Tolarno
Galleries, |
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Rose
Nolan's |
 Nolan white trash work. Cardboard, glue. staples, tubing & motor cycle helmet box, 1996 |
In the exhibition Constructions
+ Banners, at Tolarno Galleries, three distinct
sections of work were installed by Rose Nolan in the
different spaces afforded by the gallery: a series of
large white fabric banners, bearing an appliqued text; a
series of small unadorned cardboard constructions; and a
singular red flag, isolated in the third space. While an
art practice such as Nolan's brings with it the necessary
discourse of art history it also contains certain hybrid
applications which might best be discussed in terms of
poetics. As with the construction of a poetic form, these
works are fine, enigmatic, precise and serve to condense
aspects of visual history in order to appraise and to
propose a singular, even teleological, perspective. A scene of silence and a place of noise: enlarged letters taken from the Russian Cryllic alphabet, somehow personal and yet anonymous; a white on white display balanced by the imprint of a red pigment, neutral yet unhesitatingly subjective, forming a site of proclamation without any distinction being demanded between speech and writing. These composite works, as with political banners, affected a simulated shout or an echo - heard, spoken, eventually silent, absorbed by a cardboard cone, a curve resembling an ear or the delicate outline of a word. |
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Limp white trash work. String, glue, staples with issey miyake box, 1995-6
Copied white trash work. Cardboard, glue, staples and tubing, 1995 |
White fabric banners proclaim
events of the everyday in a foreign language. A series,
punctuated and held together by a single red flag,
oscillate between the demands of subjectivity and the
impact of a revolution within the politic of identity
formation, giving rise to a poetics of ordonnance that is
overtly transparent, sheer, light. And the simple
utilitarian cardboard, a recycled material, making up a
series of scaled down constructions - cones, spheres,
trumpets, supported or fanned out - resembling certain
forms found in early Russian constructivist works. The
formal elements, of both the flags and the constructions,
serve to displace the literal text or image and bring in
references to minimalist sculpture and painting. Rose Nolan has acknowledged the circularity of the various modalities within her existing body of work, but the enigma of what it is that circulates and transcribes a revolution through a pathway that is now red, now white, now textual and now sculptural, remains a curious feature of the work. Helene Cixous, referring to the process of writing, proposes a view worthy of reflection in the context of this exhibition: "Writing is good, it's what never ends. The simplest, most secure other circulates inside me. Like blood; there's no lack of it. It can be impoverished. But you can manufacture it and replenish it."1 Nolan, like Cixous, affirms a process replayed like a linguistic code, and an investment which seeks to assert a place for an art practice which relies on materials and configurations that have been used many times - replenishable. It is significant that the banners, bearing the Russian text, are scaled up, over-blown or enlarged, and the constructions, made up of an indelicate matter, are scaled down. This might be described as a specific strategy by which the genealogy of the early Russian avant- garde is acknowledged and yet broken up into fragments made alternatively larger (where it refers to the singular and the local context) and smaller (where it refers to a particular period of art history), not so much to destabilise or to undermine but to create a different schema, a schema that is poetic and political. In a similar manner, the alteration in scale of the cardboard constructions serves to liberate the formal elements from a fixed relation to a period of art history. As a result, the constructions become a type of miniature or marquette, almost toy-like, introducing a certain liberty of gesture described by Nolan as being both "luxurious" and "playful". The artist, through this teleological aspect of her investigation, "shrinks" the historical components with an almost surgical precision and simultaneously traces the origin of the design elements while asserting her authority over them. She subjects them to her own speculative scrutiny. |
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A flying work. Cardboard, glue, staples and plastic tubing, 1995 |
The constructions, using the
neutral material of an art povera (raw, pulped
card, roughly glued and yet finely moulded) can be read
in terms of an over-used linguistic matter which has been
reconfigured. Nevertheless, Nolan, having minimized the
aesthetic impact of an essentially utopian mode, imparts
significant aesthetic goals of her own through the
delicate and finely wrought manufacture. But what of the choice of a foreign alphabet; a white text heralding a mother tongue, incorporating the language of an unfamiliar motherland? What is the relation between the choice of white and the use of text? In the catalogue to the exhibition an interview with the artist, conducted by Sandra Bridie, gives an account of the narrative behind the use of the Russian text. The artist, living in a Russian neighbourhood of Melbourne, followed the Russian language announcements placed in a shop window celebrating the birth of a child. This initial announcement, followed by a dialogue on the life, activities and sayings of the child named Natasha, became the title of the catalogue - IT'S A GIRL!. Taking up another of Cixous' statements on writing here: "I was raised on the milk of words", we are brought into a world where language is cast as opaque, fluid and yet signifiable, already bearing a relation to the maternal.2 In Nolan's representation, the text by virtue of an opalescent sheen achieves a certain oblique quality which adds to the minimal affect, as if being already overdetermined. This extraction or reduction, this loss of colour or addition of matter, eliding the distinction between text and ground, refers the text back to a materiality, back to the ground on which it rests or is attached. |
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Skylarking trash work. White paper, glue, staples and ukelele box, 1996 |
The significance of the choice
of white (fabric) also lies in the revolutionary function
that allows a cutting way of the old and the proposition
of a new perspective; whole sheets of nothing, white
flags, blank spaces, held by the corners or folded like a
new page on which to proclaim a point of view (a singular
narrative) or to rework a body of visual art. This is
not, however, to deny the acculturation of the subject,
nor the accumulation of cultural matter, but instead
privilege a process whereby certain overdetermined
elements are bleached out to create a surface that is
minimally marked. Yet, in its very materiality, it
contains the chimera of a former history. The addition of text to the works strengthens this claim in a singularly poetic mode. The writer Edmund Jabes, in an interview with the American author Paul Auster, remarked that our "reading takes place in the very whiteness between the words, for this whiteness reminds us of the much greater space in which a word evolves." 3 These spatial or architectural dimensions allow for multiple associations, for the palpable body of the word used in everyday phrases, for the space where a creative response might be differentiated. The single work which brings the two larger components together is described by the artist as "a red and white banner which has what looks like a back-to-front R on it, which is actually the Russian character for 'I'. It was a nice play on my initial R. Making it a red and white banner was to give a hint to the political banners it related to." 4 |
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A fancy white trash work.Cardboard, vase, glue, staples, tubing and slide boxes, 1995 |
This is a pivotal work. While
the composite design elements and ideas at work in the
installation are defined, here the minimal becomes the
counterpoint to the excessive. Thus the contributing
element of art history is reduced and the configuration
of identity is expanded. The impact of acculturation is
contracted, and the drama of subjectivity enlarged. In
this one work the poetic and revolutionary strategies are
realized. The red pigment, seemingly confined within the
space of the flag, threatens to seep out, to radiate and
to splash. It is pigment and fabric at the same time. And
the precise and incomparable white letter attests to the
theoretical revolution which has taken place within the
politics of identity and subjectivity. It proclaims and
poses the primary question so well articulated in the
poetics of Cixous: "But if I wrote 'I', who would I
be?"5 Brenda Ludeman Endnotes
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