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