Incidental traces left most notably in the left hand side of the 2nd canvass from the left, as if it was dirtied by dust or charcoal left on the hand, or directly imprinted by being left on dusty ground.
- Unmitigated mark making such as prominently seen in the 3rd canvass from the left, reminiscent of childhood scribbles or abstract drawing in the 80s.
- Symbolic drawing as seen on the 4th canvass as a symbol of a stone, or more directly as an M on the 1st.
- Contour drawing as seen unravelling from the etchings at various points of the image.
- Expressive scribbled rendering of the etching often being used to dissipate the concentrated faithful rendering.
- unravelling of the woven lines that are involved in the cross hatched etching.
- The lines that copy the original etching
- a faithful representation of the distortion that occurs from using a projector, to highlight the projector as a medium as well as to further subvert the suggestion of a real scenery by suggesting something more hallucinatory
- an intentional painting over with the gesso to accentuate the act of making white the canvass. Also seen by the way the edges of the gesso are handled to show action rather than image.
- an unnerving truncation in the scenery that seems incidental and serves to interrupt the illusion of a natural scenery.
In this work the canvasses act more as a screen for projection or an instructional blackboard rather than as a window in to another realm. The etching of natural scenery whose intention is transportive, is only left as an index. The rendering in marker that we see here is not presented here to transport the viewer to another space, but to point to that experience. The artist attacks this subject with a range of implements in his aresenal to question and disturb the cognitive perception that recreates the sound of the wind and the coolness of the stream through a collection of lines.
The major tension in the work is created by the preservation of this transportive quality throughout the various violations he imposes upon the image. A metaphor to torture as a means of implementing pain without serious physical damage maybe more appropriate than reference to destruction or slaying of the image. There is a love of the transportative that comes through while the artist stages his transgressions upon illusion.
Rendered in a pared down palette is a truncated drawing of a projection of an etching that is interrupted by and adorned with unmitigated mark making and symbolic drawing.
As an inquiry into the nature of perception, this work speaks with in the confines of the language of painting and drawing. Drawing the confines that frame the work, not physically, but aestheto-linguistically one can access the intentions of the work. Where are the borders of this inquiry?
The work travels from 2-dimensions into the realm of the three dimensional, but stops at the level of pointing to the canvass as object through the ruffles created by stapling.
The palette ventures from reds to pale green traversing through burnt umber and the raw canvass yellow, but never to blue. The coolest tone is the raw gesso.
CONFINES OF THE WORK
The range of mark making remains in the realm of lines. Never to shading as can be made by charcoal or graphite (or god forbid painting).
The range in the arsenal starts with 19th century etching styles and its dissipation into naïve drawing. Alternatively, the work remains with in a western idea of illusionistic representation and its subsequent devolution.
What remains within these confines is a categorical documentation of an inquiry into the nature of line, and its capacity to hold information.
Through tampering with and dissipating a representational print of nature, the work litigates the source –the etching- of it’s possibilities to hold information, and through this action enhances its communicative qualities.
Categories of drawing involved in this work can be listed as following:
-Absence of marks posit the canvass as an object and its material presence is accentuated by the stapled application on to the wall
- Incidental traces left most notably in the left hand side of the 2nd canvass from the left, as if it was dirtied by dust or charcoal left on the hand, or directly imprinted by being left on dusty ground.
- Unmitigated mark making such as prominently seen in the 3rd canvass from the left, reminiscent of childhood scribbles or abstract drawing in the 80s.
- Symbolic drawing as seen on the 4th canvass as a symbol of a stone, or more directly as an M on the 1st.
- Contour drawing as seen unravelling from the etchings at various points of the image.
- Expressive scribbled rendering of the etching often being used to dissipate the concentrated faithful rendering.
- unravelling of the woven lines that are involved in the cross hatched etching.
- The lines that copy the original etching
- a faithful representation of the distortion that occurs from using a projector, to highlight the projector as a medium as well as to further subvert the suggestion of a real scenery by suggesting something more hallucinatory
- an intentional painting over with the gesso to accentuate the act of making white the canvass. Also seen by the way the edges of the gesso are handled to show action rather than image.
- an unnerving truncation in the scenery that seems incidental and serves to interrupt the illusion of a natural scenery.
In this work the canvasses act more as a screen for projection or an instructional blackboard rather than as a window in to another realm. The etching of natural scenery whose intention is transportive, is only left as an index. The rendering in marker that we see here is not presented here to transport the viewer to another space, but to point to that experience. The artist attacks this subject with a range of implements in his aresenal to question and disturb the cognitive perception that recreates the sound of the wind and the coolness of the stream through a collection of lines.
The major tension in the work is created by the preservation of this transportive quality throughout the various violations he imposes upon the image. A metaphor to torture as a means of implementing pain without serious physical damage maybe more appropriate than reference to destruction or slaying of the image. There is a love of the transportative that comes through while the artist stages his transgressions upon illusion.
Nicki Wynnychuk
Nicki Wynnychuk
Responent: Mila Faranov
Nicki Wynychuk
The first thing I notice when I walk into the room is the smell of something like disinfectant. This is at odds with the dilapidated cardboard I see before me. Its dark and at first I wonder if its meant to be that way. Then I see the one light above the canopy like tarpaulin, which is suspended above me. I get an over riding sense of gloom. The canopy casts a shadow on the walls of the room, further emphasizing my feelings of despondency. It implies shelter but what does it shelter us from? It is after all in a gallery? It evokes a sense of impermanence. I associate it with make-do measures. It may keep you dry, but not warm. I register that Wynnychuk’s work employs a definite sense of the un-heimlich, both in the un-homeliness and the way it presents me with things I know but I don’t know.
The rectangular units in front of me, remind me of beds, and of make shift cubbies. The volume of the units implies weight and strength, which, it is obvious by the crushed unit, they do not have. They are big but empty, hollow. There is 3/13 written on one of the units. Is that because these constructions are an edition, or to imply that they are dispensable because there are more.
My thoughts as to what I am confronted with in Winichuck’s installation, tend towards notions of an intentional insubstantiality. It is an exploration of the faux arbitrary.
Within this installation, which in scale occupies a large space, I get the feeling of vacancy. I go back to the box units, which remind me of cardboard dwellings that homeless people may have occupied. There is an element of destitution here. Homelessness is to me a sort of inversion of vacancy.
What I know to be a representation of a map of Switzerland is propped up against a cardboard sheet, which bears a white cross, evocative of the Swiss flag. This cross also reminds me of aid, as in the Red Cross. Its vitality, or potency is drained, an anaemic flag or anaemic symbol. I know Switzerland to be politically neutral, what ever that means. Is this precisely what Wynnychuk is putting forward? What does it mean to be Switzerland? He seems to be mocking the ‘idea’ of Switzerland.
The large sheets of cardboard remind me of shallow waves. I have the feeling I cannot cross them and do not go to the other side of the room. These sheets are like a territory, there but off limits. Is that like Switzerland – untouchable? The cardboard that was once rolled up is being held down flat by some rods and thin planks. The edges curl up. “Elegantly”, Ken Shimuzu said to me last night. He might have even said “A little too elegantly.” Again I think of the faux arbitrary. Nicki often talks about ‘the economy’- the economy of means. The recycled, or re-claimed cardboard provokes notions of the ephemeral. Which economy is this work trading on? The economy of the inability of nothingness to be nothingness I believe.
There is something here to do with falseness, representation and value. The glossy images in the corner and the small graph, which I know are sourced from a Swiss bank calendar, border on the perverse. They are way too idyllic to seem real. They seem born of propaganda, towards a nationalistic pride and patriotism. Blu-tacked so intentionally to the wall, printed on such shiny paper. This is about exemplifying the veneer. These images are in sharp contrast to the materials utilised in the rest of the installation, yet they seem to speak to the same theme – or more precisely beg the same questions. What is substance?
There is another cardboard wave in the corner, curling in towards the room. There is also a stack of cardboard squares. Are they the left over bits? Can I make something myself. I am slightly confused by this big cardboard wave. What does it do here in the room? Is it there for a compositional balance? It reminds me of a skate ramp. It is however, an insubstantial one. It too is precarious. Like the box units, size does not mean strength. It has a contradictory nature, dynamic yet fragile.
I find all of this insubstansabilty quite oppressive. Is it because it provokes so many questions that remind me of a dog chasing its own tail? In using the term ‘faux arbitrary’ I am trying to describe what I believe to be Wynnychuk’s very considered intention to seem intentionally non-intentional. He knows that the audience knows that his un-aesthetic aesthetic is an aesthetic. What is the value in the valueless? What is the worth? Is what you appear to be what you are?
The first thing I notice when I walk into the room is the smell of something like disinfectant. This is at odds with the dilapidated cardboard I see before me. Its dark and at first I wonder if its meant to be that way. Then I see the one light above the canopy like tarpaulin, which is suspended above me. I get an over riding sense of gloom. The canopy casts a shadow on the walls of the room, further emphasizing my feelings of despondency. It implies shelter but what does it shelter us from? It is after all in a gallery? It evokes a sense of impermanence. I associate it with make-do measures. It may keep you dry, but not warm. I register that Wynnychuk’s work employs a definite sense of the un-heimlich, both in the un-homeliness and the way it presents me with things I know but I don’t know.
The rectangular units in front of me, remind me of beds, and of make shift cubbies. The volume of the units implies weight and strength, which, it is obvious by the crushed unit, they do not have. They are big but empty, hollow. There is 3/13 written on one of the units. Is that because these constructions are an edition, or to imply that they are dispensable because there are more.
My thoughts as to what I am confronted with in Winichuck’s installation, tend towards notions of an intentional insubstantiality. It is an exploration of the faux arbitrary.
Within this installation, which in scale occupies a large space, I get the feeling of vacancy. I go back to the box units, which remind me of cardboard dwellings that homeless people may have occupied. There is an element of destitution here. Homelessness is to me a sort of inversion of vacancy.
What I know to be a representation of a map of Switzerland is propped up against a cardboard sheet, which bears a white cross, evocative of the Swiss flag. This cross also reminds me of aid, as in the Red Cross. Its vitality, or potency is drained, an anaemic flag or anaemic symbol. I know Switzerland to be politically neutral, what ever that means. Is this precisely what Wynnychuk is putting forward? What does it mean to be Switzerland? He seems to be mocking the ‘idea’ of Switzerland.
The large sheets of cardboard remind me of shallow waves. I have the feeling I cannot cross them and do not go to the other side of the room. These sheets are like a territory, there but off limits. Is that like Switzerland – untouchable? The cardboard that was once rolled up is being held down flat by some rods and thin planks. The edges curl up. “Elegantly”, Ken Shimuzu said to me last night. He might have even said “A little too elegantly.” Again I think of the faux arbitrary. Nicki often talks about ‘the economy’- the economy of means. The recycled, or re-claimed cardboard provokes notions of the ephemeral. Which economy is this work trading on? The economy of the inability of nothingness to be nothingness I believe.
There is something here to do with falseness, representation and value. The glossy images in the corner and the small graph, which I know are sourced from a Swiss bank calendar, border on the perverse. They are way too idyllic to seem real. They seem born of propaganda, towards a nationalistic pride and patriotism. Blu-tacked so intentionally to the wall, printed on such shiny paper. This is about exemplifying the veneer. These images are in sharp contrast to the materials utilised in the rest of the installation, yet they seem to speak to the same theme – or more precisely beg the same questions. What is substance?
There is another cardboard wave in the corner, curling in towards the room. There is also a stack of cardboard squares. Are they the left over bits? Can I make something myself. I am slightly confused by this big cardboard wave. What does it do here in the room? Is it there for a compositional balance? It reminds me of a skate ramp. It is however, an insubstantial one. It too is precarious. Like the box units, size does not mean strength. It has a contradictory nature, dynamic yet fragile.
I find all of this insubstansabilty quite oppressive. Is it because it provokes so many questions that remind me of a dog chasing its own tail? In using the term ‘faux arbitrary’ I am trying to describe what I believe to be Wynnychuk’s very considered intention to seem intentionally non-intentional. He knows that the audience knows that his un-aesthetic aesthetic is an aesthetic. What is the value in the valueless? What is the worth? Is what you appear to be what you are?
Respondent: Hamish Carr
Nicki Wynnychuk
We are not presented with ready made cardboard, Nikki Wynnychuk has selected this medium, re-configured and sculpted it to actively portray his intentions. But what are his intentions? What does he want to communicate? Initial interpretations seem to suggest Joseph Beuys however the photographs on the wall seem to imply otherwise.
In order to comprehend or gain insight through a somewhat conventional reading, the exhibit can be split into five key works. As we enter the space we are confronted with a platform or stage comprising four constructed cardboard boxes decaying from what appears to be water damage, shielded by means of a green tarpaulin suspended from the ceiling. The work to our left is composed of numerous sheets of cardboard, elevated slightly off the ground. Their placement suggests that they are awaiting application, building materials left by the artist to repair the damages, or perhaps to make other work not yet configured. Behind the stage we are presented with several large sheets of brown paper lain on the floor in a horizontal position and to the left of this a map of Switzerland again elevated slightly. This sculpted map the height of a child is composed of numerous sheets of cardboard glued and molded together. Behind the map is a white cross further reinforcing the artist’s intent to represent Switzerland. On the opposite wall of this almost shrine like installment we are given further references to the country. We are drawn to this corner as it provides us with a variation in colour as well as what we think may be more identifiable imagery. These photos seem to hold the information we require to interpret the work. Advertisements for a Swiss bank Glarner Kantonalbank portray postcard imagery of the landscape. Alongside these appropriated photos is a document outlining graphs referring to what may be interpreted as interest rates or profit margins. If you cannot read German you may feel somewhat disappointed, however after further contemplation you get the feeling that even if one could comprehend the text, insight would still be somewhat obscured.
Wynnychuk is demanding that the reception of his work is contemplated, and through the process of reading each work and their relationship to one another, meaning can be negotiated. Returning to the artist’s reference to Switzerland one begins to question their understanding of the country. The reputation of its neutrality initially grabs us which then leads to the question, is the artist a neutral party, or, is he probing into the intentions of a neutral country? Is it merely apathy that the Swiss flag represents, and is he using it to portray the neutrality existing in contemporary society or, is he probing into the financial benefits of having a Swiss bank account? The later seems correct and when considered, the work begins to speak of decay, the temporal and the unjust. Swiss bank accounts have for sometime been associated with corruption and tax evasion. Through the country’s neutrality in World War II it has long been suggested that they profited from the spoils and misfortune of war. In this questioning and through the works representation lies notions associated with the post-heroic. With these elements in mind we begin to read further into the surrounding works. The tarpaulin represents a form of protection against the weather; however this seems somewhat temporary and ineffective due to the state of the boxes. This exposure speaks to the works temporality but also the constant global awareness of the darker element associated with the countries financial institutions. These notions are elevated through the play of space between the stage and the tarpaulin; there is something foreboding being played out here a heavy weight is pressing down on the stage. Behind this work we look to the brown paper unrolled and held down with heavy weights exposing a symbolic representation to the plans of the exhibition and perhaps plans to expose the notorious elements of a Swiss bank. The media used speaks of shanty towns and the plight of the homeless, juxtaposed against the backdrop of the ever expanding profits of Glarner Kantonalbank. The somewhat magical elements portrayed in the photos of the Swiss landscape, further enhances elements of injustice when placed alongside the degenerating cardboard.
There seems to be an underlying mysticism in this work, elevated through the lack of lighting, reinforcing notions that the audience is in a space that moves between the somber and the sacred. We have stepped into an empty vault a closed factory – something that was meant to be hidden or closed to the public has somehow been exposed. It is almost as if the viewer has walked into this space by accident, we feel the need to be silent and through these feelings maybe even uncomfortable in the surroundings. The artist is playing with us, directing our reception. The works that lack an explicit reference to Switzerland exemplify these notions. While the iconic imagery referencing this country seems to pull us towards it in the hope of escape, it works only to force us to look back into the gallery. And through this combination and interplay, the works feed off each other and through contemplating their relationship between one another the artists intentions seem to evolve.
We are not presented with ready made cardboard, Nikki Wynnychuk has selected this medium, re-configured and sculpted it to actively portray his intentions. But what are his intentions? What does he want to communicate? Initial interpretations seem to suggest Joseph Beuys however the photographs on the wall seem to imply otherwise.
In order to comprehend or gain insight through a somewhat conventional reading, the exhibit can be split into five key works. As we enter the space we are confronted with a platform or stage comprising four constructed cardboard boxes decaying from what appears to be water damage, shielded by means of a green tarpaulin suspended from the ceiling. The work to our left is composed of numerous sheets of cardboard, elevated slightly off the ground. Their placement suggests that they are awaiting application, building materials left by the artist to repair the damages, or perhaps to make other work not yet configured. Behind the stage we are presented with several large sheets of brown paper lain on the floor in a horizontal position and to the left of this a map of Switzerland again elevated slightly. This sculpted map the height of a child is composed of numerous sheets of cardboard glued and molded together. Behind the map is a white cross further reinforcing the artist’s intent to represent Switzerland. On the opposite wall of this almost shrine like installment we are given further references to the country. We are drawn to this corner as it provides us with a variation in colour as well as what we think may be more identifiable imagery. These photos seem to hold the information we require to interpret the work. Advertisements for a Swiss bank Glarner Kantonalbank portray postcard imagery of the landscape. Alongside these appropriated photos is a document outlining graphs referring to what may be interpreted as interest rates or profit margins. If you cannot read German you may feel somewhat disappointed, however after further contemplation you get the feeling that even if one could comprehend the text, insight would still be somewhat obscured.
Wynnychuk is demanding that the reception of his work is contemplated, and through the process of reading each work and their relationship to one another, meaning can be negotiated. Returning to the artist’s reference to Switzerland one begins to question their understanding of the country. The reputation of its neutrality initially grabs us which then leads to the question, is the artist a neutral party, or, is he probing into the intentions of a neutral country? Is it merely apathy that the Swiss flag represents, and is he using it to portray the neutrality existing in contemporary society or, is he probing into the financial benefits of having a Swiss bank account? The later seems correct and when considered, the work begins to speak of decay, the temporal and the unjust. Swiss bank accounts have for sometime been associated with corruption and tax evasion. Through the country’s neutrality in World War II it has long been suggested that they profited from the spoils and misfortune of war. In this questioning and through the works representation lies notions associated with the post-heroic. With these elements in mind we begin to read further into the surrounding works. The tarpaulin represents a form of protection against the weather; however this seems somewhat temporary and ineffective due to the state of the boxes. This exposure speaks to the works temporality but also the constant global awareness of the darker element associated with the countries financial institutions. These notions are elevated through the play of space between the stage and the tarpaulin; there is something foreboding being played out here a heavy weight is pressing down on the stage. Behind this work we look to the brown paper unrolled and held down with heavy weights exposing a symbolic representation to the plans of the exhibition and perhaps plans to expose the notorious elements of a Swiss bank. The media used speaks of shanty towns and the plight of the homeless, juxtaposed against the backdrop of the ever expanding profits of Glarner Kantonalbank. The somewhat magical elements portrayed in the photos of the Swiss landscape, further enhances elements of injustice when placed alongside the degenerating cardboard.
There seems to be an underlying mysticism in this work, elevated through the lack of lighting, reinforcing notions that the audience is in a space that moves between the somber and the sacred. We have stepped into an empty vault a closed factory – something that was meant to be hidden or closed to the public has somehow been exposed. It is almost as if the viewer has walked into this space by accident, we feel the need to be silent and through these feelings maybe even uncomfortable in the surroundings. The artist is playing with us, directing our reception. The works that lack an explicit reference to Switzerland exemplify these notions. While the iconic imagery referencing this country seems to pull us towards it in the hope of escape, it works only to force us to look back into the gallery. And through this combination and interplay, the works feed off each other and through contemplating their relationship between one another the artists intentions seem to evolve.
Mila Faranov
Mila Faranov
Respondent: Lucy Griggs
Whilst the author wishes to avoid a Freudian analysis of Mila (although I must mention that she shares her birthday with Halloween), any viewer of Mila's artwork is not so lucky.
Via the imagery, Mila creates the context (or provides the information) to form a narrative. However, like all successful visual narratives, the real meaning is facilitated by way of ambiguity (or by what is missing/not said). Mila does not, in her art, tell the whole story. This is for the viewer.
Within the work, horror is over-laid with beauty. The exterior outer layer is one of innocence and beauty. The imbedded interior is much more ominous. The viewer’s initial emotions of beauty and calm, ultimately must confront more off-putting and uncomfortable ideas. This is achieved by placing innocent forms, such as children, together with themes don't sit well or that shouldn’t go together. For example, the works may allude to the sexualisation of children.
There is a somewhat tenuous connection here with the Surrealists, such as Magritte, who placed everyday objects in 'out of the ordinary' or juxtaposed contexts, thereby re-contextualising the everyday and transforming it into the surreal. The Surrealists (as with Mila) were, of course, interested in the unconscious mind and the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Mila's interest in Freud also appears to be borne out in her use of the 'uncanny'. Sigmund Freud’s idea of the uncanny, or unheimlich, lies somewhere between horror and fascination, between what is foreign and what is known. Freud suggested the uncanny was something brought to an experience by the viewer, drawn to the surface through particular psychological triggers. (ii) This conception ties in well with the narrative elements of Mila's work.
Mila plays with the viewer's perception with a hypnotic kaleidoscope of imagery. Things are not always as they first seem. What may appear to be innocent and beautiful could turn out to be terrifying, horrific and grotesque. In this way, Mila takes the viewer for a walk down the garden path and closes the gate behind them.
There is a fantastical, absurdist silhouetted tree in the background, which appears as a mirrored repetition of an image, not unlike a child’s 'fold the page painting' or a 'Rorschach blot', named after the Swiss psychiatrist. (iii) This is crucial and ties the work together. The narrative, which is developed by imagery that is unmistakeably grotesque, is developed by the psychoanalysis of the viewer.
I am disturbed and confronted with my own readings of Mila's work: the tattooed man has become a paedophile with his head in the bushes (perhaps that’s where he beats the children black and blue)… is that a vagina… does that child on the left have a party blower penis, or perhaps it is an unfortunate place for a tail?
A man is hidden/masked by a tattoo, his decoration reaches across the painting tickling the penis of a child along the way. As it stretches across the paper’s edge it transfers from the painted watercolour to paper cut decoration across the corner of the wall.
On the floor in front of the work are wigs with fanged teeth. These objects may lend themselves to a 'feminist' construction and refer to vaginas. If this is the case, then the teeth are charged with meaning. In any event, the objects are unmistakably grotesque.
Bakhtin states that, ‘The grotesque… is looking for that which protrudes from the body, all that seeks to go out beyond the body’s confines. Special attention is given to the shoots and branches, to all that prolongs the body and links it to other bodies or to the world outside… The grotesque body… is a body in the act of becoming… The essential role belongs to… the bowels and the phallus… Thus the artistic logic of the grotesque image ignores the closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescences (sprouts, buds) and orifices… it never presents an individual body; the image consists of orifices and convexities that present another, newly conceived body. It is a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception.’ (iv)
He further states ‘In everyday parlance, it [the grotesque] implies something absurdly or hideously ugly.’ (v)
In European art and literature, especially in the Romantic era, ‘grotesque’ took on its modern, more negative valency, evoking nightmares (as in Fuseli, Goya and others), and symbolising the alienation and inhumanity supposedly typical of modern day society…’ (vi)
Mila’s painting/sculptural installation encompasses ‘grotesque’ in all of its definitions:
• A very ugly or comically distorted figure, creature or image.
• Repulsive, incongruous or inappropriate to a shocking degree.
• A style of decorative painting or sculpture consisting of the interweaving of human and animal forms with flowers and foliage. (vii)
What do you see?
For me, the triumph of Mila Faranov’s work is her ability to powerfully mix elements of ambiguous narrative, surrealism, Freudian psychoanalysis and the grotesque.
Prior to delving into an interpretation of the work as a whole, it is first necessary to describe the work to provide a context.
The work is a striking installation of bright blue, red and black decoration, somewhat resembling a Rorschach blot (which will be discussed further below).
Mila’s installation depicts a decorative landscape and there are many layers within the work, that form a palimpsest of meaning:
Prior to delving into an interpretation of the work as a whole, it is first necessary to describe the work to provide a context.
The work is a striking installation of bright blue, red and black decoration, somewhat resembling a Rorschach blot (which will be discussed further below).
Mila’s installation depicts a decorative landscape and there are many layers within the work, that form a palimpsest of meaning:
- A girl's wig and arms are suspended by a body of rats, which at first might appear to be the girl's body;
- Naked, fleshy children are holding hands dancing. Some of the children are wearing shoes (perhaps referencing the Chapman brothers use of Nike footwear);
- There is a tattooed man – is this a disguise? Is it used to amuse or terrify? Is he good or evil? He is a suspicious character. Tattoos can represent (at last in the West) decadence or criminality; (i)
- Children, rats, flowers and foliage are intertwined;
- Ambiguous shapes all strewn together in some kind of carnivale – perhaps even a perverse/surreal ‘Alice in Wonderland’ type garden party?
Whilst the author wishes to avoid a Freudian analysis of Mila (although I must mention that she shares her birthday with Halloween), any viewer of Mila's artwork is not so lucky.
Via the imagery, Mila creates the context (or provides the information) to form a narrative. However, like all successful visual narratives, the real meaning is facilitated by way of ambiguity (or by what is missing/not said). Mila does not, in her art, tell the whole story. This is for the viewer.
Within the work, horror is over-laid with beauty. The exterior outer layer is one of innocence and beauty. The imbedded interior is much more ominous. The viewer’s initial emotions of beauty and calm, ultimately must confront more off-putting and uncomfortable ideas. This is achieved by placing innocent forms, such as children, together with themes don't sit well or that shouldn’t go together. For example, the works may allude to the sexualisation of children.
There is a somewhat tenuous connection here with the Surrealists, such as Magritte, who placed everyday objects in 'out of the ordinary' or juxtaposed contexts, thereby re-contextualising the everyday and transforming it into the surreal. The Surrealists (as with Mila) were, of course, interested in the unconscious mind and the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Mila's interest in Freud also appears to be borne out in her use of the 'uncanny'. Sigmund Freud’s idea of the uncanny, or unheimlich, lies somewhere between horror and fascination, between what is foreign and what is known. Freud suggested the uncanny was something brought to an experience by the viewer, drawn to the surface through particular psychological triggers. (ii) This conception ties in well with the narrative elements of Mila's work.
Mila plays with the viewer's perception with a hypnotic kaleidoscope of imagery. Things are not always as they first seem. What may appear to be innocent and beautiful could turn out to be terrifying, horrific and grotesque. In this way, Mila takes the viewer for a walk down the garden path and closes the gate behind them.
There is a fantastical, absurdist silhouetted tree in the background, which appears as a mirrored repetition of an image, not unlike a child’s 'fold the page painting' or a 'Rorschach blot', named after the Swiss psychiatrist. (iii) This is crucial and ties the work together. The narrative, which is developed by imagery that is unmistakeably grotesque, is developed by the psychoanalysis of the viewer.
I am disturbed and confronted with my own readings of Mila's work: the tattooed man has become a paedophile with his head in the bushes (perhaps that’s where he beats the children black and blue)… is that a vagina… does that child on the left have a party blower penis, or perhaps it is an unfortunate place for a tail?
A man is hidden/masked by a tattoo, his decoration reaches across the painting tickling the penis of a child along the way. As it stretches across the paper’s edge it transfers from the painted watercolour to paper cut decoration across the corner of the wall.
On the floor in front of the work are wigs with fanged teeth. These objects may lend themselves to a 'feminist' construction and refer to vaginas. If this is the case, then the teeth are charged with meaning. In any event, the objects are unmistakably grotesque.
Bakhtin states that, ‘The grotesque… is looking for that which protrudes from the body, all that seeks to go out beyond the body’s confines. Special attention is given to the shoots and branches, to all that prolongs the body and links it to other bodies or to the world outside… The grotesque body… is a body in the act of becoming… The essential role belongs to… the bowels and the phallus… Thus the artistic logic of the grotesque image ignores the closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescences (sprouts, buds) and orifices… it never presents an individual body; the image consists of orifices and convexities that present another, newly conceived body. It is a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception.’ (iv)
He further states ‘In everyday parlance, it [the grotesque] implies something absurdly or hideously ugly.’ (v)
In European art and literature, especially in the Romantic era, ‘grotesque’ took on its modern, more negative valency, evoking nightmares (as in Fuseli, Goya and others), and symbolising the alienation and inhumanity supposedly typical of modern day society…’ (vi)
Mila’s painting/sculptural installation encompasses ‘grotesque’ in all of its definitions:
• A very ugly or comically distorted figure, creature or image.
• Repulsive, incongruous or inappropriate to a shocking degree.
• A style of decorative painting or sculpture consisting of the interweaving of human and animal forms with flowers and foliage. (vii)
What do you see?
(i) ‘Obviously, the principle cue was tattooing, described by Adolf Loos in 1908 as a ‘primitive’ form whose appearance in the civilised West signalled decadence and criminality’, (Gregory, John. ‘Carnival in Suburbia; The Art of Howard Arkley’, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006, p69)
(ii) Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny, UK, Manchester University Press, 2003.
(iii) A 'Rorschach blot' is a type of projective test (developed in the 1920's) used in psychoanalysis, in which a standard set of symmetrical ink blots of different shapes and colours is presented one by one to the subject, who is asked to describe what they suggest or resemble.
(iv) Gregory, John. Carnival in Suburbia; The Art of Howard Arkley, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p162.
(v) Gregory, John. Carnival in Suburbia; The Art of Howard Arkley, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p162.
(vi) ibid.
(ii) Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny, UK, Manchester University Press, 2003.
(iii) A 'Rorschach blot' is a type of projective test (developed in the 1920's) used in psychoanalysis, in which a standard set of symmetrical ink blots of different shapes and colours is presented one by one to the subject, who is asked to describe what they suggest or resemble.
(iv) Gregory, John. Carnival in Suburbia; The Art of Howard Arkley, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p162.
(v) Gregory, John. Carnival in Suburbia; The Art of Howard Arkley, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p162.
(vi) ibid.
(vii) Grotesque, Encarta World English Dictionary, http://uk.encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/SRPage.aspx?search, (accessed 27/08/07).
Respondent: Andrew Lawson
In the garden of MILA …
“Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle. “No, no! The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone. “Explanations take such a dreadful time.” (i)
- Lewis Carroll
A Poem
like a new creation
evolving in an uncovered
alternative reality
being populated
by strangely encrypted illusions
of odd, naked fleshed babies
personalities knowingly easily
dancing
mutating
a tattooed, top hatted silhouette, sternly absent
of authority or menace, though
looming hauteur
rocket like
exploding
in this Milaesque adventure into
mediums and shapes
that germinate
transform each other and thrive
reproduce disappear change
in this strange mirror of otherness
and vivid imagination
that Mila holds up to the world
in wild coloured strips
of paper and things
in ever growing
dimensions and bizarre relationships
rats patrol this Milascape
Oversized
menacing with fake
glistening eyes
bristling hiding behind
masked
fleshy prosthetic noses
confident in haute-couture
devouring their surroundings
contorting
vigilant
prowling their stage
furry marbled vivid
savagely proud aloof
eager and greedy
relishing their role of weirdness
and raw animal presence
watercoloured wonderful
uneasy
this cut paper carnivale
Jimi Hendrix psychedalia
“butterflies
and zebra’s are
zooming
and fairytales…” (ii)
Mila’s butterfly is black
her zebra is a trifid tangled child
peeking through its
world
a
sealed vision
this language of oddity
subversive echoes of storybooks
grim re-invented
in bright red blue and black
psychological obsessions drawing
graphic presence is there
redemption here
any return
any way out
from this colourful yet darkening
macabre atmosphere
figures cahooting working off each other
tightening their grip in this
warped myopic twilight zone
a freak show
lovingly created
vampire blonde and redhead
3 children
bodiless and floating
playing a game or masked
rhizome horrors
brunette has crashed
upon the cold concrete floor
exiles
is this a place?
to call home
(i) Tim Guest, and Germano Celant, Books by Artists, Art Metropole, (Toronto, Webcom, 1981), 7.
(ii) Jimi Hendrix, Axis bold as love,” Little wing”.1967.Producer.Chas Chandler.
Ben Millar
Ben Millar
Respondent: Robyn Base
The exhibited works of Ben Millar
On approaching Ben Millar’s work, I was immediately aware of a general sense of whimsy, wit and good-naturedness. Balloons are usually associated with celebrations, childlike notions of play, fun, laughter and games. In a sense, Ben’s work embraces these recollections and memories and the good-naturedness appears to stem from the idea of community or cohesion.
Balloons on the floor are in groupings: colour groupings. A cluster of black balloons is separated or removed from two clusters of white balloons. They are held apart, suggesting perhaps that such separations along colour lines may not be good-natured after all. Structurally ordered in neat, precise formations, the balloon clusters are tightly regimented. The dividing line across the concrete floor acts as a type of ‘apartheid ‘ barrier. Some of the black balloons are slightly deflated. Is this intentional? There are less of the black balloons – only one group of twenty-five as opposed to two groups of twenty-four white balloons. Is white dominant for a reason?
There is no movement amongst the balloons, undermining any festive associations. Their rigidity and severity is at odds with not only both their celebratory nature but also their composition: stretchy elasticised rubber inflated by warm, moist air supposedly blown from the mouth of the artist. Such a medium suggests floaty, graceful movements – not starched conformity.
And what of the solitary white balloon? It stands alone, stretching up like a sentinel. It appears to be the only balloon filled with helium and whose isolation is augmented by scattered remnants, fragments, memories of lost, fallen, perhaps, exploded balloons. On closer inspection, the surrounding detritus does not contain pieces of burst balloon but only discarded strings. Perhaps the others have floated off, having freed themselves of their constraints; drifting heavenward having ‘left this mortal coil’ with ‘no strings attached’. (Although looking up at the gallery ceiling, there are no hidden balloons stuck in the rafters and no visible means of escape.)
There are also two screens – one comprised (again) of balloons and the other being a projection on the wall. The black and white balloon-screen features a Peter Tyndall-type motif, which was a feature of Millar’s earlier works. The symbol here has been re-formatted as a giant video screen mirroring the opposite wall in size and shape. Ironically, it also appears to be electronically plugged into the wall as though it was a working model. It is almost as though the action on the opposite wall is emanating from this static, blank screen. But no, it is a sombre, inflated, impossible screen.
The electronic hardware actually consists of wiring, leads, a laptop computer and projector and it is from this equipment that a film about chairs, ladders and co-operation is being screened onto the opposite wall. The film is a short, looped soundless video featuring ‘stop’ animated characters. An old ladder hangs from an invisible ceiling attracting an assorted array of used chairs that gather to watch. By communicating and working together, they attempt to reach it themselves by climbing on top of each other. Only one is able to do so. Unthwarted the chairs (children, perhaps?) inveigle the help of a larger ladder (an adult?) who ‘walks’ into the room - in human fashion - and allows the chairs to climb its steps to their goal. Achieving levitation, they commune with the old ladder, hanging, swinging and twisting in the air.
Levity, also a theme of Ben’s earlier work, has more than one meaning. The anthropomorphised chairs are experiencing a literal kind of levity – they’re floating, flying, being raised up or lifted up from their normal surrounds. Another interpretation of levity is to experience a general sense of joyfulness, mirth, or good humour. So these domestic, functional objects are being ‘lifted up’ in both body and spirit (if indeed, chairs and ladders have a spirit). They are working together, of their own volition.
This video is amusing, gently whimsical and subtly subversive, in that ‘chair’ functionality is rendered useless. This subversion of the original function of chairs mirrors the inversion of the original use of or intention for balloons. Balloon association with mirth or joyfulness has been subverted and squashed by regimentation. Interestingly, there is a shadow of balloons in the foreground of the video suggesting the presence of an audience. Balloon silhouette heads sit silently, in neat rows, in the half-light watching the show. Perhaps they are learning about such things as working together and co-operation. Perhaps the black balloons will cross the line and watch the show, too. Perhaps they’ll all break ranks and throw a party.
On approaching Ben Millar’s work, I was immediately aware of a general sense of whimsy, wit and good-naturedness. Balloons are usually associated with celebrations, childlike notions of play, fun, laughter and games. In a sense, Ben’s work embraces these recollections and memories and the good-naturedness appears to stem from the idea of community or cohesion.
Balloons on the floor are in groupings: colour groupings. A cluster of black balloons is separated or removed from two clusters of white balloons. They are held apart, suggesting perhaps that such separations along colour lines may not be good-natured after all. Structurally ordered in neat, precise formations, the balloon clusters are tightly regimented. The dividing line across the concrete floor acts as a type of ‘apartheid ‘ barrier. Some of the black balloons are slightly deflated. Is this intentional? There are less of the black balloons – only one group of twenty-five as opposed to two groups of twenty-four white balloons. Is white dominant for a reason?
There is no movement amongst the balloons, undermining any festive associations. Their rigidity and severity is at odds with not only both their celebratory nature but also their composition: stretchy elasticised rubber inflated by warm, moist air supposedly blown from the mouth of the artist. Such a medium suggests floaty, graceful movements – not starched conformity.
And what of the solitary white balloon? It stands alone, stretching up like a sentinel. It appears to be the only balloon filled with helium and whose isolation is augmented by scattered remnants, fragments, memories of lost, fallen, perhaps, exploded balloons. On closer inspection, the surrounding detritus does not contain pieces of burst balloon but only discarded strings. Perhaps the others have floated off, having freed themselves of their constraints; drifting heavenward having ‘left this mortal coil’ with ‘no strings attached’. (Although looking up at the gallery ceiling, there are no hidden balloons stuck in the rafters and no visible means of escape.)
There are also two screens – one comprised (again) of balloons and the other being a projection on the wall. The black and white balloon-screen features a Peter Tyndall-type motif, which was a feature of Millar’s earlier works. The symbol here has been re-formatted as a giant video screen mirroring the opposite wall in size and shape. Ironically, it also appears to be electronically plugged into the wall as though it was a working model. It is almost as though the action on the opposite wall is emanating from this static, blank screen. But no, it is a sombre, inflated, impossible screen.
The electronic hardware actually consists of wiring, leads, a laptop computer and projector and it is from this equipment that a film about chairs, ladders and co-operation is being screened onto the opposite wall. The film is a short, looped soundless video featuring ‘stop’ animated characters. An old ladder hangs from an invisible ceiling attracting an assorted array of used chairs that gather to watch. By communicating and working together, they attempt to reach it themselves by climbing on top of each other. Only one is able to do so. Unthwarted the chairs (children, perhaps?) inveigle the help of a larger ladder (an adult?) who ‘walks’ into the room - in human fashion - and allows the chairs to climb its steps to their goal. Achieving levitation, they commune with the old ladder, hanging, swinging and twisting in the air.
Levity, also a theme of Ben’s earlier work, has more than one meaning. The anthropomorphised chairs are experiencing a literal kind of levity – they’re floating, flying, being raised up or lifted up from their normal surrounds. Another interpretation of levity is to experience a general sense of joyfulness, mirth, or good humour. So these domestic, functional objects are being ‘lifted up’ in both body and spirit (if indeed, chairs and ladders have a spirit). They are working together, of their own volition.
This video is amusing, gently whimsical and subtly subversive, in that ‘chair’ functionality is rendered useless. This subversion of the original function of chairs mirrors the inversion of the original use of or intention for balloons. Balloon association with mirth or joyfulness has been subverted and squashed by regimentation. Interestingly, there is a shadow of balloons in the foreground of the video suggesting the presence of an audience. Balloon silhouette heads sit silently, in neat rows, in the half-light watching the show. Perhaps they are learning about such things as working together and co-operation. Perhaps the black balloons will cross the line and watch the show, too. Perhaps they’ll all break ranks and throw a party.
Respondent: Nicki Wynnychuk
Hey, cool whose birthday is it? Where are the cookies and the chips?
We’ve got balloons, black, white, it’s not very colourful, and they seem ordered into groups.
Why?
There’s a projector beaming onto the wall, where’s the music or all the people?
To my right there is a black bunch of balloons that look like grapes. They begin to make me think fuck the cake, where’s the wine?
I do hope the sad little deflated one doesn’t get into the mix and spoil the brew.
Now that I’ve been in the space for a while longer, I’ve had my first glass of wine (I’m a little drunk as I didn’t have any lunch). I’m able to have a chat with some of the people who I see in the room, at the party.
I see Tony Osler in the corner, he’s not very happy with his spot, he’s annoyed at being knocked in the face all the time by those damn chairs.
Yeah who invited that Czech fruitcake anyway?
What’s his name? The guy who made the stop motion video?
Tyndall what are you doing over here?
What?
Yeah I did know John Cage was a Buddhist,
Oh you’re a Buddhist,
Cool man, does it help to make a sale?
Ah ha, I see, so that’s what the symbol is supposed to mean,
Is it what your easel looks like when you do all your stuff and levitate around the room?
Yeah meditate sorry I meant meditate,
Oh so you don’t fly around and stuff when you meditate,
Oh Ok that’s right,
It’s those funny Hindu guru’s who do the transcendental meditation,
Hey did you know that David Lynch is into that stuff?
Yeah he is, I read it in an interview
His work starts to make a bit more sense when you find that out,
Yeah, well it did for me anyway.
Where did you get that cookie?
To be honest I’m a bit lost and I guess I’m still looking for the cookie.
When I am given balloons in a gallery context my mind will always shift back to Berlin when I saw Martin Creed’s “Work 360: Half the air in a given space” 2004 (in silver).
Wow, I mean if your going to pull a stunt you might as well make it fun, floaty, shinny, light and reflective.
Creed’s silver balloons were unreal; they looked so heavy from the outside yet they still made way for as you moved your way through what was left of the gallery.
When Creed showed the work in Berlin it was in a gallery with floor to ceiling windows exposed out into the world. The gallery was located in the fringe of the inner city like a corner-store surrounded by apartment blocks, a small Turkish market and like most of Berlin across the road there was a major construction site.
The men across the road were welding iron and when I peered through the balloons to this point of reference, it made me levitate through the balloons towards the visual irony following the weight behind these silver balloons.
Ok,
It feels like Big Bird in Sesame Street but,
one of these things is not like the others; one of these things is not quite the same.
There is one balloon that is very different from the rest, we have all been shown this balloon first, as we walk in, it wants out, the balloon is being held back by the string, it seems to have worked out (for now) it’s eternal war with gravity (maybe it’s Hindu and practicing transcendental meditation). Yet I only come to this conclusion when I sit with the work and search hard in and about the show.
As a counter-point to the single floating balloon I observe a moment in the video. I seem to be illustrated towards a situation that works to oppose the single floating balloon. The moment is short, there is no announcement by the artist other than this moment seems to be the end of the video and be quick as were off again on another loop.
When the animated chairs (and a couple of ladders) have some kind of suspended cessation from the floor I seem to feel that the artist as lead me towards an oppositional kind of tension.
There is a stack of furniture strung up hanging from a cable, they are pulling it down tight, we don’t see what the cable is tied to we just see the weight add tension as the chairs load up fighting against their own natural gravitation.
So if the solo balloon and the video have established some kind of oppositional tensions of levity then, hay now what about those pinot grapes on the floor they’ve turned into Tyndall-ish modulations.
If one needs to replace the information within the symbolic frame on the wall these modulations are ready in the wings waiting. How would they get there? What about their gravity? I don’t know maybe I can ask the funny Czech guy in the corner.
We’ve got balloons, black, white, it’s not very colourful, and they seem ordered into groups.
Why?
There’s a projector beaming onto the wall, where’s the music or all the people?
To my right there is a black bunch of balloons that look like grapes. They begin to make me think fuck the cake, where’s the wine?
I do hope the sad little deflated one doesn’t get into the mix and spoil the brew.
Now that I’ve been in the space for a while longer, I’ve had my first glass of wine (I’m a little drunk as I didn’t have any lunch). I’m able to have a chat with some of the people who I see in the room, at the party.
I see Tony Osler in the corner, he’s not very happy with his spot, he’s annoyed at being knocked in the face all the time by those damn chairs.
Yeah who invited that Czech fruitcake anyway?
What’s his name? The guy who made the stop motion video?
Tyndall what are you doing over here?
What?
Yeah I did know John Cage was a Buddhist,
Oh you’re a Buddhist,
Cool man, does it help to make a sale?
Ah ha, I see, so that’s what the symbol is supposed to mean,
Is it what your easel looks like when you do all your stuff and levitate around the room?
Yeah meditate sorry I meant meditate,
Oh so you don’t fly around and stuff when you meditate,
Oh Ok that’s right,
It’s those funny Hindu guru’s who do the transcendental meditation,
Hey did you know that David Lynch is into that stuff?
Yeah he is, I read it in an interview
His work starts to make a bit more sense when you find that out,
Yeah, well it did for me anyway.
Where did you get that cookie?
To be honest I’m a bit lost and I guess I’m still looking for the cookie.
When I am given balloons in a gallery context my mind will always shift back to Berlin when I saw Martin Creed’s “Work 360: Half the air in a given space” 2004 (in silver).
Wow, I mean if your going to pull a stunt you might as well make it fun, floaty, shinny, light and reflective.
Creed’s silver balloons were unreal; they looked so heavy from the outside yet they still made way for as you moved your way through what was left of the gallery.
When Creed showed the work in Berlin it was in a gallery with floor to ceiling windows exposed out into the world. The gallery was located in the fringe of the inner city like a corner-store surrounded by apartment blocks, a small Turkish market and like most of Berlin across the road there was a major construction site.
The men across the road were welding iron and when I peered through the balloons to this point of reference, it made me levitate through the balloons towards the visual irony following the weight behind these silver balloons.
Ok,
It feels like Big Bird in Sesame Street but,
one of these things is not like the others; one of these things is not quite the same.
There is one balloon that is very different from the rest, we have all been shown this balloon first, as we walk in, it wants out, the balloon is being held back by the string, it seems to have worked out (for now) it’s eternal war with gravity (maybe it’s Hindu and practicing transcendental meditation). Yet I only come to this conclusion when I sit with the work and search hard in and about the show.
As a counter-point to the single floating balloon I observe a moment in the video. I seem to be illustrated towards a situation that works to oppose the single floating balloon. The moment is short, there is no announcement by the artist other than this moment seems to be the end of the video and be quick as were off again on another loop.
When the animated chairs (and a couple of ladders) have some kind of suspended cessation from the floor I seem to feel that the artist as lead me towards an oppositional kind of tension.
There is a stack of furniture strung up hanging from a cable, they are pulling it down tight, we don’t see what the cable is tied to we just see the weight add tension as the chairs load up fighting against their own natural gravitation.
So if the solo balloon and the video have established some kind of oppositional tensions of levity then, hay now what about those pinot grapes on the floor they’ve turned into Tyndall-ish modulations.
If one needs to replace the information within the symbolic frame on the wall these modulations are ready in the wings waiting. How would they get there? What about their gravity? I don’t know maybe I can ask the funny Czech guy in the corner.
Ken Shimizu
Ken Shimizu
Respondent: Mimmalisa Trifilo
Ken Shimizu - I had stepped into their territory.
When entering the gallery space, the eyes are immediately draw to the large one point perspective wall drawing on the main wall. It appears to have been drawn quickly like a cartoon or an image from a storyboard. Minimal lines have been used to create an impression of a scene. The red scribble (the hint of a red cap) becomes evident and then a mental zig zag occurs as the eyes move from red to the black dot in the distance. It appears to be the one point at which everything recedes, but it is also in the middle of a person’s face? Who is it? Where am I?
The blue diagonal lines correspond well with my eye movements which have been initiated simply by the use of colour. They seem to suggest a connection between the people and the edge of the image (or is it referring to another person outside of the frame?) Is energy being lost or intensified? Are they caught in a web?
Elements of the image appear to fade and fragment and parts of the drawing are left incomplete. Limbo. The outlines suggest a presence that is barely there. Fleeting… and yet some things are dominant: the red scribble, the black dot, the crosses… they seem to map out something more concrete. X marks the spot. What kind of spot? It seems to be a transient space. Things appear in the midst of change. Is it the frenetic pace of the blue lines that emphasize this or the tension created between the dark lines and the incomplete sections?
More information is gained from looking at the photographic print to the left of the wall drawing. At first glance the image appears to be a still taken from a futuristic film such as Blade Runner or the Matrix. A closer inspection reveals some handwritten words in the top left hand corner of the work:
I had stepped into another world
like a portal in time to a space
where hostility and violent intentionswere a source of joy.
we were about to play in this space and it made me sad to
be part of this scenario where
the only way out was through injury
and then what?
I had stepped into their territory.
Violence is reiterated in the photograph through the posters depicted on the wall towards the right of the print. These pictures portray what appear to be body parts affected by gangrene or injury. They are high in contrast compared to the rest of the picture, highlighting the fact that they have been deliberately inserted and drawing attention to the Asian characters. It also becomes clear that an onlooker on a motorcycle is wearing an army uniform. The reference to War is extended in the well known Uncle Sam image that is placed in the foreground marking the territory. Is it a cultural war? The text outlines that someone’s territory has been invaded. Someone does not feel safe. There is talk of hostility and injury. A boundary has been crossed and anxiety reigns. Hetherington, as cited by Tompkins (2006), suggests that:
Boundaries are threshold spaces that demarcate one thing from another. Boundaries are a means of relational ordering: they give a space or thing an identity defined in relation to its Other. Boundaries are places of uncertainty and as such often play a very significant role in the processes of social ordering.
Is anyone in control of this situation? Who is in the position of higher status? It is difficult to ascertain simply by looking at the print and drawing. The reality of the situation is difficult to grasp. The photograph holds more information and yet more questions arise.
The other photographic print on the perpendicular wall depicts an origami crane obscuring a person’s head as if taking the place of them. Change seems imminent in this work too. There is an obvious connection, here, to Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Is Shimizu depicting an identity crisis? Is the cultural symbol of the crane overtaking the person’s own identity? Or is it merely a dream? The black and white aspects of the photograph are highlighted by the fact that the wall drawing to the left is in black and white too. No colour is used. Compared to the other drawing, the lines seem more precise as if trying to pin down the exact moment of transformation. Is this achievable? It seems not, the crane’s wings are about to break out of the grasp. Is it going to fly away with its human cargo and inflict injury upon it? Anything is possible.
Tompkins, J. 2006. Unsettling space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
When entering the gallery space, the eyes are immediately draw to the large one point perspective wall drawing on the main wall. It appears to have been drawn quickly like a cartoon or an image from a storyboard. Minimal lines have been used to create an impression of a scene. The red scribble (the hint of a red cap) becomes evident and then a mental zig zag occurs as the eyes move from red to the black dot in the distance. It appears to be the one point at which everything recedes, but it is also in the middle of a person’s face? Who is it? Where am I?
The blue diagonal lines correspond well with my eye movements which have been initiated simply by the use of colour. They seem to suggest a connection between the people and the edge of the image (or is it referring to another person outside of the frame?) Is energy being lost or intensified? Are they caught in a web?
Elements of the image appear to fade and fragment and parts of the drawing are left incomplete. Limbo. The outlines suggest a presence that is barely there. Fleeting… and yet some things are dominant: the red scribble, the black dot, the crosses… they seem to map out something more concrete. X marks the spot. What kind of spot? It seems to be a transient space. Things appear in the midst of change. Is it the frenetic pace of the blue lines that emphasize this or the tension created between the dark lines and the incomplete sections?
More information is gained from looking at the photographic print to the left of the wall drawing. At first glance the image appears to be a still taken from a futuristic film such as Blade Runner or the Matrix. A closer inspection reveals some handwritten words in the top left hand corner of the work:
I had stepped into another world
like a portal in time to a space
where hostility and violent intentionswere a source of joy.
we were about to play in this space and it made me sad to
be part of this scenario where
the only way out was through injury
and then what?
I had stepped into their territory.
Violence is reiterated in the photograph through the posters depicted on the wall towards the right of the print. These pictures portray what appear to be body parts affected by gangrene or injury. They are high in contrast compared to the rest of the picture, highlighting the fact that they have been deliberately inserted and drawing attention to the Asian characters. It also becomes clear that an onlooker on a motorcycle is wearing an army uniform. The reference to War is extended in the well known Uncle Sam image that is placed in the foreground marking the territory. Is it a cultural war? The text outlines that someone’s territory has been invaded. Someone does not feel safe. There is talk of hostility and injury. A boundary has been crossed and anxiety reigns. Hetherington, as cited by Tompkins (2006), suggests that:
Boundaries are threshold spaces that demarcate one thing from another. Boundaries are a means of relational ordering: they give a space or thing an identity defined in relation to its Other. Boundaries are places of uncertainty and as such often play a very significant role in the processes of social ordering.
Is anyone in control of this situation? Who is in the position of higher status? It is difficult to ascertain simply by looking at the print and drawing. The reality of the situation is difficult to grasp. The photograph holds more information and yet more questions arise.
The other photographic print on the perpendicular wall depicts an origami crane obscuring a person’s head as if taking the place of them. Change seems imminent in this work too. There is an obvious connection, here, to Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Is Shimizu depicting an identity crisis? Is the cultural symbol of the crane overtaking the person’s own identity? Or is it merely a dream? The black and white aspects of the photograph are highlighted by the fact that the wall drawing to the left is in black and white too. No colour is used. Compared to the other drawing, the lines seem more precise as if trying to pin down the exact moment of transformation. Is this achievable? It seems not, the crane’s wings are about to break out of the grasp. Is it going to fly away with its human cargo and inflict injury upon it? Anything is possible.
Tompkins, J. 2006. Unsettling space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Respondent: Andrew Lawson
At the time of my first visit Ken is not in the gallery, which is empty except for a chair that has its back to me, as it faces a corner and I'm thinking of a Sex Pistols song ' pretty vacant'.
The almost empty room reminds me of a line in a book I was just reading, a reference to a series by Joseph Kosuth, which the author describes as a presentation being about 'only ideas, or a chosen fact' the work I think of is entitled "Present whereabouts unknown" 1966. i
I think now that I'd better stop this train of thought because I'm not that knowledgeable on Kosuth, and I'm responding to Ken's work, and I know, or feel that I'm already participating in some sort of performance or action. Like me, the gallery is waiting for Ken's next move.
A little later ... I have bought a new shirt, and I feel ready to reenter the gallery space, with enthusiasm, new eyes, and I'm thinking I'm an actor entering a visual narrative stage. I relate an essay by Germano Celant to Ken Shimizu's new work as I see it as an extension of a drawing exercise, like a diary, based on real events in the artist's life. Celant states (of the book) "A volume is a collection of photographs, writings and ideas, it is a product of thought and the imagination. It is a result of concrete activities, and serves to document and to offer information as the means and as material." ii
The chair is till in the corner, and a transformation has taken place (and probably still is as I write), by means of two photographic images accompanied by two corresponding and possibly unfinished wall drawings.
Both of the drawings attract me by means of classical traditional devices like perspective; I was getting an impression of maybe a Velasquez type portrait in the vertical drawing and a Delacroix in the horizontal drawing.
The photographs each positioned as coming from or leading toward the gallery's left corner, make me think of the chairs now as an empty director's chair.
Now that I have acquainted myself with the visuals, first impressions at least, I am again drawn toward the chair and the corner, which is generating great energy or pull, like a magnetic field, simply the result of perspective at work, but it feels electric. Is this director's chair the catalyst for an idea of looking into the unknown or yet to be explore regions of Ken's practice, is it about where he is?
To my left is the vertical wall drawing, a portrait, a doppelganger to its smaller companion, hovering or levitating, not in terms of Ben's investigations into 'levity', but as a comment on the positioning of portraiture in times past, hung above the crowd, the masses, this one's about the singular, the subject, a snapshot of an individual.
The photo next to this drawing is the original image perhaps, a figure in white scuffs and white dressing gown, metamorphosing from its human form. The figure's head has disappeared and transformed with the aid of an origami style paper construction, working as a mask and head dress, into a crane-like being.
The drawing, the doppelganger crane-man, is quite ephemeral and sparse, its overall presentation is level with the floor, but the photo, though rich in colour and personal warmth, subverts the straight line and is on a slant, toward the corner floor. It either points to or announces the emptiness of the chair in the corner and directs me to the cityscape on the right, or if read from right to left, it may represent a portrait of the artist, a snapshot of an idea in process.
The two works on the back wall, again a smaller photographic image, this one a cut and paste dreamscape looking patchwork, paired again with a large wall drawing doppelganger to its right. Again, the smaller picture is positioned to the chair and the corner, emphasising perspective, so I feel drawn to the empty corner, then sent through a kind of lop toward the unfinished(?) drawings.
The cityscape figurative drawing does not speak of the individual as singular, but as a participant in street culture, territory, inter-mixing, community living, the individual and the rest.
The many lines in this drawing act as a web that holds this cityscape together and drags me into the action, guides my eye around the narrative. Amidst the clutter and refuse so common to inner city dwellers, this particular street seems a patrolled, guarded place, unfriendly, uninviting, to the individual in the distance. Above this scene, to the right looms what could be for me, an eye?
I thought this might be a comment on the ever present surveillance cameras in our cities or our own memories perhaps? Looking down. A poster in the street below this 'eye' or camera says: STATE...... VIC... The artist may be saying that even with State surveillance and Big Brother, the streets are still tribal and nomadic. I'm drawn to what looks like a crack in this image that leads me to think of the surface as a membrane (sky, upper left,) suggesting to me this drawing is "entropic." iii It could disappear anytime soon.
I think of Ken's show here as a performance space, a series of ideas being realised but the realisation is only part of this process -- fluidity comes to mind, pages, computer screens, layers evolving.
I'm getting a strong feeling of Utako Shindo's performance last year at Ocular Lab, "Utako Shindo 9," which involved a bed, waking, the daily ritual of organising and packaging memories/longings perhaps, moving on and then drawing the moment of engagement with the outside world. A kind of realisation of place and physical space, day/night circular play on being.
I'm again drawn to the energy concentrated in the corner of the gallery, with the expanse of cement floor propelling this intensity, something in the composition of the display gives the floor so much presence, and it has become part of the work.
I'm again staring into the void, involved in the questioning nature and determination implicit in the conceptual framework that Ken is proposing, and loving it.
i Germano, Celant, Books by Artists, Tim Guest and Germano Celant, Webcom, Toronto, Art Metropole, 1981. 94
ii Ibid, 88.
iii Ibid, Germano, Celant, (The book ... is considered an object of study ... It is only another space that naturally coincides, together with the spoken work, with the highest degree of entropy of art, and can therefore be considered an art work.' 88
The almost empty room reminds me of a line in a book I was just reading, a reference to a series by Joseph Kosuth, which the author describes as a presentation being about 'only ideas, or a chosen fact' the work I think of is entitled "Present whereabouts unknown" 1966. i
I think now that I'd better stop this train of thought because I'm not that knowledgeable on Kosuth, and I'm responding to Ken's work, and I know, or feel that I'm already participating in some sort of performance or action. Like me, the gallery is waiting for Ken's next move.
A little later ... I have bought a new shirt, and I feel ready to reenter the gallery space, with enthusiasm, new eyes, and I'm thinking I'm an actor entering a visual narrative stage. I relate an essay by Germano Celant to Ken Shimizu's new work as I see it as an extension of a drawing exercise, like a diary, based on real events in the artist's life. Celant states (of the book) "A volume is a collection of photographs, writings and ideas, it is a product of thought and the imagination. It is a result of concrete activities, and serves to document and to offer information as the means and as material." ii
The chair is till in the corner, and a transformation has taken place (and probably still is as I write), by means of two photographic images accompanied by two corresponding and possibly unfinished wall drawings.
Both of the drawings attract me by means of classical traditional devices like perspective; I was getting an impression of maybe a Velasquez type portrait in the vertical drawing and a Delacroix in the horizontal drawing.
The photographs each positioned as coming from or leading toward the gallery's left corner, make me think of the chairs now as an empty director's chair.
Now that I have acquainted myself with the visuals, first impressions at least, I am again drawn toward the chair and the corner, which is generating great energy or pull, like a magnetic field, simply the result of perspective at work, but it feels electric. Is this director's chair the catalyst for an idea of looking into the unknown or yet to be explore regions of Ken's practice, is it about where he is?
To my left is the vertical wall drawing, a portrait, a doppelganger to its smaller companion, hovering or levitating, not in terms of Ben's investigations into 'levity', but as a comment on the positioning of portraiture in times past, hung above the crowd, the masses, this one's about the singular, the subject, a snapshot of an individual.
The photo next to this drawing is the original image perhaps, a figure in white scuffs and white dressing gown, metamorphosing from its human form. The figure's head has disappeared and transformed with the aid of an origami style paper construction, working as a mask and head dress, into a crane-like being.
The drawing, the doppelganger crane-man, is quite ephemeral and sparse, its overall presentation is level with the floor, but the photo, though rich in colour and personal warmth, subverts the straight line and is on a slant, toward the corner floor. It either points to or announces the emptiness of the chair in the corner and directs me to the cityscape on the right, or if read from right to left, it may represent a portrait of the artist, a snapshot of an idea in process.
The two works on the back wall, again a smaller photographic image, this one a cut and paste dreamscape looking patchwork, paired again with a large wall drawing doppelganger to its right. Again, the smaller picture is positioned to the chair and the corner, emphasising perspective, so I feel drawn to the empty corner, then sent through a kind of lop toward the unfinished(?) drawings.
The cityscape figurative drawing does not speak of the individual as singular, but as a participant in street culture, territory, inter-mixing, community living, the individual and the rest.
The many lines in this drawing act as a web that holds this cityscape together and drags me into the action, guides my eye around the narrative. Amidst the clutter and refuse so common to inner city dwellers, this particular street seems a patrolled, guarded place, unfriendly, uninviting, to the individual in the distance. Above this scene, to the right looms what could be for me, an eye?
I thought this might be a comment on the ever present surveillance cameras in our cities or our own memories perhaps? Looking down. A poster in the street below this 'eye' or camera says: STATE...... VIC... The artist may be saying that even with State surveillance and Big Brother, the streets are still tribal and nomadic. I'm drawn to what looks like a crack in this image that leads me to think of the surface as a membrane (sky, upper left,) suggesting to me this drawing is "entropic." iii It could disappear anytime soon.
I think of Ken's show here as a performance space, a series of ideas being realised but the realisation is only part of this process -- fluidity comes to mind, pages, computer screens, layers evolving.
I'm getting a strong feeling of Utako Shindo's performance last year at Ocular Lab, "Utako Shindo 9," which involved a bed, waking, the daily ritual of organising and packaging memories/longings perhaps, moving on and then drawing the moment of engagement with the outside world. A kind of realisation of place and physical space, day/night circular play on being.
I'm again drawn to the energy concentrated in the corner of the gallery, with the expanse of cement floor propelling this intensity, something in the composition of the display gives the floor so much presence, and it has become part of the work.
I'm again staring into the void, involved in the questioning nature and determination implicit in the conceptual framework that Ken is proposing, and loving it.
i Germano, Celant, Books by Artists, Tim Guest and Germano Celant, Webcom, Toronto, Art Metropole, 1981. 94
ii Ibid, 88.
iii Ibid, Germano, Celant, (The book ... is considered an object of study ... It is only another space that naturally coincides, together with the spoken work, with the highest degree of entropy of art, and can therefore be considered an art work.' 88
Mimmalisa Trifilo
Mimmalisa Trifilo
Respondent: Ken Shimizu
Response to Mimmalisa Triffilo
Forsaking the brightness of the day, the viewer walked in to a white cube to ponder art. She saw an installation of transported domesticity and a contextualising photo, placed in a darkened space. In the corner was a single spot lit photo of an old woman making pasta.
The objects took centre stage; its physical presence demanded the viewer to contemplate this situation. A kitchen array of pasta making had been moved into this stark space of concrete floors. She walked over to the table, touched the pasta to make sure that it was dry, and then remembered that one mustn’t touch art. She would have known that without touching, just by the way they are approaching translucency. The tactility of them, the familiarity to daily life seemed to have grabbed her hand.
She turned her head to look at the pasta that hung from the broomsticks laid between two chairs. There was much pasta that seemed to have fallen on the ground while the remainder was collected into a tray. All of the furniture was wooden, darkened by its years. Constructed in rigid angles, the furniture spoke of practicality. In this framework, the spilt pasta was not waste, only a practical reality of the process.
The viewer then walked around the T shaped configuration of objects to the photo. With a signature touch of a plastic camera, the shot was off coloured to blue and blurry around the edges. The evidence of the domestic process in the room was reflected into this image, where an old woman contemplatively makes pasta. Her face was sparingly, but deeply, wrinkled, having seen much in her time. The polka dotted red apron pulled the viewer’s eye to the centre of this composition, from which the image spilled out to its white borders, slowing losing focus. In the blurry edges, she sees the outside world and a ladder, but mostly the darkness of the shed where the woman. Composed similarly to the room, the viewer noticed. A T rotated upside down.
While the installation was configured in an T with its objects and intersected with diagonal darkness, in the photo, the light drew an T, while the ladder and the table cut the composition diagonally. This inversion prompted her to contemplate the absence of the woman in the room. The viewer was left to study the evidence of work, domestic chores of traditional Italian families.
After sitting and pondering some more in the cube, the viewer wandered out to the soft morning sun. As she walked through the city, she is still contemplating the work. What was it about? All of the adjectives that describe a work, is that what it is? A description? No, descriptions are of our impressions of the work. The feeling a work gives to us asks for descriptions, it is how we communicate through art.
What crawled under her psyche as the viewer pondered the work in the corner of the room was stillness. Stillness of the room, the stillness of evidence, the stillness of a woman caught in quiet action. Quietude, the woman keeps working, and works at something significant to her upbringing: pasta making. Engaged in an act passed down through generations, the old woman continues a tradition that is portable and easily consumable. Cultural diversity starts in cuisine, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
The reference to pasta making transported the viewer to Italy, which lead her to contemplate, “Are we in Italy?” Looking back to the photo, the scenery out of the shed was rather non-descript. The blue tint in the photo and the blurry landscape located her in any part of the world. The light was a blue tint that seemed to be from England, the trees were blurry shadows and the fields could be golden wheat fields of Tuscany, thirsty chaparral of California, or the tired bushlands in Australia. (i)
People from the past, when domesticity was an occupation, laid importance in the production of the daily meal, and the quiet pride of making food according to how it was taught by our grandmothers. Though the pasta maker on the table is a sign to a modern industrial age, it is a domestic piece of machinery, accentuated by the domesticity of the furniture. From the wood, the viewer expanded on the rest of the home, though nothing was for certain she knew the setting was a practical room. Something theatrical about this, she thought.
Economical, pasta is a staple, needing only flour and water, a practice in tradition that is possible for any social class. Tradition keeps alive an identity, of who we are, where we come from, speaks of pride. Pride can produce words and phrases like “sacrilege,: “how to,” “the right way,” and situations where there is a fine for using any flour less than durum wheat for the production of pasta in Italy. (ii) Pride in a culture gives us the dignity to walk the streets in composure, knowing that we are composed of our ancestors, and ancestry a connection to something larger than ourselves.
The viewer noticed that she wasn’t thinking about a story but an action, a simple action, turning the handle, placing the cut sheets of pasta on to a floured surface, and repeating. This act is repeated by the pasta maker, but mimicked and passed down to her offspring, as she had through her matriarch, a process by which the act had found its meaning.
The similarity to works from the third world, where cultural identity is a currency, was queued to the viewer by the presentation of these objects. Artefacts and documentation of cultural practice, reminded her of a museum. And museums, the process of colonisation where traditional practice is taken out of context, taken from the homeland or preserved after its practice was destroyed, and these remnants displayed in isolation from the pursuit of life. In Stranger in a Strange Land, superior beings destroyed a civilisation only to sing of its cultural accomplishments for millennia to pay homage to the beauty. (iii) In the post-colonial context, people of conquered cultures utilise how their tradition has been smothered by a foreign modernity, and the critique of museum, anthropological methods and the western grand narrative is a method of attacking the veil of empire that shrouds their world. (iv) How does this connect to Italians, and their role as colonisers rather than the colonised?
She connected this to traditional labour in a modern western context, and its potency existed through the fetish of a domestic past. The sweet melancholia was of pasta making dampened by the blue tone in the photo, and the subject forgoing the bright day to drudgery in the shed. Though not a critique, the work shed insight into the half lit romanticism of pride in a culture, a sombre practice that is both a prison and a tie to the past.
Having reached a point of conclusion in her pondering, the viewer wondered where she will get her long macchiato this afternoon.
The objects took centre stage; its physical presence demanded the viewer to contemplate this situation. A kitchen array of pasta making had been moved into this stark space of concrete floors. She walked over to the table, touched the pasta to make sure that it was dry, and then remembered that one mustn’t touch art. She would have known that without touching, just by the way they are approaching translucency. The tactility of them, the familiarity to daily life seemed to have grabbed her hand.
She turned her head to look at the pasta that hung from the broomsticks laid between two chairs. There was much pasta that seemed to have fallen on the ground while the remainder was collected into a tray. All of the furniture was wooden, darkened by its years. Constructed in rigid angles, the furniture spoke of practicality. In this framework, the spilt pasta was not waste, only a practical reality of the process.
The viewer then walked around the T shaped configuration of objects to the photo. With a signature touch of a plastic camera, the shot was off coloured to blue and blurry around the edges. The evidence of the domestic process in the room was reflected into this image, where an old woman contemplatively makes pasta. Her face was sparingly, but deeply, wrinkled, having seen much in her time. The polka dotted red apron pulled the viewer’s eye to the centre of this composition, from which the image spilled out to its white borders, slowing losing focus. In the blurry edges, she sees the outside world and a ladder, but mostly the darkness of the shed where the woman. Composed similarly to the room, the viewer noticed. A T rotated upside down.
While the installation was configured in an T with its objects and intersected with diagonal darkness, in the photo, the light drew an T, while the ladder and the table cut the composition diagonally. This inversion prompted her to contemplate the absence of the woman in the room. The viewer was left to study the evidence of work, domestic chores of traditional Italian families.
After sitting and pondering some more in the cube, the viewer wandered out to the soft morning sun. As she walked through the city, she is still contemplating the work. What was it about? All of the adjectives that describe a work, is that what it is? A description? No, descriptions are of our impressions of the work. The feeling a work gives to us asks for descriptions, it is how we communicate through art.
What crawled under her psyche as the viewer pondered the work in the corner of the room was stillness. Stillness of the room, the stillness of evidence, the stillness of a woman caught in quiet action. Quietude, the woman keeps working, and works at something significant to her upbringing: pasta making. Engaged in an act passed down through generations, the old woman continues a tradition that is portable and easily consumable. Cultural diversity starts in cuisine, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
The reference to pasta making transported the viewer to Italy, which lead her to contemplate, “Are we in Italy?” Looking back to the photo, the scenery out of the shed was rather non-descript. The blue tint in the photo and the blurry landscape located her in any part of the world. The light was a blue tint that seemed to be from England, the trees were blurry shadows and the fields could be golden wheat fields of Tuscany, thirsty chaparral of California, or the tired bushlands in Australia. (i)
People from the past, when domesticity was an occupation, laid importance in the production of the daily meal, and the quiet pride of making food according to how it was taught by our grandmothers. Though the pasta maker on the table is a sign to a modern industrial age, it is a domestic piece of machinery, accentuated by the domesticity of the furniture. From the wood, the viewer expanded on the rest of the home, though nothing was for certain she knew the setting was a practical room. Something theatrical about this, she thought.
Economical, pasta is a staple, needing only flour and water, a practice in tradition that is possible for any social class. Tradition keeps alive an identity, of who we are, where we come from, speaks of pride. Pride can produce words and phrases like “sacrilege,: “how to,” “the right way,” and situations where there is a fine for using any flour less than durum wheat for the production of pasta in Italy. (ii) Pride in a culture gives us the dignity to walk the streets in composure, knowing that we are composed of our ancestors, and ancestry a connection to something larger than ourselves.
The viewer noticed that she wasn’t thinking about a story but an action, a simple action, turning the handle, placing the cut sheets of pasta on to a floured surface, and repeating. This act is repeated by the pasta maker, but mimicked and passed down to her offspring, as she had through her matriarch, a process by which the act had found its meaning.
The similarity to works from the third world, where cultural identity is a currency, was queued to the viewer by the presentation of these objects. Artefacts and documentation of cultural practice, reminded her of a museum. And museums, the process of colonisation where traditional practice is taken out of context, taken from the homeland or preserved after its practice was destroyed, and these remnants displayed in isolation from the pursuit of life. In Stranger in a Strange Land, superior beings destroyed a civilisation only to sing of its cultural accomplishments for millennia to pay homage to the beauty. (iii) In the post-colonial context, people of conquered cultures utilise how their tradition has been smothered by a foreign modernity, and the critique of museum, anthropological methods and the western grand narrative is a method of attacking the veil of empire that shrouds their world. (iv) How does this connect to Italians, and their role as colonisers rather than the colonised?
She connected this to traditional labour in a modern western context, and its potency existed through the fetish of a domestic past. The sweet melancholia was of pasta making dampened by the blue tone in the photo, and the subject forgoing the bright day to drudgery in the shed. Though not a critique, the work shed insight into the half lit romanticism of pride in a culture, a sombre practice that is both a prison and a tie to the past.
Having reached a point of conclusion in her pondering, the viewer wondered where she will get her long macchiato this afternoon.
(i) Some of the major Italian enclaves aside from New York and Chicago.
(ii)http://www.thenibble.com/zine/archives/rossi-pasta-flavored-pasta.asp
(iii) Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein, Publisher: Putnam Adult. New York 1961.
(iv) The Location of Culture. Homi K. Bhabha, London, Routledge, 1994.
Respondent: Nicki Wynnychuk
I do not think the desire to come up with a new kind of criticism to adore, contemplate, confront, and resist what is before one is unique. Yet while artists drive on in pursuit of things elusive and unformulated without them, art critics, a good de
When my viewing body arrives at the work of Mim Triffilo it should be obvious that I bring my own personal history with me.
It is suitably obvious when I arrive here that I am looking at an installation made by an Italian, so here I am, in a live cliché.
Things often become cliché for a good reason. I see that Mim has a strong connection to the woman in the picture and appears to maintain a valuable attention to the knowledge that can be passed down when one is receptive.
The work in its current state in front of me seems as cohesive and latent as the smell of garlic on Lygon Steet. I mean there is substance to the recipe; I just wonder if the context is suitable, the problem here is that I can’t let myself eat on Lygon st, I would rather cook at home.
Don’t get me wrong I love fresh pasta (I have a machine just like this one at home). I have spent many hours listening, learning and experimenting with the art myself.
This experience and ability does not make me Italian.
Just like me being of Ukrainian decent doesn’t necessarily make me a suitable candidate to maintain a suprematist lineage.
I have a friend who is a dancer. She lives in Germany but was born in Paraguay. At her house she too has a photo (hung in the kitchen) of her grandmother cooking. In private and at a modest scale I am drawn into this image in a way that really makes me care, the picture leaves room for me to find meaning in this fragment of a second, even now four years since my one and only viewing.
Krzysztof Kieslowski made a trilogy of films in 1993-94 loosely based on the political ideals of the French Republic: liberty, equality and fraternity. Kieslowski’s work appears to be an investigation into the possible meaning of these signs.
“Pad Thai changes from restaurant to restaurant. It is always impossible to predict what semblance to some never-approached pad Thai ideal will be served. Heat on the side or already applied? Lemon or lime? Crushed peanuts on top, peanut sauce stirred in, or a dish of it to be poured over by the dinner? Will there be broccoli, cabbage, carrots, sprouts? Too much egg, too little? Would you describe it as New Age or old-fashioned; oily or streamlined; fresh or frozen? Good or bad it is still pad Thai.
It is suitably obvious when I arrive here that I am looking at an installation made by an Italian, so here I am, in a live cliché.
Things often become cliché for a good reason. I see that Mim has a strong connection to the woman in the picture and appears to maintain a valuable attention to the knowledge that can be passed down when one is receptive.
The work in its current state in front of me seems as cohesive and latent as the smell of garlic on Lygon Steet. I mean there is substance to the recipe; I just wonder if the context is suitable, the problem here is that I can’t let myself eat on Lygon st, I would rather cook at home.
Don’t get me wrong I love fresh pasta (I have a machine just like this one at home). I have spent many hours listening, learning and experimenting with the art myself.
This experience and ability does not make me Italian.
Just like me being of Ukrainian decent doesn’t necessarily make me a suitable candidate to maintain a suprematist lineage.
I have a friend who is a dancer. She lives in Germany but was born in Paraguay. At her house she too has a photo (hung in the kitchen) of her grandmother cooking. In private and at a modest scale I am drawn into this image in a way that really makes me care, the picture leaves room for me to find meaning in this fragment of a second, even now four years since my one and only viewing.
Krzysztof Kieslowski made a trilogy of films in 1993-94 loosely based on the political ideals of the French Republic: liberty, equality and fraternity. Kieslowski’s work appears to be an investigation into the possible meaning of these signs.
“Pad Thai changes from restaurant to restaurant. It is always impossible to predict what semblance to some never-approached pad Thai ideal will be served. Heat on the side or already applied? Lemon or lime? Crushed peanuts on top, peanut sauce stirred in, or a dish of it to be poured over by the dinner? Will there be broccoli, cabbage, carrots, sprouts? Too much egg, too little? Would you describe it as New Age or old-fashioned; oily or streamlined; fresh or frozen? Good or bad it is still pad Thai.
I do not think the desire to come up with a new kind of criticism to adore, contemplate, confront, and resist what is before one is unique. Yet while artists drive on in pursuit of things elusive and unformulated without them, art critics, a good de