WHAT GOES ON.
The last missive, six, was sent out to sort of the wrong list; there was some issues. Even things like this can run into technical issues. Such is life. There’ll be some housekeeping, but before that, more art.
SELF OSCILLATION
Dylan Sheridan
Good Grief Studio
I don’t know about you, but I find the work of Dylan Sheridan hysterically funny.
There’s a scene in Evil Dead 2. It’s called the laughing scene. It takes place after a tremendous amount of over-the-top violence has occurred, and there’s a pause. Then suddenly something happens.
A stuffed deer head on the wall twists and stares at the hero, Ash.
The deer laughs. It’s a horrible, squeaky laugh that builds. Then a lamp laughs and moves. Gradually, all the furniture in the room starts to guffaw and chortle in an evil manner, moving, jerking, up and down, back and forth, ha ha ha ha ha.
Ash, covered in blood, joins in. The hysteria builds. It’s funny, it’s tense, it’s horrible, Ash is deranged, terrified and terrifying. The objects make noises, they move in ways they should not and it all builds to a pitched moment of total weirdness, built with an intense soundscape and twisting, lurching camera angles. The actor, Bruce Campbell, is absolutely amazing here: his expressions, his body, his movements, are exactly correct: his performance sells this supremely strange moment of cinema horror perfectly: it would not work without his commitment.
Then it all stops.
There’s silence and the tension cannot dissipate: familiar things inverted to do that which we do not expect them to do. Vertigo-inducing and comically horrendous.
Evil Dead 2 is a masterpiece of cinema.
I find it at once terrifying and hysterically funny.
Slapstick comedy is one of the earliest comedic forms. It relies on physicality and vision, and found its apotheosis in cinema: the ability of the camera to create extreme situations was exploited with great skill by people like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. It’s a weird comedic form: it is often violent or terrifying, relying the precise use of props and timing, and in particular, exploiting the possibilities of an object far beyond the intended purpose of said object.
It’s supposed to be funny, but when you watch these films, they often feature moments that would in reality probably severely injure someone, or breathtaking near misses, such as the façade of house falling onto Buster Keaton who happens to be standing exactly where an open window is located. It’s terrifying and hysterically funny.
I’m sure you’re beginning to get the angle here, but when I dropped in to check out Dylan’s show, he was there because he had to be, to make sure all the surly devices he’s made run properly, and he reminded me of Ash trapped in the cabin in the woods in Evil Dead, surrounded by insolent objects, trapped in a way in strange landscape of falling knives, yelling, insistent dryers and sauce that looks like stupid fake gore from a cheap z-grade horror film (the best kind of horror film). He has the demeanour of a silent film star, but he’s also a mad scientist, a trope found in equal measure in the traditions of comedy and horror. He has a relationship with his devices, describing how they work, and how they do not work, and for me this became part of the work.
It’s amazing: there is so much in this exhibition. So many reference frames are possible: there’s a post-apocalyptic salvage hint found here alongside the slapstick and the horror: there’s something really interesting about the way Dylan re-purposes devices and objects and materials to find sounds they might make.
It’s important to note as well that in the end this is about sound: the end point is about the noises created. It’s a one-human band of self-made instruments, and the haunted comedy of the objects does produce a cacophonic orchestration of domestic revolt: this is not industrial music, it is composed largely with objects we find at home: labour-saving devices that have reached obsolete status and been given new purpose – which is a radical gesture in this era of extreme commodity fetishism and disposability. This makes Dylan’s work subversive in an intrinsic way – actually in a few ways.
I’m a bit troubled by pop music, especially pop music that makes you feel great. You should maybe not feel great about things as they are, and your desire for escape whilst understandable, could be part of the problem. Soothe yourself by streaming corporate R&B by all means, but note as well the possibility that organized sound that makes you uncomfortable might be at least a useful comment on this situation we find ourselves in right here, right now, and that when garbage screams back at you, and broken domestic consumer products make you feel as if something was out of kilter, and you see that Dylan is extracting something ferocious and accusatory from repurposed appliances, and this is all just a by-product of an emerging composition of noise, churn, feedback and electronic squall, well, maybe you might consider your own comfort and what allows it to occur.
There’s so much in this work: the awkward yet beautiful objects, the sonic textures that interweave, the gaps that make you tense, the implied cartoon violence; this is violent art, violent like those Warner Brothers cartoons that featured so much sudden noise and sharp shocks, terrible but funny and filled with parodies of work and relationships and pointlessness. It’s so pointless: it just makes horrible upsetting noise. It doesn’t do anything. It does not make me feel good[1]. It un-nerves me, unsettles me, fills me with questions and it will not stop unfurling. Which probably is the point.
The devices are instruments, things that play themselves, that require constant attention, just as smart phones do.
I don’t know about you, but I find the work of Dylan Sheridan terrifying.
And hysterically funny.
I mean, they’re the same thing, aren’t they?
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OLD FRUIT
Lucienne Rickard
Michael Bugelli Gallery
TOMB
It should be obvious to anyone who has the slightest long term engagement with my critical attempts that I have quite an amount of time for Lucienne Rickard’s work. I was wondering why, and I think it’s because there’s a genuine investigation underway in her art. This has turned out to be crucial for me in all the art that really grabs me over time: the artist has a line they are following, that they explore and investigate; rather than finding something that works and just mining that. I might have said this elsewhere recently but it does bear repeating.
Anyway, I think Lucienne is on a bit of a voyage with art, and that she takes risks, goes back to the core of her practice and keeps pulling it apart, re-framing it and finding new methods to create visions and objects.
A lot of where this comes from is obsessive repetition. This is in everything Lucienne does: repeated gestures, repeated activities, doing it again, and again.
Old Fruit gets somehow right to the core of this, and then does something else. Old Fruit comes with a story, which sort of explains a lot, but is also a bit of a red herring. At a certain point in her childhood, Lucienne found it totally necessary to make a lot of paper cranes. She was sort of trying to save her sick mother; it seems Lucienne’s mum was ill a lot and that Lucienne dealt with this by making those beautiful paper cranes, the ones that are used to make wishes.
This information does feed into the nature of Lucienne’s art, but it is far too simple and even glib to suggest this ‘explains’ the whole process. There’s more here in this work than just repetitive gestures.
I’ve seen surfaces and skin a lot in Lucienne’s work. Here we have these much larger sheets of paper, entirely transformed by the application of graphite - pencil material - into a shiny surface that looks metallic. Paper, as a surface for art to be made on is totally necessary: something Lucienne explores is the repetitive gesture, but she also what happens to a surface that you make repetitive marks on, and what happens to something you make repetitive marks with. The integrity of the paper can only take so much before it begins to break down; the pencil grows shorter and shorter until it is finally useless, a stub, worn down, bleeding graphite until it can bleed no more. Her works that have totally abandoned anything resembling a discernible subject make this plain, the story here is the the interaction of gestures and surfaces and what this leaves behind, which I believe she’s done before. Here it leaves lines, folded and folded again until the paper surface, transformed with graphite, ruptures, scars opening like cracks in dry skin, like whitened callus on exhausted feet that have walked forever and still have far to go.
Lucienne explores wear over time; the cost of making the gestures, the scars that come from the comfort and transcendence of the mark repeated. Do it until a literal hole is worn.
These sheets look incredible. Lucienne has infused so much pencil onto the surface they look metallic, shiny, catching the light: at once made more solid and more fragile. These works possess that ineffable quality and have a massive presence. They’re some of the most gorgeous works she has made since her practice shifted dramatically and she really dug into what she was doing, moving into a phase where an interrogation of her materials and process is taking place, mixed in with deeply personal notions of what happens to bodies and to skin over time. We transform and become beautiful as we wear out, maybe.
The arresting graphite sculptural drawings are juxta-positioned with a surprising series of prints of the artist’s hair, presented in stained frames, in red and black. There are forty of these works, and they all have sentence as title: read together the room sheet turns into an accident of poetry. These seemed to reach again into Lucienne’ s past life, hinting at blood and bruising but also shedding and change. The swirling hair shapes are deeply gestural, like calligraphy or some form of intimate language.
There’s something really bodily about this work: skin, hair, wounds and blood are all present, and presented quite openly. Bodies are a leaky mess, worthy of celebration just as they are.
Unsettling and seductive, complicated by unavoidable titles that fragments of whole as yet unexplored in Lucienne’s work, this is a moment of transition and consolidation of previous experiments and works, that mines personal information and transforms it, but also points out more broadly to far larger damaged surfaces.
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[1] I have a lengthy series of notes about what I understand about the political implications of ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful’ art and this is something I should start sharing with the masses. If interested, drop me a line
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HOUSEKEEPING:
So I have two things, this one, which is Make And Do, which was largely about art in Tasmania, and Utterings , which was just bits of writing. I sent out make and do 6 as part of Utterings, which was an error, oops. If you missed that and want to read it, it may be found here.
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and if you want to support independent writing about art in Tasmania, consider buying me a coffee by going here.
Oh and I interviewed Pat Brassington in Island magazine and I must admit I am quite pleased about this, because I think Pat is a tough and magical artist, whose articulacy of vision makes her work an absolute treasure.
over and out.
Andrew Harper