well, it's not going to be pretty, but at least it's here (and altered a bit so as not to be too formal)...
Piccinini is an artist who, for me at least, successfully combines attraction and repulsion within the realm of the intersection of technology and nature. Nature’s Little Helpers at Robert Miller, has photographs, drawings, a video, and several sculptures (which either fall into the bio-engineered "toy/tool" category or a biological entity). The latter group is what caught me, no doubt due to their almost horrific details (moles, hair, skin, scales, and birth pouches) combined with those giant, almost sad, eyes. Alternately fierce and sad, they mimic mammalian hybridization so well they elicit a visceral shudder, which has stuck with me ever since. I love that something inanimate, which I know is not real, can still make me squirm.
Less successful for me were her photographs and video, which seemed all too obvious in their material trickery, in a time when Photoshop amalgams of impossible scenes are almost expected. I don't quite know how any of it is REALLY made, but I have an idea - the difference being that the photos and video seem like almost too easy of an answer and the sculptures emit a palpable engagement with material.
No doubt I am sculpturally biased and seduced by the on a certain level by their technical mastery, but that doesn't really explain my lack of interest in the "Cycle-pups" and other autofinished pieces. My feeling is that the "Helpers" convey an all-too-real squeamishness when contemplating their possibility - they are more ethically challenging.
“…her menagerie of genetically modified, cloned, and artificially created life-forms suggests a world in constant transition…In these works, fact, fiction and fantasy co-exist suggesting that ‘reality’ as we know it is no longer a stable concept.” Rachel Kent, “Patricia Piccinini: Nature’s Little Helpers” exhibition catalog.
Piccinini is an artist who, for me at least, successfully combines attraction and repulsion within the realm of the intersection of technology and nature. Nature’s Little Helpers at Robert Miller, has photographs, drawings, a video, and several sculptures (which either fall into the bio-engineered "toy/tool" category or a biological entity). The latter group is what caught me, no doubt due to their almost horrific details (moles, hair, skin, scales, and birth pouches) combined with those giant, almost sad, eyes. Alternately fierce and sad, they mimic mammalian hybridization so well they elicit a visceral shudder, which has stuck with me ever since. I love that something inanimate, which I know is not real, can still make me squirm.
Less successful for me were her photographs and video, which seemed all too obvious in their material trickery, in a time when Photoshop amalgams of impossible scenes are almost expected. I don't quite know how any of it is REALLY made, but I have an idea - the difference being that the photos and video seem like almost too easy of an answer and the sculptures emit a palpable engagement with material.
No doubt I am sculpturally biased and seduced by the on a certain level by their technical mastery, but that doesn't really explain my lack of interest in the "Cycle-pups" and other autofinished pieces. My feeling is that the "Helpers" convey an all-too-real squeamishness when contemplating their possibility - they are more ethically challenging.
“…her menagerie of genetically modified, cloned, and artificially created life-forms suggests a world in constant transition…In these works, fact, fiction and fantasy co-exist suggesting that ‘reality’ as we know it is no longer a stable concept.” Rachel Kent, “Patricia Piccinini: Nature’s Little Helpers” exhibition catalog.
posted by mkc at 8:45 AM
4 Comments:
I agree with you that the photography lacks the same wallop. Artists in general have a hard time getting beyond the trickery of Photoshop and I have rarely seen it used well. It tends to slide into a fake documentation that undermines the authority of their imaginations, as if they had just happened on something and took a quick picture. Are they afraid to own up to their creations? Sometimes I think so. But in this case I think she was trying to complete the illusion, and instead pointed our attentions to the fact that it was an illusion.
Yeah, I like the squirm factor as well--too real, spooky.
She seems to be pushing at the same thing that makes Charles Ray's replicas of himself work. (I am thinking Charley Charley Charley!) On one hand, it's a physical fact, this thing in space. So it's definitely 'real'. But its stillness (Duane Hanson!!!), its veracity (Ron Mueck!!!), the fact that we can really gaze upon it, and that it is only activated by our moving around it--that special relationship I think creates the squirm factor. (In addition to the skin being delightfully gross).
I agree as well about the photographic stuff, mostly because IMO it takes away from the most powerful thing about the sculptures.
The sculpture is so great because it has no possible context--you have to make up your own. She is asking a nice amount of work from the viewer--what are these car shapes, and what is the relationship between the car and the animal/human? Bioengineering? Some version of our own Id? Is this the future or the present?
Piccinini has answers to these questions, and frankly I find them pretty unsatisfying. I like that they are elusive and that you have to find your own answers, make up your own world in which these grotesque-humanoid-animals are zipped into car-pods and nurse little humans. Of course Piccinini needs to have her own little worldview in order to support the creation of this work, but I don't need to know what it is.
The photographs and video are too much context, too illustrative, they drain the ick factor from the sculpture by explaining it away.
It is interesting that the drawings are extremely illustrative as well. I didn't like them either. They created a very real-looking improbable situation, just like the sculptures, but didn't...
...I'm thinking...
...her sculpture succeeds because that highly illustrative world of freaky beasts being suckled and hatching out of their backs is simultaneously sitting right in front of you, as plain as the nose on your face AND extremely elusive, a fragment caught in this blank gallery netherworld. This creates a satisfying spatial effect. Like the picture of the young lady and the old hag, I stand in front of the monster-momma suckling the tiny baby with her gigantic foot-hand and flip-flop between imagining HER world and realizing that there IS no other world, that she doesn't fit.
The photographs and drawings and video ruin that effect for me.
I think it's often very important in fine art to leave the doors open. Narrative has all this excitement, but it's possibilities narrow as you go through its arc. Fine art's narrative can be as much your (the viewer's) construction of meaning, and making interpretations that you then revise as it is the artist's intent. And sometimes when the artist tries to get more of that intent across the art looses possibility without gaining anything.
That's well put, Kat.
I think that artists are sometimes pressured to make sense, to explain their work. This photographic/video/illustration stuff seems to be of that impulse. I feel like PP is trying to explain herself.
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