Exhibited at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery,
21st September-3rd November 1996. This show
consisted of seven paintings, 1800 mm x 1350
mm, in a printed format with over painting
of the major elements.
Titles:
1. Works
featuring pyramids: CHAIR, BED.
2. Works featuring columns: TABLE, BOX, CUPBOARD,
DRAWERS, and BATH.
This series
of seven works by Maree Horner could be seen
to pose a question that is basic to our being.
That question could be framed as: How to represent
in an artwork the relationship between the
male and the female, between the masculine
and the feminine, in an incisive and telling
way.
To that
end, it can be noted, that each work presented
here contextualises a cultural or artistic
element, the Greek fluted column or the shape
of the Egyptian pyramid, within the matrix
of a familiar or domestic piece of furniture.
What at a glance might seem incongruous, such
as a pyramid on a chair, or two pyramids on
a bed, seems also, somehow, sardonically correct.
These works suggest that the domestic item
is in some way the center within which the
meaning of the columns and pyramids may come
to rest. Better still that they attain their
true and full meaning when determined in that
way. The whole weight of culture might, in
the end, find its denouement in relation to
a piece of furniture.
To understand
this seeming paradox, to throw some light
on the intent of these works, it might be
instructive to consider the Greek Temple or
the Egyptian Pyramid, in relation to its native
landscape. The Greek Temple is usually set
in a symbolic relationship to the valleys
and clefts, the mountains and peaks nearby,
whilst the Egyptian Pyramids stand in their
permanence against the ubiquitous shifting
sands of the desert. Valiant as they might
be in their defiance of the surroundings,
in their pseudo sylvan whiteness or monumental
scale relative to man, they are still dwarfed
by their settings, by the undeniability of
Nature and the inevitability of the Earth.
In general
the contrast here is between Mother Nature
and the assertions of a masculine paradigm.
The columns of the Temple capped by the pediment
and the outer form of the Pyramid thrusting
to the sky assert their masculinity over the
feminine reading of the same shapes as containers
with their usually discreet entrances and
germaine insides. As if to emphasise the masculine
dimension of the cultural element these works
use the phallocentricity of the single column,
or the closed tetrahedron of the pyramid.
We are left in no doubt as to their sexual
symbolism and so in no doubt as to the gender
of the contextualising shapes. The keyhole
of the BOX, the open drawer in the TABLE,
the CUPBOARD ajar, the soft enclosing forms
of the CHAIR, and the landscape of the BED,
suggest or even better insist, that the relation
in each work is between the female and the
male.
If the Temple
in the landscape or the Pyramid in the desert
is indeed a male element conceptualized by
Mother Earth then what we have to come to
understand is why in these works items of
furniture take that role instead and do so
with an effect that renders the whole equation
perhaps more precisely than a painting of
the original in its setting would do. If,
this time, the nature of the interior of the
Temple or the Pyramid is taken into account
rather than its relationship to its surroundings
we are minded that within the original Temples
and Pyramids furniture abounded either to
serve the needs of worship or the needs of
the dead. From the Egyptian pyramids particularly
extant items of furniture have a reality and
a presence at least as palpable as, if not
more than, the remnants of the dead.
What we
have to face in these works is the fact that
in a sense the original has been turned inside
out in relation to itself. How more ironical,
to convey the sense of context than to employ
the domestic contrivances that epitomise the
femme, at least as convention would have it.
And why ironical? Firstly because of the difficulty,
if not the impossibility, of conveying this
relationship in a painting of the site. Secondly
that the acceptance of the fact of painting,
of its scale, dimensions and kinaesthetic
allure, demands an inversion of reality in
the service of the need to allude, in short,
to make an effective work of art.
These works
capitalises not on illusion so much as on
symbolic perception. They appreciate that
meaning in art is generated in the mind prescient
as it is in the body and that it is best generated
by acknowledging the gender equation of the
mind relative to the body. They attempt to
resolve this equation by both formal means
of size, scale, kinaesthetic, picture plane
and fracture, and by means of locating content
in the nexus of the erotic (the process of
understanding as it is affected by the feminine
and the masculine).
The size
of these works or more significantly the size
of the items of furniture in the works is
crucial to their effect. That the items of
furniture are of a size as we would imagine
them in life enables the work to induce in
us a sense of familiarity, a sense of kinaesthetic
immediacy, an appeal to our comfort zones,
and a response from the body language of everyday
interaction, that is confounded by the relationship
of scale. Either the furniture dilates as
the columns or pyramids assert their normal
size, or the columns and pyramids shrink as
we reconcile the furniture to our lives.
If these
works use metaphor to suggest a relationship
between the feminine and the masculine they
also use a sort of crazy metonymy where a
part (the furniture) represents the whole
(landscape) and also represents the inverted
relation of furniture to Temple or Pyramid.
Is the furniture colossal and so the columns
and pyramids true to scale or are the columns
and pyramids miniscule and the furniture normal
sized. In this way the works play with our
kinaesthetic sense both by drawing us in,
in terms of our usual interaction with these
items of furniture we use everyday but then
by expanding our expectations by forcing us
to decide how we stand with it or how it stands
with us. Whatever, our sense of kinaesthetic
immediacy is engaged and enlarged.
This sense
of physical enticement is enhanced by the
titling of surfaces forward in the picture
plane and further by the tantalizing glimpses
into darkened interior spaces. The various
works do this in particular ways. In the BATH,
for instance, the column pieces are seemingly
floating on the surface of the water that
is either thick with minerals as if it were
a super-concentrated Dead Sea or as if these
might be vesiculated Temple remnants floating,
pumice like, in the Aegean from the hypothesized
volcanic eruption that gave birth to the myth
of Atlantis.
Then there
is the element of danger implied by the sharp
edges and points or the collapsing column
pieces as if to conflate the ever present
danger of falling masonry and the inherent
danger in the domestic environment of tables,
chairs, beds, baths, where unexpected accidents
occur or planned misadventure is perpetrated
time and again in real life and again on a
real scale.
Crucial
also is the recognition of fracture. We are
not allowed to forget that these are works
of art made by artistic processes. The grid
of printed components that form the basis
of these works takes the reality of conceptual
processes into the reality of fracture. These
components, though, are not overstated (by,
for instance, numbering them ad nauseam) but
merely assert their independent part in the
making. In doing that appropriately they are
able to add a subtle level to the symbolic
intensity by echoing the stone block construction
of the Pyramids and the basic elements of
the columns and Temples. A bit more fancifully
the works could be seen as mirages on the
surfaces of those structures or as x-rays
into their furnitured interiors.
The above
formal considerations obviously have their
part to play in the content of these works.
They have been considered separately to give
a sense as to how rigorously they have been
put in place by the artist to underpin and
accentuate the content that is there. If we
move now to the sense of erotics evident in
these works the intent is to gradually unfold
just what is meant by that term in relation
to art and to show how these works epitomise
that understanding, and also epitomise the
relation of art to life.
Although no flesh, no bodies, no people, no
persons are evident in these works, there
is an anthropomorphism of size, and a further
physiological and physionomical presence that
evokes a corporality more dramatic than four
limbs, a trunk, and a head in one. The arm
of a CHAIR, the keyhole in the BOX, the legs
of the TABLE, the huge black mouth under the
BED, the pyramids as breasts or as impossibly
mating mates, all focus our body language
in a welter of meaning beyond the obviousness
of absence.
As if to
emphasise this embodiedness of the objects
the furniture is tinted in shades of pink
through to white; fleshiness and ghosts of
fleshiness set against the white of the classical
elements and the black and paper white of
the background pattern of deep shadows and
streaky light. The cultural elements, the
columns and pyramids, are starkly white, sperm
like in their determined masculinity, except
for the only whole column in the series where
the fulgent light from the CUPBOARD causes
the near side to glow pink in expectation.
Identifiably
male and female elements appear consistently
in relationship throughout these works with
the masculine elements being undeniably contextualised
by the female elements. This state of affairs
seems congruent with the biological relationship
of female and male where the female chromosomes
are primary and the male possibility results
from a modification of that state. In that
sense bisexuality is a strategy devised by
the female organism to further its own reproductive
and evolutionary possibilities. It is as if
the male is a projection of female determination,
of female desires or even of female fantasy.
Ironically
the further the male drifts or asserts himself
from the female the more he contextualises
himself in the broader feminine matrix of
nature until in the case of mega structures
such as pyramids he merely identifies the
futility of his conceit.
Here now
it is important to distinguish two strategies
for the return of the male to the female.
Both have to do with conception, the one sexual
and the other erotic. One is of the body and
the other of the mind. A clear distinction
is drawn etymologically between the sexual
as of female/male, procreative, biological,
and the erotic as of desire, of states of
mind to do with the sexual. This is the import
of the Myth of Maui attempting to re-enter
Hine Nui Te Po through her vagina and being
squeezed to death. The mythical, the symbolic,
the artistic does not produce children - rather
it characterises the mind, it conceives only
in terms of sensations and ideas. Hence the
story of Maui as being a classic erotic myth
and as being a salutary one for our minds.
So here
we have another and maybe more basic reason
as to why furniture as the femme replaces
Nature in these works. A painting of the original
Temple or Pyramid with its site would employ
the paradigm of nature which logically, biologically
connects with the sexual as the human being
is a natural part of its domain. By substituting
furniture in which Nature has been transformed
by the processes of the mind and contextualising
the super cultural elements in that ideated
base the work is free to act as it can or
should as an object of thought, as a pure,
or near pure, conception of the mind.
In this
way the work is as liberated as much as it
can be from biological parameters. Because
of its erotic content, its association of
the female and the male in terms of the relationship
of the mind to the body, it accesses the body
in the only way remaining to it, through the
mind. The mind is housed within the body.
If we combine
this erotics of the mind, of the very process
of "conception" of ideas and their
modes of expression, with the formal elements
mentioned above and the elements of danger
and dark recesses and the kinaesthetic insistence
of the feminine and masculine components,
we find that these works are not to be read
as erotic in just a gratuitous sense of gross
pleasure or its violent denial. Rather, they
are deeply founded in an understanding of
the erotics of the feminine and the masculine
both as a sophisticated rendering of the gender
equation and an appreciation as to just how
that translates into artistic means.
Whereas
physical conception necessarily involves both
the female and male as autonomous beings,
mental "conception" involves, for
both female and male, both feminine and masculine
components, combined not sexually but erotically.
In fact the pervasiveness of this paradigm
in human understanding and expression would
suggest that constitutive elements for the
functioning of the mind are characterised
by the sexual in this erotic sense.
Not only
are these works produced in a consciously
artistic way through formal means, they are
conceived in a way that enables effective
art to be conveyed. And that is as a product
of the mind that gives a sense of the erotic
body, that state of mind that acknowledges
the peculiarity of its gender base. And that,
it seems, is how to represent in an artwork
the relationship between the female and the
male, between the masculine and the feminine,
in an incisive and telling way.
(Thank you
Marcel D.)
Roger Peters
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