Michael Riddle : Everything's broken

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Michael Riddle Everything’s Broken 15 Oct – 15 Nov 2014

Everything’s Broken Seems like every time you stop and turn around Something else just hit the ground…

Broken bodies broken bones Broken voices on broken phones Take a deep breath feel like you're chokin'

Like this lamentation by Bob Dylan, everything in the work of Michael Riddle is broken. Black panels bear deep cracks in their surface. Lattice forms that we imagine once stood proud and strong, are crumpled, some under the weight of rocks, others by circumstances unknown. The titles of the works carry suggestive words such as catastrophic, collapse, control, and failure. The materials the artist uses are pulled from the industrial world, among them pewter, steel, acrylic resin, fiberglass, and concrete. Commonplace things, yet here alchemised to create bitumen-like surfaces and stoic metal structures. These materials are made to stand the test of time—they speak of willful permanence—yet each artwork is frozen in some state of undoing.

In the works, Control 2014, I’m not best pleased 2014, and That’s how the light gets in 2014, carefully prepared perfect black, bitumen-like surfaces have had pressure forced on them by mechanical means, creating ruptures in their very fabric. For the artist, the foundation for this action comes from a deeply personal place. With I’m not best pleased, Riddle charted the topography of the intersection where the fatal car accident that took his father’s life occurred.

From this, he created a metal mechanism based on this landscape that, when placed under the smooth surface and mechanically jacked-up, ruptured the surfacei: the invisible pain of the memory now made visible by a permanent scar.

The lattice structures found in Complete collapse 2014, Catastrophic failure 2014, and Iconoclast 2014 are modeled on the architecture of electrical transmission towers. These obelisk-shaped forms can be regarded as a symbol of industrial achievement and a marker of the advancing of civilization, as it is these towers that carry the electricity necessary for all of the virtues of modern life. The towers are made to be self-supporting and capable of resisting all forces, but here they are afflicted: bent out of shape, burdened, deflated, and collapsed. Once again, the artist orchestrated this destruction during the making process. Heat generated by an electrical fan heater was applied to the original wax models of the towers, melting them into various states of collapse; these forms were then cast in pewterii.

There is a distance between the artist and each works’ ‘demise’. Their destruction is never an act of impulse or feverish emotion. Riddle never enters into the slippery territory of nihilism. His actions are calculated and considered, always executed by some external force and never directly by his own hand.

Well aware that there will be consequences to his actions, even though he tries to control the damage through knowledge, practice, experimentation, and choice, the penultimate outcome is still left to chance.

Why do you hate me so much 2014 pushes past destruction into the realm of repair. Here we see the delicate bone china surface shattered through the making process, and then painstakingly repaired with small sterling silver staples. It seems, in this case, the will to allow things to pass has been overridden by the will to repair the damage.

Parnell’s dream 2014 looks like a historical tool that has been uncovered from some lost age; however, the concrete and metal of its construction are distinctly of this time. This piece harks to an earlier series of work by the artist titled Tools for living—all these works took a tool-like form but were impractical for actual use.

Parnell’s dream looks as if it should be held and perhaps used as some sort of shovel, but the holes in the gridded basket at one end deny its use as a container, and the sharp, gravelly surface of the handle is not comfortable for the hand.

Perhaps Parnell’s dream is not a tool in the utilitarian sense, but a tool for the soul.

In his view of modernism, Marshall Berman puts forward: To be modern…is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.iii Like Berman, Michael Riddle’s work and arguably his self is located in this perpetual maelstrom. We are shaped by so many outside influences, things that afflict us physically and mentally that, over time, create a butterfly effect of consequence amongst which our connection to self can become murky. Even with the best-laid plans, all things come to an inevitable demise. But if this is the case, destruction can be of our own choosing. Let us wipe it all away and, if not by our own hand, let it be within our control, let us choose the influences and path of demise, and let us rest with hope that something altogether more wonderful, interesting, and good, is created.

Megan Williams October 2014 1

Conversation with the artist, 23 September 2014.

Ibid.

1 Marshall Berman, All that is solid melts into air: the experience of Modernity (London/New York: Verso, 2009), 345–346.

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Cover image: Catastrophic failure, pewter, acrylic resin, wax, 54 x 22 x 42 cm Photography by Carl Warner

Control (2014) acrylic resin, pigment, fibreglass, wax 60 x 60 x5 cm ed of 3 $1,600

I’m not best pleased (2014) Acrylic resin, pigment, fibreglass, wax 120 x 120 x 5 cm ed of 3 $1,990

Parnell’s dream (2014) pewter, acrylic resin, concrete, pigment, glaze 40 x 5 cm $2,400

That’s how the light gets in (2014) acrylic resin, pigment, fibreglass, wax 60 x 180 x 5 cm ed of 3 $1,990

Complete collapse (2014) pewter, acrylic resin, wax 36 x 45 x 22 cm $2,200

Waiting for clarity (2014) steel, acrylic resin 40 x 31 x 33 cm $2,200

Catastrophic failure (2014) pewter, acrylic resin, wax 54 x 22 x 42 cm $2,500

Iconoclast (2014) pewter, acrylic resin, wax 44 x 36 x 42 cm $2,200

Why do you hate me so much (2014) human bone china, Sterling silver staples 33 x 34 x 8 cm $2,800

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Conversation with the artist, 23 September 2014.

Ibid. iii Marshall Berman, All that is solid melts into air: the experience of Modernity (London/New York: Verso, 2009), 345–346. ii