Ground Zero
Size Zero
Aram Tanis
Martin C de Waal
Simon Willems
Anna Orton
Maurizio Anzeri
Marcelle Price
Gert-Jan Akerboom
Curated by Ken Pratt
Ground Zero, Size Zero offers a timely nod, in September, to London Fashion Week. Drawing on the work of an improbable selection of artists, it traces body panic, dysmorphia and anxieties about the body through their works. Some engage directly with the media images fed to us by the endless diet of fashion magazines, colluding with and subverting their notions of the idealised body in equal parts. Others tap into the neurotic niggling anxieties about who we are within our own organic existence, their locus of concern, perhaps, sharing something in common with the world of fashion that feels the need to reshape and reform the living form since a natural existence is simply not good enough.
Martin C. de Waal
Martin C. de Waal’s practice has criss-crossed that of fashion and art for the past two decades. In addition to working as a stylist and all-round fashionista in his hometown of Amsterdam and further afield. For example, during last September’s London Fashion Week, he performed at the opening of London’s On/Off catwalk. His more conceptual art works have been shown internationally in both commercial galleries and institutions. And, in a further strand of shape-shifting, he is something of a personality on the mainland European underground club and dance music scene. If his constant reinvention is part of his practice, then this literally extends as far as physical re-invention in the trope explored by body artists: cosmetic surgery is equally an option of medium for the contemporary artist. Earlier this year Martin C. de Waal underwent an eight and a half hour plastic surgery intervention to alter his face, something previously explored in less dramatic ways and included in various series of photographic works –largely what might be called ‘non self-portraits’- in which the effects of surgical intervention were augmented with digital manipulation. The results are at once striking; sometimes very beautiful and yet always marginally or fully disturbing, the presentation of his face often pushed to an extremity that the mainstream fashion industry seldom dares present to us. Martin C. de Waal has exhibited and performed in a range of galleries and institutions including Fondation Cartier (Paris), Chelsea Museum of Art (New York), FOAM (Amsterdam) and Stedelijk Museum s-Hertogenbosch (s-Hertogenbosch). In 2006 he had a solo exhibition at Torch Gallery (Amsterdam).In his most recent video work – a kind of eulogy for his now departed previous incarnation- footage from various live performance works are edited together in something that might be best termed an MTV docu-obituary; flashes of grandiose gestures of a ludicrous glamour for a persona no longer physically with us.
Aram Tanis
Fellow Dutch artist Aram Tanis is best known for his photographic works that often feature combinations of heartless urban environments and human figures, most often female nudes whose depiction does little to encourage us to retain any notion of seduction or glamour. At first glances, the work might share similarities with a kind of ‘heroin chic’ fashion photography that rose to prominence in the 1990’s and resemblances to the contemporaneous use of photography in the visual arts. However, in Tanis’ work the human body always seems to be in engaged in some process –perhaps internal- that is about a diseased state or denotes stress. There is a pathology here where impossibly thin women splay themselves naked over tables in twitched-out states or where impossibly fat women seem to become motionless under their own collapsed weight and young men form unhealthy relationships with blow-up dolls. Where the bland urbanscapes intersperse, we find then suggestion of a dislocated isolation and an environmental alienation that might lead to these states. Like animals in an unnatural captivity, the coats of Tanis’ figures is not glossy. Their noses are not wet. Their eyes are not bright. Aram Tanis has exhibited work internationally including at Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt), Witte de With (Rotterdam) and MAMA (Rotterdam) amongst other locations.
Simon Willems
Simon Willems’ tight paintings and drawings do not share a single preoccupation or line of content. And yet, some preoccupation with the human body seems to be always present. In one strand of work this involves the unexpected humanisation of the inhuman. Droids and aliens species familiar to us from iconic sci-fi films are captured in dramatised human moments, themselves drawing from the history of painting. In another strand of work, Willems seems to draw on the traditions of 1970’s hyperrealism, abstract painting and graphic design. In such works we often see the sleek people of the the glamourous world of music and pop iconography in relation to abstracted and partly abstracted elements. The result seems to play games with intended meanings, simultaneously raising formal questions about the nature of an image constructed through painting and yet –where these figures are present or appear to have been present- can be read as a relational comment. Are we literally observing the dissolving or fragmentation of a body that was there just before the moment captured on the canvas? At times, such flirtations with a kind of dark humour of body anxiety come into sharp focus: in one work we see a meteor that has crashed onto a street party. More horrific and horrifically amusing than the presence of mangled human remains is their complete absence. The human presence that was there just a moment ago that is narratively indicated through party paraphernalia leaves us with an open-ended anxiety about what happened to these human bodies. Did they escape or are they still there, trapped beneath the smouldering rock from the sky? An unresolved distress or schadenfreude seem to be the only options open to us. Simon Willems has exhibited internationally with a numerous solo exhibition credits including at Percy Miller (London), Mark Moore Gallery (Los Angeles), Galerie-Polaris (Paris) and FRAC Auvergne (Clermont Ferrand). He will also participate in forthcoming projects at Galleri SE (Bergen), Gallery The Space (Seoul) and Galerie Brunnhofer (Linz) this year.
Marcelle Price
Marcelle Price frequently uses documentary photography and quasi-documentary photography in her practice. More often than not, this is combined with her personal interest in subcultures; their dress codes and the aspirational self-image being conveyed through these codes. At times, she explores the aspiration of these meanings compared with the social realities of their presentation. For example, in various works, she has explored the lives of ageing members of the Rocakbilly and Ted subcultures; how they decorate their domestic interiors with the accoutrements of the subculture or head out into public spaces. In this more traditional documentary approach, Price often seems preoccupied with the way in which people occupy, decorate and transform their banal domestic spaces to speak of the values and codes of subcultures from which they can draw a personal identity. In another trope, she is more interventionist, seeking to take the totemic and fetishitic nature of the dress codes and the materials from which they are made one step further. She creates anti-naturalistic images of herself in these dress codes that highlight the highly-charged eroticism of the very fabrics of themselves. In this sense, Price offers us a world not in which clothing serves and adorns the natural human body seeking to make a statement about identity, but in which the body itself is subject to the demands and ideologies of the dress codes and must form an identity already described by the fabrics. Marcelle Price has exhibited internationally including exhibitions at Sadie Coles (London), MAMA (Rotterdam), amongst others.
Maurizio Anzeri
Maurizio Anzeri is an Italian artist trained as a sculptor whose work flirts with the narrow spaces between sculpture and installation and fashion and design. Although a substantial part of his body of work exists in straightforward object sculpture terms, part of his practice has been within the field of fashion and design – for example, he has been commissioned by Alexander McQueen to make one-off pieces. In this area, his work in ambiguous materials such as synthetic hair often departs the fringes of experimental fashion practice for an intersection with art. Unwearable and apparently functionless masses of twisted and tangled hair hang down from ceilings like some organic manifestation, one part Spanish Moss and two parts Barbie on a bad hair day. If there is a possibility that the form itself can be attractive and beautiful, all the socialised beliefs that we hold could also mean that it can become repugnant. Without the presence of the rest of a body to guide us, it can be difficult. Hair is a socially determined issue to be negotiated. Depending on which culture is defining it, variables exist. On the whole however, the globalism of international fashion means that we can use the body to guide our reactions: luscious growth of hair from model’s head is good; luscious growth of hair from model’s back, less so. Maurizion Aneri has had a solo exhibition at Galleria Palladio (Lugano) and has shown in a wide range of group projects in locations such as Museo CAMEC (La Spezia), Villa Erba (Como), Plastyfikatory Gallery (Poznan) and Furini Arte Contemporanea (Arezzo).
Gert-Jan Akerboom
The young Dutch artist, Gert-Jan Akerboom’s largescale drawings and installations of drawings are, at their most simplistic level, figurative drawings achieved with a deftness of technical skill. However, what Akerboom chooses to highlight –or place in shadow- with this most traditional of artistic crafts often makes a dramatic difference to what we actually see. What, in effect, could be fairly straightforward portraits are transformed into weird and strange vistas with distorted perspective and areas of against-the-grain light and shade that change the normal into the mystical and ritualistic. More recent works have seen the emergence of more full-blown fantastic elements. Akerboom is fairly candid about his work drawing in his personal experience of growing up in an unusually religious community. And, whilst this is evident in the work, there is certainly a departure from the socially decorous manifestation of Calvinism that often seems focussed in its attempt to remove the dramatic, mystical and liminal aspect of (Catholic) Christian ritual. Akerboom, by contrast dives headfirst into the world of ‘smells and bells’. Traditional Christian allegorical imagery about transcendence, death myths and transformation are mixed up in a convoluted language that takes in the world of subculture Gothic and street art. In many respects, Akerboom’s imagery about the distortion, alteration and destruction of the mortal flesh is far more ambivalent than a traditional Christian anxiety. The exciting and potentially positive experience of our bodies becoming something else –something stronger, new and exciting- inherent in Japanese anime and sci-fi in the trope of Transformers is equally evident in his work. His is a world in which our flesh might eventually wither on the bone, but it might equally become some powerful mutation, part machine of part superbeast. Gert-Jan Akerboom is currently working on new work in Berlin. He has shown in various project spaces and institutions including Centre for Fine Art (Rotterdam), Blaak 10 (Rotterdam) and Stichting Kop (Breda).
Anna Orton
Anna Orton is a young Scottish who recently graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone. Despite only graduating this year, she has already participated in shows in the respected Scottish project spaces The Embassy (Edinburgh) and Generator Projects (Dundee). To date she has worked mostly with drawing, sculpture and photography. In her recent sculptural works, the shiny materials of fetishism and, perhaps, auto-eroticism are combined: mirror and black patent leather. Are we witnessing the scene of some unfortunate accident or merciful release? Has some unfortunate pole-dancer crashed through her mirrored podium or has she managed to break free, leaving the damaged tools of her trade in her wake? The result can be read as a purely formal sculptural object, but given the choice of materials and presentation, the narrative aspect of the work is hard to deny. This is a work that also speaks of a human body that was there but a short while ago and, like the mechanism in Willems’ “Street Party” painting, what we can not determine is the outcome of the narrative to which the object bears testament. One psychological definition of anxiety is that it is a psychological state resulting from the simultaneous underestimation of the ability to survive a threat and overestimation of the power of the threat itself. In this sense this is not only the thread that connects Willems’ and Orton’s work – where the anxiety is the natural result of a state in which we are taunted with evidence of what appears to be a great threat without being given any evidence about the ability of the bodies once present to have survived the onslaught. And, in less obvious ways, it is also present in the work of others in the show.
Anxiety is the best diet for models since it makes them underestimate their ability to survive in an unreal world unless they are more beautiful, even skinnier, beyond better. And since it also makes them overestimate the power of that unreal world to demand compliance, they must starve and beautify for fear of joining the rest of us in the real world. But, as Ground Zero, Size Zero suggests, perhaps the same anxieties and neuroses that propel models at the top of the food chain also permeate our daily psyches. Even when we could never be models, we have been trained to think like them.
Ken Pratt © 2007