Hanging by a thread, or Fair Isle on the line (April - May 2014)
Part 1
Wednesday 16 April: The idea
of the homunculus, the little man, remains. A fixed element that has emerged
slowly – but it was there from the start, more or less. The initial impetus was
the ‘sleeve’ I found on the street – and then there was another sleeve, both
made of brown paper, beautifully. I thought they were for flowers but I think
T’s guess is correct: the prototypes of sleeves and thus suggestive of arms. We
go from there to other body parts and the body itself. And the notion of the figure
as an element of design.
Knit me a cardigan, please do, and knit me a cardigan
Later I would understand that
the body is what dominates and shapes the room. Architecture is the art of the
body. And so to enter architectural space …
And then the notion of
pattern, the many layers of the epidermis …
It took one look at the room
with the objects in it, many of them well crafted, one of them (Sturgess’s
paper piece) beautiful: refined, elegant, I could stick it in the elegant
apartment that I don’t have. Here, in my actual apartment it would join the
general high-class grot!
K’s remark was decisive:
‘Make it yours’. Not only did I take that on board, abandoning the ‘sleeves’
but gradually converting whatever I was to produce into my own history. All art
is biography, I might say – and so it is. But it doesn’t come automatically, as
it were; it’s not auto or self in that sense. But it does come unbidden
Thursday 17 April: The room
as I saw it yesterday is a mess: confusion, a tangle, competing egos. The wall
still dominates – for indeed it is a space in which the wall does dominate.
Sue’s concertina pipe (Sue Callanan, Fixtures and Fittings) has the virtue of
adding width to the space as it ‘worms’ around, ‘knitting’ the room together.
Otherwise it is a mad jumble sale, all competing for attention. Alone much of
the work would be good but with these odd juxtapositions in which there is no
real communication, everyone heading towards their own Godhead!
But isn’t that how it is, the
modern condition, the gaggle-babble insistence of voices all broadcasting on
their own special frequency – and a sense here that everything is enlarged
beyond what it or the room can endure? Too big too big too big, the death of
intimacy – and control. Incomprehensible. And we, those trying to take it all
in, uncomprehending, confused, alarmed even. It’s disconcerting. When I left
the room I said to myself ‘space debris’.
Mostly when I leave a gallery
– certainly the AGNSW – even with its mediocre or fatigued art - I look afresh
at my world, the world, the world out there. All becomes art. In this case it
wasn’t that the outside provided unexpected artistic pleasures – but it came as
a relief. I’d escaped the abattoir, the slaughtered carcases of ideas that,
smaller and less aggressive, might have appealed. What might have thrived as
bilbies became monstrous charolais, a scene from Fassbinder’s In
einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978). In the actual abattoir the bodies of
the slaughtered animals create a sort of seriality – so that they get reduced
into themselves – and into the ‘row’. There is a rhythm: tick tock, the dread
metronome of death rings out, tick tock tick tock. And we are driven to look at
Man Ray’s metronome with a new – if again uncomprehending – eye. For in the
metronomic the repetition is in the action, a sort of reverse pendulum – not in
the object itself. It reduces all time to a simulacrum of itself
Maybe this is true of all
objects
Ah, the room, space. There
are the walls, the floor, the ceilings, the ‘cubicle’ that is created by these
elements. Three surface spaces (look up, look down – but principally look
across) and a space that things fold or disappear into, die almost like tombstones.
This is why I like Sturgess’s work: it is a flue, it sends some vapour up into
the air. All the better that this vap’rous substance is invisible - an
untainted if not entirely safe exudation. (No exhalation is entirely safe!) It
creates a flux in itself, it lives and breathes. It’s stillness is only
apparent. It may even speak – a silent voice but not mute, not by any means. An
extended sigh – or a secret growl
I look for a fourth dimension
– even though I may have found one: the cubicle with its heavy air at the
bottom and its lighter air at the top. For mostly everything seems wedded to
the wall – or the floor. I think if I had my choice again I might just put in a
concrete pipe – one of those Hume pipes, diameter about 4’. The fourth – or is it
a fifth? – dimension is a passage, a moving through: a liminal space, some
might say, a worm hole, a tunnel, the sort of cave speleologists are so fond
of, a tight squeeze which cannot be too cluttered. In this respect Sue’s piping
only has exteriority: we can follow it with the eye but we can’t place
ourselves inside it. We cannot experience the interiority of the pipe, of being
enclosed in that half-exuberant blood vessel …
There is a sort of echo of
this outside: a bathtub in the shop window of an establishment that sells
bathroom items. Just across the road. It’s an elegant shape. Across the bottom
in large regular letters it says PARADIS. Maybe for someone. I treat it as an
anagram: SID A RAP, RAP SAID, PAR SAID, PARSED, PARSLEY, PERHAPS … The shape and
run of associations, the gradual deformation and re-working of the original
impulse which – paradoxically – only emerges later, virtually at the end of the
day. We in fact work backwards, towards the original impulse[1]
We head towards Body Parts …
John von Sturmer
e-mail: johnvon@bigpond.com
[1] From PARADIS
we might have gone down a different route: PARADIS … PARODY … PARODIC… PARDON!
There are threads – and threads