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| Paul Saint:
Against Catachresis Christopher Chapman |
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 Paul Saint, Rug 2,
silicon on |
Everyone talks about how
Paul Saint’s sculptures fail. This is one of their
virtues, they say; his sculpture is deliberately
"wrong" or "mistaken". As baskets, or
pots, they are consciously malformed so that their
"true" function is blocked. It follows that the
works critique the functionality of the crafted object,
of all objects perhaps. Of course, Saint’s objects
have been described as "graceful" and likened
to natural forms,1 but while
the pleasure of the process of making is acknowledged
(even if it is theorised as a conceptual misguided
catharsis), the visual appeal of Saint’s work seems
to have been largely overlooked.2 Paul Saint’s Catachrestic Baskets of 1993 writhe and shiver with a strange organic energy. Made from the lengths of cane and masonite bases that are the basic materials for "how-to-make-a-basket" kits, the objects carry a certain nostalgia for childhood craft activities. This is part of the baskets' dopey appeal. One sits low on the floor, its vertical lengths of cane splaying outwards to form a wide open top. Half-way up are a few rows of horizontally-woven cane like a stripe, or a belt, around its middle. The rest of the horizontal weave is made from sticky silicone sealant, squeezed from a tube. This object is also luminous, the opaque silicone captures and reflects the light making it glow. Other works of Saint’s have a similar quality, the result of materials like plastic-coated cane, Japanese rice-paper, wax and resin. In Rug 2 from 1993, he glued rows of postage stamps to a length of faintly patterned Japanese tissue. The pale tones of the repeated stamps (each bearing the identical silhouetted profile of Queen Elizabeth in white against various pale hues), sometimes revealed the soft white of the paper beneath. Suspended vertically, the work was like a gently hanging scroll, painted with subtle watercolours yet the title signalled a mock functionality, like a rug hung on the wall. In Rug 2 this repetitive use of motifs and materials produced a digital effect. Ironically, the result of its pixellated gridded surface was more analog than digital, since the object wore the traces of its making and seemed guided less by binary logic than intuition and habitual memory. Saint’s large, curvaceous woven-cane objects have a distinctly anthropomorphic quality. Inappropriate (1994), a basket woven from coloured plastic-coated cane, looks like the exaggerated hips and torso of a 1930s film actress. It cheekily bends toward the viewer at the top, like a young woman with her hands on her hips reaching forward for a peck on the cheek. Untitled (1995) is similarly narrow-waisted, but at the top the exposed lengths of cane are roughly snapped so that they stick out in all directions. When these works are conceived as torsos, the broken lengths of cane suggest the neck-line of a high-fashion strapless dress. Despite the way Saint wrenches, crumples and incises his works, the violence inherent in this process is subdued and communicates the possibilities for moulding and shaping the material itself. This is true also of Saint’s photographic works. Earlier photographs depicted landscapes and views of trees along a close horizon. The images were coated with wax or rows of brown-opaque elastic bands. Rather than obscuring the landscape views, these violations of the integrity of the photographic surface acted as atmospheric devices which provided an extra layer of mist or fog over the soft green foliage. The addition of these extraneous materials to the surface of the photograph not only made the flat photographs into something sculptural, but extended what they represented into something directly material and palpable. Reversing this logic of addition, Saint's curved photographs of his floppy pots use scored surfaces that reveal stripes of fluffy white photographic paper. The process not so much scars the images as it adds another texture to each photographic surface. The exposed under-layer of paper allows these images to exist as objects as much as their curved intervention into three-dimensional space. Saint’s collapsed pots and fallen-over rolls of rice paper have something in common with the papier-mâché sculptures of Viennese artist Franz West. In West’s 7 Pillars (1989) he incorporates a performance where:
Significantly, both artists rely on the physical relationship between sculptural objects and the body. And like West, Saint’s cylinders are subtly erotic. This is evidenced not only in the tactile and sensuous nature of materials but in the way these objects possess a sometimes cryptic sexuality. The tall, cylindrical and slightly rippled Catachrestic Basket (1993), woven from "natural" cane and only slightly rippled and twisted, is phallic but in an abstract way. Even the solidly restricted vase immobilised in porcelain resin in Lumpen from 1996 divulges a mischievous eroticism. A number of artists have explored the meanings of objects in domestic environments. In the wake of the ready-made, artists understand that the aesthetic, psychological and social aspects of any object can be drawn-out, emphasised and complicated. Los Angeles artist Jorge Pardo has suspended Danish ceiling lamps so that they hover just above the floor, accentuating their exacting and utopian beauty. British artist Neil Cummings collected discarded plastic bottles and re-presented them on shelves in a backlit custom-made cardboard display cabinet so that they appeared as precious and stunning as ancient glass vessels. But with Saint’s "domestic objects" their meaning exists both with, and away from the objects themselves. Because of this, his work shares something with the young German artist Tobias Rehberger who recently designed and had fabricated nine vases, one for each of the artists represented by his Berlin gallery. Unaware of the vases on display in the gallery, each of the artists were asked to bring a bunch of flowers to a gallery party. The bouquets were then placed in their respective vases, completing the "portraits" orchestrated by Rehberger. Saint’s objects don’t require or request this kind of completion, but they are grounded in the same conceptual space as Rehberger’s vases. Saint’s recent sculptures, collectively titled Jihad (recycled) (1997) are tall cylinders made from the pages of comic-books collected by the artist. Sprayed in sections with enamel paint, giving a semi-gloss, sometimes translucent finish, the works develop the structures he explored in his rice-paper cylinders, and introduce more immediate "content" in the form of the comic-book pages. Where Saint’s earlier cylinders maintained a sense of unease via rolled-up or slightly crushed layers of paper, these objects are much more candidly "poles". Their placement throughout the gallery space, their different heights, the graphic nature of their imagery and the patterns made by the application of spray-enamel strongly alludes to the hollow log coffins traditionally used by the Arnhem Land aborigines. Traditionally, the bones of the deceased are placed inside the wooden poles which are then installed in places of spiritual importance. Saint’s poles are also a repository, not for sacred bones, but the cutup pages of comic-books which rest in a cavity inside the opening at their top. In his installation Towards a Cultural Future (1997), a grid of fifty-five "poles", all approximately six feet tall, are placed in a grid formation. Unlike Jihad (recycled) the allusion to Aboriginal burial poles is eclipsed by the structured placement of these objects. Also made from the pages of comic-books, the imagery of the comic pages provide a constantly repeated decorative motif. Seen at eye-height, the viewer catches glimpses of explosions, wide-eyes faces, speech-bubbles full of exclamation marks. The busy surfaces appear like a vast array of Egyptian columns inscribed with a minutiae of hieroglyphs. It’s in their ability to evoke a range of somatic and psychological sensations that Saint’s work communicates something profound. There's a explicit contradiction between the conventionally "unwarranted" materials and the forms they represent. But these object's physical and intellectual beauty lies not only in their form, but in their honesty. Endnotes © The artist and |
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Paul Saint, Catachrestic
Basket, |
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 Paul Saint, Inappropriate,
installation |
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 Paul Saint, Jihad
(recycled), |
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