Flotsam and Jetsam

Robin Foley — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 15:50:33 +0000

Curator Kirstie North’s title for this exhibition does more than simply describe the show; it simultaneously binds the featured artworks together and invites reflection upon the contemporary purchase of these maritime terms. The difference between flotsam and jetsam is no longer common knowledge: flotsam refers to items which float as a consequence of the action of the sea, whereas jetsam refers to items jettisoned from a ship. Yet today their meanings can be extended metaphorically beyond floating debris to introduce broader ideas of the unwanted and discarded, of odds and ends and junk.

The first work encountered in the exhibition is Simon English’s When We Left the City (2012), a masterful optical performance. A scene tantalisingly reminiscent of the heyday of old Hollywood glamour has all the right ingredients: a long shot, smoky lighting, a mysterious car driving down a foggy highway. However, despite what my eyes believed, it was filmed using only a dinky toy car, cardboard, masking tape, straws, and a homemade conveyor belt.

Left to right, Fiona O’Reilly (wall pieces), Paul Chrisholm (TV), Anne Marie Taggart (Sculpture in foreground), Swaantje Guntzel (piece on plinth). Image credit: Pamela Myers.

The beauty, delicacy, and preciousness hidden in the conventional and habitual are again highlighted in Fiona Reilly’s Time Spent (2008). Time Spent is an on-going project for which the artist has gathered together every bus ticket from every journey she has taken on the Dublin Bus since 2005. The tickets are stuck and coiled together in chronological order. There are currently in excess of 1,250 tickets and Reilly is still adding to the collection; she intends to continue the project until the paper ticket system becomes obsolete, until it represents a forgotten history.

Alternative histories of the obsolete, the forgotten and the overlooked are presented throughout the show and are documented most poignantly in the exhibition’s namesake, Sam Walkerdine’s Flotsam and Jetsam (2012). Flotsam and Jetsam is a documentary film exploring the relationships, history, and struggles facing a dying breed of beachcombers on the Frisian Island of Texel, north of Holland, where a strong tidal system and winds wash up an estimated two tons of debris on the shore each day.

If we return to the original meaning of ‘flotsam and jetsam’ as tidal bearings, consequences of the action of the sea, another unifying theme emerges, that of action and re-action, cause and effect. The so-called junk, waste, and odds and ends that make up this exhibition are the remnants of our contemporary throwaway culture narrating the untold stories of the dispossessed and demonstrating that effects are more heterogeneous than we could possible imagine. The show both endows our detritus with unexpected value and celebrates the possibilities inherent in the discarded.

This jubilance that can be evoked within the overlooked, forgotten, and pushed aside, is best encapsulated in James L Hayes’ The Rocky Mountain
Flyer (2008/9), which charts the tragicomic flight of a polystyrene model jet plane over the Rocky Mountains accompanied by a replica of the plane made of recycled scrap iron. The work is sophisticatedly simple, with a child-like grace; it takes what we regard as nothings, polystyrene, and playfully attempts the impossible.

Flotsam and Jetsam was on view at Tactic, 24 May – 2 June 2012.

Wangechi Mutu: My Dirty Little Heaven

Robin Foley — Tue, 27 Oct 2015 15:46:14 +0000

Wangechi Mutu’s mutated, morphing forms walk a line between beauty and abjection. At first the works seem delicate – exquisite even – but upon closer inspection this pleasing quality is undermined by unnerving and incongruous juxtapositions. Born in Kenya and now living in New York, Mutu is the 2010 Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year. My Dirty Little Heaven is her first solo show in Germany.

The exhibition space at the Guggenheim has been organised into one large installation, breaking with the tradition of the clean white cube in favour of a murkier, more suggestive environment. The walls are covered in grey felt and two large organic tree-like structures, placed at opposite ends of the gallery, both articulate the space and provide a thematic framework for Mutu’s collage, installation and video work. While Mutu’s ‘heaven’ might have evoked a cocooning space of safety, here any such sense is subverted by a strong undercurrent of violence and decay.

In collages, such as The Bride Who Married a Camel’s Head (2009), Mutu uses her own cultural identity to confront clichés of both race and gender, especially those associated with colonial constructions of the ‘dark continent’ as both exotic and dangerous. The image of the beautifully adorned African bride, seductively positioned in the long grass, is fashioned from a delicate application of gems, pearls, fabric, and flowers. This is contrasted with the decapitated head of the camel, spurting blood from its freshly cut neck, which she grasps in her hands as an offering. By way of a strategy of excessive referencing, Mutu tries to deconstruct such oft quoted visual symbols, although there is some irony in the fact that this exhibition works only because of our instant recognition of these stereotypes.

Although an African artist, Mutu has lived and worked in several countries and wants to present not just her original cultural identity but also how she has been shaped by her itinerant lifestyle. She suggests that identity is no longer defined by geographic or biological designations, but is instead formed by the multi-perspectival experience of a trans‐global existence. At university Mutu studied both Art and Anthropology, and this comes through in the exhibition as she explores our move from specific geographic locations to truly global networks.

As more and more people choose or are required to move across the globe, Mutu suggests that in the future we will see the rise of permanent global travelers or migrants in what she calls the ‘AlieNation’. In Zebra Crossing (2008), this juncture is envisioned in five separate frames, variously playing upon organic primordial formations, as perhaps the next evolutionary phase. However, the nature of her ‘AlieNation’ is left rather ambiguous. This global perspective can perhaps help us move beyond these ethnic stereotypes, but devoid of geographic or ethnic roots an atmosphere of alienation, uprooting, and even disorientation is reflected throughout the exhibition.

A series of large white tables, rustically painted and covered with floral crockery, take central position in the exhibition space. Suspended from the ceiling are green glass bottles out of which drops of liquid slowly fall into the chipped and cracked bowls below. For the most part it appears as water but towards the end of the room, as the liquid overflows onto the carpet, the stain is most definitely red. The viewer literally contaminates the space as traces of footprints are dragged along the floor from this suggestive puddle. The unnerving atmosphere which pervades the exhibition is aggravated by the hints that some catastrophic event has recently occurred -the damp seeping up the walls, the way in which the tables echo stretchers, the stale smell in the air, and the pools of soiled liquid slowly spreading along the ground. This heaven is undercut by the association between migration, disaster, material want, physical force and often explotation. Mutu’s heaven cannot be divorced from the determining connection between migration and economic, political, and military forces.

However, there are also suggestions of hope in Mutu’s ‘AlieNation’. In literally using society’s refuse to create this exhibition, Mutu explores the problem of waste in relation to consumerism and exploitation. She counters our often cavalier attitude to consumption with her own philosophy: ‘I have a theory that there’s an incredible waste of resources, imagination, and ideas – although they are right in front of us’. While her collages also reflect the fragmented feelings of alienation, at the same time they represent the way in which this new transglobal existence can be pieced together in an endless array of new possibilities.

Creativity, Mutu seems to suggest, is the spring from which these possibilities steam; she writes: ‘In a way, my exhibition is an homage…[to] tenacity and ingenuity’. This philosophy extends into the exhibition itself, as the artist salvages the detritus of an alienated world and reprocesses these materials in her creative output. The large tree-like structures, for example, are held together with the humblest of materials: simple brown duct tape. Like the new multi-perspectival traveller that Mutu sees emerging from this globalised world, her work is also collaged together from a varied array of geographic, ethnic, and experiential concerns. Whilst the sanctity of Mutu’s heaven is up for debate, the power of collage to connect these disparate elements, and in so doing transform them, is passed on to the viewer as Mutu invites us into her ‘Dirty Little Heaven’.

Wangechi Mutu: My Dirty Little Heaven was on show 30 April – 13 June 2010.

Gemma Carroll – Enclave Review

Flotsam and Jetsam

Wangechi Mutu: My Dirty Little Heaven