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Alive
and Unravelled |
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Shaun Kirby, The
Kundmanngasse |
Shaun Kirby is a
Melbourne-based artist who works with found objects,
images, textual fragments, and materials sourced from
commercial outlets such as fabric and novelty shops and
hardware and department stores. His work is
uncompromisingly oblique, formally complex, materially
layered, and dense with left-of-field cultural references
and linguistic associations. Recent pieces appear as extended, lapidary meditations upon 'selfhood' as formed within and by both the experience of heterogeneous social realities and the operations of language. Since 1994, Kirby has exhibited in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney; this year with two solo shows: International Headache Congress, at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and What Was He There: What Actually Happened, at Melbourne's Stripp Gallery, as well as participating in the exhibitions Ruins in Reverse (Storey Hall RMIT, 1996), White Hysteria (Stripp, 1996), and Shape Shift (ACCA, 1997). |
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| JB: | Shaun, you moved to Melbourne in 1995 and you've had a number of shows both here and elsewhere since then - what's the difference between showing your work here and, say, in Adelaide? | ||
Shaun Kirby, Next to
Nothing, |
SK: | It's read quite differently - there's no history or 'memory' here of my earlier works. In Adelaide there's almost a kind of inattention displayed to the work itself - after a while you feel it's seen as just another Shaun Kirby exhibition, another outing. Some people are more engaged and over time get a sense of the themes being laid down and explored but there's this numbing effect where you become a kind of institutional figure. Whereas the last thing Melbourne needs is another artist, let alone an Adelaide artist! There's no reason here to engage with the work other than on its merits, so it's quite challenging. The ACCA show (International Headache Congress) has been responded to very positively and that enthuses me - there's a sense not only of a new audience engaging with the work but of me engaging anew with the work - although there's also that reflexive thing of asking myself whether I'm settling into an easy methodology that's not critical or expansive enough. | |
| JB: | I want to ask you about your formal or aesthetic strategies. Earlier works of yours I've seen appeared to display a much more considered and controlled approach to aesthetic form, whereas recent work seems to signal a conscious shift away from that - a kind of attempt to short circuit your own aesthetic preferences. I'm thinking particularly of the piece in the ACCA show, the giant lath construction covered with fabric printed with stick figures and the words "Jockey or Nothing". | ||
Shaun Kirby, Next to
Nothing, |
SK: | Yes. One of the factors there has to do with my thinking about the gallery as a performative site . . . and thinking about public performances of national identity such as world fairs, cultural and trade fairs, and so forth. I was looking at designs for demountable displays and that lath structure came from a very beautiful European 1950's display stand - a series of interlocking cubes made out of aluminium tubes with infill of stretch fabric. Initially I wanted to reproduce that - with this material I had - as an analogue for an understanding of the unconscious and how it is structured as a restless sort of covering over. But I also wanted to use Kristeva's notion of the chora - seeing the gallery as a choric space - formless and unstructured. It occurred to me that if I just remade the structure, its geometry would match that of the gallery - so the obvious thing was to make a provisional, coarse, mad structure. But there is a logic there. | |
JB: |
There is almost an element of caricature about it. | ||
| SK: | There's definitely an element of parody. But there's also a kind of lineage in the work. I'd like some day to provide some kind of context for the last ten or twelve years' work - maybe a publication - to show the progression. There are apparent jumps at certain points - like with the Cultic Gloss show - but they're really not such major shifts. In fact it's all the same work - just different models. | ||
JB: |
This sign in your living room: "Labour Bridging Nothing/The Hole That Holds Together/A Smell Hides A Stink" - did that begin from a pre-existing or 'found' verbal construction? | ||
SK: |
Not exactly. It relates to notions of the unconscious - this idea of an economy of holes - of the unconscious as structured around absences or as maintaining its consistency on the basis of some kind of non-knowledge. Labour Bridging Nothing speaks about that - The Hole That Holds Together also speaks to that. A Smell Hides A Stink comes from a fifteenth-century tract on hygiene, Sir John Harrington's Metamorphosis of Jakes: a Cloacian Satire - a jakes being a colloquialism for toilet. It's really an overlay of stuff. | ||
JB: |
The sign is a bit of a decoy though, isn't it? This conjunction of Labour Bridging Nothing is like a political slogan and the form of the piece itself is like a political poster or banner but really none of those underlying considerations or references you've mentioned are easily deciphered. | ||
SK: |
The meaning occurs - and this sounds like familiar jargon but it's one way of articulating it - in the spaces between things. Is it Gregory Ulmer who talks about an "offset overlay of semantic fields"? The idea that the meaning emerges as a moiré pattern from that movement between fields. | ||
JB: |
But how do you select from those semantic fields - because all phenomena belong in or are registered across them - how do you make choices? | ||
SK: |
Through my own obsessions or drives. Each project is different, but I guess there is a consistent notion of working with the architectural space the work is going to be seen in. | ||
JB: |
Does it need then to begin with the exhibition opportunity - would nothing happen otherwise? | ||
SK: |
I often wonder myself . . . no, the work would happen but it's focused in a particular way by the venue, so I'd still think and make but the work could take any number of forms. | ||
JB: |
Why is that? This is maybe asking you to go through your back pages - but why is it important that it be seen in relation to a particular space? | ||
SK: |
I suppose because I've always seen the gallery as a performative site. There's a particular way one encounters artworks that is conditioned by the architecture: the way you enter the space, the way you reconnoitre the works, the general "atmospherics", the lighting - all the general "stuff" that attaches. It's there, whether you choose to consciously work with it or not. To see work at the National Gallery or at Karyn Lovegrove's, those are two entirely different scenarios. | ||
JB: |
But it seems to me you could equally well argue that they are absolutely alike in being generic - as performative sites - that they are similar in kind and anyway that people go in there to look at works of art, not to look at the architecture. But when you talk about their differences I take it you mean on a material level, or are you talking about some sort of "character"? | ||
SK: |
I think there are certain ideological factors that maybe are specific to the National Gallery that are different to those that attach to Karyn Lovegrove - or maybe even more so to somewhere say like First Floor than the National Gallery - there's a certain politics attached to each. | ||
JB: |
And they're not equivalent? | ||
SK: |
They are not equivalent but they are part of an interlinked phenomenon in visual art practice. | ||
JB: |
So the installation you did at Miss Gladys Sym Choon Gallery in Adelaide - which is a gallery upstairs from a clothes shop carrying the . . . what's the designer's name? | ||
SK: |
Razak | ||
JB: |
Yeah, the Razak fashion line. That seemed to me very much one of the threads you were developing in the works presented - that they came out of your response to the site. The fact the shop was a fashion outlet, the position of the shop in a retail street. The way people came into the gallery through the shop then upstairs, the clothes worn by the models serving the drinks, and so on. | ||
Shaun Kirby, Labour
Bridging Nothing, |
SK: |
Yes . . . like I said, the work would have happened regardless, but the site provides a kind of "lens" to focus it in particular ways. But that work was the beginning of a more thorough investigation of anthropological and psychoanalytic concerns to do with subject formation. And the site is one of dressing up - it's about the public performance of your own subjectivity. Choosing your clothes is like choosing in some way to show how you open out to the social. It's a matter of working between and around these things. I'm not sure quite how that happens - I'll be making work just enjoying the rub between different images, phenomena, words - doing what I do - then I'll think - where is this to be? What is the public face of this work? The gallery as a consideration enters at a secondary stage to "formalise" the work, but the work itself comes from the daily activity of moving around the world - reading - watching movies. It's informed by particular psychosexual drives but also it grows out of a sense of puzzlement over things. | |
JB: |
What do you mean by psychosexual? | ||
SK: |
I'm talking about film directors like . . . | ||
JB: |
David Lynch? | ||
SK: |
Perhaps, but his work is becoming repetitive . . . increasingly full of "Lynchisms". Someone more complex is Stanley Kubrick - from early films like Killers Kiss and Paths of Glory to Full Metal Jacket. It's something about the quality of light - a cold, brittle clarity. The films often seem bathed in a sort of fatigue-inducing glare, and in a peculiar way it suggests the presence of Kubrick in the film. | ||
JB: |
How do you relate this quality of light to the psychosexual? | ||
Shaun Kirby, Labour
Bridging Nothing, |
SK: |
It's to do with relations between people - a sense of tension or stress, an awkwardness. The Shining is a good example - where you have this slow psychological dissolution of the character played by Jack Nicholson mirrored by his unravelling relationship with his partner. But then, and most interestingly, you have this uncanny site - the deserted hotel during mid-winter. The whole thing is quite chilling but there are none of the tricks of high drama horror film - no one jumps out from behind a bush. One of the most terrifying things is when his son is riding a trike through the corridors of the hotel - with the camera following a foot or so off the ground. All you hear is the sound of these big plastic wheels -this on/off sound as the wheels go over the edge of the carpet onto the polished wooden floors - round and round. And the constant looming of the corner as the camera tunnels through the architecture of the hotel. | |
JB: |
How do you use this insight into Kubrick's films? | ||
SK: |
I don't. It comes down to this process of work emerging out of multiple overlays of "semantic fields". I recognise in Stanley Kubrick's films qualities that . . . I don't want to reproduce them but I'd like my work to speak about them. It's not about mystery - it's about the projection of a particular psychology. | ||
JB: |
You talked about mystery earlier today - about how that was less important to you than the resistance of the works to interpretation. Yet "resistance to interpretation" is - maybe not exactly a theoretical construct - but I'm just wondering why it's OK to talk about "resistance to interpretation" but not about mystery these days? | ||
SK: |
I think mystery maybe has suggestions of a metaphysical or religious dimension which make me uncomfortable. | ||
JB: |
Surrealism seems to me slightly unfashionable now partly because of its susceptibility to mystery - yet I identify many contemporary artists as deeply influenced or informed by it - and I guess I see a lot of things in common between your work and Surrealism, maybe even with Symbolism. Do you accept that? | ||
SK: |
I'm not sure I do. Maybe the difference is that I'm interested not only in the process of subject formation itself but in how it opens out to the social - to me Surrealist work is perhaps not so aware of its own constructedness, more driven by a belief in primary processes. But anyway it was then - I'm not and I can't be a Surrealist. | ||
JB: |
No, I'm just trying to describe some aspect of the work I think is there - it seems to me your work has a sort of visual metaphoric dimension, like the conjunction - in the piece in the ACCA show for example - of a light on a bed of green foam rubber, with an elongated plastic nose lying beside it. That's not just a matter of materiality, or of a working over of materials or references - the transformation is of the order of the surreal. And it seems to me your practice in this is quite distinct in many ways from other local art practice. | ||
Shaun Kirby, Home,
from The International |
SK: |
That work operates on a number of levels. One is - and it's one I'm less interested in but perhaps is the more easily articulated - the notion of story-telling, within a very strict psychoanalytic frame. Analysis as a process of story telling or gossip - the Pinnochio nose and couch in this case. But there's also a reference to a psychic exhaustion that's perhaps more personal - a puzzling through of the process of what it is to make art - why do it? There's an honest acknowledgment of my own frustration, exhaustion and inabilities. In that same work there's also a kind of public critique which references psychoanalysis as an institutional form - which sees the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art or the Experimental Art Foundation as parts of the maintenance system for institutional art practice. The work references - playfully I hope! - psychoanalysis - yet it's also intentionally resistant as institutional critique. There are a number of registers operating - there's on the one hand an obvious slapstick quality, like a bald joke, but there's also a critical engagement with particular issues in contemporary practice. | |
JB: |
Such as? | ||
SK: |
I guess I'm thinking particularly about psychoanalytic theory and its recent positioning as a major force within contemporary art practice - post Lacan. | ||
JB: |
You mean in terms of its influence as a pull toward writing and theorising about art rather than the actual making of it? | ||
Shaun Kirby, Rathaus,
from The |
SK: |
Yes. Headache Congress came about through my trying to read a particularly difficult text - reading it again and again and trying to understand it and then picking up a pen that actually was a souvenir from an international congress on headaches. Those two things colliding made me laugh. I was already thinking of an exhibition as being a congress of sorts - a coming together (and there's a sexual dimension to that too) in public in a display of subjectivity. There's a connection to the bad joke in a lot of this work - in a strictly Freudian sense - you know, big noses and dicks. There's an acknowledgment of that as public symptom but also an exploration of it as the material of my own construction. I'm a fascinated agnostic in terms of psychoanalytic theory and I guess I'm working through it fairly late in the piece because for me it has seemed such an oppressive, totalising force. | |
JB: |
Yet you've made this one of the themes you've set out to explore in your recent work for your postgraduate studies. Has that been useful? | ||
SK: |
It's forced me to read in a more organised way and it's formalised a certain understanding of my way of working. It's given me more confidence in believing this is not an onanistic exercise. | ||
JB: |
I'm curious in this light about your response to the structure I proposed for the interpretation of your work in the essay I wrote for your exhibition International Headache Congress. | ||
SK: |
I thought it was very funny - I recognised in it a similar dark, cynical intensity in its exploration of the impulse to deflate the self. And there was that same overlay of literary and philosophical references. | ||
JB: |
For some of us the self is an easy target, but are you concerned the essay might have suggested your works to be overly "literary"? | ||
SK: |
No, I think the work is broader - more obviously jokier - though it occasionally concerns me that people might find it more amusing than troubling. There should be a degree of opacity and resistance which goes beyond humour - a perversity about it - a darker dimension. | ||
JB: |
So the conjunction of the pens and the . . .? | ||
SK: |
French mop. | ||
JB: |
Yeah, there's a real perversity about that piece - by the way it's analogous in form to the iconic Surrealist conjunction of what is it? - a something and an umbrella on an ironing board. | ||
SK: |
The fact it's called a French mop is
more important - it's a device for institutional
maintenance. It's also a reference to French theory which
I see as being used to maintain or service an
institutional rhetoric. That stuff to me has become part
of the maintenance of a system rather than an opening of
things to new possibilities. As a teacher you hear so
much of this terminology fed back, yet you know the work
is more interesting, more perverse than students want to
believe. They want theory attached. There's something
much more - unspeakably - complex about art that eludes
theoretical justification. John Barbour © Photo: Alan
Cruickshank |
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