Hauler Me
John Meade
Sutton Gallery
12 June - 7 July, 1999
Melbourne
 
 
loading . . .

John Meade, Hauler me, Nova jet
print, canvas on aluminium,
200 x 220 cm 1999

John Meade once trained as a window dresser and often employs the seductive techniques of that trade in his art practice. The enchanting rhythms of his kinetic installations, the playful enigma of his abstracted forms, and his use of dramatic lighting all appeal to the economy of window shopping, or, as the French say, "window licking" [léche-vitrines]. His Popish sculptures invite the eye to casually slide across their sensuous surfaces like a flaneur running his tongue over shop windows.

But it would be misleading to characterise Meade's work as flanerie. In Foucault's reading of Baudelaire, he marks out a distinction between the flaneur and the dandy. While the flaneur is content to wander through the arcades with his eyes wide open, taking delight in all manner of fleeting curiosity, the dandy searches for something singular that will give him reason to rub his eyes with astonishment. The dandy is the true man of modernity because he does more than linger on the fluctuating fashions of a world in transition. Instead, he seeks things that will excite the imagination and transfigure reality.

Like the dandy, Meade's aestheticism is directed toward transfiguration rather than frivolous flux. One of the ways that he makes this agenda evident is by referencing sport and other forms of physical re-creation. In past work he has evoked activities such as dancing, quoits, acrobatics and various children's games to develop a sense of corporeal metamorphosis. In his recent exhibition, Hauler Me, Meade employs the trope of rock climbing.

There are two dimensions to this show. On the one hand, Meade has taken several moulded climbing holds and manufactured them on a larger scale. Although the reference to indoor rock climbing is fairly clear, these forms could be identified as domestic Henry Moore sculptures or props from the latest Fintstones movie. Meade has hung a cluster of these fibreglass bulges together, in a vaguely floral arrangement, and lit them with acute spotlights which throw loopy shadows across the wall.

The second component of the show is a photograph of an atrium in a corporate office building. Looking up from the centre of the monumental light well, the architectural interior begins to look like an Op Art painting of concentric squares. Mead has reproduced this image as two large scale ink jet images, which face each other on opposite walls of the small space at Sutton Gallery. And in the main space (where the climbing holds are clustered) Meade has projected a slide of the atrium down onto the floor of the gallery from the rafters.

The climbing holds and the atrium photographs work together in both figurative and formal ways. At a figurative level, the moulded forms are tools for scaling territory that is alien to human anatomy. They are prosthetics for extending human capabilities. And, given the exaggerated size of these foot and finger holds, they seem to offer themselves to a superhuman race; a people of the future. The photographs compliment this with their view of an engineered cliff face that a "human fly" might attempt to climb. Even though this is a man-made environment, which is surmounted by humans every day, Meade's point of view inflects it with sublime, science-fiction proportions.

At a formal level, the climbing holds and the atrium photographs affect a modulation between intimacy and vertigo. The bulging, quasi-organic forms emerge from the dramatic lighting like embryonic growths. Their rounded contours and clustered configuration suggest intimate relations of formative development. In contrast to this, the atrium photographs evoke a void of unsettling proportions. The floor projection opens up dizzy dimension below us, while the two ink jet images suck space out toward intangible horizon lines.

Hauler Me is an environment for aesthetical transfiguration. Like Baudelaire's men of modernity, Meade tries to imagine life other than it is, and take the human form as an object for sensual elaboration. Against the vertiginous background of a world in continual flux, he seeks out singularities that might function as stepping stones to different modes of existence.

Stephen O'Connell
1999

© The artists and
Courtesy of Sutton Gallery
Melbourne and Ballas
Gallery Brisbane

   
  loading  . . .

John Meade, installation view, Hold,
carved styrofoam,
polyurethane/sand surface,
enamel paint 200 x 100 x 650
cm & Hauler me
(as above),1999