Phoenix Year Zero Exhibition – M. Rene Ariston Artist's Statement

Artist’s Statement – Page 1 / 4

That was then. This is now.

In 2015 I thought I had it made. I was married to a beautiful and intelligent woman who I still had the hots for 16 years after we’d gotten together. We lived in our own home in a safe, pretty, little city with a pair of highcalibre kids we’d created together and a menagerie of animals. I was surrounded by the members of a surrogate extended family whose simply being around went a long way to assuage the deficiency of my blood relations (ever more lacking since we’d lost our mum, the Ariston family linchpin, to suicide in 2001). I worked three days a week in a bookshop, and got paid to discuss literature, art, and culture with an ever-changing cast of smart and funny characters – all things I’d happily do for free. The other four days, I made art and plotted how best to unleash it onto an unsuspecting world.

In June that year, by staging PEGSpressionism, my critically and artistically successful debut solo exhibition, I thought I’d also got the cherry on top. That show was, without doubt, my finest achievement. I was, in that brief few months as it all came to fruition, the happiest I’d ever been.

Now it’s 2024, and I’m divorced. Suddenly – what seemed like five minutes after I had reached the pinnacle of my life – my marriage was over, and, to quote Leonard Cohen, “wasn’t it a long way down?” Since high school, I have suffered from Bipolar II, so I thought I had a pretty fair idea about being low. But no. I had no idea how much lower I could, and did, go. I live now in a different home (a house recently rated the 3rd coolest in Hobart1), half of the time alone, and the other half with my moody, funny, sharp as razors, beloved teenagers – who I offer prayers of thanks for, every day, to No One In Particular. Despite having given it a red-hot go, I have not re-partnered, discovering (to no small personal embarrassment) that I am an implausibly tragic, fairy-tale-style, romantic cliché, cast in corporeal form. I don’t believe for a second in the concocted nonsense about a magical creature referred to as The One, but feel in my guts that my ex was just that.

What can you do? You carry on, right? I work three days a week in the prized 1st place-holding, coolest house in Hobart: Mona. On the other four days I make art – the most recent of which you see here.

Phoenix Year Zero is my second solo exhibition. I put these 19 new works together over the last two and a half years – and the making of them has helped in large part to remake me. Who’d have thought that fiddling around

for thousands of hours with little pieces of wood, spray paint, literally kilometres of tape2, problem-solving toward a series of aesthetic goals, would rehabilitate like deep therapy. I did, actually. The making of my debut show’s 20 works, comprising 30000 pegs, over a five year period, went a long way toward calming, and cohering a swathe of childhood trauma in me. I had thought, atop my pinnacle back in 2015, that I was healed. But, I find, you’re never very far away from the next wringer. And despite my temptation to hope, right now, that I’m healed once again, that Phoenix Year Zero is proof of my coming through the latest fires unconsumed, that that was then and that this is now, the truth is more complicated. My latest encounter with the wringer is, in oh so many ways, still grinding my vestigial tail.

But what can you do? You carry on, right?

SHAKA ZULU The works I made for PEGSpressionism were all driven by puns on the word ‘peg’, and thus, were rather writerly.

Toothy Pegs. Pegasus. Peg Putt, Greens. You get the idea.

They were composed and constructed with their peg-ness pushed front and centre. The new works ask that their peg-ness be viewed as only incidental. By exploring the tension created between the strict form (wood and metal converging inward to the central point of circular structures I call pegstroversions3) and the colour and line applied to them afterward (image, composition, and treatment) they have a considerably deeper, and purer, Art agenda. The pegs, this time, are incidental as opposed to integral, and therefore align themselves more with Concrete Art (whose forerunner Josef Albers I have recently come much to admire) than to pop art or street art or anything else I was more enamoured by in 2010-2015.

My earlier works were about pegs (the medium) and also about art (also the medium). The new pieces are a lot braver, by simply… just being art. In and of itself, art.

After Friendly Fire, Shaka Zulu was the 2nd of the new works, and it consolidated what, for me, the collection’s primary concern would be: exploring, and provoking, that tension between form and image.

Seven Years’ Bad Luck For Zeb is an inverse clone of Shaka Zulu, explicitly addressing the same issues also via the zebra motif. Crosscut Jigsaw, the final piece I made for this collection, pushed these tensions to their outermost

Artist’s Statement – Page 2 / 4

extremes by being, in true meta style, a transposition of an image of horizontal pegwork4 onto the pegstroversion backing. In other words, horizontal zig-zags in alternating directions overlaid across zig-zagging radii converging only inward. Look at the photo if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

P E G G a n d P I R AT E ’ S P R O G R E S S

Although I’m finished with this project, and its concerns, I’m still fascinated by the tension inherent here, and hope that you might now share some of the pleasure my exploring it gave me.

2. All of the works in Phoenix Year Zero are to be in the pegstroversion format.

EXPLODING ROY and BLUE POLIO

Then along came my son, Atticus. “You should make a pegleg; an actual literal peg leg”, he goes. And “You should make an off-centre fried egg, and call it – wait for it – Pegg”, he goes.

When I wrote, just a couple of lines ago, that “my old work was about art” and that “the new pieces are braver” it implied that you’ll find nothing explicitly about art or artists in Phoenix Year Zero. This is utterly false, as Exploding Roy and Blue Polio clearly demonstrate.

Exploding Roy was, in an earlier incarnation, titled ‘Lichtenstein’s Theft’. At that time, I wrote the following note for this essay into my phone: ‘Here’s an image Roy Lichtenstein stole from the comics.

I’m stealing it back! …but then the pegs went their own way, like they often do, taking me somewhere I’d never intended to go; concurrently making the end result all the better for it.’

Blue Polio harkens back to my aforementioned traumatic childhood years in Canberra, where my sweet little mind (already frazzled by eighties hellfire and brimstone at the Assemblies of God) was further blown by Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles; controversially hanging on a wall at the National Gallery.

LOOM and MOOL Loom, and its smaller shadow-sidekick, Mool, are the 2nd set of Phoenix Year Zero’s three conceptual pairings.

Together they depict a sort of inverse and obverse take on the structure of spiderwebs, laid atop the base structure of their pegstroversions. In Loom, the dual structures are out of step with each other, whereas Mool brings them into step and alignment. This was really a case of one idea played out over two canvases. Originally, I’d intended to apply Mool’s web-tracery design around each of Loom’s individual forested units. Wisely (I think), after putting in ridiculous hours to get that forest scene just so, I chickened out.

Anyway, it pleases me that I get to introduce my own modest addition to the pantheon of Western culture’s spider-beasts, the top two being, of course, Shelob and Aragog.

In the early stages of planning out this show, I set three cardinal rules for myself.

1. There are to be no representational images in Phoenix Year Zero.

3. Reliance on heavy punning or gimmickry in Phoenix Year Zero is STRICTLY VERBOTEN!!!

…

I sat quietly with his suggestions for a moment, then, swearing softly under my breath, I go: “Ok. Fine. But I’m calling the egg Simon”.

Two years of heated argument later, I present to you: Pegg. …

And Pirate’s Progress (not pictured in the catalogue, ‘cause it’s not a circle).

A N O D E T O J O Y, O H M , M O N E Y PA D M E , O H M and THE THIRST OF CHARYBDIS Still in the early stages of putting this body of work together, I hit on the idea of using perspex instead of marine ply backing and then shining LEDs through, resulting in pegstroversions that would ostensibly be two artworks in one; presenting one way during daylight hours and another altogether at night (kinda like Batman – who only a deaf, dumb and blind nincompoop can’t tell is Bruce Wayne gadding about in bondage gear).

When I took my scheme to Xanderware (the Mythbusters of Hobart5) they said, “Yeah sure! No problem!” Thing is, I knew that these pegstroversions I’d invented were a tricksy commodity and I tried warning them that it really wasn’t going to be that easy. I really did try… but, “Aah, it’ll be a piece of piss!” they said.

I was correct, it turned out, in thinking that transferring handwrought co-ordinates for nail holes determined by the ever-variable dimensions of common wooden clothes pegs en-masse into a computer might possibly (but in all likelihood definitely) be a nightmare. And it was.

Definitely. Nightmare.

Now is a better time than any, I feel, to add, that in the years between 20166 and 2021, Chickenfeed, where I’d previously bought my pegs, had gone out of business.

Artist’s Statement – Page 3 / 4

Shiploads had stepped effortlessly into the Tasmanian budget megastore vacuum left by their predecessor’s departure and so became, once I’d decided I was going to do more pegwork, the go-to store from which I sourced my stock. So far, so straightforward. Except that the sweatshop kids Shiploads indirectly exploits for their el-cheapo pegs, march to the beat of an entirely different drum than did the sweatshop kids Chickenfeed indirectly exploited. The Shiploads pegs were slightly longer and slightly wider (in every direction). Just… fatter.

To fit them into the pegstroversion template I had wisely prepared earlier, I now needed to grind down at least a third of each artworks’ pegs on a grinding wheel (80 for the smaller pegstroversions and up to 240 in the larger format). AND, I needed to number each frickin’ piece of wood so as they’d all fit together again once I was done applying their paintjobs. We’re talking 480 separate and distinct numbers on 480 little pieces of wood for the smaller format works and 1440 for the larger. Thing is, too, I never quite perfected my Huey, Dewey and Louie decimal systemTM, changing it up from piece to piece as I endeavoured, to no avail, to find the most workable solution to my entirely bizarre, self-generated conundrums.

Don’t think that I am merely complaining here about what I had to go through to deliver these works for your perusal, but rather that I am giving you a direct line of insight into the intricately particular creative process that has brought these works into existence.

Two years after first approaching Xanderware, I still obstinately thought that ‘using perspex instead of marine ply backing and then shining LEDs…’ etc, was a good idea and so persisted with these three two in ones, despite the prodigious logistical obstacles thrown into my path.

And here they are, hanging innocuously on the wall, like they never gave anyone any kind of trouble at all…

T H E P O I N T B E I N G , FA L S E S TA R T a n d R I P P L E / S H AT T E R In 1509, celebrated artist Michelangelo, having reflected upon his time painting the Sistine Chapel, wrote this poem7 to his friend: “I’ve already grown a goitre from this torture, hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy (or anywhere else where the stagnant water’s poison). My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket, my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush, above me all the time, dribbles paint so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!

My haunches are grinding into my guts, my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight, every gesture I make is blind and aimless. My skin hangs loose

below me, my spine’s all knotted from folding over itself. I’m bent taut as a Syrian bow.

Because I’m stuck like this, my thoughts are crazy, perfidious tripe: anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.

My painting is dead. Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honour. I am not in the right place – I am not a painter.”

Now, I am not for a second comparing my modest efforts to Michelangelo’s masterpiece (though, you are welcome to, of course) or my own humble talent to his genius (though we do – sort of – share the same name; so there is that). Rather, I am laying bare for your consideration the ineluctable and mysterious fact that, despite the world being absolutely chockablock full of manufactured stuff, the individual or collective act of creating something ‘good’8 remains frickin’ difficult – no matter who you are. No mother, in the throes of childbirth, is ever just dialling it in.

And, despite that guff in the earlier part of this essay about healing and rehabilitation and the like, once again, the truth is always more complicated. Contradictions abound in any true story. And so, the healing process can, and often does, hurt more than the injury.

Let me now tell you a little about The Point Being.

I started this piece, or pentaptych (as a five-parter artwork is correctly termed), in early January 2022. The image was meant to depict the emanating colour-rays of an explosion from the easternmost pegstroversion’s centre; out in a westerly direction, with a rainbow rippling effect spreading northerly and southerly, into a kind of implied infinity off canvas.

False Start started off as that easternmost pegstroversion depicting the epicentre of the explosion. First off, I applied the black-white-combo line onto every wooden surface across the other four pegstroversions following the axes from the epicentre in False Start – painstakingly taping up each individual piece of wood, individually numbering them with the first, and worst, iteration of the Huey, Dewey and Louie decimal systemTM, and that was when Shit! Sheisse! Merde! it hit me like a tonne of bricks that this was going to take a loo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time and a lohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhht of work.

My heart, sunken and constricted by this realisation, smote madly against the cage of my ribs. My gall rose into my gullet and I projectile vomited a filthy, frothy rant! I had a right proper hissy fit, a monolithic man-tanty; cursing myself for being such a woebegone fool, reviling art itself, denouncing the cultural wasteland that is Australia, damning all future viewers of my art (you people) for not

Artist’s Statement – Page 4 / 4

having walls long enough to hang this work, nor sense enough to see that (even if it frickin’ killed me) it was going to be Good, nor money enough to purchase what it would have to cost9 to recompense me for the many squandered future days and weeks and months that were bearing down on me like a freight train full of lead.

Endnotes 1.

By me.

(Sorry you had to see that, kids.)

Then, in July, I discovered that I had utterly failed to follow what logic was contained within False Start!

The centre that was meant to be, due to my shonky geometrical calculations, became redundant. I was under the misapprehension that I’d just spent six months making a series of small, core-sample peepholes onto a biggerpicture mega-explosion, when all that time I’d been slowly plotting out a long, acute-angled rainbow wedge!

Over many of the hours contained within much of those six months, I had wrestled internally with the epic pointlessness of what I was doing. Echoes of my aforementioned mantanty reverberated throughout that year. But, upon realising I was utterly mistaken about just what it was I was working on, I was not further dismayed but rather surprised and even bewitched. I had been working all that time on a long, sharpened point; The Point Being.

I was a little bummed out that I now had to make a replacement for False Start (which, to make, would require exactly one quarter of the time I’d already spent, on top), but it was imperative that the easternmost pegstroversion should contain the actual point. This latter-day bummer was mercifully short-lived. The piece had shown me it had a kind of consciousness all of its own, and that strange half-life I had collaborated with really beguiled me.

Ripple/Shatter is Phoenix Year Zero’s 2nd pentaptych and another of this collection’s inverse/obverse thematic pairings. It’s a close cousin to The Point Being. Take a close look and see if you can figure out how and why.

2.

To create the works for this exhibition, I used 23 x rolls of 54.8 metre length 3M Scotch Blue masking tape (with Edgelock Technology) @ a width of 25mm = 1260.4 metres. I then multiplied this number by 3 to reach an ultra-conservative estimate of the actual distance I covered with this tape = 3781.2 metres, or, at the very very least, 3 ¾ kilometres. Whichever way you cut it, Phoenix Year Zero required a LOT of tape.

3.

Pegstroversions, or, what everyone else always, always, ALWAYS insist on calling mandalas. Which pisses me off a little bit – but not nearly as much as when people have said: “What? They’re not made of plastic pegs?”

4.

As seen at play within (Pegs)ibi(table) – present in this exhibition but not pictured in the catalogue because it’s not a circle.

5.

Just a lot slower than Adam and Jamie. And a lot more expensive. But still a super helpful, super competent, super friendly bunch of guys.

6.

I made two new pegstroversions in 2016 for PEGSpressionism mach II, at Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne. Cisgender Y Chromosome Vascular Cryptogram (Manfern), is the only one included here, because, happily, the other one was sold.

7.

Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia “When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel” Translated by Gail Mazur, and quoted here in its entirety, because, frankly, it’s just one of the frickin’ coolest little tidbits of history I’ve ever come across.

8.

Jeff Koons, and his facile oeuvre, are one patently glaring exception, and of course there are many others. Hence, my emphasis on the word ‘good’.

9.

Just for a laugh I calculated it out.

BUBBLE & SQUEAK Bubble and Squeak is peasant food, primarily made up of mashed potato and whatever leftovers are hanging around the place, about to get stinky. This unholy mess gets fried up and served to your hoard of guttersnipes and ragamuffins, all too hungry and dejected to complain.

This work is a pegstroversion equivalent of a ninepanel, dice-throw-determined ‘leftovers’ piece I made for PEGSpressionism, titled Pegsperimental.

I named the piece Bubble & Squeak in honour of what has been my primary source of sustenance since my divorce.

By me. The 2nd coolest house in Hobart belongs to Tom Deams, on Station Street in Moonah. Incidentally, Tom was largely instrumental in getting mine ranked 3rd.

9th January to 10th of September, 2022 = 245 days.

(There’d have been anything up to a month of planning and preparation prior to that, but we’ll let that slide for now…)

My conservative estimate of the hours I put in each day is 7.

So, 245 days @ 7 hours per day = 1715 hours.

Minimum wage is $21.38 per hour.

So, 1715 hours x $21.38 = $36,666.70 …you know what? I’ll take it.

In case it’s not clear already, pretty ladies, that’s your cue.

instagram.com/madpress2001