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Ulterior Modish
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.”
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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Susan Robb / installation view of "Nature Watching/The Pink
Wall" / 2005
Fiona Macdonald, Outwork (detail), 2006
Susan Robb, Nature Watching / The Pink Wall (detail) 2005
Constanze Zikos, Minority in Kleptomania neo 3 (detail) 2006
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