Darren Sylvester
God only knows what I'd do without you
Williams Mora Galleries
27 July - 19 August 2000
Melbourne
 
 
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Darren Sylvester, God only knows
what I'd do without you,
lightbox and duratran,
130 x 160 x 20cms

Slotting nicely into William Mora’s slick new gallery, Darren Sylvester’s latest series of digital photographs continue his large, clean and ultra glossy aesthetic. While they feature a variety of fairly ordinary scenes of modern life, they are clearly super-staged, peopled with the kind of sexless automatons you see in magazines. Their very look is unnatural, hyperreal—with any contingency systematically erased from the shoot and through the relentless rub of the PhotoShop clone tool. Such directorial attention to the detail of these dramas leaves us to ponder the ambiguous significance of it all.

Every one of the seven images evokes a similar ambivalence, or generic emotion. This is epitomised by the infantile detachment of a lonely corporate stereotype in a stylish hotel room wearing a crisp white shirt, staring fatuously beyond a laptop. It’s called Everything In Life Depends On Yourself, and lackadaisically plays with viewer sentiment in a Prada-like way, the grammatical violence of its slogan-like title suggesting a whiff of critique of a grossly individualistic ethos of overworking.

God Only Knows What I’d Be Without You (presented as a lightbox) is an extraordinary image featuring two ‘workers’ peering into a car chassis, gripping large robotic clamps as if performing delicate surgery. Sylvester revisits the classic, photogenic site of the factory, but presents an uncannily clean human-machine assemblage. The metal shines, the hydraulic pipes glow, their overalls, gloves, and protective glasses are all brand new, even the smooth black hair of the young worker-models has a sheen. Nothing, in this fantasy of work, has seen manual labour or is sullied by real use.

So what kind of social ‘documentation’ is this? That Sylvester fuses documentary and artifice is clear. But the worlds of work and leisure are also blurred in his vision, and genders appear so conventional as to be unstable. A hermetic portrait of corporate alienation cum boardroom sexual power-play (The Performance Wage Cannot Motivate Me Anymore) reveals the same sense of lack and inertia as a stony-faced woman seated alone in a café (Relationships Begin Calculated and Hopeful). The cold discomfort of all this homogenisation culminates in a barren image, wholly excluding our gaze, of the back of a man’s head glued to a hand-held phone (If Only We Could Do What We Wanted To).

This idea of wish fulfilment is expressed in two other more playful images. One features a side view of a pair of hands gripped to a computer games console (To Help Each Other Physically Is To Help Each Other Emotionally), and another depicts a small tent in a pine forest in early morning light. This is possibly the only image that provokes a desire to ‘be there’, though this weekend escape is full of contrived vacuity, and possible loneliness: one pair of clean white trainers is neatly parked outside the tent.

Sylvester’s images divide people. An anxious Melbourne critic asks “do we really need to be reminded that the mass media can be seductive?”—and takes this work as evidence of the conceit and stupidity of ‘postmodern’ art’s engagement with the “superficial manifestations of consumer capitalism”. But isn’t advertising extremely ‘real’? It’s certainly far more dynamic than many of its critics realise—increasingly rife with ironic detachment—often more sophisticated than what is called Art. The dogmatic critic fails to allow that this shared language designed to elicit and sell dubious emotions might also be expressively employed in art beyond the trope of patronising irony. If Sylvester mimics advertising’s unblemished look, he also takes it somewhere else, starting from the assumption that commodity fetishism has infiltrated our very being. So a short essay in Sylvester’s prospectus-like catalogue, which assures us that the work has nothing to do with advertising, is no better. Of course these images of high cheekboned stereotypes and straight-out-of-the-box consumer technologies are scenes of ideal consumption. Today, where there is desire, there is advertising.

From the somewhat sidelined titles of the work, we might get a sense that Sylvester’s sensibility falls on the side of utopian yearnings and authentic longings, rather than negation and irony. That the works are modern romantic fictions, aspiring to the emotional condition of pop music, is also implied in the short, affectless fictional texts in the accompanying catalogue (which read like Delillo and Ballard put through a Simple Text voice reader). But the titles alone struggle to perform the work of turning each image from a purely aesthetic situation into a social situation. Unlike some of Sylvester’s earlier images which implicated the real spectator dialogically through a textual ‘you’, the discursive layer here is more humorous and occasionally perplexing (Darren, You Got Us Into This. You Get Us Out).

The literalness of Sylvester’s cartoon-like critique of the monotonal banality of middle-class fantasies—captured in expressionless models who we don’t know whether to love or hate—makes his work kind of squeam inducing. His ‘capitalist realism’ is too knowing, perhaps. But the real irony is that we can read his doco-fictions in an other way: against advertising’s usual mode of inciting desire for a commodity, these images seem finally nostalgic—in Susan Stewart’s terms—in their desire for desire.

Daniel Palmer
2000

© The artist and
Images courtesy of William Mora
Galleries, Melbourne

   
   
   
 
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Darren Sylvester, Darren, you got
us into this.
You get us out,
digital print mounted
on aluminium
120 x 120 cms