For Sale; Baby Shoes, Never Worn
Brychan Tudor
G39 Gallery, Cardiff
G39 represents one of Cardiff and Wales’ most exciting contemporary arts venues. The premise of this show is a pure delight. The title contains the entirety of Ernest Hemmingway’s shortest ever novel. This particular work was created by Hemmingway as an alleged response to the challenge of a bar bet to write a piece of fiction in six words or less.
Hemmingway is reported to have seen this as some of his best work and it is easy to understand why. These six words have the power to resonate within the soul of the reader causing a shudder and a contemplation of what has been and what is still to come. The Curator, Michael Cousin, has used this wonderful example of literal narrative to emphasise the gap between an artists’ construction and the viewer’s interpretation. The punch of these six words hits the reader like a series of three blows. The author is providing a starting point, a place from which the viewer can begin to devise their own sequence of events.
The power of suggestion is an incredibly strong tool when used in correlation with the human imagination. In reading a narrative, we project our experiences into it, enlivening the subject and making it personal to us. This use of memory enables the reader to develop the narrative within their imagination and to project outwardly. It also helps to realise sensations and feelings, to make them personal.
‘The Diving Bell and The Butterfly’, by Jean Dominique Bauby, provides us with a wonderful example of the link between experience, memory and imagination. These tools are vital in the creation and interpretation of any artwork. An author can use the reader’s experiences to suggest feeling through a particular composition of words or objects. The bark of a dog, the scream of a child, the bang of a gun, the infinitely singular sound of two cars coming together; all or most of these sounds are recorded through our memories and have the power to suggest narrative and produce emotion when organised in the correct way.
Having read through the press release prior to visiting the exhibition, I became very excited about how the 5 chosen artists work would explore this notion and more pertinently, how the works would make me feel. However, it is not always easy to build a show around such a wonderfully concise example of the notions that you wish to articulate.
Rebecca Lennon’s ‘Dead On Arrival’ presents the viewer with a fax machine placed on the floor in the darkened corner of a fairly large room. The fax machine, lit only by a small desk lamp, is plugged in and bares the spurious evidence of pumping faxes out onto the surrounding floor. This illustration suggests a depiction of the event rather than the evidence of it but this quickly becomes unimportant. The positioning of the fax machine, its ‘on’ status, the mood of the space and the sheer volume and spread of the faxes creates that David Lynch feel where one is not sure if this inanimate is so inanimate after all. On closer inspection of the faxes themselves, we find that they all arrived on the same day, all with the same time of transmission, just prior to the opening of the show. As I start to analyse the work, I feel a little like Hercule Poirot analysing the evidence at an Agatha Christe crime scene.
The faxes all bare the same section of text although the size and font of text does seem to have more than one form of reproduction. The content of the fax denotes a strange kind of jumbled up journey. A dream of an experience, which seems to jump and skip, allowing gaps for the reader’s imagination to pour in and gain some personal relationship with the description of the events taking place. As I am reading it, I cannot help but recall the depiction of a dream sequence from Herman Hesse’s ‘Strange News from Another Star and Other Stories’. The façade that has been created for the viewer to ‘experience’ this text accentuates the power of the Beckett-esq style narrative and allows the reader to be consumed by it.
Akiko and Masako Takada’s series of three photographs and two films cause a series of reactions in my brain, mostly of a positive nature. The Takadas present us with a series of 3 photographic examples of cityscapes where the process of entropy has been reversed by a kind of micro-mimicry. A material and process based replication restoring their full glory on a miniature scale. This replication highlights the dilapidation of the structures they mimic.
Two of these photographic pieces seem far stronger than the third and the method of presentation does not quite sit comfortably. The A2 digital matt enlargements somehow fail to convince me, although I find myself struggling to imagine how I would prefer to see them. I left these images feeling like I should have been more excited by them. Having said this, two of the images did enough to capture my concentration for quite some time; the physical manipulation of material within these two works has been carefully considered and executed with tactile finesse.
The artists also presented us with two films, ‘Hidden Treasure’ and ‘Once Upon A Time’. ‘Hidden Treasure’ depicts a reversed real-time chemical reaction resulting in the un-dissolving of an object placed in water. I enjoyed the work visually but struggled to find the same level of entropic strength felt in two of the three stills. The timing and aesthetic beauty of the work were particularly strong towards the end of the film and the beginning of the reaction, where the boat shaped block appears to smoke (backwards) even though it is submersed in water.
Sarah Chilvers collection of found notes presented a series of banal lists and random meanderings whose relevancy remained, in the most part, with the original creators. I thought that the curation of these notes was excellent, sporadically positioned around the gallery in such a way as to draw notice to the architecture of the space. My feelings and interpretations of this work are a little mixed. I enjoy the idea behind the work; these personal recordings of banal everyday existence made even more personal by the indexical nature of their handwritten form. My feeling was that they somehow did not give the viewer enough information. I can’t quite work out whether this is a success of banality or if they weren’t banal enough.
After reading through the journal that Chilvers had logged them in, I found myself wanting to find a note that contained something of a more personal nature, like that displayed in the work of Lennon or in Hemmingway’s novel itself. Lennon and Hemmingway’s narratives are fictitious, whereas Chilvers’, we can only presume, are not. Strange then that my imagination should prefer to engage and personalise the fictitious content over Chilvers re-presentation of recorded ‘real-life’ narratives.
I accept that to create an exciting doctrine of banality is probably an oxy-moron but I couldn’t help myself wanting for a glimpse into the personal existence of the unknown stranger. The notes did provide the odd shard of something personal but I felt that these were slightly drowned out. One thing is for certain, this is an incredibly large collection of hand written notes and that in itself is an incredible feat.
Lastly, we come to the videos by Alex Pearl from the ‘Little Death’ series. Depictions of inanimate objects such as Alka Seltzer tablets and matches are given a mark of human expression, such as a simplified smile or a frown. These materials are then put through the chemical reaction that they had been previously designed for, dissolving and reducing them back to nothing. My biggest criticism of this work is that I didn’t feel any connection to the marks made on these objects. I understood that they depicted human emotion but they did not make me feel. My analysis was restricted to defining the make up of each process and the materials involved.
I failed to make the reading of these works an anthropomorphic one and as a result failed to relate them to human processes such as sexual or spiritual experiences leading to rebirth of the self as is suggested in the press release.
All in all, a thoroughly engaging exhibition.
Dead on Arrival (2009)
Rebecca Lennon
Found Notes (1999-2009)
Sarah Chilvers
Akiko and Masako Takada (2009)
