MCA: Two Exhibitions
I was in Sydney for 24 hours recently to give a reading. The reading was “Poetry Crimes”, an event in the Sydney Writers’ Festival program bringing together the 12 poets included in the Red Room’s poetry crimes series. Arriving early in the day, of course it gave me time to visit a few favourite Sydney spots – though I had to make a choice between the Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Having read in the paper about the exhibition of Rosemary Laing’s photography, I chose the latter.
I was expecting Rosemary Laing’s photographs to be the focus of my gallery visit – but, as often happens to me when I stop off at the MCA, I find that my attention is drawn elsewhere. Also showing until May 29 was a retrospective of the work of Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum.
My knowledge of art comes in pockets, and Hatoum is an artist I wasn’t at all familiar with. I don’t want to understate the beauty of many of Laing’s images, but they just didn’t transform me in the same way Hatoum’s art did. Many of Laing’s images were of a bride in flight: these photographs were not manipulated digitally but flight was simulated as the images were captured. Knowing this somehow detracted from the images, which, seen en masse, were somehow less engaging that the single print I’d seen reproduced in the newspaper, prompting me to visit the exhibition.
More interesting were Laing’s photographs of the landscape: her photographs of forest scenes, the forest floor instead replaced by carpets mimicking red clay or green moss surfaces. These images are playful and make the viewer consider what landscape means, what a tradition of depictions of the landscape would look like, where an end point could be where the landscape is transforming into something no longer a landscape. Too many of Laing’s other images, though, required a story, and did not engage alone. This is where the proximity of her work to Mona Hatoum’s was perhaps most unkind to Laing.
Mona Hatoum was known earlier in her career as a video artist, but has moved more recently to creating objects and installations. Her artwork is a world of the uncanny, and yet it is not the uncanny used cheaply, or overused: each object seems so perfect, the uncanny becomes a double experience. The object itself as familiar: the object it mimics as now unfamiliar. A perfect pair of crutches dangle down the wall, and—turned to jelly—sink across the floor. Silver kitchen utensils become industrial hairbrushes with screws fitted into the holes. A grater is enlarged and turned into a oriental style screen: the utensil as art object; the art object as utensil. It is not just a cleverness that pervades these artworks, though, but a sense of menace: the imagined pain of the metallic hairbrush, the idea of changing clothes behind a cheese grater… her objects make us aware of our own fragility.
Most visceral of all were the pieces using human hair: to weave with, to embroider… at Auschiwitz you can stand in front of a giant cabinet filled with human hair, shorn off by the Nazis for its superiority to animal hair, this stolen wealth spreads before the viewer and hits home. The vast sea of hair makes the viewer feel ill. I found myself having this experience over again standing in front of Hatoum’s works using human hair: not the masses of hair I had seen in Poland, but individual strands, the pieces of humanity literally being used to create art. On a chair sat a small bunch of pubic hair: yet this didn’t cause me to raise my eyebrows or roll my eyes, but instead to ask – why not? Her screw & utensil hairbrush was somehow more confronting than this little pile of hair. Hatoum seems one of the more successful artists owing a debt to Duchamp: and a debt, too, to Jonathon Swift. The objects seem like Duchamp’s readymades, until we realise that we are viewing the object as shrunken or elephantine Gulliver’s. Hatoum’s art is political, it is both beautiful and ugly, it is visceral and articulate—and yet it loses none of its cache as art. This retrospective of her work, “Over My Dead Body”, was another of a series of happy accidents of experience I have had at the MCA—perhaps the best reason to encourage you to stop off there if you find yourself in Sydney for the day.
I was expecting Rosemary Laing’s photographs to be the focus of my gallery visit – but, as often happens to me when I stop off at the MCA, I find that my attention is drawn elsewhere. Also showing until May 29 was a retrospective of the work of Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum.
My knowledge of art comes in pockets, and Hatoum is an artist I wasn’t at all familiar with. I don’t want to understate the beauty of many of Laing’s images, but they just didn’t transform me in the same way Hatoum’s art did. Many of Laing’s images were of a bride in flight: these photographs were not manipulated digitally but flight was simulated as the images were captured. Knowing this somehow detracted from the images, which, seen en masse, were somehow less engaging that the single print I’d seen reproduced in the newspaper, prompting me to visit the exhibition.
More interesting were Laing’s photographs of the landscape: her photographs of forest scenes, the forest floor instead replaced by carpets mimicking red clay or green moss surfaces. These images are playful and make the viewer consider what landscape means, what a tradition of depictions of the landscape would look like, where an end point could be where the landscape is transforming into something no longer a landscape. Too many of Laing’s other images, though, required a story, and did not engage alone. This is where the proximity of her work to Mona Hatoum’s was perhaps most unkind to Laing.
Mona Hatoum was known earlier in her career as a video artist, but has moved more recently to creating objects and installations. Her artwork is a world of the uncanny, and yet it is not the uncanny used cheaply, or overused: each object seems so perfect, the uncanny becomes a double experience. The object itself as familiar: the object it mimics as now unfamiliar. A perfect pair of crutches dangle down the wall, and—turned to jelly—sink across the floor. Silver kitchen utensils become industrial hairbrushes with screws fitted into the holes. A grater is enlarged and turned into a oriental style screen: the utensil as art object; the art object as utensil. It is not just a cleverness that pervades these artworks, though, but a sense of menace: the imagined pain of the metallic hairbrush, the idea of changing clothes behind a cheese grater… her objects make us aware of our own fragility.
Most visceral of all were the pieces using human hair: to weave with, to embroider… at Auschiwitz you can stand in front of a giant cabinet filled with human hair, shorn off by the Nazis for its superiority to animal hair, this stolen wealth spreads before the viewer and hits home. The vast sea of hair makes the viewer feel ill. I found myself having this experience over again standing in front of Hatoum’s works using human hair: not the masses of hair I had seen in Poland, but individual strands, the pieces of humanity literally being used to create art. On a chair sat a small bunch of pubic hair: yet this didn’t cause me to raise my eyebrows or roll my eyes, but instead to ask – why not? Her screw & utensil hairbrush was somehow more confronting than this little pile of hair. Hatoum seems one of the more successful artists owing a debt to Duchamp: and a debt, too, to Jonathon Swift. The objects seem like Duchamp’s readymades, until we realise that we are viewing the object as shrunken or elephantine Gulliver’s. Hatoum’s art is political, it is both beautiful and ugly, it is visceral and articulate—and yet it loses none of its cache as art. This retrospective of her work, “Over My Dead Body”, was another of a series of happy accidents of experience I have had at the MCA—perhaps the best reason to encourage you to stop off there if you find yourself in Sydney for the day.
posted by Kate Middleton at 6:41 PM
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