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| Maureen
Burns: Residence Shane Breynard |
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Maureen Burns, between
words & things, |
Walter Benjamin
The past fifteen years have seen a renewed interest in Minimal art among contemporary artists and art writers. Because Minimal art adopted a similar aesthetic to modern gallery display it has been a primary influence on much contemporary installation art. Minimalism's critical effectiveness was, however, compromised through its adherence to an avant-garde rhetoric. In the 90s, Minimal art appears alongside other phenomenological, formal, popular, cultural, and subjective languages as a nostalgic sign of the last great avant-garde, a cheeky icon for engaging public space as a site where subjectivity is formed. In 1967 Michael Fried criticized Minimal art because it embodied a literal "presence". It dramatised everyday living space by getting physically in the viewer's way, displaying banal materials and cool architectural form. For Fried, Modernist painting and sculpture had more value because of its ability to transcend this "literal" space and to produce an aesthetic experience of disembodied "depicted", "presentness".1 Literal space and aesthetic transcendence were antithetical for Fried. He saw no way they could be combined as art. Rosalind Krauss however thought Minimalism's sensitivity to literal space could provide a new immanent engagement with public space. Krauss writes that Frank Stella's proto-minimalist pin-stripe painting's "expurgation of illusionism [was] a will to lodge all meanings within the (semiotic) conventions of a public space. And to expose illusionistic space as a model of privacy - of the self conceived as constituted prior to its contact with the space of the world."2 In opposition to Modernist and minimalist ideals of a pure hallucinatory two and three-dimensional space, Krauss asserted the culturally and environmentally contingent, heterogeneous nature of particular spaces.3 Nevertheless, the formal acuity of modernist art and rhetoric was not lost on Krauss. Rather, she refigured it to analyse Minimalism's engagement with an embodied subjectivity. The body as determined by the architectural and display technologies of particular sites is central to Krauss' understanding of Minimal art. Australian artist, Maureen Burns, produces works which sit between the pure hallucinatory space of Modernism, and a more contingent, discursive idea of particular space. Like Krauss, Burns finds a formal language in Minimal art to examine the prosthetic relationship between subjectivity and public space. Burns has said that the title of her 1994 work, Delay with footnotes, has become symbolic of her practice in general.4 She claims that in the first moment of viewing her work there is a "delay" of uncertainty, where the viewer is confronted with a seemingly impossible synthesis of familiar forms. To Burns, this experience of "delay" gives way to a second moment of "footnotes": the viewer's pleasure in realising an unconscious imbrication in the work. "Footnotes" are abstracted architectural references and evocative sensual materials which slowly enliven the initial "delay" by working on the viewer's spatial memory. However, Burn's "delay" is not entirely reliant on her work's oblique resemblance to familiar domestic objects and architecture. Similar to the cool institutional character of Donald Judd's work, Burns' "delay" relies on contrasting sensual and visual pleasures of a subjective and domestic nature with those of a more public origin. Although Burns and Judd share a mutual pleasure in the sensuality of banal form, their works' orientation to institutional aesthetics differs markedly. Burn's art pictures a constructed world, of bricks and glue, which is far more responsive to its inhabitants than Judd's art would ever admit (a prisoner at times to its obdurate avant-gardism). This is not to say that Burns doesn't subscribe to Krauss' view that Minimal art represents "a will to lodge all meanings within the (semiotic) conventions of a public space". Instead, where Judd's works describe the implication of bodies in the striving-to-be-pure spaces of institutional art, Burns' works describe an interaction between bodies amongst the heterogeneous places of art. Her work self-consciously engages the spaces of their display sensually and historically, acknowledging their contingency as places and the unique ways in which they are inhabited. References to formal, sensual and historical aspects of the sites where her work is exhibited appear in the work itself. This is how her "footnotes" acknowledge both the viewer's and the work's context. Delay with footnotes consisted of a large low plinth with two arms which reached to head height on either side. This armed plinth embraced a double window in the gallery. Internally lined with ceiling plaster this painted brick structure combined rough and smooth surfaces like the outside and inside of domestic living space; public and private surfaces. The smooth internal section of this object was body length and lay at a low bench height. Burns recalls that Delay with footnotes tempted viewers to lay down on it.5 However the pristine quality of the piece held people back. The work thus affected a bodily alienation which combined with it's somewhat creepy camouflaged presence alongside the existing gallery architecture, to provide a "delay" (here a sense of both unrecognisability and physical awkwardness). The "footnotes" emerged with the work's slow reference to other domestic forms like the front verandahs of inner Sydney terraces. Burns' work looks beautiful, but feel odd. The materials she uses attract, but the forms are impractical; there is a complex and palpable disjunction between their appeal to the body and the eye. Though the forms and materials of her work are literally and formally fitted to their sites, her work resists the closure this type of installation might imply. Rex Butler observes this phenomena in recent installation art and re-evaluates literal and depictive perceptual modes. Butler describes the essential issue of contemporary installation art as "the relationship between literal and depicted (narrative) space. Bad installation art understands space as alternately literal or metaphoric, but not as a problem, the impossibility of having one without the other." 6 Butler elaborates this distinction between good and bad installation art by arguing that in good installation art an aporia - a material/phenomenological excess, or a type of "delay" - remains, barring the work from fully realising and expending itself in its narrative (textual) potential. Burns' work sits in this irreconcilable space between the literal and the depicted. This relationship between the literal and the depicted is evident in between words and things (1993). This work was first manifest as a three panel installation in Pendulum Gallery, Sydney. Each panel continued the pre-existing kickboard moulding from the gallery along its base. Each panel had a loose pattern of mother of pearl buttons sewn onto it plaster surface. between words and thing sutured a personal historical materiality (like mother of pearl buttons) onto the historically transcendent immateriality of the austere white wall. These buttons were arranged in accordance with a computer-generated random pattern but they mimicked a type of mannered drip painting, revealing the technologically contingent nature of modernist ideas of subjectivity and expression, contingency and utopianism. Burns' characteristic method of providing a suturing of the literal and the depicted, is again evident in this work. The literal space of the gallery is depicted as historical place (through copying the moulding on the bottom of each panel, and including the buttons as a key to subjective historical production) and literalised, through being mutely "plonked" in the viewer's space. Burns' most recent work, Talking-seats (1996), used white bathroom tiles and coir matting to form two conversation seats. Conventionally, conversation seats sensually invite, but ultimately vanish as props for the communication they foster. However, Burns' talking-seats possess an aggressive tactility. They do not disappear into utility, but continually prick their users' bottoms, reminding them of their subjective sensual presence in a public, institutional setting. Burns speaks of an interest in the despatialisation of interaction and communication.7 This interest is evident in Talking-seats' combination of evocative utility which carries one out of literal space into a space of "talking", with a literal materiality which returns one to a sensual awareness of one's seat in spatial circumstance. Burns' achievement lies in her work's ambivalent Modernism; it is both discursive ('footnoted') yet precisely formal ('delayed'). While it insists on its particular relation to it's site and on banal reference (to seats, verandahs, and buttons), it simultaneously plays between sensual materiality and optical richness, and between abstracted (barred) utility, and everyday utility. Clement Greenberg expressed a similar ambivalence in Modernist sculpture's inability to hold as a formal art when it "hovers finally on the verge of pure architecture".8 Burns' practice takes place in a context of contemporary art where the embattled Modernist and Constructivist heritage of Minimalism has been restyled as a nostalgic pop icon. This new-gen minimalism tips its lid to institutional critique but ultimately comes from a position of calmly assured complicity with the institution, to provide a spectacular double act of contemporary art. @home from 1996, is a large padded bench six metres long with an arm coming off each end. The bench is upholstered with orange woollen fabric, though at 1.3 metres it is too high to sit on comfortably. @home is split down its centre by internally lit translucent glass panels which resemble vertical light tables or computer screens. In mimicking the seating in the Art Gallery of New South Wales where it was first exhibited, @home self-consciously engages with our intimate involvement in the phenomenological technologies of the museum. Burns has confessed that on one level @home's lit panels, orange fabric and bench height refer to her pleasure in communicating with friends via email over her kitchen bench; a mode of public, prosthetic, and personal interaction similar to the gallery seat.9 @home elevates seat height to kitchen bench height, thereby transforming the gallery as a space of leisure into a space of industry. In doing this, Burns creates a complex slippage between experiential modes of public and private interpersonal interaction (email, the kitchen bench, gallery seating). As much as its smooth milky panels of light attracted the eye, @home's well upholstered orange expanse of felt attracted the touch. Unfortunately, counter to talking seats, the work's fragility precluded physical interaction and necessitated highly visible "Please do not touch signs" in the gallery. These signs had the effect of shifting a physical consideration of the object's interactivity into a consideration of it as a sculptural or historical artifact. The sign announced the work verbally as art, and severed its beguiling complicity and immanent connection with museum space. Burns uses the rhetoric and forms of Minimal art but replaces their utopian approach to space with an evocative and contextually open sense of place. Her work sensually frames the spatial conventions of memory, history, site, and social interaction at play in the contemporary gallery. The liminal separation her work performs between Minimalism and gallery furniture stirs our awareness of the necessary structural historicisation of the former by the latter. Endnotes
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 Maureen Burns, @home,
woollen upholstery, |
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Maureen Burns, between
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Maureen Burns, Delay
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 Maureen
Burns, @home, |
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 Maureen Burns, @home |
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 Maureen
Burns, Talking |
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© The
artist and  Courtesy of the artist. |
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