Kinderart
The Art of David Rosetzky
and Jacinta Schreuder

Danny Huppatz

David Rosetzky, Girl and Boy, First Floor, 1995

Jacinta Schreduer, Make it Hot, First Floor, 1996

In using imagery from popular culture, Rosetzky and Schreuder create art, like memory, that produces difference through perceptual similarity. Theirs is an art of the simulacra in the Deleuzian sense, that is, not a copy of a copy but an art of parallel proportions.¹ Rosetzky and Schreuder's simulations of childhood produce the effects of childhood rather than reproduce the appearances of childhood memories. They engage with the derivation of pleasure from nostalgia, from an object supposedly lost but in fact one that is here with us now.

Swapcards

Lying on my back, on my bed, on the living room floor. Watching the ceiling, the mobile floating in the heat. School yard crazes, holiday projects, odd balls of wool, spent textas and colouring books. Memories of the mundane, secure moments of childhood.²

Sarah Tutton

Rosetzky's show at 1st Floor in August 1995, "The New Optimism" (with Megan Woodward), included two swapcards, Boy and Girl. The installation also included a large mobile, a shag rug called Maverick by Megan Woodward, and a taped therapy session, Reel to Reel, which the audience could listen to through headphones. Boy and Girl feature simple painted illustrations of a boy and girl, each holding a flower, the girl facing us, the boy facing away with his pants drooping down. These colourful cartoon images were copied from children's swapcards of the seventies. The swapcards revel in their retro context - above sits a large colourful mobile, below, a shaggy rug.

The mobile is big (a blown up copy of a Guggenheim giftshop Calder), the swapcards also oversized, their proportions translated. These idealised images of children were created by adults for children: a pretty little boy and girl holding their giant flowers. The viewer's first reaction is intuitive rather than "reasonable" in reaction, a purely visual delight in perceiving the cute kids.

Schreuder further exaggerates this nostalgic vision of childhood in her recent installation Make it Hot.³ Schreuder places her swapcard in the centre of a candyland colour scheme, a girl turning to face us. This girl is even bigger than Rosetzky's, almost lifesized, a glamour portrait of an idealised woman-child.

Swapcards are objects that are collected and traded between children, in this case, trading stereotyped images of themselves. On the one hand, this is how a little girl sees herself as grown up (Schreuder), on the other, this is how we adults would like to remember childhood (Rosetzky).

Both instances of swapcards have a slightly uncomfortable aspect to them: the sexualization of childhood by adults: Schreuder's girl framed as an adult sexualized body, Rosetzky's boy with his pants coming down. Not that these images are sinister in any way, indeed quite the opposite, they portray the innocence of children and their non-sexual understanding of the world. However, it is their adult audience who are placed in the uncomfortable position of (sexualized) voyeur. These are images of beauty derived from popular culture: the pre-pubescent body prevalent in advertising imagery. Rosetzky and Schreuder critique the mass media coding and channelling of desire.

Jacinta Schreuder, Body 'n Bounce, detail, First Floor, 1996

Hairstyles

In her recent show Post-Porn Modernist, Annie Sprinkle, veteran of the American porn industry, stated that the three things a woman needs to be successful in porn movies are attitude, high heels (the higher the better) and plenty of hair (again, the higher the better). A decent wig collection is essential for every porn star's wardrobe. Not only in porn, but in advertising too, the perfect woman has long thick flowing hair.

Schreuder's hairstyles Body and Bounce ⁴ are fashionable coiffures abstracted from their heads. Schreuder's painted "Hair forms" stand in for the living figure of woman. A magnification of an ornamental device without body, these hair fetishes are a fixation on a part. They critique the construction/constriction of feminine beauty by the mass media advertising machine and the fashion industry.

The fetish becomes free-floating in this work. The hairstyles are detached, freed from their bodies. Tessa Dwyer writes that they are "suggestive of fleeting identities, a mobile, perhaps nomadic lifestyle - certainly indicative of a widely felt 'lack' caused by incessant distraction and/or a society that remained constantly in flux."⁵ Advertising imagery creates a lack and then offers to fill that lack with a substitute product, it creates route for desire - there's something missing from your life, you need this. Schreuder analyses the subtle coding of "the look" of womanhood, from both a child's perspective (swapcard) and from a mature adult's (hairstyles).

However, fashion is also about change and transformation: clothing/artifice/fabrication/fantasy/transformation. We are reminded of the little girl of the swapcard, "dressing up", becoming a woman. Schreuder importantly indicates the liberating possibilities of transforming identity, of putting on a different wig, of yet another new look, and another new self.

David Rosetzky, Dumb Bell, 1996

Dumb Bells

For me, beauty is always retreating from one's grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed.⁶

Yukio Mishima.

A particularly masculine transformation of the body is attained by developing muscles, and weightlifting may serve as a parallel to fashionable hairstyling. Weightlifting entails the development of a self that is completely useless, muscles blown up so big as to become functionless. Such a body is designed to be looked at, to be consumed (and gyms are notorious for their mirrored walls). Rosetzky's work, Dumb Bell ⁷ calls to mind the mechanism for developing such a body, the silent steel with which one creates a new identity.

Rosetzky's shiny chrome bell has the potential for noise but sits there quietly. One assumes that a beautiful surface is stupid, as with musclemen, supermodels or children. The shinier it is, the duller of mind (rational intellect) - Dumb Belle. Rosetzky invites us to meditate upon the alluring surface that cannot speak for itself, the object that is created to be consumed.

A bell also serves as a reminder ("that rings a bell"), in this case a mute reminder, a suspended memory. Without speaking, how could a memory reveal itself? Dumb Bell's shiny round panel is a mirrored surface at about eye level. In it, I see an image of myself. Like the bodybuilder's ideal body, which becomes an object of fascination or a mirror of erotic voyeurism, Dumb Bell is artwork as pure surface. There is no point in seeking out hidden depths, existence is no longer inward (the search for essence), but freed of function, outward and exposed. Dumb Bell warns that the human body is not only for seeing but also for being seen. Contrary then, to popular mythology (often associated with supermodels), beauty does not lie hidden within, but lies on the surface. Dumb Bell's ambivalence lies in it's alluring but untouchable surface, for to touch would be to smear it's beauty with greasy fingerprints. With Dumb Bell, beauty seems to be not only unable to speak, but ungraspable. It excites a desire that we are powerless to control, a detour around common sense, beyond the constrictions of rational thought. A desire that threatens to transform me into someone I once was or into someone I might yet be.

Jacinta Schreuder, Lotus Wall Flower, 200 Gertrude Street, 1996

Flowers

In this place there is no hierarchy for the reception of pleasure. It is a field of sensations, each one being equal to another. The invitation is to surrender cynicism and to be "innocent" and 'open', like children. Like flowers. ⁸

Andrew McQualter

The kind of cynicism that McQualter is referring to is all too common in the artworld. As Dave Hickey argues in The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, ⁹ the contemporary distrust of splendid surfaces, by the therapeutic institution, is propped up by a search for essences or hidden depths. This particular hermeneutic approach to art criticism is so widespread that an intuitive or emotional reaction to art seems to be out of the question without a barrage of discourse to defend it. In his essay "Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art", Kenneth E. Silver writes of Andy Warhol's "insistence on our taking art at face value, his insistence that we remain on the surface of things, derived from acute awareness that 'depth', intellectual or pictorial, could all too easily begin to assume the shape of the 'closet', from the depths of which one might never emerge."¹⁰ Both Rosetzky and Schreuder unfold various surfaces in their work like blooming flowers.

If one looks again at the swapcard examples, both depict children not only holding flowers, but surrounded by a field of flowers. The earliest works of Rosetzky's I saw were wax-coated paper cups that had been sliced and splayed into flowers. Rosetzky's flowers in the installation "Fields of Joy" are cups transformed from a functional container to a beautiful open surface. These are flowers that have "come out", they are proliferating and moving across walls. Like Schreuder's hairstyles, they are suggestive of mobile subjectivities; they extend across the walls, around corners, beyond the confiding surfaces of the gallery wall.

David Rosetzky, Mobile, 1995.

Like their children, Rosetzky and Schreuder reveal what is in their hands: a flower. The flower offered to their audience is ambivalent, its beauty somehow flawed or dangerous. But the greatest danger is the act of giving, opening up a previously unknown channel of communication. To give flowers, to give oneself up, to expose oneself. The gift is not so much the object itself but the unfolding and extension of beautiful surfaces.

Endnotes
1. see Gilles Deleuze, "The Simulacrum & Ancient Philosophy" in his The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester & Charles Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990.
2. Sarah Tutton, case study ms. d, exhibition catalogue for David Rosetzky and Megan Woodward, "The New Optimism", 1st Floor, August 1995 (reprinted in A4/95, 1st Floor Publications, 1996, p.32)
3. Jacinta Schreuder, Make it Hot, 1st Floor, April 1996.
4. Schreuder, Body and Bounce, 1st Floor, January 1995 & 200 Gertrude St., August 1995.
5. Tessa Dwyer, Excavations in A4: Jacinta Schreuder, Brett Vallance, Constanze Zikos, exhibition catalogue, 1st Floor, September 1995 (reprinted in A4/95, 1st Floor Publications, 1996, p.37).
6. Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel, trans. John Bester, Grove Press, New York, 1970, p.26.
7. Rosetzky exhibited this work in "Specular Bodies", 1st Floor, January 1996.
8. Andrew McQualter, Fields of Joy, exhibition catalogue for Rosetzky, 1st Floor, August 1994.
9. Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, Art Issues Press, Los Angeles, 1995.
10. Kenneth E. Silver, "Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art", in Russell Ferguson (ed.) Hand- Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955-62, Museum of Contemporary Art Press, Los Angeles, 1992.
11. Schreuder exhibited this work in "Wall Drawings", 200 Gertrude St., August 1995. See GLOBE E , vol.1, no.2, May, 1996
12. On the spreading "theatrical" surface of decoration, see ibid.