HARD RUBBISH

DAINE SINGER GALLERY - 16th Nov - 20th Dec 2024

A group show curated by Singer and assistants Jane Rhoades and Nicholas Mahady pursues a theme of suburban waste as material for assemblage sculptures. The show offers several works by each of the nine artists participating - Molly Cook, Christopher L. G. Hill, Lou Hubbard, Zoe Jackson, Jordan Marani, Matthew Morrow, Louise Paramor, Steven Rendall and Murray Walker.

NB - Click on images for enlargement

Installation view

In spite of the teasing title, there is little that is difficult in this assortment of waste materials or the preferences of the chosen artists. The show offers a judicious cross-section of contemporary waste practices, aesthetic sensibilities and generations of exponents. Sculpture shows are rare at any time but here the gallery breaks ranks and keeps it grassroots and real in counterpoint to grand and condescending fabrications, cultural politics and a ‘management aesthetic’ prevalent elsewhere.

Installation view

Assemblage has its subsets or species and a history that commences with Synthetic Cubism in the second decade of the twentieth century. It steadily expands from figurative ends to more formal or abstract ones with subsequent movements. All manner of urban detritus is soon arranged through shrewd contrasts to reveal underlying formal properties of colour, shape, texture and so on within an assembly. This broadening of scope eventually involves matters of scale in the American Junk Sculpture movement of the 1950s and later to temporary and ephemeral qualities - even audio and olfactory qualities - with the Italian Arte Povera movement in the late 1960s. There, materials are not urban waste but rather modest everyday materials, deliberately chosen as impossible to carve, cast or model. It was a time of a fistful of lentils and a few horse droppings more (to salute key practitioner Jannis Kounellis [1936-2017]).

An ‘assemblage’ where appealing to considerations of location and duration is more properly termed an installation. But there are no hard and fast lines to be drawn between the categories. And while discernment of qualities now appeals to a greatly expanded context, for site-specific and temporary works, returns there soon diminish however, through a kind of inflation of scope or tastes. We see more but it means less. The work all but dissolves into a larger design. The problem of demarcation runs directly into identity or definition for a given work. Which qualities are part of the work and which are only the context in which to display them?

Installation view

This is particularly acute in a group show and in Hard Rubbish it is not always easy to tell whether one regards a single or several works in close proximity. Positioning may be a crucial requirement to perception of many other qualities to a given work, where assemblage is the name of the game. A catalogue may correct us, but only declares an intention.

This has been a challenge to assemblage for some time. On evidence presented here, the solution would seem to be a gentle retreat from institutional engagement needed for broader contexts. Artists quietly downscale, pursue more modest and personal themes, adopt a stand-alone posture and take matters into their own hands.

Four works by Louise Paramor

The range of work in Hard Rubbish extends from Louise Paramor, as the most committed to the art-as-civic-design approach and whose materials look least like rubbish (which is not to say they were not found there but only that this aspect is not apparent).

‘Orbyusssss’ (2022) 22 X 28 X 13 cm plastic-acrylic gel medium, screws

The work of Steven Rendall features recycled components of domestic appliances such as a vacuum cleaner and their re-purposing is greatly facilitated by a coat of black or white paint, disguising surface while highlighting shape and texture. Rendall’s ‘Orbyussss’ (2022) is closest in spirit to the Junk Sculpture aesthetic with its indescribable crushing, possibly searing of machine parts. This is the grot side of waste given appropriate flourish, equalled only by Murray Walker’s amusing ‘We Are In Love’ (1990), for this critic the show’s standout.

'We Are In Love' (1990) 88 X 35 cm mixed media

Six works (2010-2012) by Matthew Morrow

The works of Matthew Morrow clearly announce a hard waste or skip origin and yet his treatment is deceptive. On closer inspection each work is actually a carefully reconstructed plywood facsimile of the discarded furniture item. Where Paramor’s work does not look like waste material although probably is, Morrow’s work looks like waste from a distance, but turns out to be something more archly rendered.

Jordan Marani - ‘Self-portrait (Hanging Around)’ (1989) 80 X 92cm acrylic and oil on fabric

Marani’s ‘Self-portrait (Hanging Around) (1989) discreetly places him among the show’s seniors and bridges the familiar divide between two and three dimensional works, figuration and abstraction. The work definitely flags waste origins, possibly on successive occasions.

Lou Hubbard - ‘Catsuit’ (2024) 20 X 60 X 17 cm cotton onesie, soccer ball

Hubbard’s ‘Catsuit’ (2024) is the most understated of assemblages, merely a soccer ball inserted down the left leg of the costume. Without the ball we would have merely a found object, its placement hardly compelling as assembly. Yet the ball hints at an absent third dimension, a knee raised perhaps for a reveller now lacking more body. Such costumes almost certainly end their short life in hard waste collections.

Christopher L. G. Hill – ‘Strung Together’ (2024) 30 cm width, dimensions variable, found objects

Hill’s sole contribution, the modest ‘Strung Together’ (2024) surely declares a suburban hard waste disposal. The tangle of various fashion accessories, cables and cords positions a range of colours and materials that not only denote an era of wearables but also the inconvenient entanglements that easily follow, that are disposable rather than disentangled.

Several works (2024) by Molly Cook

Smaller works of Molly Cook and Zoe Jackson perhaps carry the withdrawal from institutional bombast furthest, if only to risk too refined an address. Cook’s arrangements have an almost Japanese delicacy with live flowers and household clutter but may be too precious to register as much more than table dressing.

Zoe Jackson - 'Untitled' (2024) 36 X 56 X 40 cm trinket box and branch

Jackson’s assemblages, with their platform of picture frames carry a hint of Joseph Cornell in the accumulation of fetish-like oddments, but it was the small work with twigs that caught this critic's eye. Some time ago ‘Twig Art’ was the subject of ridicule on online forums, possibly following the feature movie Lovely and Amazing, in which a bored housewife and habitue of adult art classes (played by Catherine Keener) persists with her twig assemblages in the face of commercial indifference.

Finally, this is a timely and thoughtful show, the perfect note on which to close the year. It would be great to see the theme treated with a larger number of artists in one of the city’s lesser public spaces, Heide or Tarrawarra perhaps, but given the policies and abilities in operation there, this is unlikely in the foreseeable future.