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Ostrow: Its a Beautiful Day Jonathan Nichols |
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 Deborah
Ostrow, animated Courtesy of |
Its a beautiful day 1 Deborah Ostrow is a Melbourne installation and video artist who has become known for working with ordinary circumstances and exploring popular life styles. She seeks an intimate proximity with her subjects and to this end presents us with the residents and places of her own social world. Ostrow's strategy is 'semi-confessional'. It displays elements of lived experiences and special knowledge with a photographic-like rhetoric that infers a personal stake in the substance of the things she chooses to show us. The presentation mode Ostrow uses is always forthright; concerned with access and proximity, directed toward information (education and learning) rather than expressive gestures. There are rarely exalted moments that might draw the audience away from the work's easily accessible and purposefully uncomplicated processes. It is an installation strategy which locates the artist as an unusual social documentary maker or producer of public information - a type of exotic public provider. Lifestyle There's an experimental aestheticism rooted in Ostrow's examination of lifestyles. Teahouse, exhibited at 200 Gertrude Street in 1995 seems to disclose a kind of 'wanderlust' for life in its simplest sense and involves a desperate but nevertheless affirming will. It is possible to trace this feeling for aesthetic vitalism back to the fringes of Store 5 in Melbourne during the early 1990s. Ostrow, along with a few other artists who exhibited with Store 5, reacted against the then dominant tendency toward a painterly expression of subjectivity, while adhering to some of the better philosophical basics of artistic subjectification. Ostrow's 'lifestyle studies' has taken her outside the immediate confines of the art scene and has involved more prosaic forms of expression as well as her own private languages. Ostrow installations have centred around Vietnamese restaurants in Thy Thy from 1995 and in Style Elba, brothel interiors. An early example of this externalising behaviour can be marked in Flowers, exhibited at the Monash University Gallery in 1995, where Ostrow engaged a florist to place freshly cut flowers in the gallery once a week throughout the duration of the show. As a personal display of reverence it was uncommon only because of its public setting. On one level, the phenomenal qualities of the flowers were immediately available to the audience in the form of colours and smells. At the same time, however, there was a private level, shrouded in personal feelings and knowledge; an order of meaning that can only by suggested and not conclusively documented. As a way of emphasising the presence or pressure of this private world in her art works, Ostrow often employs people of other professions to construct her work. The physical or phenomenal "gestures" of the work come from the hands of florists or musicians carefully displacing the artist's motives by one degree. An important part of Ostrow's project is her preparedness to project her own psychology in these life studies. This not only involves Ostrow's private psychology but her "perspective" as an artist and the way she orients herself to the world at any one point in time. This willingness to project ultimately confers ambiguous representative codes in the work. This stands at odds with our age of authorial denial to the extent that it affirms art's capacity to interpret subjectivity at all. In this way Ostrow's documentary practice withdraws from notions of "realism". Ostrow's installations operate at the convergence where the viewer's expectation for information slides into a social experiment with points-of-view. There is a lighter, more popular side to all this. As a cheeky provocateur, Ostrow brings playfulness to bear on important political issues, often recording details from the lives of women or "multicultural" Australians. In Style Elba, exhibited at Storey Hall Gallery in 1996, Ostrow blurs and extends her own sense of the "divine comedy" to include Franco Cozzo's furnishing assemblages, then substitutes this for the divine modernism of boy-architects Ashton Raggatt McDougall, 2. With this humour Ostrow seriously maps the plight of contemporary prophets: the fashion designers, architects, tarot readers, peddlers of drugs, and psychologists; the quintessential seers of our contemporary culture who exhort the power of semi-unconscious healing and subliminal self-help. This is not about a cure for the body, as much as a yearning to touch the force that runs through all beings. In Ostrow's work there is experimental testing of the equivalence between beings, but the joke (if there is one) is that seeking inner balance or a new tranquillity in these times is probably best pursued in the artifice of artistic forms. Melissa McMahon has recently published two texts which help draw out Ostrow's position. In the first, McMahon explains her reading of Kant by contrasting him with Walter Benjamin: "What the modern (non-) artwork seems most to lack in Benjamin's eyes is the ability to provide an image". Benjamin's notion of the "image" is neither realist nor non-representative, "but about the role of the aesthetic as a synthesiser of values, relations and forces. To provide an image is to provide a point of reflection, identification and orientation for the subject in relation to its community and to the world ... where it gives form."3 In McMahon's reading, Kant offers a more radical conception of artistic beauty, as something singular and without an image; something that forces the subject to reinvent itself in the aesthetic encounter. The second of McMahon's texts is a translation of an intimate note written by Gilles Deleuze to Michael Foucault in 1977. Deleuze confides to his friend that he "cannot give any positive value to pleasure" for it seems to be a "means for a person or a subject to 'find themselves again' in a process that (otherwise) overwhelms them. It is a re-territorialisation." 4 What draws these texts together is the problem of how to link the singularity of aesthetic experience (which is essentially subjective), with Deleuze's call to go beyond subjectivity; to go beyond organising the self around a principle of unity or interiority (be it a transcendent essence or an underlying ideology). McMahon's Kantian criticism of Benjamin is concerned with conceptualising the aesthetic act as something which is individual, but doesn't take place under an image of the subject. Similarly, Deleuze's complaint with Foucault is that the concept of "pleasure" gives rise to authorisation (a place for the author/subject). In the 1970s, at the time when Deleuze wrote his remarks to Foucault, this was the worst kind of revisionism. One of the dilemmas for artists over the last thirty years has been how to deal with the tendency in art criticism and new critical languages to constantly frame their discussions around the appropriateness of authorial gestures. This leaves art in a fairly rudimentary state; given that artists have traditionally sought some sort of "sovereignty" or strength in singularity.5 Nevertheless, this dilemma continues to dominate criticism of art practices and it is the struggle with this dilemma which is central to the obtuse documentary gestures in Ostrow's practice. Speed and singularity In conversation, Ostrow has explained how her relationship to the work changes once it's finished. In these conversations she isolated the points at which she was cut off from the work's prior state and how she began to disregard each show. There was a speedy tempo in Ostrow's talk. She used words like "fast . . . closer . . . stopping . . . hurry"6 to identify a particular "flatness" in her work. It was as though this "flatness" or "depthlessness" represented a particular way of viewing; it corresponded to simultaneously holding a number of different modes of seeing and times of viewing. What she was saying about "how one sees" related as much to the "speed" of her talking. This "flatness" is an instrumental "flatness" that is watchful and avoids overstatement. It is implicated in the way her work makes the viewer step back. But this is not to distance the viewer because Ostrow sends her work out alone and complete and the audience is provoked into participating in their environmental singularity. Claire Ostrow's photographs of the Daily Planet brothel formed part of the installation Style Elba. There are eight images of the brothel although only five interiors made it into Style Elba. Another shows Claire, a prostitute, who is on a bed acting out various poses for the camera. The room is dark and Ostrow emphasises the bleaching effect of the flash. Ostrow is never seen and for all their blandness, there is a phenomenological argument about the embodied world. In this angled light, amidst these physical relationships and in this atmosphere of attenuated sexuality is an immanence. Endnotes © The artist and |
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Ostrow, Where to from |
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Ostrow, Style Elba, |
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Ostrow, Teahouse, |
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