Exhibition review: Isidro Blasco 'Sydney Interiors'

Yellow Office, 2013, C-print on museum board, wood and hardware, 35x35x10cm 

Walking into the Isidro Blasco exhibition can look at first like a high-end, post-modern Hobbyco store. There is a lot of plywood joinery and delicately assembled collage that would of required dexterity of a practiced model maker in order to get to their finished state. Categorically they fall between wall mounted sculpture or 3D photo montage, depending on what angle you’re looking from.

This is Blasco’s third solo show at the formidably tasteful Dominik Mersch Gallery. Born in Madrid and now New York based his works are a combination of collage, photography, architecture and deft skill with a glue gun. The format varies from exhibition to exhibition but the themes remain constant. Blasco’s works are all meditations on place, space, memory and perception.  

Sydney Interiors is a continuation from his 2011 Australian residency and shows (Tilt at DMG and The Laneway Project with the City of Sydney). These previous exhibitions were surveys of exteriors in the city: laneways, skylines, aerial views and streetscapes that Blasco configured in his distinct style of collage-construction. His 2013 exhibition is again the result of a two-month residency in Sydney where Blasco turned his attention to the interior to produce a body of work that examines the values we place on our inside environment.

The subjects in this exhibition are domestic, commercial, private and public Sydney interiors. Apparently his initial plan was to record the interiors of celebrity Sydney-siders but he abandoned that pursuit in the early stages of the project. Perhaps he read too much of Andrew Hornery’s column or maybe he just felt easier around the arts set. Either way it’s for the best as viewers now get to see inside some of the beautiful, humble and historic interiors of this city.

Audiences can take instant delight in these works, as they are immediately accessible on both conceptual and experiential level. There is a simple thrill in getting up close and looking in, around, over and behind the montages. The tiny scale of the works forces the you to come right up to the display and requires you to physically move around in order to see more sections of the collage. It is also like the gallery equivalent of an open-house inspection as you get to perve on their bookshelves and see what’s in the pantry. It’s as if you are physically in the space, you have to look around corners and up walls in order to see what’s there.

The montage process requires Blasco to take numerous panoramic photos of the area from the same angle. He then cuts them up and reconstructs them in 2D and 3D forms in accordance to a sense-view rather than a realistic view of the space. What this does is create a much more intuitive way of looking that is much more akin to how we really absorb our visual field.

Interestingly, the approximate bandwidth of the human retina is about 8960 kilobits per second, which is equivalent to the amount of content on two sheets of typed paper. The point being is that we take in so much more visual content than we are aware of and most of it just becomes lost data. What Blasco’s work does is record all of the details- indiscriminately and compulsively recording the full spectrum of what we look at and what we actually see.

Of a similar vein is the after-image phenomenon that Blasco refers to in a number of his essays. This is the wonderful sensation of the optic nerve fooling the brain into seeing something that’s not there. Being in this exhibition is a little bit like looking at stills of after-images, all overlapping and merging into each other outwitting the eye and mind.

The wooden support structures that hold the works are both a practical and aesthetic consideration. Instead of a concealed and neat system we see this erratic plywood nest, jutting out at awkward angles. These exposed skeletons give the works architectural as well as sculptural qualities. They can also read like a wood-frame construction or scaffolding gone mad. This is perhaps a coincidental comment on the modus operandi of most arts enterprises: well-organised chaos.  

The more conceptual aspects of Blasco’s practice are his ideas on the significance of place and space and the influences of perception and memory. Sydney Interiors is like a visual essay on these themes. You can’t help but feel the sincerity and kindness that Blasco brings to these reconstructions of private places and shared spaces. He treats all the subjects with affection and sensitivity, giving as much attention to the modest and humble as he does the illustrious and ornate.

Some of the standouts include The Godess II, a panoramic interior of a grand old Valiant car resplendent in its original turquoise upholstery. Yellow Office is a fabulous fly-on-the-wall view of the power station that is Wayne Tunnicliffe’s desk. In comparison to the other works this one really bursts against the confines of its surface area. Groaning bookshelves bulge out at the viewer and hide Tunnicliffe under the abundance catalogues. 

Hibernian House is more accurate description of how most ‘creatives’ live, which usually is cramped, communal and fairly subsistent. This work is unwieldy in its assembly and juts out in all directions, aptly describing the nature of this creative residence that grants so many artists the ability to work and live in this frightfully expensive city.

Ultimately what Blasco’s work prompts us to think about is how and through what significance does a space turn into a place? Are places made through the tangible things they contain? Or are places made by the intangible memories and presence that we attach to them? And is a psychological and emotional sense of place what we need, rather than space itself?

This exhibition also illuminates the fact that how we see our world is entirely different from how others see it. We use perception and memory as primary tools to build the framework that becomes our reality. The idiom that it is perception not truth that matters is perhaps the most fitting summary of Blasco’s works in Sydney Interiors.

And in art as in life, perception is everything.

“I know something and you know something else”

Talk: 

Chris Durcon

Art Gallery of NSW

July 13, 2013

“I know something and you know something else”

This is the maxim of Chris Durcon, Director of Tate Modern, London, who was in Australia this week to talk to Sydney and Melbourne audiences about the lecture title: The 21^st–century museum. Durcon typifies this new breed of the polymathic museum directors with hybrid accents and lucrative personal brands that they bring to their posts. This puts them more into the frame of the ‘roving curator’ than the static directorships of administrations past.  

Thanks to the increasingly powerful arts muscle that is Kaldor Public Art Projects audiences received an intimate presentation from Durcon, free of charge. A sort of BorisGroys meets Richard Branson, he is relaxed, sagacious and infectious in his quest to open up, enliven and activate a public museum model that is fit for the 21^st-century.

The lecture explored what audiences should expect from their museums and what museums shouldn’t give to their audiences. (And by ‘museum’, he means what we would locally refer to as galleries.)   

The 21^st-century audience is the primary stakeholder in these civic-minded spaces. In the Western, secular society the museum is a platform for community congregation. The museum site is meeting place that invites the audience to be part of the experience, shifting the historic model from consumer to contributor. Enabling what Durcon calls the “collective production of memory”.

Durcon also advocates a return to the original meaning of curator, as a person who ‘takes care’. But in this instance they are stewards for the public good rather than public goods. This again reiterates the quickly changing role of the 21^st-century museum from an object-orientated site to an experiential place.

Durcon also assigns new responsibilities to audiences, as they must learn how to make decisions for themselves in order to become part of the new museum experience. He also raised the point of imposed “self-denial”, by not showing audiences what they want to see. I assume this comment is directed at the marathon, tea towel merchandise-friendly exhibitions that finance the briefer, edgier shows. I found Durcon’s analogy “you know what happens to a sponge that stays wet for more than a month” rather helpful to summarise that insight.

In light of Durcon’s lecture, what I think we all know is that the Art Gallery of NSW is an institution on the move. Given that the ‘existingbuilding is ill-equipped to meet the needs of the 21st century’ and ‘stifles the Gallery’s ability to attract visitors, stage major exhibitions and fulfil its role as the principal art museum serving Australia’s global city’, the plans for the Sydney Modern expansion seem suddenly very pressing. While the expansion’s main emphasis is on increasing the gallery’s physical space, Sydney Modern will allow Australia to participate on the global, shared platform of cultural production.

#thefutureofthecritic

The presence of the critic is becoming increasingly fainter in the cultural landscape. Once an authority to the masses, the masses have now become the authority. We know that the future is social and that we increasingly define ourselves by our networks and accumulated “like” capital. We’re sharing, posting, publishing and pining with fervor, allowing our chosen platforms to project all the 140 character long, photogenic square-shaped things we like. Amazeballs.

But what’s being forgotten with all this awesome totes cool positivity is the importance and rightful place of the critical voice. “Like”-ism has replaced criticism as the qualitative signifier. Traditionally the place of the critic in the arts has always been supported; while the modes and methods have evolved, there has always a mutual agreement between the creator and critic that their existence is codependent.

But as we know history is quickly becoming what we refer to as yesterday’s news feed. In this age of instantaneous content production and consumption, quality criticism is quickly being replaced with impulsive comment and motley sharing. What have now is the ‘critical courier’ who embedded and invisible the broadcast.

Smart devices have become our phantom limbs, allowing us to fulfill the Zuccerbergian goal of Frictionless Sharing and instant endorsement (BTW when did ‘Zuccerbergian’ become an adjective?) What we have now is criticism by omission. If you are not part of the shared narrative, then your relevance is questioned. Reputation banks are what dictate quality in this like-economy, where identity is currency and image is wealth. 

Meta-armies of cultural couriers that dictate taste and fashion are increasingly replacing considered critique with a bricolage of short thoughts. Audiences and cultural consumers only receive what is in the feed, or at best a tarted-up press release adorned with a few hybrid words ending in "…ence". In the quest to be liked and followed we seem to have developed a phobia to expressing and discussing critical views.  Criticism isn’t the same as schadenfreude; it’s very different from the sad cat diary. At its core is the ability to think for oneself, which is on the verge of wipeout from networked intelligence.

If the late art critic Robert Hughes is right and the ‘new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive’, then perhaps the new role of criticism is to sit on the pleasant fence and get more vapid. An observant, art critic friend of mine pointed out that the best criticism around today is Fashion Police. This E! Entertainment is show devoted to learned, considered and wonderfully candid sartorial criticism that makes Joan Rivers to fashion what Hughes was to visual arts. Okay perhaps that’s pushing it, but can you imagine those two on the couch together? It would be brilliant!

But until NBC does a posthumous pilot for the Hughes and Rivers Show, critical thought and response can’t just be swallowed and softly regurgitated by the networked vernacular. Things don’t evolve to greatness through shares and likes, they evolve through vigorous thought and frank discussion. Fashion Police, you have a new pupil.