Stereolab
Exhibited: Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, 1997
Stephen Zepke, catalogue essay
‘Body of evidence’
Antonioni’s film Blow Up is a 1966 dream of deconstruction. The photographer goes from jubilant detective work to a bit player in a mime act. Moving through the signs significance to its absent presence, he moves from diligent research to art – to play. The evidence of murder caught by the photographer’s lens, and only seen by him in reproduction, disappears when the shots are stolen. The body of evidence vanishing; meaning – the real body – is gone. The moral seems to be that we can no longer trust the sign or its fickle reproductions. The studly photographer is left, at film’s end, resigned and grasping the invisible ball of the mime’s game, embracing the empty sign, real not through reference but through a group consensus, a possible madness, a beautiful depotentialisation – the start of a new aesthetic.
If you haven’t seen this film, don’t worry; it’s only one possible trajectory through Luke Parker’s exhibition, Stereolab, that you can take. It is interesting to me as Parker seems to use the changes in the lead character as a metaphor for his own charting of reproduction aesthetic, one that ends in an ambiguity which is nevertheless beautiful, sexy, but always already, most unsure. This all suggests a remembering as reconstruction, a reconstruction which, in its necessary failure, pays creative homage to an original which is never regained, which never existed except as a remembering of itself. Behind every sign lies a memorial abyss of deferral and difference, an incredible depth which flattens everything onto a playful surface. Of signs. And it’s beautiful.
This is the movement charted by Parker in Stereolab. Each work seems to start with a sign systems displacement, its deferral of meaning. They each reproduce the real reproduced (photographs; posture diagrams; x-rays, and Rorschach blots), producing a sustained exploration of a possible deconstructive aesthetic. Reproduction no longer as degeneration (fuck Plato) but as generative, freed from the debt to its model, the work creates a free and open place of possibility. A space filled with its own intertextual ornamentations, open to its and our elaborations and improvisations. Appropriation not evolution is reality. A never-ending rhizomatic system of references proliferating into buds (or fireworks, a splash – your metaphor of choice – there is no legislation on taste here) of joy. Infinite chains of reference, an aesthetic whose rules are whatever you make them (I mean you).
To slip into a psychoanalytic aside, the phallus is castrated and we are no longer prey to its goal oriented projections, its protestations of truth. The photographer in Blow Up starts with a bang – a misogynistic camera rape – and ends within the a-sexual and egalitarian mime troupe, his camera-cock shown to be impotent, de-masculinised, irrelevant to the new game of pretend. True enough, it’s only now that Parker starts to find him sympathetic.
This deferral of the signified, a deferral always already in place (the Abyss), seems to be one of the more solid assumptions of post-modernity. Too often however, it has been the end rather than the beginning of analysis, and our sensibilities have become jaded to continual rewritings of the abyss(m)al end-point of deconstruction. Undecidability can be boring. Parker’s Stereolab is imminently po-mo in its embrace of a world inscribed and inscribing on a tissue of quotations, but it don’t stop there. The artist takes deconstruction as a ready-made, and re-frames it (how appropriate), forcing us to pay attention to its inscription. Once we do this, the consistent references to Blow Up start to give us ideas as to the style which here makes the man.
In Stereolab: Blow Up, two monitors quote Blow Up, reproducing its reproductions: 1) the photographer shooting the crime without knowing it, his meeting with Vanessa Redgrave, their chase and retreat, his arrogant and slightly sadistic air; 2) he develops the photos and sees the crime. Beside the monitors, blow-ups of the photos of Redgrave and her victim, on the gallery wall, part of the body of evidence. But this evidence merely charts a photographic cross-fire that ends up proving nothing: a body that disappears, a meaning that escapes. The photographers hard-on is gone, his opportunities of meaning no longer contained within a mechanism of reproduction, but finally produced through the network he forms with others – the mime act, organised around the empty sign, a tennis ball in play.
So how are we to see playfully? What do we see from the midst of the abyss? Parker presents most delicious suggestions, seductive reconstructions, a play of images which chart their own disorientation. Most strikingly for me in this work, Vanessa Redgrave’s statuesque face, its intense gaze locked onto something out of frame. Onto what? The thing we can never quite get hold of, the out of shot truth, the always already visible invisible. Her ears similarly cocked to a soundtrack we cannot hear. But this disturbing absence doesn’t scare us anymore. Without his cocky posturing of control, the photographer is suddenly sexy. A sex of the future where penetrating to the heart of the matter is no longer desirable. We want to play.
Exhibited: Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, 1997
Stephen Zepke, catalogue essay
‘Body of evidence’
Antonioni’s film Blow Up is a 1966 dream of deconstruction. The photographer goes from jubilant detective work to a bit player in a mime act. Moving through the signs significance to its absent presence, he moves from diligent research to art – to play. The evidence of murder caught by the photographer’s lens, and only seen by him in reproduction, disappears when the shots are stolen. The body of evidence vanishing; meaning – the real body – is gone. The moral seems to be that we can no longer trust the sign or its fickle reproductions. The studly photographer is left, at film’s end, resigned and grasping the invisible ball of the mime’s game, embracing the empty sign, real not through reference but through a group consensus, a possible madness, a beautiful depotentialisation – the start of a new aesthetic.
If you haven’t seen this film, don’t worry; it’s only one possible trajectory through Luke Parker’s exhibition, Stereolab, that you can take. It is interesting to me as Parker seems to use the changes in the lead character as a metaphor for his own charting of reproduction aesthetic, one that ends in an ambiguity which is nevertheless beautiful, sexy, but always already, most unsure. This all suggests a remembering as reconstruction, a reconstruction which, in its necessary failure, pays creative homage to an original which is never regained, which never existed except as a remembering of itself. Behind every sign lies a memorial abyss of deferral and difference, an incredible depth which flattens everything onto a playful surface. Of signs. And it’s beautiful.
This is the movement charted by Parker in Stereolab. Each work seems to start with a sign systems displacement, its deferral of meaning. They each reproduce the real reproduced (photographs; posture diagrams; x-rays, and Rorschach blots), producing a sustained exploration of a possible deconstructive aesthetic. Reproduction no longer as degeneration (fuck Plato) but as generative, freed from the debt to its model, the work creates a free and open place of possibility. A space filled with its own intertextual ornamentations, open to its and our elaborations and improvisations. Appropriation not evolution is reality. A never-ending rhizomatic system of references proliferating into buds (or fireworks, a splash – your metaphor of choice – there is no legislation on taste here) of joy. Infinite chains of reference, an aesthetic whose rules are whatever you make them (I mean you).
To slip into a psychoanalytic aside, the phallus is castrated and we are no longer prey to its goal oriented projections, its protestations of truth. The photographer in Blow Up starts with a bang – a misogynistic camera rape – and ends within the a-sexual and egalitarian mime troupe, his camera-cock shown to be impotent, de-masculinised, irrelevant to the new game of pretend. True enough, it’s only now that Parker starts to find him sympathetic.
This deferral of the signified, a deferral always already in place (the Abyss), seems to be one of the more solid assumptions of post-modernity. Too often however, it has been the end rather than the beginning of analysis, and our sensibilities have become jaded to continual rewritings of the abyss(m)al end-point of deconstruction. Undecidability can be boring. Parker’s Stereolab is imminently po-mo in its embrace of a world inscribed and inscribing on a tissue of quotations, but it don’t stop there. The artist takes deconstruction as a ready-made, and re-frames it (how appropriate), forcing us to pay attention to its inscription. Once we do this, the consistent references to Blow Up start to give us ideas as to the style which here makes the man.
In Stereolab: Blow Up, two monitors quote Blow Up, reproducing its reproductions: 1) the photographer shooting the crime without knowing it, his meeting with Vanessa Redgrave, their chase and retreat, his arrogant and slightly sadistic air; 2) he develops the photos and sees the crime. Beside the monitors, blow-ups of the photos of Redgrave and her victim, on the gallery wall, part of the body of evidence. But this evidence merely charts a photographic cross-fire that ends up proving nothing: a body that disappears, a meaning that escapes. The photographers hard-on is gone, his opportunities of meaning no longer contained within a mechanism of reproduction, but finally produced through the network he forms with others – the mime act, organised around the empty sign, a tennis ball in play.
So how are we to see playfully? What do we see from the midst of the abyss? Parker presents most delicious suggestions, seductive reconstructions, a play of images which chart their own disorientation. Most strikingly for me in this work, Vanessa Redgrave’s statuesque face, its intense gaze locked onto something out of frame. Onto what? The thing we can never quite get hold of, the out of shot truth, the always already visible invisible. Her ears similarly cocked to a soundtrack we cannot hear. But this disturbing absence doesn’t scare us anymore. Without his cocky posturing of control, the photographer is suddenly sexy. A sex of the future where penetrating to the heart of the matter is no longer desirable. We want to play.