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Christopher
Braddock, Gavin Hipkins and Kiki Smith
21st October - 15th November 2003
Gow-Langsford Gallery, Auckland. BODYLOGUE is
a curated project by Chris Braddock exploring
sets and
groups of bodies. From gestures, to porn-star
names and body-bits,
BODYLOGUE collects fragments of the body and
body-types for collection
and display.
Kiki Smith
Gavin Hipkins
Christopher Braddock
Gow-Langsford Gallery, Auckland. October –
November 2003
There’s an old
party trick designed to create your own porn-star
name: choose the name of your first pet and the
street you lived in at the time. Gow-Langsford
Gallery staff produce some glowing examples: Muffy
Shackleton, Pussy Sentinel, Mitzi Milais and Lucky
Karaka. This word-game sets the scene for BODYLOGUE
as it explores sets and groups of bodies. New
syntaxes logue associations from memory and history,
providing a rich terrain for overlapping typologies
resulting in new frameworks of ordering. From
gestures, to naming bodies and body-bits, BODYLOGUE
collects fragments of the body and body-types,
for collection and display. The BODYLOGUE artists
share a fascination with sets and multiples. To
LOGUE suggests recording, listing and itemizing.
These preoccupations share characteristics of
the archive that seeks inherent structural order;
seemingly infinite multiplicity; serialisation
and a desire for comprehensive categorisation.
What interests me most about the porn-star names
is that they are so easily identifiable as a known
typology, yet they are so random: they have so
little to do with the endgame. It’s always
shocking, how collections of types of things do
more than prop up similarities, but provoke differences.
One might expect continuity: a collection of things
that exclude interpretation in favour of narrowed
and existing conditions, but discontinuity follows
as does a plethora of possibilities.
Gavin Hipkins’ The Den (A), 2003, based on
the names of famous porn-stars that begin with
the letter A, presents plastic kid’s letters
overlaid against second-generation photographs
of the earth's surface from outer space. A dilemma
in understanding Hipkins’ work is the nonsense
of the game. Like the construction of the porn-names
themselves, what do these layers have to do with
each other? Nothing and everything. As with some
of his recent projection-strip works such as The
Gulf (Redhead), 2001, The Den (A) suggests a kind
of mnemonic experience that can be related back
to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, 1925-29.
Warburg montaged together more than sixty panels
comprising over a thousand photographs in an attempt
to chart traumatic historical experience from
Classical Antiquity in Renaissance painting. Warburg’s
mnemonic methodology offered a challenge to the
hierarchical and compartmentalised archive of
the discipline of art history. It was this attempt
to construct social memory by means of a broad
range of photographic imagery, from monumental
frescoes to stamps and magazine pictures, that
is of interest here. In Hipkins’ work an
extreme heterogeneity of subject and spatial relationship
is contrasted against the paradoxical homogeneity
of photography’s ability to reduce size and
scale, given formal rigour by the fall and seriality
of The Den’s (A)’s projection-strips.
These issues of difference and similarity within
the notion of the archive are echoed in Braddock’s
series of flocked works mimicking museum display-case
bases. The recessed forms, calculated from three
key modules, suggest an alphabet in reverse. They
are reminiscent of apparatuses of display: the
recesses in which artifacts might rest. Entitled
Bunking Off, the series solicits ideas of truancy:
an absence of the body. His recent works including
Repository, 2001, and Push, 2003, hint at recent
patterns in ethnographic practice that propose
the study of collection methods and patterns of
display as a valuable area of research in its
own right: how things are collected as well as
what. Bunking Off reverses the dilemma: so often
accustomed to negotiating the prejudices of display,
the viewer is confronted here with the display
system as a trace of the artifacts. While the
absent archive suggests congruence in its nod
to minimalist repetition and serialisation, the
viewer is invited to complete the task in a plethora
of privately imagined endgames.
As BODYLOGUE shifts from medium to medium an underlying
framework is that of multiplicity, both as a technology
and in the syntax that results from serialisation.
While such multiples are associated with loss
of aura of the original, photography as the queen
of reproduction presents a monumentalising and
reproducing capacity that displaces that auratic
cult-value. In this light, photography has been
a catalyst for a discussion where reproduction
is understood as both imitation and as a trace
of the thing imitated, involving a two-layered
notion of mimesis.
These relationships of imitation and trace are
continued by Hipkins in a Celtic mantra of the
Teat Prayer forming the audio to The Host Part
2. This incantation adapted from the late 19th
& early 20th Centuries offers infinite multiplicity
in its naming: Teat of Jack; Teat of Mary; Teat
of Rebecca etc… Hipkins overlays female and
male voices where the endless list of names adheres
to strict alphabetic order. The DVD echoes The
Colony, 2002, in that he has cultivated a strange
collection of body-like polystyrene cones and
balls, the frame shifting at each incantation.
Religious mantras act as a kind of mnemonic background
that allows the mind to empty the self’s
ego in order to be filled by the divine presence.
The repeated mantra is both an imitation and a
trace of the thing imitated: it is both to copy
a divine order and offer a palpable connection
to the aura of the original.
The Teat of Mary is both sexualised body-part
and venerated as signifier of Christ’s humanity
and nutrition, the flow of milk pulling us into
a dilemma of sacred and profane dimensions. Catholicism’s
capacity to physically embody spiritual ideas
is pivotal to The Host Part 2 and to the work
of Kiki Smith. Her 2002 trio entitled Mudra, Heart
and Baby Doll take their cue from earlier sculptures
such as Blue Girl, 1998, and notably, Mary Magdalene,
1994. Following her interest in Catholic iconography,
the figures display a mix of exposed childlike
vulnerability and meditative rigour. Her depictions
of long and tangled hair are seen by Smith as
the unfolding of the head, representing the artist
herself and a resistance to cultural norms of
femininity. The iconography, reminiscent of Donatello’s
Mary Magdalene, is employed to signal a fragmentation
of traditional dichotomies of mind/body and spirit/nature
inherent in mainstream philosophical discourses
just as the depiction of the full-figure nude
is employed as a means to critique much of late
modernism’s mainstream conventions. Saint
Mary Magdalene, in her sexual subversiveness,
is a pivotal figure in addressing such dichotomies
of rationalism and the body, particularly given
her service and devotion to the figure of Christ.
BODYLOGUE places Smith’s three bronze female-nudes
down the centre of the gallery in a semaphore
of gesture mimicking the three monkeys: ‘see
no evil’, ‘hear no evil’ and ‘speak
no evil’: lets call it mnemonic semaphore.
In Smith’s case the hands either cover the
genitals, the breasts or reach into the sky. As
such they constitute a set of moral gestures,
a kind of pedagogy of behaviour. Her works such
as Hand in Jar, 1983, and Glass Stomach, 1985,
inaugurated an exploration of the body in fractional
parts: body-organs, parts and the significance
of the body as a system of coded signs. Smith’s
figuration provokes a startling collision between
sentimentalism, vulnerability and assertion. Like
the porn-star word-games and concomitant porn
industry, these works stretch the body’s
limits, both physical and moral.
This stretch and strain is given material veracity
in Braddock’s nine Imprints from the Fleshly
Worn Series which index the artist’s right
wrist and elbow. He has pressed these body-parts
into clay and poured the cavities with white silicone
rubber, overflowing at the limits of the impression.
There is a suggestion here of the artist as ethnographer,
collecting gestures – a set of body citations.
If ethnography is understood as a published description
based on fieldwork, these impressions offer the
author as the field of enquiry: a kind of typology
of one’s own everyday anatomy. It is argued
that ethnobiograhies tell us stories about what
people say about each other in local settings:
the native gossip. Auto-ethnobiography comes close
to gossip about oneself, not normally for publishing:
one’s own informant. To collect one’s
own gestures is to collate a subjective archive
of bodily and emotional projections. Set in place
here are the artifacts collected that are themselves
the product and imprint of the archivist.
Kiki Smith’s trio share the marks of the
self-portrait suggested by Braddock. Raising questions
about where the membrane of the self stops and
where it starts. The membranes of Braddock’s
works literally overflow and fall from the walls
challenging the idea of the self-contained limits
of the body. Just as Hipkins’ porn-stars
challenge the private and public identity of the
sexual self. It is the photographic intensity
and exactness of Braddock’s silicon body-casts
that brings them into the realm of mimicry. These
works engage in a sensuous mimesis of the artist’s
body, that which Walter Benjamin took to be the
compulsion to become the Other - the mimetic faculty.
Michael Taussig describes mimesis as both "a
copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous,
connection between the very body of the perceiver
and the perceived."
As BODYLOGUE flips between the gestured-body,
the named-body and the fragmented-body, the nature
of mimesis is played out in all its complexity.
In each of these works, Benjamin’s well-quoted
exhibition value surpasses any original gesture.
Multiplicity, expressed through serialisation
and reproductive technologies, is played out within
an arena of typological display and mnemonic phrasing
where the archive poses its dominant pressure
for containment and its desire for categorisation.
Caspar Millar
For references in this text see: Ahrens,
C. (1998). All Creatures Great and Small: Kiki
Smith's Artistic Worlds. Hannover: Kestner
Gesellschaft; Buchloh’s Atlas/Archive
in Coles, A. (1999). (Ed). The Optics of Walter
Benjamin. Black Dog Publishing; Posner, H.
(1998). Kiki Smith. Boston: Bulfinch Press; Söderqvist’s
Biography or Ethnobiography or Both? in
Steier, F. (1991). (Ed). Research and Reflexivity.
London: Sage Publications; Taussig, M. (1993).
Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History
of the Senses. New York: Routledge.
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