BARELY HUMAN

18th Jan - 24th Feb 2007

Featuring:

Jemima Brown, Patrick Goddard, Wouter Feyaerts, Enrique Marty

Patrick Goddard ( * 1984 GB), has recently graduated and has since shown in various British venues, including Studio 95 , Brick Lane, the Black Swan Gallery , Froome and the Tara Bryan gallery, London. He also creates drawings and paintings parallel to his sculptural practice.

Enrique Marty (Salamanca, Spain 1969) also creates series of drawings and watercolours as well as videos. He had solo exhibitions at Espacio Uno in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico and in several foreign galleries like Enrique Guerrero in México D.F., Bryce Wolkowitz in New Cork, Greenaway Art Gallery in Adelaide. He has part in collective shows such as The Real Royal Trip that Harald Shemann curated for MOMA/PS1 in New Cork.His work forms part of various collections including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museo Marugame Hirai in Japan, the MUSAC in León, the Fundación Marcelino Botín in Santander, the Junta de Castilla-León or the Unicaja and Caja Burgos collections

Wouter Feyaerts ( *1980,Belgium) has shown extensively in Belgian institutions and museums, most recently with gallery Transit, Mechelen and as part of a presentation for S.MA.K., Gent. Forthcoming shows include Advantage of Doubt at Lier and In Between in Antwerp. Barely Human is Feyaerts’ first London exhibition.

Jemima Brown, combines her sculptural practice with installion environments, printed wallpapers, videopieces and drawings. After a large number of international shows, including the centre Georges Pompidou and the Royal Academy Galleries how she has shown in several galleries, including Torch, Amsterdam , MC Magma, Milan and Vilma Gold, London. Most recently she had solo shows at Rosy Wilde London and Art Space Witzenhausen, Amsterdam. Recent and forthcoming projects include Temple Bar gallery, Dublin , and a forthcoming solo show at the Agency gallery in May 2007.

Barely Human
The human form remains a persistent motif for artists despite any clichés we may have generated about what contemporary art looks like after Modernism. We should remember that Modernism too does not shy from the human figure, merely finding different ways to address it.
This pressing attraction for the human figure is hardly surprising. Perhaps it is even biological. Animals also engage with their reflections, we believe, without the consciousness to be prompted to all the existential, empirical and simply practical questions that our reflections raise.
And, if not a knee-jerk reaction, then the weight of cultural narratives alone must give a cue to artists to reflect on our states of existence through exploration of a human likeness or perhaps more accurately, in relation to contemporary practices, our un-likeness. Seared into the cultural layer, we exist in the European tradition where the warnings abound: Narcissus, so drawn to exploring his own likeness, really lost the plot; Pygmalion, seduced by his own creation of another’s likeness, did likewise. Perhaps the moral and religious taboos such as those against pride and vanity merely stand as evidence of just how powerful a reflection of who we are – or who we might be- is.
And then there is the refractory reflection, the projected likeness of ourselves we seek in other things, in animals. This tendency is just as ancient –as evidenced by a million narratives and phenomena- as the quest to capture our physical reflection. And, again, the strength of the attraction for seeking ourselves in the animal or other non-human worlds might be borne out by the taboos: the daily interaction between humans and sacred animals in ancient cultures transmutes into a Judaeo-Christian prohibition in which those who identity too closely with animal spirits become cast as witches with familiars. Only certain sublimated forms were allowed to remain and remain revered; the metaphor, the folk tale, the heraldic.
Contemporary artists, however, should be less at risk of falling for their own creations or over identifying with beasts given that they often use a consciously critical practice; a less than glowing picture of humanity. Desire, however, is a strange thing and the inversion of traditional psychologies after Existentialism might mean that they are just as likely to be enslaved by their reworking of the human form as their ancient Greek cousins. In fact, in some cases, the work might relate directly to such enslavement, to recognising rather than denying the power of self-obsession in the world after Freud invented the ego and its fellow travellers.
The earlier bodies of work in Jemima & Dolly Brown’s practice speak of exactly such enslavement, so much so that the mirror image is given the status of authorship. The real world Jemima Brown felt that her own creation, her invented artificial twin sister, Dolly, had become such an entity – so much a subject and not merely the object- that she needed authorial credit for works.
For years, this joined-at-the-hip duo explored the extremity of self-obsessive behaviour in works in which the wonder and horror of seeing one’s own form in the world were brought to the fore. Later, the boundaries of identity could be extended beyond the literal representation of another self. Animal forms and the body parts of other family members would be appropriated, cut up and reconstituted as sculptures, installations or video works where the intersections of the personal and secret would mingle with culturally legible meaning.
In more recent works, this use of the replicated self-image has evolved into the appropriation of body parts from others to form composite non-existent people. Placed in the context of highly-loaded elements referencing English or other decorative traditions, these works create non-existent people alluding to real –or emotionally real- experiences in the artist’s life.

A couple, quietly frozen, staring out from a garland of garish flowers refers as much to secret passions and betrayals played out in the countryside as to any English country idyll. A grandmother might have all the facial realism of a work by Hanson or Segal, but here there is no pretence at the kind of objectivity that Hyperrealism might once have claimed. The carefully selected elements – the hair, the glasses, the position of the mouth- and the use of more contemporary deconstructed sculptural elements made with found cloth and artificial flowers are all clearly active choices on the part of the artist. She presents an image of a possible grandmother that may be very warm and loving, but it is not without the humour or insight of exactly how one’s grandmother presents to the world if she ends up living in the retirement home for Hollywood actors. Unlike the hyperrealist sculptors with whom elements of the works share technical similarities, even the most human of her works defy any naturalism or realism: single body parts such as heads, hands or feet are contracted into more abstracted forms and even the most figure-like sculptures play with emphatic distortions of scale. A little girl in school uniform may appear “realistic” but her “realistic” adult-sized hands and head throw the viewer’s expectations into disarray.
The anthromorphic, however, is a reoccurring motif that appears at various points in Brown’s overall body of work. Forms half-human, half-beast draw on the terribly English tradition for making human behaviours into fluffy little creatures in twee stories and wispy illustrations. But, as with other contemporary artists exploring the anthromorphic possibilities of the human form, Jemima & Dolly Brown’s creatures are a little more problematic than the sanctimonious toads, rabbits and otters of British children’s literature. Midget teenagers steer out with bulging animal eyes, their fleecy sweatshirts replaced with fleece as they mutate into sheep. The ratty features of snotty schoolgirls were never literally as ratty as in the visions of Jemima & Dolly Brown. In related works, the animal qualities settle into a jarring suggestion; cats eyes and the glimmer of whiskers are part of the human heads that stare out from floral whirls mounted on the wall. In other works, the physical sculpture is physically absented, present only as a moving thing in a time-lapse video work, the highly mutated human animal removed from the immediate sensual grasp of the viewer.
The overall mechanism of such elements in Brown’s work shares a common process with artists such as Jane Alexander: the animal elements and their immediate surrounding context rely heavily on their loaded cultural connotations to construct their discourse. But whereas Jane Alexander’s work often uses the African anthromorphic oral traditions as starting points for work that will, inevitably, be read in a direct social political context, in Brown’s work these elements draw on a complex social identity in which the political discourses are built defiantly against the expectations created by the cultural meaning of the decorative elements. Jemima and Dolly Brown are those most English of girls who only happen to actually be half-American granddaughters of one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, something that only reveals itself from beneath the cottage wallpapers and fluffy pets by a winding route in more recent works.
The anthromorphic is also present in the work of the Flemish artist, Wouter Feyaerts. Feyaerts literally works with junk; rubbish and found scrap materials that he works over frames and then consolidates with binder’s glue. His work goes in numerous directions. There is a whiff of mid-twentieth century modernist figurative sculpture about many of the forms whilst others become weird cartoonesque creatures; bears, flying monkeys, generic unidentified animal thing.
These two worlds -the irreverent world of street aesthetics and underground cartoons and the awareness of the classical and modernist traditions- may exist as a tension in his work, but this is not mere pastiche, existing instead in traditions sometimes neglected. The later works of many of the twentieth century modernist heavyweights were hardly lacking in humour. If Feyaert’s figures engaged in their epic struggles or quests appear to be undermined by the artist’s cheeky suggestions of an absurdity in their attempts, then it’s worth remembering that the legends like Picasso hardly resisted the temptation to make people look funny. In all of the seriousness with which Modernism has come to be associated, it is wise to remember the humour of some of its biggest successes.
Similarly, the anthromorphic quality of some of these works does not only relate to the cartoon forms of street art.
In Tongeren, Bertin’s romantic 19th century sculpture of Ambiorix, the legendary chieftain of the Belgae, looks out from its plinth, the hairy Celt sporting flowing locks and bushy facial hair in bronze that gives him a distinctly leonine quality. Of course, Ambiorix, like his Roman enemies existed in a world in which the acquisition of animal qualities was deliberately evoked by appropriation, draping one’s form in the skins of the animals with the most desirable qualities; wolf skin capes or headdresses of bear and lion. The ancients engaged with anthromorphic forms in a directly performative way long before it was assimilated into sculptural practice.
And, of course, this is exactly what Bertin’s sculpture engages: anthromorphic form. Despite the contemporaneous move towards a quieter classical realism, Bertin instead emphasises the proud animal-like qualities of the Celt by working the bronze in such a way the he literally becomes part animal rather than merely draped in animal skins. Created at a time of burgeoning national consciousness for a very new country, the work uses a deeply animalistic human form to talk of a grand struggle, an epic task of keeping invaders at bay.
In this sense, there is a connection with this in Feyaerts work. Wouter Feyaerts produces work in which the content is almost unfashionably epic; individuals engaged in search of the absolute. Sometimes this moves in a distinctly animalistic direction. At other times the metamorphosis is more lyrical, the form is subsumed into the overall entity of the sculpture. In “Human Race” for example the body of a motorcyclist fuses into that of his bike in a moment of speed serenity that evokes all of the liturgies of latter day biker lore as he unapologetically becomes one with his machine. The humour of the overall presentation cannot be denied. We cannot be chided for perhaps thinking bemusedly of conversations overhead in which bikers wax lyrical about the moment of unity between man and machine. And yet we would be foolish to overlook Feyaert’s skill as a sculptor merely because of the humour: this is a work that understands Rodin’s research into the way in which human form can grow out of materials that remain stolidly, monolithically present in their own right.
In Feyaert’s work, however, we also see the use of a sensibility that is informed by Modernism (and the neglected humour of Modernist sculpture) and pop cultures. In his work, the contemporary daily experience is once again able to shift into the realms of something that might be heroic or at the very least, a heroic failure. A flying figure, perhaps a goalkeeper, throws himself through the air. In his gravity-defying moment, he becomes the football. Is this the goalkeeper without fear of the penalty? Feyaerts does not need to remove humour to focus the viewer’s attention on the frozen heroic moment. And yet, as with the Modernists, the form is not a Utopian human being. He’s a funny looking guy with a football for a head.
In Feyaert’s oeuvre the moment of the epic, the absolute and the sublime is always in focus, the lineage of the mid-twentieth century modernists by whom he has been influenced. But the overall result is not divorced from a contemporary context. This is the work of a sculptor who longs to convey the absolute but understands that its experience played out in daily life is informed by sports page metaphors and evening class Zen Buddhism.
Humour of a dark and ferocious kind is also very much in evidence in the work of the Spanish artist Enrique Marty. As with Jemima and Dolly Brown, Marty’s own family is often the starting point for works. And, like Jemima and Dolly Brown, he often produces figurative sculptures that play with scale to construct his discourse. In Marty’s work, however, the context of relationships between the characters in his personal, dark soap opera is emphasised, often using sculpture, video and paintings or drawings to construct groupings and potential narratives of relationships.
Reasonably realistic sculptural self-portraits or portraits of other family members are thrown into a kind of surreal world by their scale. In the well-known stories about Alice’s adventures through the looking glass or in Wonderland, scale is used to create a sense of the unreal and fantastic. Marty’s work is visually able to access the same mechanism, but often with far more alarming and brutal results.
In a body of work made in 2006, clusters of family groups could be found scattered throughout a “horror house” where the viewer came upon what appeared to be the unravelling tale of a family massacre. Sometimes apparently burnt, sometimes torn apart, Marty’s sculptures speak as much of a contemporary visual culture of excess in which we all experience the world in ways that sensationalist reportage and horror films have taught us. The perversity of Marty’s humour –and arguably his brutal insight- is that he chooses to use it as a means of relating it to family relationships. In his vision, we are perhaps prompted to wonder whether we haven’t been conditioned to experience even our most intimate daily relationships in terms of populist entertainment and reality TV.
No less gentle, though perhaps less confrontational, are the images he constructs in the watercolours and video works that are often presented alongside his sculpture works. In these there remains a taunting humour in his depictions of his parents or his uncle, transgressing unspoken expectations about the kind of situations in which we should present our family members or disregarding simplistic social taboos such as nudity.
But despite the occasionally brutal jibes poked by his representations, there is also a strong emotional content, an acknowledgement of emotions experienced that he does not remove from the work. He and his family members –as sculptures or paintings- may be screwed up and have a lot of problems, but the dignity of their emotional bonds is always fore grounded.
Media desensitisation, metamorphosis and humour are also themes that run through the work of the English artist Patrick Goddard. In his works, humanoid figures sometimes appear to be trapped; pinned to walls or literally stuck with their heads inside electric sockets. The visual language is as much one of contemporary media imagery as figurative sculptural traditions. This is the world of television advertising special effects shown in real time and real detail. But, it is also work created with painstaking attention to detail in both the construction of the human figurative elements and the non-human elements. And, in this sense, it shares something of a connection with the “hyper(sur)realism” of artists such as Thierry De Cordier, finding its impact in the accuracy of the rendering of discordant elements brought together in humanoid form.
In Goddard’s world realistic little people, perhaps children, have inexplicably had their heads replaced by oversized electric plugs. Whether they are meant to fear having their heads trapped in a wall socket –as in one work- or whether this is an action that they happily embrace –jacking in directly to the juice- remains somewhat ambivalent. His work appears to be connected to established narratives in contemporary art relating the increasingly mechanised nature of human existence and yet, we are never directly told whether the artist views this negatively or positively. None of his plug-headed kids look particularly distraught. After all, in a world in which a plug head is normal, surely the kid with a human head would be the odd one out?
Similarly, a humanoid figure composed of an indeterminate, potentially decaying material, is trapped, suspended against a wall, by a large plank jammed between the floor and his neck. The effect is immediately evocative of Charles Ray’s iconic work. In immediate obvious terms, this is a horrible image of entrapment, pain or even torture; the detail in the hands convey the heightened moment. But, again, ambivalence is present. It could be a moment of erotic asphyxia. Or, the figure could be hanging still and serene, the composition presenting such an elegant architectural or design solution that we are readily invited to the possibility that the figure may be fully content with the situation. In fact, the resulting state is so simple, elegant and cool, we might even be tempted to try this one at home ourselves.