 |
Veneer
In the issue of Who magazine devoted to the best and worst dressed
people of 2004 Jack White, of the White Stripes, comes in for perhaps
the harshest criticism of any celebrity featured. Designating him
as the worst dressed man of the year, one judge, Ty Henschke from
the clothing label Ty+Melita, sums up White’s two outfits
thus: “He looks wood-grained. He looks like a floor finish.”
Apart from being a salutary lesson in the perils of wearing brown,
Henschke’s comment is revealing for the insight it provides
into the qualities of wood veneer. To examine the two images of
Jack White they have reproduced in the magazine is to acknowledge
that his appearance presents such a bland evenness, such a dull,
flat, unbroken and lifeless expanse that the overall effect is one
of blankness. White’s figure seems impervious to vision in
the same way wood grain can be a type of camouflage, able to spread
out its own invisibility in a layer. It achieves this not merely
by hiding what lies beneath it when it is laid on as a veneer but
by performing this invisibility across its own surface through the
repetition of the grain. If the quality of being deadpan, could
be gathered up, compacted and rolled out, it would unfurl in the
depthless patterning of wood veneer.
Actual or simulated wood laminate – in its various incarnations
as plywood, painted-on wood patterning, wood veneer and wood-grained
plastic adhesive – is incorporated in some substantial manner
in each of the works that make up this exhibition featuring Lyell
Bary (Brisbane), Anne Harry (Sydney), Katie Moore (Adelaide), Steven
Rendall and Constanze Zikos (both based in Melbourne).
On first consideration, the idea of organising an exhibition around
a single substance, especially a fairly idiosyncratic material like
wood veneer, seems arbitrary if not perverse. However, if you consider
veneer is a verb as well as a noun, then what these artists have
in common is not simply the material they use, with its qualities
of being low-tech, cheap, thin, flexible, insubstantial and lightweight.
Just as significantly, by sharing a tactic of applying wood as facade,
or choosing to work with materials that already incorporate this
feature (irrespective of whether it is actual or imitation wood),
each enters into a strategy of simulation, imitation, camouflage,
superficiality, disguise and deception.
By simulation or deception, I do not necessarily mean that the artists
in Veneer deliberately conceal their materials, or perform visual
substitutions, but rather they employ wood in such a way that it
departs the condition of being a substance and approaches the condition
of being an image; there is a simulation effect in the hyper-visuality
created by the image of wood’s surface details when they are
divorced from its substance. Constanze Zikos’ work for this
exhibition consists of adhesive plastic (the product here is called
Kontakt) applied directly to the wall is a side-by-side inlay that
approximates a tessellation, marquetry and cloisonné effect,
but on a much larger scale than these techniques normally adopt.
Zikos has covered two long, rectangular, vertical sections of masonry
either side of the windows in a geometric pattern created by four
different surface effects: mid and dark brown woodgrain, metallic
woodgrain and silver.
Each of the artists in this exhibition has employed techniques or
materials that push wood in the direction of wallpaper, but Zikos
adopts its most extreme and dematerialised form: an imitation wood
product which, having no body or structure of its own, clings to
the walls for support. To understand the way in which a dematerialised
image of wood signifies in each of these artists work, but especially
in Zikos’ painting practice, I think it is necessary to briefly
retrace the history of wood’s use as a material in the discipline
of painting. For the divorcing of wood’s image from its substance
is not a particular innovation by these artists; it is part of the
history of Western painting practice.
Over the course of the development of European painting, around
the Renaissance period on, the image of wood began to detach from
its substance. This detachment is not the ordinary separation that
exists in the process of representation, where one thing can stand
in for another. Instead it is a doubly inscribed separation because
of the way that wood retreated from providing the support for the
painting medium at the same time as representations of wood began
to proliferate within paintings to a much greater degree than ever
before. The rapid spread of the medium of oil on canvas, around
the 1500s onwards, eclipsed tempera on wood as the preferred medium
for discrete or autonomous painting (painting that was not integrated
with the architecture in the manner of fresco). Not only was wood
rapidly overtaken by canvas as the dominant support for painting,
but the lightweight and portable stretched canvas panels that replaced
it relegated wood’s role to that of a frame that provided
distension for the canvas but remained unseen and even concealed.
Its role in the hidden structure of painting was even incidental
to the degree that canvases are easily and readily removed from
stretchers and restretched on other frames as required. The image
of wood could still, and increasingly did, appear as a painted representation
on the surface of the canvas, especially with the rise of the genre,
still-life, picturesque, and academic modes of painting, but remained
conspicuously absent from its support to the degree of suppression.
When wood appears in Zikos’ work, as in Rendall’s and
Moore’s (despite her work occupying three dimensions, I believe
it engages theoretically with the discipline of painting), there
is a reversal of this effect. Each artist stages the return of wood
as all surface,with no distension. The ‘wood’ in their
works possesses no structure of its of own apart from what other
materials – foam, stretched canvas, the gallery walls –
can provide. This decisive split between the image and substance
of wood was never made more explicit than during the early years
of the twentieth century when the Cubists (Braque, Gris and Picasso)
took up the idea and worked it through exhaustively in image after
image that portrayed wooden objects – mandolins, violins,
guitars, walls and table tops – through the application of
collaged papers printed with imitation woodgrain. Several of Georges
Braque’s works even feature sections of brown paint, applied
flat initially and then scratched through in parallel lines with
a comb or similar device in the most cursory approximation of woodenness.
These sections are sharply delineated at the edges and over- or
under-lapped with other surface treatments to suggest they are not
depictions of wood but painted simulations of collaged woodgrain-printed
paper.
I think painting retains, within its own discipline, the memory
of wood. This wood, having departed from painting in substance,
repeatedly stages its own return to painting by a kind of sleight
of hand, in a dematerialised form, as a hyper visuality on (and
often parallel with) the surface.
Constanze Zikos’ work stages a symbolic return to the pre-oil-on-stretched-canvas
mode of tempera-on-wood. The one traditional art form that has retained
the practice of painting on solid wood (in oil or tempera together
with gold leaf) is the production of religious icons in the Christian
churches of eastern orthodoxy. Like icon painting, many of Zikos’
works adopt the form of paint on wood, using enamel on plywood or
wood laminex. His images often repeat the motifs of secular icons
(flags) as well as quotation of ancient religious icons (stars and
crosses). His painted works may be understood in terms of icons
not only because they depict these powerful cultural symbols, also
because in many of his composite laminex painting images he retraces
or picks out forms with thin lines of pale colours – such
as the stars on his seminal work Fake Flag (1994) – in what
operates as a kind of halo effect. Or in the case of the work he
is showing here, he picks out accents in a metallic finish.
One motif that Zikos makes repeated use of in other works refers
to the manner in which Greek temples retain the memory of wood within
their marble architecture. Numerous of Zikos’ paintings have
incorporated some version of the Doric frieze. This temple frieze
is a carved marble representation of the wooden triglyphs and metopes
that were part of the structure of wooden temples preceding the
marble ones. In a discussion of the historical significance of the
image of the Doric frieze in Zikos’ work, Merryn Gates writes,
“[W]ith the change of building materials from wood to marble,
what had its source in structure became motif.” Zikos depicts this frieze repeatedly, across many of his
works, to symbolise the way architecture memorialises wood. This
operates as a counterpart to the concern in his practice with the
idea that painting retains, within its discipline, a memory of wood
– a memory whose return he repeatedly stages through a symbolic
and stylised engagement with icon painting. Zikos’ paintings
use veneers and laminates, substances with shallow depth, but the
two types of wood they evoke are the solid and the invisible; the
solid wood of the orthodox icon and the imaginary wood, the dematerialised
memory of wood in the Greek temple frieze.
Katie Moore’s collection of ‘wooden’ objects are
arrange in the centre of the room like theatre props. And as with
theatre sets, we read the woodenness of their surfaces at a distance,
and symbolically invest them with the solidity of real furnishings.
Up close, though, we can see that Moore is not fooling anyone. There
is no attempt to disguise the materials as anything but what they
are. The ‘bench’ is made of synthetic foam encased in
an adhesive imitation wood product called Cover-it (also known in
Australia as Con-tact) in the approximated colour of teak. Two ‘stones’
are in fact plaster ovals covered by the same product in a lighter
shade of pine. Up close, this tableau creates an effect not exactly
of objects that try to be convincingly wooden but rather embody
the abstract quality of ‘woodness’.This ‘woodness’
seems to be an attribute that real wooden objects can never have;
it can only be attempted by something that is not wood but takes
on exaggerated aspects of its appearance. The product Moore has
used to cover her objects mimics wood in a way that is blatant (in
this case through a hyper stripy surface treatment in a medium to
dark brown colour) without really trying to deceive anyone that
it is actual wood.
I think the artist identifies the ontological status of this stick-on
imitation woodgrain product most precisely when she claims that
she is drawn to using it not because, or despite, it being fake
wood but because it is real Con-tact. There is a degree to which
materials aren’t real or fake anything; they are what they
are. In discussing the increasing polymorphousness of materials
caused by the manufacture of synthetics, Jean Baudrillard writes,
“Objectively, substances are simply what they are: there is
no such thing as a true or a false, a natural or an artificial substance.
How could concrete be somehow less ‘authentic’ than
stone?”
In it’s portrayal of everyday objects and its placement in
a deliberate, artful composition, I think Moore’s work relates
to the discipline of still-life. In conversation with me, she rejected
too close an association with the still-life genre because of its
lifelessness, its frozen qualities. And while I do not believe her
artwork is either frozen or lifeless – there is a sense of
humour that animates it – I do however think that it references
the deadest mode of them all within the still-life genre, the vanitas.
The vanitas confronts the viewer with his or her own mortality by
presenting objects that represent the passage of time and/or decay.
Woodgrain symbolically represents time in all its eternity because
wood is the image of its own history; wood recounts a tree’s
own life story. Each ring, knot, blemish and striation in the grain
of the wood represents slow growth in the life of a tree. The grain
of the wood represents both an immense span of time but also time
arrested, for the tree must be felled before the grain can be laid
bare. Even where the wood is imitation, the grain still operates
as a schematic or shorthand reference to the passing of time. The
meaning is embedded in the grain of the wood whether such grain
is hard-won by slow accretions in the forest, or more fraudulently
acquired by being printed on, in stripes, in a factory. If several
of the artists in this exhibition use the image of woodgrain in
connection with the idea of memorial, this is because wood especially
lends itself to the practice of commemoration. Wood is its own memorial;
its surface is its own history made palpable. And it is significant
that Katie Moore’s tableau centres around a bench seat, an
object associated with passing time or more particularly, waiting
for something to happen. But the anticipated action may already
be in the distant past. The old-fashioned and outdated pair of shears
set in a stony landscape is a nostalgic evocation of a type of rural
labour that has long vanished.
One manner in which the genre of the vanitas reminds us that the
world is transient is by revelling in the material surfaces of things.
Convincing details, and carefully painted textures, reveal the material
deceptions that belie our passage on this earth. The exaggerated
‘woodness’ of Con-tact burdens us with a complete disclosure,
a full revelation of the surface details of the material. But if
the vanitas is often also based on representations of material decay,
then herein lies the real deception that sustains Moore’s
work. Clinging to the underside of the shears is a little foam snail,
an animal associated with an extreme slowness of movement, and it
is this little detail that provides the key. Wood – despite
symbolising time in all its eternity – eventually breaks down,
but plastic as we know has a half-life that rivals that of uranium.
Lyell Bary’s painting Cuckoo II features the application of
paint over most of the surface of a large-format sheet of plywood.
It is divided into flat segments of colour using a limited palette
of three shades of acrylic paint. He exposes the surface of the
wood only by leaving a slender network of lines bare of paint, the
natural hue of the wood imparting a fourth colour to the composition.
The artist has constructed the image by superimposing a drawing
(sourced from Branch of Leaves, 1970, by Ellsworth Kelly) onto the
plywood. Where the curved lines of the drawing interact with the
dominant lines of the wood grain, this articulates closed shapes
that Bary identifies and fills in with paint, leaving bare a linear
band along each edge. The paint is applied with an overall flatness
and crisp edges not unlike the effect of stencilling or screen printing.
Over the course of his painting career, Bary has worked exclusively
with these materials of acrylic paint and plywood. His practice
varies in the application of colour and the infill treatment used
across the grain sections. But his work remains consistent in that
the composition always follows the lines in the grain of the wood,
and he leaves some section of the plywood bare of paint, allowing
the wood to reveal itself, and to represent itself, on the surface
of the painting.
By looking for these intersections between the lines of the drawing
and the lines of the wood, Bary is likening the grain of the wood
to a readymade composition or visual framework. Instead of being
confronted by a blank canvas, each sheet of plywood he selects for
painting on comes with its own markings, a type of compositional
armature to hang things off. Moreover, this structure or framework
is likened to the modernist grid in that it bears its own internal
part-to-partness. It has an overall pattern, internal markings or
subdivisions and a broad equivalence between parts.
But there is nothing mechanical, geometric or predictable about
the structure of the wood grain. Bary is drawn to using plywood
as his support partly because no two sheets of wood are the same.
Each one is unique in the patterning of its grain; the appearance
of each incorporates chance and randomness. Bary’s working
style exposes the notion that shapes in the grain of the wood are
like patterns in clouds. Once Bary identifies a shape, he can coax
it out by applying paint in some areas and leaving others empty.
The wood has its own compositional logic that can be highlighted
or minimised, but never completely defied.
The image of Cuckoo II remains abstract but because it is made up
of a bold and stylised network of lines and shapes our eye seeks
out symbolic patterns in the image, as we would in an Henri Matisse
collage or a John Coburn painting. The title suggests the image
of a bird, encouraging us to identify some shapes that may be tail
feathers, some leaves, perhaps an egg. Maybe the word cuckoo also
hints at something else, something more wooden: a kitsch carved
timber clock, and the Black Forest where it originates from.
Because Bary works along, and not across, the grain of the wood,
the sections of exposed plywood of his painting appear to be featureless,
lacking any of the lines or tonal variations we expect to see in
the grain of the wood. To look at the apparently flat yellowish
linear network connecting the shapes in his painting is to be deceived
into thinking that there is no woodgrain to be seen. By following
the lines of the grain so exactly, it is as if Bary has managed
to suppress them. He deliberately works too close to the grain.
I think Bary’s strategy is to reveal the grain of the wood
and in revealing it, to efface it. The grain of the wood is now
forever lost to the line of the paint. In Bary’s work we may
say that it is the paint itself that becomes ingrained.
Anne Harry’s work is a black-on-black grid structure made
up of multiple squares of burnt beech veneer applied to a stained
wooden support. Her work, (like the ashtray sculpture by Steven
Rendall), makes direct reference to wood’s potential as fuel;
in Harry’s case it is by singeing the surface of the beech
to a powdery black that she evokes the material transformations
effected by fire. Her work shares a reference to the grid with that
of Lyell Bary, but here it is made more overt as this surface is
divided into multiple squares. It has an overall regularity and
symmetry without being rigid or mechanical. The image she presents
could simply be the abstract grid which operates as a conventional
device in modernist art, but can also be read as a chequerboard,
an aerial depiction of a landscape under agriculture, or reference
to the technique of marquetry where sections of different coloured
woods are inlaid side-by-side for ornamental effect.
The chequerboard shape is suggested by the grid of black squares
but the art work’s placement on the vertical plane and the
absence of a distinct alternating pattern of dark and light tones
prevents us from reading it too literally along these lines. Alternatively,
as a representation of an aerial view of the landscape, each square
can appear as a sections of land under agriculture with the divisions
representing fences or enclosures. If the work is read in terms
of landscape, the surface burning of the veneer comes to evoke accidental
bushfires or the deliberate burning off that is part of land-clearing
practice, one stage in the cycle of regeneration that fire represents
within the landscape.
The raised circles that appear in many of the individual squares
of veneer were vacuum-formed according to a mechanically process,
but they can represent the ring shapes of salt pans in the landscape,
the shape made by dumped tyres (especially those that adopt an abstract
form when buried by dirt or sand), or even a stylised representation
of the rings that form within a tree. If read in this way there
is perhaps an irony here as well, because if the work is viewed
as an aerial depiction of landscape then it is a denuded one in
which trees are absent.
The other reading which this work permits is a self-conscious reflection
on the ornamental technique of marquetry. Like marquetry, the work
is made up of side-by-side inlaid sections of wood veneer. But Harry
avoids the fetishisation of technique or potential for kitsch that
marquetry can have by minimising the tonal variations across the
inlaid pieces and adopting a technique that is deliberately low-tech.
She uses pieces of veneer that are slightly irregular and incorporate
splits in the wood. There is a randomness, too, in the interspersion
across the grid of squares that are flat and those featuring embossed
rings. As well as environmental renewal being evoked as the subject
matter of the work, Harry’s work practices are themselves
regenerative. She prioritises the use of plantation timbers, recycled
wood and offcuts from industry. The technique Harry has applied
in the manufacture of the work may be described as controlled burning.
The way the artist transforms her materials with low and high technology,
by cultural and natural means, operates as a metaphor for the way
humans transform the landscape through industry and agriculture
but their efforts must ultimately bow down to the laws and processes
of nature.
If Lyell Bary’s work Cuckoo II represents an effacement of
the grain, then Anne Harry’s work does too, but in a different
manner. By burning the wood, she softens it to a rich, matte, velvety
black finish. This surface fuzziness directly counteracts the usual
crisp detail, the distinctness, the self-evident self-revelation
that is the usual way in which wood articulates its own distinct
details through its own grain. To soften this grain is to silence
it and render the surface enigmatic. Ultimately this is an evocative
work of art possessing great formal beauty. It hints at various
meanings but cannot be pinned down too precisely. Here is a work
whose surface continues to smoulder in a slow burn long after the
flame that ignited it has been extinguished.
More than any of the other artists in this exhibition Steven Rendall
rethinks the innovations of Cubism through his images and materials.
By incorporating depictions of imitation woodgrain within his paintings,
his work reiterates some of the strategies Picasso, Braque and Gris
employed in their paintings and papier collé works. In the
sculpted ashtray piece, he reiterates some of the conventions Picasso
used in his reliefs and assemblages. The ashtray is even attached
to the wall on its own shelf, in recognition that it shares concerns
with Cubist relief assemblage rather than operating as sculpture-in-the-round.
It has the same sense of deliberate crappiness of one of Picasso’s
cardboard guitar assemblages. It even takes especial glee in its
slipshod manufacture: Rendall knows it is bogus and takes pleasure,
as does the spectator, in the joke.
There is a lovely detail within this work where Rendall coincidentally
echoes Zikos’ concern with painting and architecture both
retaining a memory of wood. The filter ends of Rendall’s modelled
cigarettes are covered in cork-effect Con-tact. Rendall mentions
to me in conversation that in the distant past, cigarettes used
cork wood as the filter. The now universal practice of printing
an imitation cork pattern around the filter in the manufacture of
cigarettes is a testimony to the fact that cigarettes retain the
memory of wood within the logic of their construction. Further,
it becomes hard to read Rendall’s sculpture as being in any
way ‘fake’ when those real things they portray incorporate
their own simulations.
Like the work of Anne Harry’s we have already discussed, this
sculpture of Rendall’s refers to the combustibility of wood,
but here it has a daft aspect because an ashtray could never conceivably
be made of a substance that is itself flammable. In its focus on
burning, it is also about transience, the brief passage of time
it takes a lit and abandoned cigarette to burn down to the end.
Although the moment is frozen, latent within the meaning of this
work is the thought that when the cigarette burns down, the moment
will draw to a close and something besides the cigarette, we are
not sure what, will be snuffed out. It is a sombre art work; like
that of Katie Moore, a vanitas, and like that of Constanze Zikos,
a memorial. Rendall’s paintings appear to depict not woodgrain
but imitation woodgrain. They are not paintings of wood but of Con-tact.
Although the distinction I make here is to isolate real woodgrain
from fake, I think Rendall’s work achieves the opposite: he
shows that all woodgrain (real or fake) blurs into one stripy oblivion,
all woodgrain (real of fake) operates as a simulacrum. In F.A. and
Tears, Abuse and Accusations of Subterfuge he incorporates painted-on
sections of wood grain in unexpected areas within his paintings.
In each, there is a visual confusion between two words that have
their own logic but do not make sense in relation to one another.
Each bears a section that is a painterly depiction of the world
and a section painted with brown stripes of flat woodgrain. It is
as if one of these two representations – either the painted
world or the painted wood – is intruding on the other but
we cannot be sure which is the impostor. In one of the two paintings,
F.A., we are encouraged to believe the artists’s own hand
is poised to pull back the veil, but we will never find out whether
it will be the illusionistic painting describing a three-dimensional
world, or the stripes of brown woodgrain that will be torn away,
denounced as fraud.
This dual logic in Rendall’s work relates to the nature of
the self-adhesive product, Con-tact, that he depicts. It comes in
a roll, in which the adhesive part (woodgrain) is designed to peel
away from the backing paper (usually a blue and white grid). Both
of the two-part, hyphenated names this product is sold under –
Con-tact or Cover-it – seem to announce the very duality of
its nature, the back-to-backness it represents, its own verso-recto
equivalence. This world Rendall is depicting in his paintings –
the world of Con-tact – is not a world in the round. It is
flat and depthless like veneer. It has a verso and a recto and while
you can peel the stick-on wood away from the backing paper, you
can no more separate out its dual logic than you can conceive of
a one-sided coin or a one-sided sheet of paper.
Monkey Painting is a little different in its operation from the
other two painted works. In the image, a monkey appears to be painting
woodgrain onto a stretched canvas. But the bottom strip of the canvas
is blank, making the stripes appear as if they are being filled
in by some parallel motion gradually creeping down the canvas, rather
than the monkey completing each individual stripe from top to bottom
before moving across the painting. While I was discussing this work
with Katie Moore, she made the lovely observation that the monkey
was probably applying the stripes in the mechanical manner of a
computer printer: from left to right, then back again in slow, automatic
increments down the page, filling it from top to bottom. Or perhaps
the monkey knows it is not really painting these wooden stripes,
knows it is merely holding the brush for effect, while the woodgrain,
presumably printed in a factory, seems to be rolling down the canvas
of its own accord. Rendall’s work holds out the threat that
Con-tact, once loosened from the tight roll it comes in, could unfurl
and spread virally to infinity, effacing everything in its wake.
This foregrounds the other feature of woodgrain that we have only
just touched on in passing. By revealing all its details promiscuously
on its surface, it represents alike time in all its plenitude and
time in all its tedium. For woodgrain can be boring, repetitive,
and endlessly monotonous. The effacement that is taking place in
the painting Tears, Abuse and Accusations of Subterfuge has already
blanked out part of a dog and the whole of a person; it may be impossible
to arrest its further spread. Which brings us back to where we began
with the image of a man whose appearance, incorporating the likeness
of woodgrain, renders him blank or invisible.
Let us briefly revisit the hapless Jack White who ought not go undefended
against the attempted sartorial assassination at the hands of Ty
Henschke. For being likened to wood grain in his dress, for achieving
an overall effect with his appearance that finds its equivalent
in floor finish, let us grade White on a different scale from that
employed by Who magazine and award him full marks; for this was
the effect Andy Warhol strove for all his life but never quite managed
to achieve.
Christine
Morrow
|
Steven Rendall
Monkey
|
|
