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Darren
Sylvester, God only knows
what I'd do without you,
lightbox and duratran,
130 x 160 x 20cms
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Slotting nicely
into William Moras slick new gallery, Darren
Sylvesters 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, hyperrealwith 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. Its 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 Id 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 mans 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.
Sylvesters 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
arts engagement with the superficial
manifestations of consumer capitalism. But
isnt advertising extremely real?
Its certainly far more dynamic than many of its
critics realiseincreasingly rife with ironic
detachmentoften 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 advertisings 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 Sylvesters 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 Sylvesters 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
Sylvesters 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 Sylvesters cartoon-like
critique of the monotonal banality of middle-class
fantasiescaptured in expressionless models who we
dont know whether to love or hatemakes 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 advertisings usual mode of inciting desire
for a commodity, these images seem finally
nostalgicin Susan Stewarts termsin
their desire for desire.
Daniel Palmer
2000
© The artist and
Images courtesy of William Mora
Galleries, Melbourne
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