Gorge: An un-mountain, 2016
Dimensions: 190cm x 110cm x 110cm and 35cm x 235cm x 85cm
Materials: Baking tins, copper coated steel rings
In the text ‘Ask the Dust’; ‘Unmonumental: the object in the 21st century’, Gioni provides a psychoanalytical response to the ‘fictional universes’ that began to appear within sculptural practice, describing them as a ‘schizophrenic division between the desire to dissolve into the world and the need to fortify their own borders’. Reflecting on this dichotomy, Gioni defines these artistic acts as an ‘indecision’, which he declares as having a resemblance to ‘the state of paranoia that we live in as we stand divided between carrying out a new war to conquer new territory or, instead, retreating and carefully protecting our own ground’.[1]
Louise Bourgeois, ‘Cell XXVI’, 2008
Exploring Louise Bourgeois’ series of ‘Cells’, though Bourgeois denies physical entry into each of her assembled scenes, on comparing the circular cage that frames ‘Cell XXVI’ to the circular drum of a zoetrope, in which, on being turned, creates the illusion of a motion picture by dissolving the individual gaps between a series of images into one active image, by exploring all 360 degrees of the circumferential edge of ‘Cell XXVI’, the surface of the wired boundary dissolves, drawing the viewer into her cellular universe.
Mark Manders, ‘self-portrait as a building series’, 2010
Unlike Bourgeois’ ‘Cells’, on viewing Mark Manders ‘self-portrait as a building series’ you are free to roam the physical spaces between each of his assembled scenes that form part of his expansive, collective self-portrait. What is comparable between each artists approach, is that you can never fully grasp the totality of their world building, which continually push at the boundaries edge and form an ever-expanding universe.
Referring to Stewart’s ‘contrasting modes of analogy’ explored between the boundaries of scale, in ‘On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection’, she delineates how the miniature and the gigantic are both exaggerations.
Defining the miniature as having ‘proportion, control and balance…a model universe’ and a contained ‘world within a world’, in opposition, she refers to the gigantic as an ‘analogical mode of thought’, that reflects a ‘world without world’ in a ‘powerful’ and ‘self-destructive’ sense, who’s ‘infinite’ nature evokes a sense of ‘disorder and disproportion’, while creating a sense of containment as it ‘envelopes’ and ‘encloses’ the spectator who walks within its ‘shadow’.
Articulating the miniature as ‘reductive’ and ‘toy-like’, that enables interior thoughts to be ‘over-seen’, Stewart refers to the ‘expansive’ state of the gigantic as being akin to ‘magnificent’, ‘sublime’ landscapes, which elevate thought ‘physically and psychically’, impressing the mind with a sense of awe.
Though Stewart refers to the gigantic as offering ‘unlimited consumption’, she explicates how there are ‘consequences of movement’ when viewing ‘vastness’ which limits perspective, by disintegrating any sense of a framed whole, that can only be ‘partially’ and ‘fragmentarily’ consumed.
Bestowing ‘unconsumable’ landscapes with a ‘theatrical’ significance, Stewart describes such scenes as generating a ‘consuming’ and ‘cannibalistic’ force, leaving their viewer feeling ‘swallowed’ and ‘devoured’. Here, Stewart defends the reactions of ‘the soul and emotions’, portending how overwhelming encounters can leave one feeling the need to ‘domesticate’ and ‘reform’ nature.[2]
[1] Massimiliano Gioni. ‘Ask the Dust. In: Richard Flood Unmonumental: the object in the 21st century’. New York: Phaidon, 2007, p65
[2] Susan Stewart. ‘On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection’. Duke University Press, 1992, p73-86