Sheep Head

Dislodge, Angus Taylor and Rina Stutzer

By Prof Elfriede Dreyer - Department of Visual arts, University of Pretoria

Prof Dreyer is an academic, arts writer, curator and consultant, and she produces her own creative work.

In a way art is always on a threshold: shifting from what is or was to what can be; from stasis to interchange and passage. The threshold is the liminal, the juncture where the known and the unknown meet in unexplored territories and novel spaces. On this exhibition entitled Dislodge the artworks of Angus Taylor and Rina Stutzer depict such journeying and transference into the unfamiliar. As a purposeful process of abandonment of the safety of acquaintance and the stagnant, their works embrace discomfort and uneasiness in the search for revitalisation and renewal.

Yet it is not only artistic creation that constantly lingers on the threshold; our times of globalisation is characterised by continuous change and nomadic movement brought on by the ever-induced pace of new technological developments and over-crowding in urban spaces. Contemporary globalised identity can be described as essentially liminal and continually hybridising. Flemish theorist Rik Pinxten (2006:81) maintains that cultures are forever voluntarily hybridising and continually adapting a part of their ownness to new circumstances and new offerings, which do come with losses. Of seminal importance to him (Pinxten 2006:82) is that the claiming of an identity should go hand-in-hand with the understanding that identity is synonymous with habitual change.

In the Altermodern Manifesto Nicolas Bourriaud (2009) describes how such new global identities call for new types of representation and how our daily lives have become dependent on transnational entities and journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe: as such “artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history.” Zigmunt Bauman (2007:82) argues that “the real powers that shape the conditions under which we all act these days flow in global space, while our institutions of political action remain by and large tied to the ground; they are, as before, local.“ [1] The harsh realities of dystopian everyday life in South Africa are evident in conditions of people‐on‐the‐move, homelessness, violence and xenophobia. Such instability and restlessness, especially in the urban environment, have become synonymous with contemporary states of being that defy neatly packaged utopias aimed at ensuring ultimate happiness and everlasting bliss. The liminal condition – both in being and the creative process – is hence dystopian, entailing critical reflection on what is left behind as well as on the continually unfolding new universes, heterotopias or playing fields where established models are being substituted by fragments of data, information and experiences.

In order to obtain their own truths and grasp of the world, the artists Taylor and Stutzer explore the fickle nature of reality, their own undisclosed rituals, nameless in-betweens and liminal spaces that Turner (1967) refers to. Various techniques and materials are investigated, tested and recodified in the search for comprehension and renewal. In the raw materiality of primeval soil and earth, Taylor finds personal metaphors of belonging, a cognitive home and a sense of been grounded in a world of alienation and constant defamiliarisation. Ironically, his artistic methodology defies such belonging by embracing experimentation and renewal, as in the ramming of earth for plinths and sculptures; the disembodiment and fragmentation of the human figure through the use of stacking and packing; and the dematerialisation of physical form through processes such as burning. 

In a work such as Die omdop van doodsekerheid (2011), liminality is instituted in the displacement of earth from its natural habitat to the artificial gallery space, creating a void in the natural space and filling a void in the parameters of the non-natural space. The dislodgment of earth generates a burial space without a corpse which involves a deconstructive process of transition and resignification through the dis- and relocative actions.  Using the metaphor of an empty coffin in upright position for his idea of the parergon, philosopher Derrida (1987:195) maintains that there are certain imperturbable aspects which makes an artwork or text stand up to all manipulations of interpretation, “all assaults, ... all perspectives and all anamorphoses” (Derrida 1987:195). In the signification process, this “paradigmatic coffin” of information is constantly vulnerable to being “multiplied, described, serialized, analyzed, detailed, displaced, turned about in all its states (or almost) and from all its angles (or almost)” (Derrida 1987:195). Taylor’s ‘taking’ of the earth creates a dystopian void and temporary losses that shatter wholeness, but in the process suggests new meanings and contexts. To Baudrillard (1996:61) the “Nothing, the Void, primal scene of the material illusion, and continuation of the Nothing as perpetuation of that state” enable the description of the real where ‘nothingness’ perpetually appear and disappear.

In the final stage of the ritualistic process of creation, Taylor’s sculptures occupy new spaces, self-assuredly creating affirmative stances of being and identity in high-point positions that suggest surveillance through the raised horizon and viewpoint. Almost immediately the romantic idealistic outlook is counterposed by works articulating low vantage points. Such interaction of spatialities and vantage points raise questions of reciprocity and suggest continual shifts in positioning. The conceptual and technical exploration of new territories is an exciting, adventurous journey; it is a course of action where there are liminal moments of interchange and mostly a confusion of boundaries of which Donna Haraway (1991:29) pointed out its pleasurable dimensions. In her Cyborg Manifesto she argues that there is gratification to be found in the notion of connectivity, a view that is similar to that of Jean Baudrillard (1996:125) who in The Perfect Crime finds the pleasure principle in the simulation and fantasy possibilities of the narcissism located in the “inner mirror” or the self as “happy self-reference”.[2] Artistic practice might itself be understood as ‘at the edge’ and as being at an uncertain point between the real and ‘something else’, or at a point between the self and itself, not merely in the sense that the “things that it creates may themselves function as liminal points that move us between different forms of appearance, but also in the sense that it explores the very character of liminality including its own liminal status” (Malpas 2007:2).

Liminality in Stutzer’s paintings is evoked through transmutative materials such as rust and patina, and imagery such as the crow, seasonal landscapes and a caravan.  The raven in the Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 poem speaks of such liminality:

... And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor …

In similar way, Stutzer’s crow on the threshold is a Romantic symbol of suspension between heaven and earth and a metaphor for transcendence. Whilst on one hand containing stylistic elements of the Romantic genre, her landscapes or mindscapes on the other hand entail a kind of painting where its prospects and pictorial composition have been overturned and moved aside in favour of a Duchampian use of the representative value of materials and the tropes of process. Not only do her patinaed landscapes reflect time in the Romantic sense of changing seasons,[3] they are forever changing due to the chemical impact of the patina on the bronze surfaces. Stutzer’s nomadic works constantly transform, maybe leaving only a simulacrum or a copy of the original as a memory of the original which has disappeared. Her process reminds of Baudrillard (1996:38) who maintains:

But there is nothing of the death instinct here. It is the ruse of God. Eluding the question of his existence by vanishing beneath his images. It is the ruse of the original, vanishing beneath its many copies. By the very fact of existing, we are from the beginning in an impossible anthropological situation. We can nowhere test our existence or its authenticity. Existence, being and the real are, strictly speaking, impossible.

The instability of Stutzer’s medium creates a radical position of indeterminacy, since not only is the detailed outcome of the final artwork unpredictable but her very medium refers to the momentary and the transitory, being permanently in a state of liminality and ‘on the way’. There is an element of blindness at stake here, some degree of the deconstruction of the greatness of the vision of the Romantic and Modernistic vanguard artist. According to Derrida's idea of blindness we cannot ‘see’ beyond the personal point of view as frame and therefore cannot make any permanent authoritative statements. All we have are our own memories and visions (Kelly 1991:102-104). The groping, liminal gesture of the blind person is metaphoric of the both the artist and the interpreter who feel around in the dark during the creative act although having some vision accompanied by memories (Kelly 1991:103). As such Stutzer deconstructs eternal truths through the creation of decaying, dying artworks, time bombs that in sentimental way comment on the destruction of the natural environment through the harmful brunt of polluting technologies. The works become a postRomantic lament for the losses and voids created by such undesirable postindustrial conditions.

The interrelation of ideas, materials and aesthetics becomes in Haraway's (1991:28-29) words a condensation of both imagination and material realities. In connecting to the self through the self in the exploration of self-image and its relation to the world and others, the artworks of Taylor and Stutzer comment on self-referentiality as the most critical process and resource of the artist. The self becomes a nomadic being that constantly leaves things behind and venture into new domains; some memories linger on, others are distilled and fade. The artists push ahead, break taboos and transgress boundaries as a pleasurable nomadic condition where the time and space of the liminality of their processes become “the time and space of the indeterminate and the opaque, the time and the space of possibility and of the question. The liminal might thus be viewed as constituting both the topic and the topos of art – it is that which is the focus of artistic practice and also the place in which such practice is located” (Malpas 2007:2).

Sources quoted

Altermodern Manifesto. 2009. Tate modern. [O] Available: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm

Baudrillard, J. 1996. The Perfect Crime, translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso.

Derrida, J. 1987. The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.

Haraway, D.  1991. A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology and socialist feminism in the 1980s. First published in the Socialist Review 80, Volume 15, 2 (March/April, 1985). Later published in the Socialist review collective. Unfinished business: 20 years of socialist review (London: Verso 1991).  This version reproduced in D. Trend (ed). 2001. Reading Digital Culture. Massachusetts/Oxford: Blackwell.

Kelly, M. 1991. Shades of Derrida. Artforum 29 (6, February): 102-104.

Malpas, J. 2007. At the Threshold: The Edge of Liminality. Review on the exhibition Liminality curated by Colin Langridge, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania, March 2008. [O] Available: http://www.utas.edu.au/philosophy/staff_research/malpas/J.Malpas%20Articles/At%20The%20Threshold.pdf

Pinxten, R and De Munter, K. 2006. De culturele eeuw. Antwerpen/Amsterdam: Houtekiet.

Turner, V. 1967.  ‘Betwixt and Between: Liminal Period, in The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.