disintegration
Place Gallery
Richmond, 2008
Essay Simon Cooper
The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that objects are often invisible to us, gathered up as they are within a context of functionality and use. It is only when things break down that we become aware of them, seeing them with fresh eyes. In many ways Heidegger’s observation could form the basis of an approach to Robbie Rowlands’ work. Rowlands takes objects that are often forgotten, invisible or transparent to us, objects that exist on the verge of disappearance, and stages a kind of ‘breakdown’, inviting us to rediscover the object, poised somewhere between what it was and what it might become.
Rowlands bases his sculptural work on things that exist at the fringes of our awareness, utilitarian objects such as lampposts or desks. He refashions them into something altogether different yet in a way that never allows their original identity to be shed. The mass produced and functional designs are softened and framed in terms of a new aesthetic, giving the object a renewed energy or sensibility. The effect is to reveal hidden potential in what had come to be regarded as outmoded. If the former object is largely unrecognizable in the new sculpture, the process is not one of violence, rather there is a sense of redemption, as if the object has been liberated from obsolescence, from forgetfulness. This redemptive sense is twofold; on the one hand the object has become something else, inhabiting a new and often sensuous form. On the other hand we can’t help reading this new form back into the old; we sense that the change is not entirely arbitrary, that maybe this new energy, this emerging beauty and potential was always there in the original object, even as it was sat on, written on, or passed by on the way to work. As such his work enables us to reflect upon wider process of change, upon what our relation with things might suggest about us, and perhaps invites us to inject a little more care into the quotidian realm.
An early work entitled Comfort in Sadness encapsulates many of the concerns that would shape the artists’ future projects. In this piece we can identify an old bathtub whose base had been repeatedly sliced open allowing the tub to curl upwards into a crescent-like shape. The result is a piece of sculpture that is both visually arresting and imbued with a powerful affective resonance. The work’s title ‘Comfort in Sadness’ stages precisely the kind of opposing tensions that inform much of the artists work. Not comfort and sadness or comfort or sadness, but comfort in sadness. An invitation perhaps to tease out a complex melancholic reaction to change or loss, to see how there is a certain paradoxical comfort to be had in sadness. This dialectic of comfort and sadness opens up a rich theme that Rowlands had pursued since. Often exploring the ambiguity of domestic spaces and objects: bathtubs, interior rooms, beds and chairs, the artist reveals the dilemmas of ‘comfort’, of our investment in the familiar, suggesting how a certain level of sadness might shadow the comfort we create for ourselves.
More recently, Rowlands has had the opportunity to create site specific installations in spaces that might once have housed the kind of half-forgotten objects he likes to work with. Utilizing a wide variety of buildings and environments that have included a Bus Depot, a Toorak mansion and a beach shack, the artist has been able to project his thematic concerns into spaces rather than upon individual objects. Despite the obvious differences in scope and choice of medium, it is clear that the installations share many similarities with the individual sculptures. Significantly these spaces have themselves all been on the verge of transformation, either condemned, or subject to renovation. Of course it is this very condition, poised on the edge of erasure that allows the artist to work. The materials and structures are no longer of use; the artist is free to do what he wants with it. However, because these places and things are placed under the sign of erasure: condemned buildings, abandoned objects, things whose use-value has become obsolete, he is able to explore the complexity of reactions involved when we erase or replace our sense of the familiar.
Not everyone has seen Rowlands’ installation work in this light. Perhaps the enclosed spaces of the installations heightens our sensitivity to change, causing some to view the kinds of transformative processes as largely invasive, even suggestive of a certain kind of violence. Yet if the cutting up of interior spaces - walls and floors - can provoke a sense of the space being ‘gutted’, there is often more going on here, once you can get past the visually stunning effects of say, a floor being cut up and curled, leaving a hole in the ground. Rather than simply finding evidence of structural evisceration, it is possible to find a more subtle process at work, one that ‘suspends’ the fate of the condemned building, and allows us to contemplate this scene of frozen entropy as the room almost unravels before your eyes. One is also able to discern new patterns within the altered room, new symmetries and plays of light that extend beyond a ‘flight’ response’.
The works on display here lend themselves to this kind of reading. The artist takes spaces and objects and shapes them in a form that makes them almost unrecognizable, and of course there is certain violence, an element of destructiveness in the process. But the effect is productive. At a sensorial level we shift between remembering and reconstructing the old object and responding to the reconstituted form. This is essentially a process of openness and suspension rather than simply an exercise of force. The energies and possibilities of the object are unlocked in an engaging if ultimately elusive way, as the forms of the sculptural move toward but elude symmetrical or identifiable shapes and patterns.
The objects in this show would appear to have little in common - a boom gate, a chair, an electricity pole, a bed, a goal post and a desk - yet it is possible to explore commonalities between them that might tap into the artist’s wider concerns. For a start many of these objects are so familiar as to be virtually invisible, the bed, chair and desk are supportive, they enable sleeping and work, but we don’t often think about them. The same goes for the power pole. The boom gate and the goal post might engage us more directly, but they exist as objects to be negotiated. In doing this we take the object for granted, as something to be got past. Moreover, these objects, like the spaces that have served for Rowlands’ installations, share a context of quasi-obsolescence. Boom gates aer an inconvenience for the sped at which society wants to go about their business. Virtually nobody uses a single bed anymore, and desks like the one used in The Offering are unsuited for the digital age. In objects such as the electricity pole in Down and the goalpost in Scored one could read the decline of taken-for-grated ways of life, evidenced in the shrinking number of local sporting grounds and the end of coal-derived power. Groupings and speculations such as the above are only possible, however, because of the way Rowlands has intervened to remake their form. As Heidegger remarked, it is only when the object is suspended in some way that we can see it differently, and venture into how such objects form part of various social and communicative networks.
So what specifically has occurred in each of these works? Many of them have had their standardised technical designs collapsed into a more organic form. These forms are almost always asymmetrical, suggesting an ongoing evolution, that what we are seeing in the gallery space in merely part of a process - that in effect Rowlands has created a suspended state in which the object is neither one thing nor another.
In Boom both the material and symbolic rigidities of the original boom gate have been softened. The gate has been repeatedly cut and bent to create an object that curves back on itself. In this sense the spatial form replicates the thematic content in that both are about doubling, returning only to find difference in the place of certainty. As viewers we hover between what the object was and what is has become. The boom gate, representing the security to be found in rigidly demarcated space, has been transformed into a more equivocal form. Perhaps this broken gate stands for the unthinkable accident, as it lies on the ground misshapen and broken the only reminder of the ‘boom’.
The single bed in Persuaded has undergone a radical process of transformation. The base has been curled upwards so that the former bed almost defies the laws of gravity, barely containing its upward momentum. If we observe a shift in the bed from passive horizontal to restless verticality, it is also the case that the single bed, all too often a signifier of isolation and abandonment, now seems barely able to contain itself in its renewed form. The object has gone from conveying a sense of exhaustion and resignation to one replete with possibility. It is almost as if all the elements contained within the space of the bed, dreams, sexual fantasies, private speculations, have staged a kind of ‘return of the repressed’ causing the bed to coil and arch with liberated energy.
Something like the reverse process governs Down where a wooden electricity pole has been collapsed, recast as a coiled sculpture that lies dormant on the ground. If the object is aesthetically impressive, it contains little of the energetic potential of works such as Persuaded, or The Offering. Instead this former bearer of energy has been deflated. Snatched from the landscape and original context of functionality, the wire and cables, no longer supported by the pole, lie abandoned on the ground. The transformative gesture here has not been unduly harsh, the pole has not been felled and abandoned; instead it has been a productive intervention, where the new shape of the pole coiling outwards suggests returning and recycling, patterns more amenable to new forms of energy.
A similar approach can be seen in Scored where the goalpost has been sliced open and shaped into a serpentine like pattern. The dual punning of title draws attention to the objects former role on the field, but also the work involved in creating the sculpture, where the repeated ‘scoring’ of the post is what allows it to be bent and coiled in its current form. The gaps and fissures in the reconfigured goalpost generate a sense of ambiguity or incompleteness. Alongside the oppositions of vertical and horizontal, rigid and soft, there is an invitation to consider the investments that underpin sporting or other goal-oriented pursuits. Like the collapsed gate in Boom, the original purpose of the object has been subverted; here, the goalpost curls back and around upon itself, no longer insisting upon specific action or purpose.
The enigmatic title of The Offering mirrors the provocative yet undetermined form of the sculpture. The artist has taken an older-style desk, one clearly designed for the age of writing rather than digital processing, and bent the base back upon itself. The object lies on its side at a slightly elevated angle, which might indicate a position of abandonment. Yet the way the legs are allowed to gently touch other hints at a new kind of intimacy, undercutting any simple notion of obsolescence. The formal ambiguity of the piece - poised between ruin and aesthetic object, between falling and floating, neither vertical nor horizontal - suggests that we ought not simply mourn yet another disappearing object. Rather, as in all ‘offerings’, what is to be given away or sacrificed is also what is most valuable.
While it is true that all of these works deal with objects abandoned or nearly forgotten, giving them something of a melancholic aura, there are other ways of responding to them. Rowlands work also manifests a sense of the comic. This is evident in the punning titles, the slightly off-kilter symmetry of the sculptures, and the in-between state of many of the pieces, as if they were embarrassingly caught in the act of transformation from one thing to another. The final work Collapse, more overtly suggests this humorous element. The old chair has indeed collapsed, reminding us of similar items that have been fetched from obscurity and ill-advisedly sat upon. Yet this slapstick dimension doesn’t exhaust the semantic content of Collapse. There remains a desire to will some kind of order in the chair’s fallen state. One can’t help seeing a kind of obscure pattern in this state of collapse, as the back of the chair, its legs and supporting struts have been carefully arranged, folded over and situated so as to hint at a hermetic but cohesive purpose at work.
Rowland’s work successfully evokes this feeling of mysterious design at work. His objects are broken down and collapsed, but this is not their ultimate fate. As sculptures they reveal a redemptive dimension, not simply because they exist as raw material that can be refashioned as art. Even as he stages a kind of frozen but partial transcendence of the object Rowlands is concerned to preserve some aspect of its former identity. Ultimately it is this carefully managed state of suspension - between what is was and what we think it is now - that allows the richness of aesthetic and thematic responses to emerge from these works.
Simon Cooper lectures in Communications and Writing at Monash University. He is the author of Technoculture & Critical Theory: in the service of the Machine? (Routledge), and is an editor of Arena Journal.
Project credits
Photography:
Christian Capurro (Gallery)
Wren (Studio)
