P Piccinini The Young Family
P Piccinini The Young
Family
Sir
Edwin Landseer The CountryBreakfast
Piccinini on her work Psycho-tourism
...The fact is that if you want to sell a technology like tissue engineering you need to focus on the something a little more 'up' than mutant rodents
Piccinini on her work Protein Lattice Stills
Part 1: Truth and ConsequencesYes you're right! These statements are just like advertising copy, superficial, badly thoughtout, disturbingly inadequate to the topics that they address, deluded and/or self deceptive.
But they were written by an artist so does it matter too much?
After all some say that art is the lie that tells the truth.
Well ...
Yes, if you think that art is about epiphany, truth and consequences.
No, if you think 'serious' art is no more than a response to a market, a ploy for success.
(If you think art can be both then you are in the No camp)
In either case our artist's comments have the irritating quality of sound bites or media spin, they touch a common anxiety so as to claim attention for a moment, but they do nothing to define or resolve the confusion they have aroused.
Piccinini must want to 'sell' us something,- are fashion models really pieces of meat? Is there absolutely no difference between a person and a rat? More technically, how can one take the notion of the sublime seriously while rejecting the possibility of any absolute difference? While we worry over or take grim satisfaction in the false dilemmas she so self-righteously poses, our artist is busy slipping her expensive, ill informed and rather dull work into the pages of history, fashionable magazines and the art market.
We will never quite remember why we bought it, but her notions of 'life' transient and superficial as they are, remain no less sinister. The bond between the sinister and the superficial invokes the familiar "banality of evil", her work, by contrast, enshrines the evil of the banal. In January Ben Genocchio compared her to the good Dr Frankenstein, yet her attitudes have more in common with that other ambitious medical man Dr Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor who unlike Frankenstein really believed that there was nothing to distinguish human beings and laboratory rats, both being available vehicles for his desire. Unlike Frankenstein Mengele was a good "parent", his child victims played with him and called him uncle.
That is why Piccinnni's otherwise trivial work requires critical attention.
That was my response to her Call of the Wild, at the Curtin Gallery. I felt cheated, worked over, as if I had been to a strip club, a casino or a downtown disco and failed to score. This smug, predictable, over-expensive moralising montage was not as advertised. Like the best conpersons Piccinini proffers a habitual artistic bad faith by hitting where it hurts the most, at one's desperately nurtured sense that life might be worth the effort. She then replays that despair in her hyper schmalzy tableau, hoping they will be mistaken for some kind of revelation. In practice this evokes auniquely sickening sentimentality much akin to the work of Landseer who also invented images of animals that spoke to the unresolved anxieties of his times.
Sir Edwin Landseer Attachment
This
is theArt of the Deal, writ large Piccinini is selling our own insecurities
back to us, offering no insight.
Perhaps we should begin where I left off last week - with pornography and the real. This is Slavoj Zizek trying to make sense of the relations between desire,technology and the real
Is not the ultimate figure of the passion for the real the option we get on hard core web sites to observe the inside of the vagina from the vantage point of tiny camera at the top of apenetrating dildo. At this extreme point a shift occurs when we get too close to the desired object. Erotic fascination turns into disgust at the real of thebare flesh.
S Zizek The Desert ofthe Real
Zizek points rightly to the excessive 'real', revealed and/or produced by technology in the course of its operations, when it inevitably exceeds the objects of desire on which those operations were premised. Zizek's also suggests the possibility of very clear boundaries between the human and the non human, based not on biochemistry but on a determinedly dynamic psycho analysis and an even more dynamic culture.
This site of the emergence of difference between desire and the desert of the real, where formlessness becomes form and vice versa is the only place for a critical, subversive, epiphanic art, an art of truth and consequences.
Piccinini goes nowhere near it. Her work is profoundly reactionary, paradoxically untouched by the implications of the digital media. She uses them simply as a container for the airless neurotic posturing, the limp old excuses for bad artand ethical passivity that have dominated Australian culture since 1788. Her work is a neurotic attempt to re-impose our centuries long silence after, not before, our ruthless exercise of power. The new technologies have unique implications for the current Australian cultural crisis - consider their effect on distance and space, but as we shall see, Piccinini uses them to replay the old power games with added pixels.
Part 2: Buddy! Can You Spare Me The Sublime?
In the early nineteen-fifties the British Pop Artists, influenced by surrealism and aspects of recent science especially taxonomy reconfigured the entire range of human knowledge and artefacts as an ecology, an extension of the natural ecology and identical with it, which could be defined and engaged with the same rules and structures. For Paolozzi nature and culture, ecology and iconology were identical, hence his voluminous scrap books, the equivalent of a botanist's drawings and photographs.
This discovery not only allowed artists new kinds of freedom, it pointed to a politics in which power was essentially distributed, reticulated, natural and to a technology in which everything was organic, balanced and hence reasonable.It also abolished the credibility of some long time cultural scandals notably the Sublime. It had forced the realisation of an entirely organic technology long before Piccinni was born and it had examined many of its consequences - from houses which could be "grown" like plants to 'mind altering drugs'. More recently, Phillip Dick's novels could be read as an epic of the collapse of the nature/culture paradigm that drove American imperial culture. The now 25 year old movie Blade Runner is all about the technical creation of animals and beings almost just like us, replicants who work on distant stars. Even more recently, the under appreciated movie masterpiece A I presented an artificial child and endless other creations including a very handsome sex machine.
By comparison Piccinini's work appears little more than self indulgent. She seems ignorant of all these developments. She bleats on endlessly about the fallacy of the nature/culture divide as though it was still a big deal, hot news, which indeed it must remain if she is to use it to spin and 'sell' her infantile fantasies.She seems determined to reverse the freedoms gained by this techno-ecological universe by reimposing on it the iron laws of capital - by which art and technology is bought and sold not contemplated. For Piccinini the world is either sublime or absolutely negotiable - every gene has its price.
Her evident success in doing all this calls for a detailed, coherent exploration of the morbid desert landscape of Australian contemporary art, whose only landmarks are vast canyons of absolute silence. One explanation for her success can be found in the constant omissions which map the neurotic silences of our contemporary culture and its audience.
Our artist's over confident assertion that the first serious Australian art "revolves around a pole constructed between tourism and the sublime" omits several important factors in its emergence, amongst them the nexus between landscape as productive property, exploitation of land and labour and the rapidly emergent Victorian agro-capitalism which funded von Guerards' work and which can be seen in his many commissioned paintings of cleared properties, neatly set out with owner's mansion at the centre. Then there is his micro-peinture - every leaf on the tree visible, which masqueraded as the ultimate in the representation of a landscape of desire, but was soon to be revealed as a technical contrivance, which like Zizek's digital dildo imagery broke down into revolting over detailed reality. Marcus Clarke's weird melancholy is a tribute to this collapse.
Piccinini also remains silent about power and money and hence the production and mediation of desire in her own very expensive work. No one is likely to make animals of the kind she fantasises unless they can achieve wealth, power or emotional and/or sexual gratification by doing so. Animals have indeed been invented with this in mind, notably Mickey Mouse - the king of the capitalist rodents and the first true technological success with lineaments of gratified desire.
It is reasonable to expect artists to strive for as much clarity as possible about their work. Piccinini seeks to maintain an inappropriate obscurity a determinate irresolution, an air tight false consciousness, That is why her photo-works are so clumsy and so unrewarding like adverts on the back of a bus.
As with many artists of her generation her works remains firmly attached to the irreducible Sublime as an authentic Australian artistic category. The Sublime arose as much from the rapid development of capitalism and exploitative technologies as it did from a sense of the infinite in nature as the work of Joseph Wright of Derby shows. It is unsurprising that the appearance of digital technology should have provoked a revival of the sublime with all its tedium.
The Sublime was essentially an attempt to provide a workable ratio between the apparent infinity of natural resources and the over articulated system of differences, scarcity and exchange constantly being developed by international capital. It remains the key psycho-analytic concept in capitalism's calculus of world wide exploitation of resources and labour. In a world where everything, including your genes, will soon be copyright the sublime is a great excuse.
Piccinini has simply grafted the disreputable ghost of the Sublime onto Sentimentality -that other great survival of nineteenth century Australia - thereby lending her package a prickly bogus authenticity, difficult to negotiate or negate and as simple to sell as the Crawford soap operas that its imagery resembles.
Sentimentality not the Picturesque is the constant companion of the Sublime.
Part 3
How Much Is That Doggy in theWindow
The One With The Waggly Tail.
How Much is That Doggy in theWindow
I Do Hope that Doggy's forSale !
The doggy in the pet shop window is far more a creation of genetic manipulation in the service of desire then anything Piccinini has fantasised. This loathsome popular song from the fifties tell us a lot more about how genetic manipulation might work out in practice, in the market than she is willing or able to do.Consider the relation between sentiment and exchange value - anyone trying their luck on Friday night will tell you that looking cute and dewy eyed is always worth a few drinks.
Sentiment and sentimentality, the careful courtship of a gushing over-identification with humans or animals may have been, as Charles Dickens and Landseer found, a useful corrective to the desperate exploitation of our fellow human beings. It was more often a neurotic cover for that exploitation. Piccinni's work oozes sentimentality; Her images of human beings are almost crucified by it. Her fantasy creatures are presented as substitute babies complete with neurotic fixations. This is a cheap trick that tells us nothing about the dilemmas she poses.
Conclusion
In his January review of Piccinini's work Ben Genocchio noted "There is a very real sense that the kind of work she is making could propel her to international stardom". Time will tell but there is an even more real sense in which the Australian art hierarchy is always looking for international validation for its tardy, imitative adoption of international clichés. The issues Piccinini raises are far from new and she has little say about them. I suspect that her bottom line appeal to to the bureaucrats and the corporate sponsors stems not from her use of digital technology or her confused moralising about genetic engineering but from her ability to dress up some foundation neuroses of Australian culture as if they were the latest thing in other words her work be can be sold