Resistance is Futile
By Merrily Kerr
Chalk it up to the booming art market or the nature of what’s considered avant-garde now, but disorientation is de rigueur when it comes to experiencing contemporary art. Take for instance the increasingly common syndrome - call it gallery glut or art fair overload – of spending hours in galleries or fairs, then remembering it all as a blur when you run into a friend who asks what looked good. The root of the condition runs deeper than the number of galleries promoting their tastes and agendas (over three hundred in Chelsea alone) or the ever-increasing size and number of fairs. We expect art to be elusive. Artists who strike the right balance offer just enough information to make interpretation possible and just enough ambiguity to suggest that there’s still an untapped wealth of possible meaning embedded in an artwork. Art professionals muster wall texts, catalogue essays, audio guides, press releases, art magazine articles, panel discussions, artist talks, and symposia to try to further pin down meaning, but the effect of uncertainty is deeply lodged. The artwork in the exhibition ‘Impossibly Familiar’ evokes a state of not knowing, of almost but not quite grasping a truth or a situation.
This may be deliberate. The term ‘impossibility’ implies resistance, or a refusal to believe what’s being experienced or what experience has taught in the past. Brandon Neubauer flaunts the laws of space and time (ironically adopting a ‘nothing’s impossible’ attitude), by splicing images of nature with scenes of commerce, technology and culture in bold geometric patterns to create a new dimension that’s simultaneously here, there and nowhere. Cui Fei subtly dissolves cultural specificity by creating an illusion of calligraphic text by using natural materials that could come from anywhere, while Zbig Rybczynski sculpts a delicate dance from the commonplace actions of a selection of everyday folks brought together in confining proximity. Collapsing geographic and cultural distance is a condition of modernity, one that reminds us how tenuous our perceptions of life are, when they are based on routines that can be disrupted.
The unconscious mind is another unstable territory whose exploration makes us aware of the limits of our knowledge. Ivan Navarro’s eerie light installation entices us down a hallway that doesn’t exist, recalling anxiety dreams as much as the Peruvian guerrilla group alluded to in the title. Aurora Robson brings the terrors of the night into cold daylight, mining her memories of childhood nightmares to create gorgeous, otherworldly creatures (reminiscent of bizarre sea life) from cast-off materials, turning sculpture into a two-part rescue mission operating in both the mind and the natural environment. Like a recurring dream or a looping video, assume vivid astro focus recycles imagery from both the collective’s past projects and wider cultural history to create an entirely new creature defined by the heightened sense of perception its many eyes imply.
Juxtaposition jolts us out of the commonplace and makes
us question how we perceive the order of things, as does a probe of psychological
depths; other
artists in this show adopt a literal interpretation of the artist as creator.
Ragna Berlin’s interactive little robot has the cool-factor of a Roomba
with less functionality, but its deliberately low-tech appearance and silly
burden of ping-pong balls flouts our futuristic expectations of robot life
introduced by old friends like R2-D2. Antenna Design also proposes to create
designs for improved living, with similarly questionable usefulness. Stopping
on the sidewalk for therapy may be the ultimate in access and convenience,
but also in exhibitionism as patients pour their hearts out on the street.
Their goal (self-knowledge) is the opposite impulse of the conscious refusal
that comes with judging some person, thing or situation ‘impossibly familiar.’ Though
the latter is fundamentally a negative response motivated by disbelief, it
is also creative, involving a choice to embrace uncertainty and the infinite
possibilities for new and unique experience. It’s a position that even
starts to sound attractive, pondered from the excellent vantage point of Antenna
Design’s bench. There, analysis and people watching come together to
reveal a slow parade of weird and wonderful variations on humanity itself (our
most familiar yet misunderstood subject) as it strides, jogs and saunters by.