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Ulterior Modish

Curated by Anna Hirsh

Fiona Macdonald, Susan Robb, Constanze Zikos

23 February - 11 March 2006

Gallery One

 

Acknoweldgements

Constanze Zikos’ work and images provided courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries.

Fiona Macdonald’s work and images provided courtesy of the artist.

Susan Robb’s work and images provided courtesy of the artist.

Many thanks to the artists, Fiona Macdonald, Susan Robb and Constanze Zikos.

Thank you to Robyn Healy & LMFF, Blindside Gallery, Shane Pierce, Stef Jobbie, Jess Hutchison, Paul Rodgers, Carlis Krinkelstein, David Hirsh and the Nicholas lift ladies.

Editions

Within the Classical revivalist walls of Harry Norris’ Nicholas Building in Melbourne, the walls of Blindside have been adorned with new vestments in a self-reflective inverted window display. Ulterior Modish features work by Fiona Macdonald, Susan Robb and Constanze Zikos, who have invested in various media as overlays of a dialectical blueprint. Reverberating pinked incisions, thudding bolts, and the swish of the lacquered bouffant of the lift-operator, Ulterior Modish soundracks past and future glories of adornment with a horsehair bow from the interlining of a tailored suit.

As a young migrant I was shipped over from Poland in a dusty faded bolt of fabric. Pressing my face through the porthole with intrigue, all this led was to misery and the local plastic surgeon. Having to embrace the streets of Melbourne with my new hard face braving the cold wind of the Krakow end of Bourke St that had served individual businesses and two-bit department stores since 1912, my comment is not about the grimy shopfronts, or badly adhered vinyl signage that appears in the sunlight like a dusty leper, it is not thwarted by this; it inspired me to promote a new season of new life: new processes and new practices that were merely reinvented with a feather duster.

The Blindside level of misery has to be grateful to Rex Buttons who offers a diverse range of covered buttons that thrill even the tempestuous upholsterers. These levels of tailoring and identities are outlined on the pattern makers’ cardboard and are sourced by posses of forensic-minded practitioners.

Carlis K. Krinklestein
Inscrutable Auter of the Local Mise en Scene 2006

Ulterior Modish explores the interstices of text and fashion, represented through the language of these artists. Expressed within the context of a culture that addresses a tactile urge, the virtual and the material are threaded and laced together with the formalesque eye of the needle or the alloy-trace of the machine sewn. The languages of embroidered, half-remembered histories are captured within the pages of soft books.

The plateau becomes the available toile, and is synchronized within an analogue, electronic, or virtual spool, where weaving the rerecorded tales is performed on a virtual loom of sound tracking. Appliqué techniques are engineered to volumes of bolts, and embossed vinyl transmogrifies as mp3, within the new dialogues of modes. Inscriptions render the flesh as fabric, where writing on the body as container positions it as framed, pinned and installed as a display. Or, the container becomes a sarcophagus imprinted with the texts of mourning.

A new terrain is navigated that exists between the old world of substance and the new world of the post-literal imagination, where subtexts of internal elucidation remove a standardised conception, propelled by a nervous optimism that hasn’t been witnessed since the rocket age.

The concept of ‘Fashion as Text’ presents itself as a paradox, where it is not merely catwalk descriptions or a historiography of a particular style in its ethnographic and social context, but instead delineates the state of the unwritten de-alphabetised word that is subsumed within the practice, design, culture and manufacture of fashion.

Wearability gives way to storytelling in these frozen moments. Similarly, the mirroring of traditional display does not make any assumptions of literal garb, but captures echoes of the didactic relationship of clothing to the body. Their intimacy can be contrasted to the more socially programmatic way architectural constructions dictate a set urban language creating more rigid and impersonal conversations. Mutability and customising of an individual’s dress in relation to its unique physiology makes provision for a wider range of dialectical interpretations.

Code-breaking of the ethnographic and psychographic patternings becomes fraught, as allegorical use of costume terminology to self-describe is rendered obsolete. The text of fashion thus desires to refer outwardly: to music, literature, the laments of the poets, and through the oblique linguistic systems of mathematics that write the design process, the singing of machines in fabrication, the solemn sound of the winding cloth that encapsulates the sorrow of a temporality which stamps each phase of fashion as an moment-bound construct. The last limping disco queen adjusts her tiara of teeth and sinks into the peat.

Hermeneutical interpretations of fashion’s burlesque presence within a conservative artistic pageant nourish an overdue translation of the visual from the textual. Applied as a literate configuration that narrates the human condition, through social and mental status, religious and political alliances, allegiances of demographic orientations, as well as their coupled displacements, the released energies of war and simmering tensions of peace. When the concept of fashion is released from the realm of pure costuming, of physical exterior design, of the laments of garmentation and physical adornment, of the consumerist culture that attempts to write a common style through bastardised versions of design genius that remains out of reach, the abjection of its relic-historiography is thus delineated through the vulgarity of the physical absence.

It becomes necessary to exhume the bones of fashion’s tablet from its chthonic position, stepping it through dance sequences and the lustful lustrous refractions of the travelogue. These installations by Robb, Macdonald and Zikos create a three-way interchange of conceptual artistic practice that integrates and invigorates intellectual chronicles.

UNHEIMLICH MANOUEVRES: WORKS IN SITU – FIONA MACDONALD/ SUSAN ROBB/ CONSTANZE ZIKOS

FIONA MACDONALD – OUTWORK 2006

Fluted columns have been flattened for harsh modernism, and become deceptive architectonics evasive of their past dimensional glories and solidity, architecture androgenized through decoration and displacements. Interventionist interpretations, such as the suspicions falling on the head of Daniel Buren, position Fiona Macdonald as fresh agitator for the cause. Vinyl bars soften into text transcribed from the words contained in the whorls of fingerprints; the spatial chirologist walks us through the carnival glass air to arrive within an interior of an unnerving formalesque. The sight of the interior garden architecture is varied, of shattered urns that have fragmented their hieroglyphs on the carousel of no return.

Challenging the limitations of the space, applied bands bleed in ascendance, to festoon load-bearing beams, a moire effect to dazzle perceptions of the rigidity of unyielding walls. While the stark effect espouses an infinite fused continuity for the modern day site of execution, the guilloche of the rococo interior winds its way around the precincts of the stage setting as fancy fetters for the guillotine. The gallery has become a repository; a bone museum that is the curse of an osteoporotic veil, that forces the cryptogenic heart to speak of the Baudrillardian splintering of the soul.

Fiona Macdonald has furnished with embers crushed against the feathered furnace to bind blind and blur. Her studies speak of “the genealogy of reconfiguring architecture.”(1) Via deceptions of soft forms and hard edges, soundtracked with the overlays of discordia to wrack the spinal column, motifs become silent witnesses to subjugated wills, and the outer shell cleaves to reveal a gilded interior, an inheritance that seeps through fingers of compressed carbon.

The contours of Outwork’s objects are circumscribed through a staccato reverberation, collapsing the possibility of capturing the perimeter that once formed the apex of a legion of mediated anxieties.

Categorizing the subtextual that polishes a stellar finial, Macdonald records an abject prose that informs obstructions, of interventions within the false sense of comfort that punctuates then penetrates the prescribed desire of contemporary living. The partial rot and material disease amplifies the ghostly crepitation of the amputated limb. This encrusted odium echoes the disjointed virility that permeates Macdonald’s film series, Museum Emotions [2002-2003]. The interior of the art museum has lost the concreteness of its walls through the application of acerbic observation as the preference of focus is pinned onto the barbaric lives of its inhabitants.

Charlotte to Kyle: And because you want completeness, you lose yourself in it. (2)

Atrophy and anamnesis compressed within flight cases locate the codification of the concealed and the unwritten. Macdonald provides mesh for flesh through the pineal exegesis of breathlessness. A wry playfulness connects the article to the environment, through architectural configurations as the fabricated and polite histories hide the spilled blood from the refined crowd. Macdonald has established an antipathic entry into the space to guarantee a parable of claustrophobic intensity.

Barfly to Kyle: So you’re confronting this illusion of your conforming with some other illusion of your own virtual reality. Don’t you know its all a joke? Reality is simply a normative hallucination. (3)

Dolorous interpolations mark up a Sisyphian list of duties: the impact of the body in response to the hollow promises of soft furnishings pounds out a refrain of culpability. Observations of art practice are juxtaposed with the fraught politics of exhibition. Peeling back the demi-monde’s dilettantish prodigy, the designer is bestowed with the crown of the vitro, the sceptre of the sceptic, the curved mark of the question, punctuated with the languid pose of the larvae biding its time but violent with impatience. Interior scenarios play out via vertiginous spools through their decoration, a comment on the way that fashion can furnish lifestyles.

Outwork demarcates a stylised hyperreality that requests that specific patternings for the purpose of regaining a lost order. Pendulous repose shifts between the despondent and the enthusiastic within the theatre setting of the gallery interior. The effects of jamais-vu are imprinted onto the backdrop of the loggia, and the strength of formal purity is again challenged through the cursed edges.

Macdonald’s intuitive practice inverts the position of the underlying surface through a psychoanalytic procedure that investigates the disarticulation of the incongruous. Merging with the devices of a fashion field that englobes and envelopes, the inner layers that dictate the scaffold emerge triumphant as the exoskeleton in the fossil phase, an ipso facto necessity.

SUSAN ROBB – Nature Watching/The Pink Wall 2005

For me the “Wall” has been transformed. I’ve restructured it into something that has more meaning than the individual objects alone. … I’m seeing these objects that make up the “Wall” as raw material, boxing them up and creating meaning that flows through the piece. …I see transformation, and I see the beauty in it and I see why there is value in taking all of this raw material that is also your raw memory, your raw background, and being creative with it, turning it into something beautiful and turning it into something…
- Susan Robb (4)

Seattle-based artist Susan Robb’s installation Nature Watching/The Pink Wall casts the familiar and rewrites their innocuous pasts into an unnerving theatrical scenario. Obscuring the literal meaning of a theatre set that has abandoned its wait for a cue, the cast have turned inward to engage in a discourse scripted by the Tower of Babel. The overtly feminine pink wall of a TV childhood has shifted from its natural perpendicularity through a psychic tectonic shift, instigated in part by the recurring nightmare of the sham ursine animatron ambling a menacing soft-shoe shuffle. The tropes of fashion embrace ambiguous vestments through the specific arrangement of diverse possessions and fabricated items.

Robb not only fetishises the components, but agitates compulsions to reseparate the items for new honours. Currency of the totalitarianism of modern living is discernible by the mass-produced steel and wood chair, which has undergone reconfiguration as the silhouetted memory of a bustled-dress or discarded binding of the devotional. This placement reveals components common yet distant, dissections reveal specific matting and a Flokati rug, both palimpsestic palliasses paradosically noosed to the seat through a tactic of kinetic unrest, the inchoate tome of the dispossessed. The multiple apertures stir uneasy desires for incongruous commodities, a sinister front for strange dealings of inspired objects of desire for a cooler than thou effect.

Robb reconfigures the appropriation of singular objects as a dramatic conglomeration, theatrical scripts infused with the remnants of diaries and catalogue furnished lifestyles. This questions fashion’s claims of a deliberate semi-amnesia to its historical influences in order to determine the creation of the new and write one as the origin, not as the original. Robb re-objectifies the original, and reanimates her subjects through a sinister anthropomorphosis. Her investigations have encompassed the relationship of nature with the human application of progress – evident in earlier works such as through the Airlifted to Safety [2003] protective devices made from artificial cloths that assist in removing the human body from nature in an effort of divine transcendence.

Harsh veils swathe as counter-feminine, ossifying traditions of finely needled lace. Past walls, memorials of political and geographic divide, of prayers and tears, of Foucaultian delusions of freedom, and Kafkaesque vaults controlling metabolic cravings position the feminine on the brink of passionate effects to plunge headlong into a fur carapace. All changes, dancing poodle reverts its transmutation to cur with bad hairdo. It becomes time for matted fur to stick between fingers of fire within the ivory edifice. The divide between what is presented and the obfuscated subdermal poses an hallucinatory longing for release.

…In 1988 I saw a Yannis Kounellis show at the Museo di Rivoli in Turin, Italy. It was the first time I had really understood art. It blew my mind. I really can’t adequately express the experience I had there and I feel like that is important ingredient in art - it should leave you a little dumb. 

I never went back and studied Kounellis but I definitely logged the experience I had with his work. While I understand that he is talking about life and death what I felt was a perpetual now, standing still in the deluge of moments. I think that feeling has greatly influenced my work. – Susan Robb 2006

Nature Watching/The Pink Wall demarcates the ongoing tensions of action and historicism, associations between the nostalgia for the organic and instinctive viewed through a faddish frenzied kaleidoscope of the hyper-artificial that constellates luminous longings for the remnants of past ages and pocketed experiences. Solace remains attainable in the comforts of the familiar; the spirit companion that guides the hand between the remote control buttons that surf through the channels of the earthbound, reinforcing the antiquated instincts that believe in the necessity for grounding, but concedes that the evolutionary phase remains distinct from highly polished interiors.

To move beyond the placement of the garment into the realm of the discarded requires acknowledgement of specific references. These become intertwined with the essentialist consciousness of a blushing wall, the opaque mirror scrying future chronicles, the slack noose harnessing descending passage of an ontological stateliness. The deceptively unassuming grandness of displaced objects permeates the scene, and is observed by the artist in masquerade through an opalescent aperture, who distracts the viewer from this scrying through the actions of bizarre shenanigans. Analysis needs to be considered of the fallacious mysticism that flows through fictitious foliage in its chronographical circumnavigation of an episode of the sequence.

CONSTANZE ZIKOS: MINORITY IN KLEPTOMANIA NEO 3

Veneer needs moist soil to apply. Unearth the specific psalms for idolism, idolatry and pinups prose; as the marble drowns your scorn.
Constanze Zikos 2006

Constanze Zikos’ work explores cultural forms and patternings, symbols and styles that inform and transform, forging a context to contest. Zikos channels the poets of the classical and electronic ages through the hexagrammatical meterage of Aristophanic phrasings of desire, yearning, and mourning, through large litmus flags that test the unheimlich and the unholy. The fleeting nuances of faith, of the powers of fascinated saints, and the rigorous intellectualisation of dance floor pulsations resonate through flamboyance and geometric abstractions. Minority in Kleptomania neo 3 presents as a parallax portal to an otherworldliness transcendent of fictions, and enters the hardspace of a precise universal application.

Minority in Kleptomania neo 3 continues narratives of Zikos’ earlier pieces, including the hyperactive hysterical glamour of Electrolashes [1993], the melancholic violence of Soft Flag [1994], and the anastylotic monumentalism and the sublime whiteness and harsh geometric precision of the Hex Addict series [2004]. Minority in Kleptomania neo 3 regulates the transmission of light. The disco-ball iridescence that bloomed in Electrolashes has been reduced and the regal silhouettes of the modern icons of fashion’s neo-Byzantium have morphed into hermetic formalesque spectres. Eluding demarcation as a merely spectatorial device for a perimetric adornment, Zikos’ flags and banners manifest as membranes, simultaneously delicate and resilient acid tests of the structural zone.

Reanimator of the fables of displaced kings and priests, channelled through an eyelid fragile, the neo-leather discards its history of the organic, rather the vinyl countdowns to a contained self, a now individual material entrenched in the catalogue of the post-space-age. Elements of the decorative symbol have morphed, through Goddard’s nuclear Blow-up and atomic pop pin-ups, the confrontational inverted Crystal Palace of the billboard dazzles and further stimulates the frustrations of nympholeptic desire. Evidence of our aspiration to place faith in other icons, instinctively reflected in the urban, is inscribed with geometric sonnets and the harnessing of electronic waveforms.

Minority in Kleptomania neo 3 is the private poster of the self-contained intimacy of the limitless flattened mapping of the spatial universe. Zikos demarcates the geometrical configurations of the poets where structural patternings of the hexagonal threshold sing the stanzas of the Classical era, and the mathematics of Modernism’s spiritual verse. Allusions of rigid modernity breathe the tunes of electromagnetism, brought sharply into the current age of discordia and the use of the programmable sounds of the synthesiser. Dark undertakings reveal the subtextual creation of layers of music to superimpose with a sung didacticism, The work orchestrates a film of a light-blocking self-incandescence, an insistence of artificial illumination that reveals the cryptogrammatology of subdermal secrets, ciphers through a sublime iconography, the invisible ink of silent prayers playfully directed at fascinated saints, and of histories contained in layers. Minority in Kleptomania neo 3 contemplates the refrain of the assembly line, located within an interior of a post-war stasis that overlays languages and customs to engineer a nuance of the precious token of the symbiotic.

Half hour self storage as house, so dear,
Foliage, extensions, as a liqueur designates other walls for portraits
Weakened begotten, as scholastic ropescherish the substance of a chandelier
Other and offers substitute your fingers,as miniatures represent your angel,
Un leashed entreatingly as a moth in your mouthan open trouser pocket, wrought iron pickets

Thimbles and thievesIs this necessity, sleeved cuffs and soldiers flute tongued destiny,companion compressed a monumental Italian city giant grieving,deluxe ingenious balance and coated mail,apologists contrived waxed reflective sediments inhale,disagreeably misprinted unmentioned days. - Constanze Zikos 2006

Zikos’ signature woodgrain delineates the falsified glorious finishes of the domestic interior, as well as the imprinted memory of the casket and the reliquaries of memento mori. The home has itself become the first gallery. Crafting the fabrication, the mark of the maker becomes the subjective non-sequitur, by flaunting the precision finishes of fashion houses, and forging the holy signature of the Haute Couture’s sovereigns. Scrutiny reveals deliberate evidence of the fabricator, via graffiti of autograph, sewn texts that divert from the perfect adroit finish, in order to write the quality of humanness on a surface.The ectoplasmic fabric has materialised through the clairvoyant canon, the medium of the medium, the cloak of the mystic that enunciates a telekinetic oratory. The position of the pennant on the window of the gallery acts as intervening valve of illumination, blocking out natural sunlight. The dispersal of Minority’s own efflorescence regulates the reflections and refractions of the gallery’s interior. It converts the paned casements into a soft wall, establishing a mutable architecture that redraws the original blueprint. This ductile partition becomes the transmitter of a hushed music, the text of staves that delineate the beats and rests of a strange composition. The grooves within the vinyl provide text for the diamond stylus.

A membrane of kinetic energies pulsates through the textures and patternings of familiar ciphers. The black central hexagon, like the pupil of the inner eye, dilates to engulf the gaze. The sightless lens of Plutus confers an incessant generosity of gifts. Portrayal of the interior microcosm renders in scale the singular depiction of the universal. Spectacled moments indicate convex implosions, of lissome flows and the patterning of androscopic destinies in grassed absent fields.

Minority in Kleptomania expresses through its material semiotics the litany of a personal devotion, obsessions with the universal, and the crisis of plasma and its location: an intracellular map reference that cannot be resolved. Its officious modification of a genteel interior with an arrogant melancholic skin is a new chapter in the encyclopaedia of spray-painted amendments of polite architecture. A vinyl version of plasma screen feature walls, the new trompe-l’oeiul, to temporarily distract from dislocations, and reposition through the perfect symmetries of formalist geometry as a portal to the site of inheritance.

The harmony in heat, the red piping composes strict beats, where an arithmetical emblem of the heart drums the internal tunes lyricized through desire and oratory. High gloss rouge lipstique masters findings on the oblique; mysteries remain discreet as Hermes strides through fresh scenes cloaked in silver D&G, mentored by the fine poets, all classical Cheshire cats.

Anna Hirsh
2006

 

Endnotes:

1 Fiona Macdonald, in conversation with the author 2006

2 Museum Emotions: a conceptual soap-opera 2002-03 by Fiona Macdonald. Written & Directed by Fiona Macdonald. Produced by Fiona Macdonald and froth productions. Episode 2.

3 Ibid. Episode 1

4 Susan Robb interviewed by Suzanne Beal, July 29, 2005 for Platform Gallery

 

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