Oct 12 - Nov 10 2024
Twilight of the Idols: a brief background
Twilight of the Idols: Or how to philosophise with a hammer, was written by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1888. The title has a portentousness I like but more interestingly, Nietzsche used his hammer to critique European culture which he believed had become decadent. However, it’s important to understand this exhibition is not intended as a comment of our contemporary culture, it is a homage to past cultural products, some of which were made during Nietzsche’s ‘decadent’ time.
The ideas for this show came from many hours spent on my couch enjoying 1960s Italian giallo horror movies, spaghetti westerns, 1950s American film noir and enjoyable junk such as exploitation cinema. I’ve never believed in discriminating between high and low culture, hence I never had a problem in moving between the low-brow and the more serious novels and art books. Another resource is photos I’ve taken during travels, for example, a giant billboard dominating a squalid Indian slum or some genuinely imaginative graffiti painted on a desolate abandoned factory in Portugal.
If this seems like undue emphasis on source material, it should be noted that this show is the latest instalment of a project I began about 15 years ago. Called Reimaginings because it roughly describes the process of decoding and remaking an image or visualising a scene from text. The main criteria is that the source material features human figures and has a narrative potential.
It’s also worth considering the synthesis between the content and the medium, in fact the project wouldn’t exist in this form if powerful 3D modelling software wasn’t freely available. This technology allows precision modelling, texturing and lighting and therefore the flexibility to test an idea to a degree impossible with traditional media.
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Julie Collins - Director gallery@djprojects.net
0417324 795
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21 Morce Ave Sorrento, Victoria, Australia
www.andgalleryaustralia.net
& Gallery is part of the djprojects family of art related businesses. www.djprojects.net
1.Outer Limits
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
A regular teenage weekly viewing pleasure was the science fiction television series, The Outer Limits. Inevitably, a monster or a transformed human who was typically the consequence of a scientific experiment gone wrong would be the highlight of each episode and I’d eagerly await whatever weirdness the show’s creators came up with to disturb the audience. Occasionally the Outer Limits would resort to outsized or distorted human heads as a creative solution for showing the results of an ethically dubious experiment. Consequently I subjected a generic 3D model male head to various defor mations and finding that I quite liked all the results, the idea of a strange sculpture park on a desolate hillock allowed me to include all of them. The ‘curator’ figure wears a lab coat— an Outer Limits prop that serves as shorthand for a scientist.
2. Spaghetti Western
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
After viewing some 1960s Spaghetti Westerns my thoughts turned to memories of the Almeria region of Spain which I had visited because some of my favourite westerns had been filmed there. It’s a surprisingly raw desert landscape and impoverished part of Europe. It was immediately clear the film-makers had little to do to make it a convincing Wild West; for example, a local bar I walked into caused heads to turn the way it happens in the saloon scene out of a cowboy film. The intended focus of this artwork is the landscape with its yuccas, prickly pear, stony ground and the goat. The two men serve no narrative apart from appearing native this soil.
3. Hellbound
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
I’ve been a longtime fan of film noir and Hellbound, a 1957 crime movie, delivers many of the tropes of the genre, including a femme fatale gangster moll who signifies her sexual availability by slipping off her high heeled shoes. The doomed central character perfectly reflects with the existential worldview of film noir and when he picks up the shoe, his fate is sealed. In the background there is a sinister looking man wearing a dark suit and sunglasses called Daddy and the movie introduces him enjoying a strip show while dealing narcotics. A strung out junkie begs for a hit, imploring him with “please Daddy” while the implacable Daddy angrily responds with “I’m watching the show,” which is ironic because Daddy is blind. I had some trouble getting the woman’s skirt to fall naturally. Instead of manipulating the cloth physics to correct it, I let stay it because it doesn’t harm the erotic undertone of the interaction. Film noir generally favours grungy settings but Hellbound begins with a meeting set in a drug kingpin’s upmarket home. I used A.I. to generate some of the furnishings, notably the artworks.
4. Nautilus
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
Watching the 1961 science fiction adventure film, Mysterious Island, I was surprised by the unexpected appearance in the third act by Captain Nemo in his submarine, the Nautilus. Equally surprising was the boat’s art deco design, both externally and internally; of particular note, was the improbable presence of a pipe organ. I researched the original drawings of the Nautilus illustrating Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I was startled by the double height victorian era mansion style of architecture which included an aquarium, sumptuous library, oil paintings and a decorative suit of armour. For a further comparison, I watched the 1997 movie made of Verne’s book and the Nautilus accommodations were far more rational, albeit quite luxurious. My version follows some semblance of logic while paying homage to the original concept; the difference is that it’s relatively modestly proportioned and decorated, the bare metal of the hull being a reminder we’re looking at a functional object. Nemo, who is studying plans of his creation could pass for a middle-aged home handyman sort of guy.
5. Love Song
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
I’ve long been intrigued by the stillness of Giorgio de Chirico metaphysical paintings. The only problem of interpreting his work is the relative absence of close-up human figures; a prerequisite for this series of digital prints. One exception is a painting De Chirico made because of nostalgia for his childhood, The Child’s Brain, which portrayed his father standing undressed in front of a table with a large yellow book. I couldn’t help mating it with one of my favourite De Chirico paintings; Love Song, with its classic sculpture of a head and a red rubber glove mounted on a plaque. Interestingly, the same arched building, seen from the same perspective, appears in both paintings. The column on the left side is a disconcerting pictorial element from The Child’s Brain and even though I had trouble reconciling its compositional presence, I decided to use it to keep it as a visual full stop.
6. Fate
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
Kathe Kollwotz’ alarming 1910 etching, Tod und Frau, depicts a very determined skeleton gripping a woman in a wrestling style hold while an equally resolute toddler fights to tear her from its grasp. It’s a powerful artwork I kept looking at even though I felt it was too dark to work with. I decided on an ambiguous interpretation where death sneaks up and caresses his next victim while the child looks on nonplussed. The blurred greenish tinted background suggests the liminal space of an unpleasant dream.
Odilon Redon’s masterfully drawn The Crying Spider is a deep dive into the human psyche that evokes a response that ranges from sympathy to horror.Redon’s drawing is minimal in detail and I had no plan about what I wanted to do with this image when I started this piece—apart from meeting the challenge of shaping a moderately convincing spider with a man’s head in 3D modelling software. Placing him on a leash held by a young woman was a surreal joke but it could also serve as a symbol of controlling dark primal emotions. I decided the spider should have minimal expression—it simply exists although the concept of an insect who feels is intriguing. The woman wears a mildly thoughtful yet unemotional expression; so the relationship between them is ambiguous.
Print on metal. Edition of 5
90 x 60cm
$3,500
7. Sad Spider
Big Eyes is a comment on how kitsch appropriates subjects and aesthetics from serious fine art. Classic French kitsch has a particularly interesting caste of characters; the harlequin, clown, hobo and street urchin. It would have required Googling in French to find a decent variety of these examples. Nevertheless I found an interesting 1960s or 1970s painting featuring a cheeky street urchin relieving himself on the bank of the River Seine. Dressed striped skivvy and flared jeans, he complicitly glances over his shoulder at the viewer. A crudely rendered bridge and the Eiffel Tower in the distance makes the setting unmistakable.
I lost interest in developing details and settled on a simple yet dynamic composition that reveals little to the viewer. I liked the tension between the big-eyed kid on the precarious path which provides minimal protection from the swollen waters with the overbearing urban architecture of the bridge in the background.
Print on metal. Edition of 5
90 x 60cm
$3,500
8. Big Eyes
9. Hypnosis
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
Sascha Schneider’s disturbing 1904 etching, Hypnosis, exudes themes of domination and submission with a dark, primal energy. The depiction of animal mesmerism and hypnosis in the early years of research presented these phenomena in mysterious occult terms. It’s the triumph of scientific rationalism over the folkloric which encouraged me into this exploration; how rationalism has sapped belief and offers banal reassuring explanations instead. The addition of the forbidding rock face background was one of these regular intuitive decisions which make sense much later; fittingly trusting the subconscious to make the right call.
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
Symbolist artist Max Klinger’s take on the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is radically different from the miserable and contrite couple portrayed in classic christian iconography. Gone is the moral lesson of obedience to God; instead, an angry Adam strides purposefully across a bleak landscape carrying Eve—suggesting that they intend to enjoy future guilt free nooky. In the background an angel in a bouncer pose stands guard at the entrance to the Garden, a lush mount with a couple of large upright boulders serving as a gate. The interpretation I’ve made dispenses with some detail; the Garden of Eden is merely sketched in and it looks pretty underwhelming; it seems like God underdelivered and the exiled couple could find nicer accommodation elsewhere. Eve looks content and Adam looks resolute about negotiating the wilderness.
10. Exile
11. Cotton Mather
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
Cotton Mather was a colonial American puritan clergyman who is mostly remembered for his professed expertise in witchcraft and acting for prosecutors in the Salem witch trials. Equally strange was his assertion that a dinosaur skull which had been discovered was evidence of the existence of Nephilim, a race of giants mentioned in the Bible. During the conceptual development of this piece I juggled with setting this scene in a candle-lit interior with the giant skull conspicuously placed on a table or alternatively locating it outdoors under a starry night. The former approach would have presented interesting lighting possibilities but the philosophic ramifications of the latter, that is, the strangeness of the world reflected in nature under an infinity of stars, would be more conceptually satisfying. Although Mather was a product of his times, I favoured a somewhat unkindly portrayal of the man, dressed in wig and ruffed shirt, stiffly gazing at the mysterious object and not liking what he sees and wondering how it fits in the bible.
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
The case of the Anson County Jane Doe has long intrigued missing persons investigators but it was the haunting image of a woman captured by a wildlife camera that gave the case a particularly strange and melancholic aura. The late night photo revealed a barefooted young woman clad in black bra and wet white tights walking with the aid of a pole. She was photographed again hours later returning from the direction she had taken earlier; so she was clearly disoriented. Being lost and alone at night in a forest must be a terrifying experience which I have tried to emphasise by the inky pools of darkness and the unfriendly patches of spiny grasses and the thicket of dead branches.
12. Jane Doe
This was originally intended as an exploration of Casper David Friedrich’s The Lost Hussar. Friedrich depicted a French soldier about to stray into a dense forest, and the political metaphor, the defeat of Napoleon’s army a few years earlier, intrigued me. The artwork was stuck until I started leafing through a book of the paintings of contemporary German artist Georg Baselitz. The painter went through a period of hanging his pictures upside down and as an experiment I placed the soldier I had made upside down in the landscape I had started to develop. This decision violated loose rules I had set about this project that patently unrealistic choices should be avoided. The crazy about-face not only rescued a moribund artwork, it presented interesting possibilities for future works.
Print on metal. Edition of 5
90 x 60cm
$3,500
13. Lost Hussar
The Japanese have been wonderfully inventive in their visual portrayal of ghosts; one of my favourites being chochin-obake, the Ghost in the Paper Lantern, particularly the woodcut print by Katshushika Hokusai. My lantern ghost went somewhat awry because I was experimenting for the first time with the hair particle function in my software and I had yet to figure how to ‘groom’ it, but I thought the disheveled hair worked just fine, looking suitably creepy. Many approaches to the lantern ghost exist but I liked the idea of the ghost coming for a besuited salary man stricken with angst in front of a bush with spear like leaves. I have generally avoided portrait oriented compositions but in this case it was perfect for representing the forces exerted by the gaping maw of the lantern and the downward pointing leaves pressing the victim against the bottom edge of the frame.
Print on metal. Edition of 5
90 x 60cm
$3,500
14. Ghost in the Lantern
15. Aroused Atmospheric Skull with a Grand Piano
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
Only Salvador Dali could conceive such an outlandish idea as an atmospheric skull sodomising a grand piano. How does a skull become atmospheric and why does it feel driven to have sex with grand piano? Moreover, the skull is performing this act with a ghastly elongated tongue. Dali painted this weird vision taking place on a rocky beach with two distant characters sitting on a stone wall showing their indifference by turning their backs to the action. My interest in the art work grew during an online discussion which resulted in jokes such as, “people in my neighbourhood don’t particularly care for atmospheric skulls because they’re bad for real estate values.” Consequently the first concept for this reimagining was to locate the offending act in a familiar urban environment. I went with an environment that has a lunar landscape feel as a better choice for giving this strange surreal vision its full due. I felt the most interesting framing was to move Dali’s distant couple to the foreground with the nearby skull, in its erotic passion, driving the piano into the earth. The women witnessing the event don’t demonstrate any sense of alarm, only annoyance that the pesky skull insists on indulging its sexual appetite publicly in front of them; the sort of response a dog humping a leg elicits.
16. Charlotte Corday
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
The interest in this subject stemmed from a search for information about the cruel and despotic Roman emperor, Heliogabalus that led to Antonin Artaud, the French theatre director, actor and writer who had written a book about him.My research into this man piqued my interest in his theatrical portrayal of the French revolutionary, Jean-Paul Marat. Hitherto, the only depiction I had been aware of was Jacques-Louis David’s famous 1793 painting, The Death of Marat, but more significantly I didn’t know that Marat’s assassin was a woman, Charlotte Corday. As a consequence of hiding from the law in the Parisian sewers, Marat suffered from a skin condition which required substantial periods of immersion in a liquid that offered relief, hence the bathtub became his de facto office which made him an easy target for assassination. I was particularly intrigued by the strange looking bathtub featured in a photo of the Artaud play; it reminded me of an oversized metal boot. I couldn’t resist inserting a punk looking Charlotte wearing a leather jacket and frayed trousers in an otherwise 19th century scene.
17. Black Metal
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
Black Metal is a style of heavy metal which evolved in Norway during the 1990s. Generally I avoid any music which features death growl vocals; the exception is Burzum which is one man, Varg Vikernes. The music is harsh, droning and lo-fi and projects some extreme values including a hostility towards christianity which Vikernes regards as antithetical to the Scandinavian character. This is also reflected in the cover art of his records, several of which feature the art works of Theodor Kittelsen, a Norwegian who depicted folkloric themes such as the wood sprite, Nokken, shown here with mossy skin, tree roots for hair and large luminous eyes and emerging from a dark pond. The character with the crudely lettered No God mask projects an animist rejection of God as an inauthentic cultural construct, while he/she is seated on a log in a dark northern forest; a the site of Thulean mysteries.
18. Futurist Noise
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
I’ve long had an enthusiasm for experimental music, for example the Japanese noise artist, K.K. Null. Remarkably, this sonic avant-garde has existed since 1916 when the futurist, Luigi Russolo, built his sound generator, the intonarumori, in his Milan sound laboratory. This artwork references a historic photograph showing Russolo and his assistant, Ugo Piatti at work in the sound lab. I’ve also included an analogous culturally significant figure, a performance artist from the dadaist venue, Cabaret Voltaire. I liked how the sleek geometry of his suit is mirrored by the speaker cones and resonator boxes of the intonarumori.
19. Marooned
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
In the 1970s I read some novels written by the French novelist Michel Tournier. His writing analysed European legends and symbols framed by contemporary thought. With that approach he reimagined Robinson Crusoe through the lens of modern philosophy and psychology. The scene I found particularly interesting was Crusoe’s discovery of a mud bath. Soon he would contently spend his days oblivious of his predicament of being marooned. This sensual indulgence eventually conflicted with his protestant conditioning that days should be spent productively and he developed feelings of guilt about being drawn to ‘the mud’ instead of improving his life by making repairs to his shelter. Initially I envisioned Crusoe lying in a mud bath with a Balinese style tropical beach in the background. As I made the models for this scene, the landscape began to take on a definite primal appearance and it seemed apt that Crusoe take on the for m of a mud man merging with the landscape.
20. Terminal Beach
Print on metal. Edition of 5 - 60 x 90cm - $3,500
When I first read British sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard in the 1980s it was his description of worlds depopulated by a calamity likely caused by human agency that impressed me. I learned later that Ballard had used the Pacific nuclear test site of Eniwetok Atoll as inspiration for the desolation of deserted airstrips, empty huts and twisted steel wreckage littering the landscape of his post-apocalypse short stories. Artefacts of humanity such as a huge soviet style figure painted on a bleak apartment tower, a billboard featuring a glowering face, a fuel tank and military style antennas define this charmless landscape. It’s a familiar landscape to the traveller with an interest in the dismal; I took the photo of the graffiti in a forlorn deserted industrial zone in Portugal and I’ve seen a huge billboard advertising Bollywood cinema towering over a slum in India. I generally favour lower key lighting in my work but in this case I felt a harsh noon light best suited this world and it throws the sombrely clad figure, morosely scanning this landscape for meaning, into strong contrast.
About
A process worker in a muffler plant, a sailor on a ship plying the North Sea, a maintenance man on a N.A.T.O. base in Germany, a bartender and a worker in a darkroom at a screen printing studio were among the jobs I worked at during my late ‘teens and early twenties, however, it was the latter job that interested me the most and confirmed a love for the printing process.
My early body of work included graphic art such as band posters, typified by a crude technique and a raw colour palette that encapsulated the Punk ethos and a selection of this work was acquired, much to my surprise, by the Print and Drawing collection at The National Gallery of Australia. After seeing a friend using 3D modelling software on a computer I resolved to learn this technology which lead to lecturing at R.M.I.T. university and repurposing the Punk style of graphic art I used.
In 2010 I started the Re-Imaginings Project which had the broad agenda of reimagining, through the use of 3D computer graphics, some of the compelling visual ideas of the past and present which drives our culture.
- Richard Horvath
Richard is a Mornington Peninsula based artist and this is his second exhibition at & Gallery Australia (Sorrento)