|
| Personal
Effects The Collective Unconscious Museum of Contemporary Art 11 July - 6 September 1998 |
||
Lucy Orta, Refuge Wear |
The exhibition Personal
Effects, curated by Ewen Macdonald, testifies to the
fragmentary 'nature' of memory and its cumulative
aspects. Faced with an exhibition of fragments, what the
show offers is an equally fragmentary experience. In fact
the exhibition itself could be said to reside in two
parts. The first, and certainly most engaging of these,
represents the work of two contemporary European artists,
the Dutch artist Frank Mandersloot and the Paris-based
English artist Lucy Orta. Despite the divide separating
their practices, both broadly concern themselves with the
issues of social containment and cultural classification.
Similarly, these artists share a desire to extrapolate
upon the 'personal' process of concealing and revealing
that is claimed to structure the unconscious. The
exhibition's second part consists of fragments borrowed
either from large museums, such as Sydney's Powerhouse,
or from individual celebrities such as Robyn Archer,
Collette Dinningham, Harry Seidler and Richard Tognetti.
The value of these artefacts is essentially incidental to
their existence as intimate momentos of their esteemed
owners' private histories. The exact significance of
these objects remains arbitrary and questionable, despite
the curious and occasionally enlightening quality of some
of the texts which accompany them. Their seeming
randomness and their broader contextual meaning is doubly
problematic when their inclusion is considered as part of
an exhibition at the Museum of 'Modern Art'. In this
instance, Ewen Macdonald has taken a cross disciplinary
stance as a curator in order to illuminate the shows
thematic, however, the banal historicism of many of the
pieces in themselves is significantly overshadowed by the
wit, economy and inventiveness of the 'art' presented in
the show. Frank Mandersloots' work functions in a manner that is understated and subtly sly. Through his utilisation of prodigiously commonplace materials from worn domestic blankets to featureless wood veneer the artist constructs works that have a formal simplicity and conceptual rigour. Many of these works gently, yet effectively, lampoon Modernist pretenses and this is clearly evident in their titles. Symmetry/Cemetery is a large text based drawing in which the blank formalism of its technique partially obscures the works 'meaning'. Here, formal symmetry becomes a vague and stultifying gesture. Another work, entitled White Cube/Black Graffiti, makes a jibe not only at institutional spaces but conversely at the effectiveness of spontaneous protest which is ever so readily accommodated and defused by the institutional processes surrounding it. This is echoed in the measured immediacy of the words "rite / riot / right" that are sprayed in black on the underside of a severe white table. What is evident in Mandersloots' work is an equivocality that questions the artist¹s traditional role as a harbinger of the new and as the bearer of a unique and personal vision. The 'personal effects' represented in his works are personal only insofar as they allude to those objects most clearly identifiable to us in our daily lives. Within the broader context of the show, these objects function iconically to question the possibilities and greater implications of 'personal' artistic statements in general. Lucy Ortas' work occupies quite a different conceptual/aesthetic space, though one nevertheless dependent upon institutional codes. Her work is employs the style of high-tech adventure paraphernalia and suggests a codified and pre-packaged experience of nature and of the body. Furthermore, the modular quality of much of her work implies the ultimate interchangeability of 'personal' experience per se. Her works, or Survival Clothing, as she has christened them, may be zipped, buttoned, tied and fitted into a variety of configurations. There is nothing particularly personal about these works other than the alternative and exploratory social situations they conceptually pre-empt, like a supra sophisticated 'Twister' game whose aim is to provoke and expose underlying societal structures. Exhibited alongside Ortas' installation are works executed by under-privileged children who are directed by the artist in workshop situations. These are garments composed of fragments of sameness: a dress made entirely of men's ties, a bustier of old gloves, an amorphic constellation of miscellaneous hats. The inventiveness and crude resourcefulness of these objects serves to question the solo artist¹s Œauthority¹ that here, however, is paradoxically reaffirmed through the absence of the young makers names. To concentrate on the works of two international artists in the context of this review might seem to disregard the underlying intent of Personal Effects and its celebration of the disparate and fragmentary. Furthermore, it would appear that another of the exhibition's aims was to question the very indispensability and cultural deification of the 'art object' and its singular qualities. Ironically, however, it is the 'art' that consistently wins out. For example, Louise Bourgeois' tiny and anonymous cracked metallic blob encased in its perspex box is at once nondescript and mystifyingly charged; both a fetishistic talisman of unproclaimed power and simple refuse of material and artistic processes. Sherrie Levine's pair of miniature adult, and perfectly constructed, brown leather shoes are both classically Freudian yet obstinate enough in their diminutive scale to deny the invasive phallocentrism of the psychoanalysts theories. Similarly, the restraint and rigour of the shoes of Hossein Valamanesh, affixed to the gallery wall at eye height, their inner-soles replaced by mirrors, their long laces dangling elegant and vertical, display a sophistication of a sort incomparable to the found or merely museological object. Personal Effects, almost in contradiction of its title, succeeds in presenting works that dissemble our expectations of the personal. In the context of its curatorship it is 'real' people's personal effects that fail to move us. Alex Gawronski © The artist and |
|
