Suzanne Treister

KITSCH 'N SHRINK

Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide


6 - 27 November, 1996


Suzanne Treister

Kitchen dresser, oil on canvas,
213.0 x 168.0 cm, 1996.

Suzanne Treister

Entering the kitchen in reverse II, oil on canvas, 168.0 x 213.0 cm, 1996

Central to Suzanne Treister's multi-media installation, Kitsch 'n Shrink are a sequence of large paintings. Overall Treister’s works are realised in photomedia, text, oil painting and computer generated work. With titles such as Entering the kitchen from afar and Standing on the wall looking down onto the kitchen floor of the castle the set of sumptuously rendered, wet-on-wet oils re-writes the baroque interior of King Ludwig's Bavarian castle, the Königsschoß Neuschwanstein, as a narrative of postmodernism.

The interior architecture of Ludwig's study is renovated conceptually as a semiotic chain-mail of cultural narratives woven together through a cross-referencing series of linguistic and visual puns. The representational space, the conceptual interface might be read as hypertextually linking multitudinous sets of iconographies and contesting discourses. The spectator is bombarded by a seemingly endless stream of all too familiar cultural narratives - folkloric, fairytale, gothic, historical, mythological, technocultural, filmic, kitsch, sexual - rhizomatically connected through a series of visual and linguistic gags. In this spectatorial space, this monumental feat of pastiche, time could be said to have been collapsed into the present. The spectator might be caught in a bricolaged nightmare where unravelling any of the narrative threads and representational motifs in this metaphor of cyberspace becomes a game of severe commitment - or of chance.

Suzanne Treister

Entering the kitchen in reverse, oil on canvas, 168 x 213 cm, 1996

In chess 'to castle' is to move the king two squares sideways and place the nearer rook (same as castle) on the square passed over by the king. If the King is passed over (dead) who or what might be said to inhabit the vacated schloss? In Treister's hyperreal vision the castle could be said to be haunted by the promiscuity of (imaginary) proletarian pleasure - a Hammer horror narrative of gothic intrigue, conflict, desires and anxieties. The fortified castle, read as an iconic representation of a model of eurocentric medieval feudalism and/or anglocentric colonial imperialism (as you wish) morphs, painterly fashion, into a multiply penetrated site of popular postmodern pleasures (cherry topped Black Forrest cake, a miniature ice palace, s/m fetish paraphernalia, portraits of David Bowie as Aladdin Sane).
Suzanne Treister

Entering the kitchen from afar, oil on canvas, 213.0 x 168.0 cm, 1996.

The writing on the wall - doughnut (linguistically) morphs into salami - figures the fantasmic site/scenario for both the disintegration of the King's heritage and the points of entry for narratives of science, history, popular culture, and 'perverse' sexuality. This set of viscerally painted images frame a virtually real space in which the castle study/kitchen walls are made of gruyere - shot through with holes; Jack Nicholson as the Joker from Batman replaces the dynastic lineage portraits of feudal robber-barons; and a splendidly detailed maquette of the castle (King Ludwig's of Bavaria) is painted to resemble jello dildos. Within this generative matrix - this hypertextual chora - Christo-wrapped objects (a maquette of the Reichstag, a display plate on a dresser) and a Daliesque jewel- studded omelette sliding relentlessly towards the kitsch'n floor suddenly appear in the object saturated room. A heavily curtained doorway promises a possible exit, coded in silver studs on leather, via the 'scenic route.'

As Richard Grayson might say, the monarch(y) as a rule(r), appears to have either been buggered or to have buggered off in Treister's work. As with any cyberspatial tourist paradise and/or site of 'paranoid nostalgia' one enters this metaphorical castle at one's peril.

Jyanni Steffensen
1996