Author Archives: johnluna

Christopher Butterfield

 [Christopher Butterfield is a composer who teaches at the University of Victoria. This review appeared in Musicworks magazine, in the spring of 2005.]

 

The Lab 3.5:  “Pavilion of Heavenly Trousers”

February 13 – March 28, 2004.

 

“ Some mornings I roll our of bed thinking it’s 1913…”

 

Chris Butterfield makes this remark during a talk for the opening of his installation, “Pavilion of Heavenly Trousers”, in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria’s Lab space.  You’d assume that this comes from Butterfield’s work as a composer, which includes homage to such seminal modernist icons as T.S. Eliot and Yves Klein, but it is also perhaps a reference to life in Victoria.  In a city where most central neighborhoods were laid out during an Edwardian building boom (1911-1912), and which repackaged its English origins in the 1930’s to capitalize on tourism, a very particular relationship persists between the colonial and contemporary.  The result might be perceived as an overlap of the ‘post’-modern, and the modern before it properly knew itself to be ‘modernism’, as such.

What Butterfield has created does rely on a classic modernist baffle:  that of the tension arising between a multiplicity of voices invoked by an absent-yet-presiding authorial control.  And yet it is the way the artist allows the use of collaboration and chance to reveal, rather than dominate, the nature of his subject that gives the work its curiously liberating quality. 

The installation consists of rows of yellow notepaper – 600 in all – mounted on the walls from floor to near-ceiling level.  The papers are Butterfield’s handwritten transcription from two novels: Pearl S Buck’s Pavilion of Women, and The Maker of Heavenly Trousers by Daniele Vare.  Butterfield’s undertaking is to ‘interleave’ the books, by working sequentially through both texts writing a full sentence from each author in turn (repeating the latter a second and one-half time as it is shorter).  The transcription itself becomes a performance of devotional labour (a reference is made in the artists’ statement to the “extraordinary Chinese work ethic”[i]), for one hour each day over two hundred days.  Also in the space are two Chinese chairs of the kind commonly exported to the West in the early 1900’s, a vitrine with circa 1930’s editions of the novels, and a small speaker relaying a recording of Butterfield’s voice reading the reconstituted script.

The audio recording is important.  The visual elements provide many well-produced pleasures:  the respective and varied artifactuality of the books and chairs; the orderliness of the pinned yellow sheets (the ‘Emperor’s Colour’ Butterfield notes), their relative illegibility confirming their status as objects of process.  It is in the presentation of the writing as a seamless narrative, however, that this deliberate confusing of voices abandons the charms of labour, accident and archive for the more ambiguous territory of interpolating between writing and reading.

This action was apparent in the examples of text that Butterfield read at the show’s opening.  As one might expect, each sentence tended to both bond with and distinguish itself from predecessor and successor, but the presumed game of reassembling two separate narratives as distinct proved unexpectedly difficult, as association between the sources seemed more elastic, yet less obvious, than one would expect.  Each sentence persuasively presented itself as both part of a distinct narrative history and a new narrative which was constantly being formed and unformed.  That this tended not to break down into self-referential theatrics of free-association – a self-reflexive scattering of sentences into words, words, words – amounted to the miracle of sensibility that holds this piece together. 

Listening to or reading the text invokes a multiplicity of voices rather than just two.  As characters recollect, connect and reflect, their thoughts open up spaces in the narrative line, forwards, backwards and between.  Recalling especially the auditory qualities of a work like The Wasteland, in which tone (in literary terms) becomes the overriding means of apprehending continuity, this opening within the narrative forms becomes artificially but gracefully compounded by the interleaving.  The closeness in tone of Butterfield’s sources should be acknowledged here; Butterfield credits the ‘crystal clear prose’ of the writing with allowing him the flexibility to conduct his exercise with such facility.  Within this greater literary gesture, the clashing of incidentals – who is speaking to or about whom, who is male or female, young or old, etc. – seem like symptoms of acceleration or nostalgia.  The smoothness and deliberateness of the form, like the behaviour of these characters encountering catastrophe or epiphany, clings all the more tenaciously to the camouflage of its tact as it becomes threatened with incoherence.

In one passage, an aristocratic woman, Madame Wu, rushes uncharacteristically from her home to see a foreign priest who has been beaten in the street and is dying.  This event is interwoven with a monologue (interior?) from the Vare text, in which an aging dandy takes ceremonious pains in describing habits of comportment.  The contrast mingles flavors of occidental and oriental; colonialism and imperial decay.  The emotional moment becomes caught in a play of interval in contrast to which the mannered broaches on the ritualistic.  Voices distinguish themselves through their connection to place and object as the shifts break them up – by turns disembodied, exemplary, or possessed by urgency and agency.

In a passage incorporating the final page of the Buck novel, Madame Wu’s experience of a kind of salutary epiphany ([she] knew that she was immortal) meets with the description of someone being lead through an apartment.  Distinct motifs seem to emerge:  here, a description of place coincides with a mental event.  Elsewhere such conditions reoccur in form of various contrasts between internal and external, both of which are stylized, the former as the rather formal and reticent exposition of feeling, the latter as the abstraction of foreignness.  Often the cataloguing and codifying of the traditional (a private school uniform) occurs within the precincts of displacement (the foreign house), with the question of whose tradition and whose estrangement already at issue in the original material.  The stylistic characteristics common to both novels – being circumspect, indirect, and given to revelation of character through incident and epiphany, rather than analytical description – seem compounded by the misdirecting, reflexive yet synthetically unifying action of Butterfield’s exercise.

The result is a surprising and cogent sense of the relationship of ‘foreignness’ to self-conception.  A correlative that comes to mind is the recent novels of Kazuo Ishiguro – particularly, When We Were Orphans and the more important but often overlooked The Unconsoled.  Ishiguro’s narrators, stranded between poles of oriental and occidental find the overturning of the world not within themselves, but a world of terms, architecture, and relationships which shift, stretch and overlap precipitously as if to accommodate a painfully subjective mental flux. Their internal voices however, are usually complacent and understated to a fault, obliquely hinting at a personal unraveling that never comes.  Instead, the world itself is unshelled by degrees, with fragments of relationship and memory commingling in their fall.  

It is worth recalling a question asked at the opening regarding the choice of process: whether Butterfield might have chosen to interrupt the continuity his authors’ sentences as he reached the end of his own lines on the page, rather than the end of each full sentence.  By distinguishing his action from a gesture which more obviously privileged the exercise of chance, Butterfield does not create a demonstration of principle (organized randomness vis a vis repetitious, automatistic labour), nearly so much as he uses juxtaposition to create a new and different literary experience which, at its most successful, refers back to both his source works and issues fundamental to their ethos. 

Crucial to this understanding is to read the work just not as an intriguing cross-section of a process, but as a fait acompli, and in doing so we come to recognize it as a machine; a progression that could continue on after the effort of writing stops.  Buck’s longer text will not always be laid alongside Vare’s in the order in which it appears in this presentation; the shorter text conceivably revolves endlessly within the longer, generating new compositions.  In this way the principle relationship of the piece as a whole – that of work to work to reader, rather than of works to artist – operates continuously, with each component opening up our notion of the other in turns, from moments of static and obstruction to clarity and fluidity.

The principle at hand, for both the characters caught up in our new text and we ourselves as readers, is that the modern subject – as we know it or have known it – requires an infinitely responsive sense of scale and resistance in order to constitute itself.  These un-completing sentences are from texts about ‘others’:  women, foreigners, members of classes remote to us and to one another.  Finding parity within the stylization that reorders them is an alternate code of relationship that, even as it dismays, conserves, rather than objectifies, their civility.

When does chance become purpose – not an ad hominim ‘intentionality’ that unravels a work’s most obvious origins, but a less definable will to form?  Cues slip into the nuance of an open scene like the accents of characters:  Butterfield’s own speech patterns recall the benignly paternalistic voice of the Edwardian children’s book narrator; the clarity is accumulative, specific to the before and after of event.  This is also a biographical performance.  Written down mostly at the composer’s home or in Chinatown, it refers to aggregate tense, filled with floating contracts, which in the greater agreement of the gallery empty into absence, as the purgative that consumes our idea of industry.  The writing as affect grounds an imponderable listening in the score’s illegibility, creating a sense of levity – not the confrontational weightlessness of a formal demonstration, but the more gracious weightlessness of a masterful artifice made new.

 

 

 

[i] Christopher Butterfield, ‘Artist Statement’, The Lab 3.5 Pavilion of Heavenly Trousers, Victoria:  The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 2004.

Emi Honda

[This was a short profile for Monday Magazine published in Autumn of 2004. I’d hoped for further chances to write about Emi’s work, but she moved to Montreal shortly after this was written. Victoria’s Brown House Collective, of which Honda was a member, continues as of this writing, notably through the work of Scott Evans)

Circuit Boards and Bacterial Amoeba

Inside the curious world of Emi Honda

 

Midway through speaking with local artist Emi Honda, a milestone emerges: her first electric shock.  

“It was one of those fake digital clocks . . . the kind where the numbers flip down,” says Honda, recounting how as a child she dismantled the clock and, having exposed the mechanisms, plugged it back in to see them in action. It seems a suitable starting point for an artist whose work is a curious preservation of the childhood urge to take things apart, coupled with the improbable wish that afterwards, they should go on buzzing with life.

The world of her often gadget-like sculptures is full of this kind of ad-hoc animation. In one, tiny plastic plants inside a fishbowl seem to bend in a breeze at the push of a button; in another, circuits decorated with pompoms surround and mimic a minute patch of moss. Props, toys and salvaged technology combine to create objects that conjure the contradictions of both cliche and everyday life: the projected intelligence of machines, the precarious delicacy of junk, and the uncanny transformations of nature.

Honda, now thirty, grew up in a relatively rural part of Japan, studying traditional academic painting during her college years. A breakthrough took place in a more industrial setting—the city of Osaka. “I found a monitor that was cracked,” she recalls. “You could see inside it to the circuit board, it was very dirty.” Fascinated, Honda took it home and went at it with pliers. This led to her first sculptures: miniature environments set inside boxes, which Honda reads as a reflection of her compact living space at the time.

She observes that her work is very sensitive to her immediate environment; a move to Victoria in 1999—and many months spent gardening as a means of relating to newfound isolation—led to the presence of natural forms in her work, which has since been seen around town In group and solo shows at Rogue Art, Ministry of Casual Living, and others.

Having recently installed herself in a new house, Honda already has work everywhere: over the mantel hangs a floating city of sorts, an amalgam of soldered circuits and twinkling lights which grows more enigmatic as daylight fails. The contrasts in the piece—between cuteness and ruin, wistfulness and intelligence—seem very timely. When asked the usual questions about influences and themes, Honda is reticent . . . but does comment on a paradoxical sense of futuristic nostalgia, as embodied by the aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner or the animated epics of Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away).

Honda also talks about photographs—she has produced two books of sumptuous colour pictures of her living environment and artwork, often delightfully blurring the boundary that distinguishes one from the other . . . as well as the way photographs of sculptures become artworks themselves. Circuit board and bacterial amoeba represent the poles of her artistic continuum: information and intent are everywhere, but nowhere specific. Things generate and regenerate unpredictably.  “Environmental concerns are part of my work, but it’s also more complicated…” Honda muses, gazing about the room at finished and unfinished stems, networks, organisms. Pausing, she offers a suitably prosaic conclusion. “Cities grow, too.”

 

—John Luna

[Emi Honda’s work can be seen in the Interface show at the AGGV until September 5th]

 

 

 

Marianne Corless

[This post was originally a catalogue essay for Marianne Corless, Further, (January 2004 at Grunt Gallery, Vancouver, BC.)]

 

Marianne Corless

 

Because we have no country,

no place to return to other than

our bodies

 

because we are alone

and have reached this place

together

 

– Susan Musgrave, Flying the Flag of Ourselves[i]

 

The fur trade jumped out as the most significant historical feature in Canada’s origins, affirming what I had learned in school. However the human drama within the fur trade, including the adventure, avarice and ruthlessness that it involved was something that I hadn’t grasped before. I had worked with fur prior to this as an art material, but with this connection I finally understood the relationship between the material and its great cultural significance to me as a Canadian.

 

– Marianne Corless, Statement, January 16th, 2003[ii]

 

Standing, looking across a floor made of fur square patches is like a view from a great height at a landscape of varying sameness.  One feels the luxury of the forest as seemingly inexhaustible reserve –there’s more where that came from- a luxury that now usually engenders a knee-jerk of anxiety.  Looking at the pelts of animals once as pelts and twice as old coats is working with the dead, but also with the occupied – imagine the smells, the textures, as spore, replete with mute information. 

 

The portraits reference the “old school” tradition of portraiture, but go beyond representation in that the fur transforms the individual into the very material that contributed significantly to their lives and accomplishments. Early trappers in the Canadian wilderness sometimes ate beaver pelts in times of winter starvation, so they became “comprised of” the material that they sought. In the same way, a fur portrait of say, Queen Victoria, actually transforms her into the “spoils of the colonies”[iii]

  

In Corless’s fur rendition of the new Queen Elizabeth portrait (the popular poster from which this image is taken reads “Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada”), there is a playful deterioration at hand, in more ways than one.  There is the underlying threat to the image itself – as if the face were in a process of disappearing into the fur.  While the fur is plainly a material used to construct the portrait, there is an unsettling sense of entropy as if the face might pass from celebrity to idiocy.  Dovetailing with this idea is the suspicion that the fur rendition of the aging queen could almost pass as a legitimate piece of souvenir ‘craft’ art. Physically, the pictures might dissolve into incoherent masses of fur; culturally the symbol of the monarchy becomes indistinguishable from living room kitsch. 

 

There is more to the fur, however, than the curious surprise of its mingling with resemblance, or the bemusement at cultural ironies. The potential for metamorphosis inferred in Corless’s evocation of the queen as being transformed into “the spoils” refers to a more penetrating reading of the notion of ‘the border’ as it occurs in the painting or the person within arm’s reach or the clothes and other commodities which become a second skin.  One looks, one wears, one makes exchanges; one alters and is altered, all within the constituency of touch.  Within the imaginative territory of these subjects are rawness and wealth, the luxuriant and the excoriated: the brown corruption of a Velasquez portrait, the germs teeming in the clothes of the colonial wealthy, the dirtiness of money and also its sublimating, purifying simplicity. 

 

Within the ‘fourth wall’ that divides a painting from its viewer is a richer terrain than we imagined from across the picture gallery.  The glazes that made the shadows and light of flesh, but also gold, velvet, leather, and jewels might open up to our inquiry as the objects of history and ephemera of personality; they might give way beneath an apprehension of age and distance to reveal the work as fragments and accidents, bacteria and dust.  A fur coat as an emblem of prestige begins as an animal and ends in luxe, literally, light.  Luxury, as a dazzling sheen, intimidates, establishes a class-distance, but also unifies with its subject into an object with no history before it was an object of desire.  This was the marginal limit of the fox – an organ but not a severed part, a resemblance, but not an index anyone can read in order to find the heart of the matter. 

 

The impact of colonization on the people of First Nations was the other historical feature to affect me strongly. The facts themselves were disturbing, but so was my sense of surprise in finally understanding that disease and violence played such a fundamental role in transforming Canada’s population. In connecting with and claiming Canadian history for the first time, the displacement of those who were already here was something that I also had to own.[iv]

 

These blankets with their intertwined suggestions of exchange, occupation and disease are both units of trade and agents of change.  As Hudson’s Bay Company currency for pelts, the point blankets represented the sense of survival as something possessing palpable weight, quantifiable in its denseness and texture.  As a colourful object of current fashion (witness the HBC’s recent reissuing of the blanket stripe on everything from scarves to handbags to coats), the colours would transcend the reality of their history along with the heaviness of their material.  They were and are moveable emblems for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s art, and – here, now – for the artist’s.  The smallpox-like anomalies Corless has sewn into them are hints of viral life that refer specifically to a concealed history.  Which history?  Here the threads diverge:  the disease was an insurgent hidden in blankets; its revelation undermines a complacency of official record; the intuitive ‘drawing’, even painting that the stitching becomes, offers a curiously liberating opposite for the artist from the rigor of working resemblance in fur.

 

However the blankets and flags might function as a grim reminder, they keep a certain fugitive comfort, and remain marked with paint or thread in a way which suggests the creative act that is rehabilitating, even while it is mordant.  Corless has noted Jasper Johns’s use of the American flag of the McCarthy era as a supposedly ‘neutral’ subject matter for the exploration of the material values of paint.  Today, his encaustic flags are in a state of constant deterioration, as if the segregated pleasure of the wax paint’s application were still burning time within the ceremonial pattern of the flag.  The most famous reoccurrence of the American flag in popular imagination since that time has been during the flag-burning controversy of the Reagan years and the flags – genuinely populist and at times wretchedly ragged – which have hung and flown in New York city since September 11th.  Blankets represent, in their oldest cultural connotations, a portable domesticity.  In America, one pledges allegiance to the flag, “wraps” oneself in it.  Here or there, you take your home wherever you can find it. 

 

Resemblances are no different.  In his essay, This Mortal Magic, David Hickey talks about the experience of losing people as a lost Rolodex card, photographs which fall out of the shuffle.[v]  He points out that in portraiture that came before the advent of the photograph, a picture might quite literally ‘stand in’ for its patron when they were away from family, as a near-flesh and blood reminder.  Contrast this with John Berger’s assertion that oil painting was developed, as a technology, firstly to render with maximum persuasiveness the palpable richness of patrons and their goods.[vi]  Somewhere between these arguments is a longing for symbolic objects to agitate the conditions of daily life, or the power of even devalued symbols to become filled with urgency as the need of the moment divines its agency in metaphor.  Within any definition of craft is repetition and labour, and it’s on to this that we’d assume, project, or wish for, the trace of love ploughed under. 

 

My father died when I was 14 — he was an alderman in our community (Fort McMurray) and the flags around our city went to half-mast. I have visceral memories of seeing those lowered Canadian flags, and to this day the sight of a lowered flag hits me emotionally. In the time following 9/11 the flags were half-mast for weeks on end; within a month and without really knowing where it would lead, I responded to the emotion that I was experiencing and produced the first piece of this body of work, fur flag.[vii]

 

  The fur flag is a dense-looking thing.  It bears a lot of associations, many of which Corless, characteristically Canadian by her own reckoning, won’t pin down exactly.

It seems a dreadful conceit to say of anything, any object, that it’s capable of speaking for victims of colonial occupation, or addressing issues of animal cruelty, etc; grave or facetious.  But a flag is and was the article of such conceits, and the flag of the nation-state is a modern idea that – like certain other 20th century concepts – mutates as it decays.  Right now, when advertisers synthesize a new Canadian-ness on beer commercials or in the creation of brand-immersive vacation camps based on sportswear and leather goods,[viii] the Canadian flag as reconstituted out of fur seems like our reference point for ‘raw materials’ lost and found. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i] Susan Musgrave, “Flying the Flag of Ourselves”, Tarts and Muggers, Poems New and Selected (Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 101

 

[ii] Marianne Corless, “Statement, January 16th, 2003” (unpublished, used with author’s permission)

[iii] Corless

[iv] Corless

[v] Cf. Dave Hickey, “This Mortal Magic”, Air Guitar:  Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angles:  Art Issues Press, 1993)

[vi] John Berger, “5”, John Berger, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, Richard Hollis, Ways of Seeing (London:  Penguin Books/BBC, 1972), 90

[vii] Conversation with the artist 12/03

[viii] Naomi Klein, “Mergers and Synergy”, No Logo:  Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto:  Vintage, 2000), 152-154

Semsar Siahaan

 

[This post originally appeared as a catalogue essay for Siahaan’s installation at Open Space in the fall of 2003. It was reprinted for Siahaan’s retrospective at the National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, in 2004.- J.L.]

 

Semsar Siahaan: G-8 Pizza and Study of the Falling Man

 

Between pain and pleasure there are three

creatures.  One looks at a wall,

the second puts on a sad disposition

and the third advances on tiptoes;

but, between you and me,

only second creatures exist.

–         Cesar Vallejo[i]

 

Exile presumes suffering, not only in homesickness but also more constantly and inescapably, in the loneliness of a new place.  Faces, stories and motifs are pulled from the plights out of which they were born, to become a series of personal responsibilities which must be supported, or defended, or rendered coherent (if this is possible), but above all repeated, towards or against a future assimilation, order, conversation.

 

Semsar Siahaan has in fact strenuously denied that he is in exile, is an exile[ii], just as he has denied that he is an ‘activist artist’ per se, though he has been tortured by the military as a demonstrator[iii] and had his work as an artist monitored, restrained, delayed and otherwise put down by Suharto’s New Order Regime.  His period away from Indonesia has been marked by friendships and misunderstandings: not a self-styled isolation, but a hospitality and agency seeking the same in a new and most likely temporary setting.  His frank attitudes towards the inherently human (and humane) nature of art making and its inevitable political consequences have remained unchanged; his mistrust of the politics of parties and markets has intensified.  Privately, Semsar has confided that this exhibition may indeed be his ‘farewell’ to Victoria.  If this becomes the case, then this period of asylum and recuperation wasn’t – isn’t – an exile, but something else:  a suspension, a communiqué, a rest (albeit not without its own agitation, alienation, exhaustion…).

 

While this exhibition marks Semsar’s fourth solo show in less than five years of residing in Victoria, it may be the one most characteristic of his time spent here.  The show’s centrepiece, G-8 Pizza, began with the theme of the slaughterhouse, which has preoccupied the artist since at least the early 1990’s.  The cardboard packing materials used are ones that Semsar retrieves regularly from a bin near the apartment where he has lived for 31/2 years.  The ambitious energy of the work – the size and scope of the project, the risk and deliberation of the drawings, all executed inside of 8 weeks of constant effort – represents most particularly the continuum of his medium and personality, from patience and accumulation to impulse, hazard and consequence.

 

G-Pizza is comprised of eight sections, like slices of a pie, depicting on a public scale a cartoonish nightmare of global scandal; the rape, dissection and devouring of the world by monstrous actors.  Each segment features a different creature or character, none of which can be pinned down to a strict symbolic interpretation.  Rather, they trade in allusive sensation, from farcical outrage to subconscious anxiety; the nauseous thrill that one’s life is immediately or indirectly, unavoidably, inevitably being intruded upon and controlled.  Gamblers of obscene leverage, eugenics surgeons, gluttonous wrestlers, leeches – the index of morphology speaks of primitive responses, or responses insufficiently formed for lack of nourishment; those fed on (and consumed by) irrational fears.

 

It is no surprise to learn that the artist refers to these creatures as Manubilis (collapsing words for animal/man/devil), a kind of magician-parasite or demiurge. [iv]  Their grotesquery relies on the shock of the hybrid, which is never so much a horror at mongrel parts alone as it is a horror of slippage, of a loss of form and underlying coherence.  In this way, they are icons of a common global delirium:  the sense that one never knows the true facts of a given incident, local or elsewhere, but accepts every item of news, every rhetorical appeal to the emotions, through a system of contradictory and self-defeating filters and biases, aware but paralysed.  Can a given media outlet be trusted?  Are any of these conspiracy theories true, given the irrational way they announce themselves?  How is it that a person becomes a terrorist?  If the point is that we can’t know, we won’t know, what is the message of this mass of communications, being not after all, a bearer of universal tidings, but the explosion of countless local rumours?  The result is unformed, imbecilic, and its product, rather than thought, is something that in passing resembles mythology.

 

Surrounding the manubilis figures are images that likewise morph uneasily from the banal to the horrific.  What first appear to be screens, bearing blue halo-like shapes – streamlined logos or exposed picture tubes – turn out to be the ‘bug-zapper’ lights found in industrial abattoirs.  An X-like form resembling an animal carcass suspended by hooks slashes across the composition, dividing the operators from their audience.  The X recalls a cape or curtain, a dramatic flourish appended to backs of the global police who stand guard – those players in a kind of pageant.  Semsar has achieved a striking range of indeterminacy within his limited palette.  Oily black pulls and tugs theatrically in the carcasses, drips and dashes unpredictably from the demons, fixes shadows that stretch to implicate constituent bodies: the mute body of the meat; the uniform-body of riot police; the anonymous, countless crowd-body of the witnesses.

 

The way in which the crowd has been rendered is different, most particularly in contrast to the caricatures of uniformity the police represent.  Soberly doodle-ish, the audience is both vital with particulars and absent to the point of dissolving into scrawls.  Among the black mumbles are select figures isolated in white.  Karl Marx, Tolstoy, John Lennon, the great art-guru Joseph Beuys, murdered Indonesian labour activist Marsinah, and others, including Semsar himself, stand as presiding ghosts, somber observers or misplaced friends.  They round out the sense that this circular, repetitive narrative is a tableau of both immediacy and duration, writhing in its centre, calmly accumulating definition at its edges.  In this regard, references to the history of expressive political art come to mind:  the work of Max Beckman (both the famous triptych and the later self-portraits) in reference to his exile in the United States; Diego Rivera’s inclusion of himself into murals combining a fantastical folk history with instrumental political messages; the emergence in Kathe Kollwitz’s use of illustrational motifs of the autobiographical from the didactic – and of an unexpected warmth in the immediate encounter that belies the linearity of the work in reproduction.

 

Originally intended as wall-mounted images, the drawings of Study of the Falling Man now meet their companion piece more directly, but with some dismay as well.  Placed on sticks like placards and weighed down with sandbags, the drawings stake out their elbow-room in the gallery, yet drift like monuments of contingency:  disaster relief; territorial marker; shifting protest line; or the anonymous deadweight of one officially ‘disappeared.’

 

The drawings that comprise the Studies are also executed on recovered cardboard, with the difference that the original shape of the packing materials has been allowed to remain intact.  The result is oddly cruciform or totemic shapes that both frame and direct readings of the drawing process itself.  Rendered in the same fashion as the Pizza, yet with a more introspective tone to the improvisation, the drawing of the Studies invokes the lost experience, the undistinguished identity, in a recessive, constantly shifting imagery of faces and packing codes, gestural, signatory strokes and serial numbers.  Faces are interrupted by packing templates, but equally often interface with mask-like results; symmetries suggesting both the ritual and clinical emerge.  One senses on the one hand the unreality of contemporary time, production and waste.  On the other hand are Semsar’s references to memory, a second, more delicate displacement, which meets the first with both acknowledgement and defiance.  Many of the images in the Falling Man drawings echo the artist’s notebooks:  quotidian sketches of figures giving birth to arcs and slashes of line; crowds of marks which assemble to form words.

 

The crosses are not explicitly Christian (though the artist has cited this as an aspect of his upbringing).  More accurate to the morphology of this reading is to recognize in the cross and the X general post-colonial symptoms of the opening and closing of speech, territory and name.  Semsar has complimented his study of the manubilis with longstanding designs for a ‘human/animal’ movement; an emphasis on art of any style or medium as having communal and humane potential.

 

While his early paintings depicted a heroic artist wielding brushes of fire, and his most notorious actions involved the burning of sculpture and drawings, these Studies are more reticent and fallible.  Despite this, or perhaps because of it, they seem more self-consciously resilient as well.  Semsar handles the materials respectfully, acknowledging the irony that the boxes are an excellent surface for conte in particular – a ready supply of pristine waste that would be unavailable outside of the West.  It seems fitting that from this surface he draws, by contrast, surprising depth, warm ochre rising from the grisaille to outlive it.

 

The figures which populate Semsar’s early painting and drawing often bear a resemblance to the artists own features, more youthfully androgynous and – even in postures of agony – sculpturally whole.  As experience modulates his own ambitions, from an activist who occupies the pigmented centre of a target, to a circumspect and contemplative expatriate, Semsar’s image becomes not so much singular as mutual.  The heroic self-portrait of the early canvasses, detailed in a language then still generous with the pleasure of its ambitions, has thinned uncertainly, faced the mediation of its struggle and the co-option of its gestures.  At times worn-down, made awkward by a left hand instead of a right, or split into fragments which share space with advertisements and memories, this figure is an outcome, one of many that a person must adopt and discard, as need be, within and without asylum.