5) 2010/Jan-Sep
Look Ahead (Rent-this-Space) 2010
Alex Gawronski: Look Ahead (Rent-this-Space), 2010
‘Hardbodies’, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Sutherland, Sydney; curated by Shane Haseman
(Digital print on vinyl on billboard) Photo credit: Jennifer Leahy @ Silversalt
Billboards are almost exclusively used for advertising. Their basic purpose is to draw attention and instil desire. Before the days of mass marketing, the excitation of collective desire was nonetheless a significant social phenomenon. One of the most apparent public appeals to collective desire was (and still is) the mass spectacle. Historically, among the most popular mass spectacles were public executions. This was particularly the case during the period of the French Revolution, an era that paradoxically also announced the birth of the greater Enlightenment project (and ultimately that of Modernism). In the 18th Century, public beheadings via the ‘modern technology’ of the guillotine drew large and excited crowds just as heavily publicised mass entertainments do today.
In lieu of these considerations and with the title Hardbodies in mind, this work suggested the macabre origins of the mass spectacle. It hinted, furthermore at the partial curatorial premise of the Hardbodies exhibition which itself hinged on an oblique reference to Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel ‘American Psycho’ - especially its conjoining of detailed descriptions of slaughter and the repetitious incantation of brand-names. In American Psycho, the ‘hero’ – curiously like many in the proto-fascist literature of authors like Ernst Junger – attempts to recast his body as instrumental and invulnerable. Alternatively, in this work the ‘hard-body’ in question was the steel guillotine blade as an emblem of a pervasive institutional/mechanical apparatus pitted against the corporeality of an absent though ever-vulnerable body.
Actually, advertising promotes vulnerability and the losing of our heads: the suspension of belief we entertain when falling for the inanities of ads practically amounts to our beheading. In such instances we are split between real needs and unstable desires incurred by the familiar though seemingly infinite adaptability of commercial phantasms. In the end, this piece hoped to provoke viewers to consider the fact that, while ads generally seek to harmlessly ‘tickle our fancy’, the soft reality of the fantasy worlds they conjure are in fact structurally harsh and violent.
Prophecy 2010
Alex Gawronski: Prophecy, 2010
‘SURVEY’, Lot 77 Eveleigh Railway Yards, Eveleigh, Sydney; curated by Janis Ferburg and Laura McLean
(Steel waste paper bin, MP3 player, perpetual sound loop of computer trash being emptied)
Virtuality strongly conditions many aspects of contemporary society. The virtual though is more than merely propositional. Certainly, today and on manifold interconnecting fronts, virtuality is truly ‘realer than the real’. Yet what could be realer, more concrete, than urban construction, another major factor determining the pace and forms of contemporary urban life. Indeed, lately rates of urban development have risen exponentially. In Sydney for example, many industrial spaces have already been transformed into private and commercial properties. One remaining site though recently abandoned by State Rail, adjoins the CarriageWorks complex in Eveleigh. This is where the exhibition/event ‘SURVEY’ took place for which this particular work was produced. The work, ‘Prophecy’ comments on how recently abandoned ‘transitional’ spaces are at the moment of their transition, rendered equally virtual. This means that such spaces suddenly become both ciphers of their former existences and, perhaps more importantly, portents of unknown futures. In this way, they are simultaneously both full and empty. The usually short-lived netherworld into which such deserted sites slip at the same time suggests many momentary possibilities.
In this work, a steel waste paper bin fitted with a false bottom emits a looped soundtrack of computer desktop trash being emptied. Thus, the real, concrete reality of the bin as a physical/historical container is lent a purely virtual, symbolic function: the bin endlessly empties invisible rubbish. The intended use-value of the bin now harbours instead the trace of its own superseded function. Similarly, the railway sheds locker room where this work was exhibited, signifies a mode of industrial production long outmoded. The virtual future haunts the building as much as if not more than, its soon to vanish past. Likewise, the lived histories of those who once worked in this space daily have effectively been trashed along with an entire discourse of manual labour that valued the collective ownership of public services. The self-emptying but already empty waste paper bin ultimately suggested that the wasting of space amounts equally to its virtualisation; historical space is atomised due to its instantaneous accessibility to pure speculation.
Afterthought 2010
Alex Gawronski: Afterthought, 2010
‘Silent Spaces’, Macquarie University Galleries, Sydney; curated by Rhonda Myer and Leonard Janiszewski
(MDF, spray putty, enamel, metal)
Time is an ever-present factor of life. There are of course, numerous parallel time codes by which we live. Indeed, the way each of us experiences time, biologically and psychically, rarely corresponds with the image of time to which we are most accustomed. Naturally, the image of time we are most familiar with is that represented by the clock.
Clocks are mechanized tools that dictate and compartmentalise time viewed as necessarily materially productive. Clocks however, are also strongly associated with notions of the immateriality of thought. In fact, the insistent ticking of a clock (a cinematic cliché by now) has been repeatedly used to indicate intellectual purpose. In such instances, the thinker’s thoughts – invisible to us as they remain unspoken – are accompanied by the metrical audio pattern of the clock alerting us to an idea of thought itself: this is an audio-visual image of thought.
Through this particular work, the common though often disregarded abstract nature of time, most fully embodied by the clock, is foregrounded. The convenient demarcation of hours we habitually take as inescapable, have become now part of an hierarchal accumulation, a physical accretion that literally penetrates space. Time is constantly built-up; it is an invisible architecture that pressures us as much as it enables us to realise projects. Nevertheless, despite its constant presence as a structural and motivational scaffold, time is also mute. Here, its limitations as an abstraction, to be applied to everyone equally, are embodied by a functionless clock devoid of hands: time’s ‘use value’ is always counteracted both by time’s cumulative inevitability and its ultimate inability to alter or prevent events.
Odyssey 2010
Alex Gawronski: Odyssey, 2010
‘ICAN Covers’, The Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (I.CA.N.), Sydney; curated by Mark Titmarsh and Scott Donovan
(Timber, book, digital prints, drill holes)
The exhibition in which this work was shown was dedicated to contemporary artists’ covers of a variety of pre-existing works, literary, musical or otherwise. Homer, the famous blind Greek poet and author of those ancient ‘road-movie’ scripts ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘The Iliad’ provides the starting point for this particular work. Of course, the paradox of the blind author who sees the world with his ‘inner’ eye is theoretically well-documented. Still, Homer’s works instead of reveling in interiority, are dedicated rather to ‘action’, to the exploits – heroic and not so much – of their central character Odysseus. This artwork, a ‘ready made aided’ (more-or-less), makes a specific point of authorial blindness, a blindness that nevertheless facilitates sight. Here, the well-known marble bust of Homer represented on the cover of this book has had its eyes ‘opened’ by way of drill-holes. These holes, while figuratively enabling sight - the viewer can now literally see right though the book – actually indicate the blindness that separates us as modern readers from the realities of Homer’s age; we see-though without seeing. At the same time, these circular incisions allow the viewer to re-comprehend a famous text albeit as an object corresponding with Homer’s proto-materialist view of the world. Meanwhile, the slippage between the work’s title and that of the book it incorporates, indicates that ‘The Iliad’ is an odyssey too: by implication, all enduring cultural artifacts have embarked on an odyssey unseen and unknown by their authors.
