Essay
The Beautiful and the Damned – Joanna Langford
Michael Hirschfeld Gallery
25 July – 31 August 2008
A work of fiction is a combination of the realistic and the fantastic. In Joanna Langford’s installation The Beautiful and the Damned the two seem so closely aligned as to be indivisible. A miniature cityscape is constructed from recycled computer keyboards, and lit by hundreds of tiny LED lights automated by a computer programme to flick on and off. The model urban scene is recognisable, the narrative implied — diminutive city dwellers going about their everyday routines — is entirely plausible, and yet something present in the work is far from ordinary. Chilean writer and leading literary Magic Realist Gabriel García Márquez said ‘My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic’; here the fiction seems to draw from both with ease.
Magic Realism is defined as a genre in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting. In visual art it generally refers to super-real images, often together with miniature or meticulously detailed components. In its literary sense, Magic Realism includes works in which the supernatural or surreal, the dream life and psychic experience of an individual are accepted as commonplace parts of human existence. This familiar response to the extraordinary distinguishes Magic Realism from other representations of magical phenomena in narrative fiction. The Beautiful and the Damned attains such naturalism: we are elated at the sight of a small exquisite existence being played out, and ask for no further proof of its reality. Like the boy in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, here we appear to have unwittingly happened upon the existence of a fairy story.
The built environment in this installation is an urban one, its mode of construction exposed and haphazard. Spatial and architectural concerns are central to Langford’s method. She draws on a technique described as ‘simultaneous strengthening’, where structures are assessed and strengthened as necessary along the way. This accommodates spontaneity in the course of the making, and an intuitive rather than engineered design. Photography and Photoshop collage are also used, the structures often disassembled and re-constructed as they are built. The towering keyboard structures seem precarious, and we can see they are optimistically supported by bamboo skewers and a web of glue strands. A makeshift aesthetic, improvised materials, and seemingly ad hoc configurations are seen in many of Langford’s works. In the past she has used plastic bags, plasticine, popsicle sticks, biscuits and sweets alongside other found materials, always attached with the ubiquitous glue gun. Not only are these items all reusable, lightweight and easy to glue together, they are also detritus in one way or another, discarded materials. In a serendipitous act they have been co-opted by the artist’s project, taken from their mundane status and transformed.
Her practice promotes the use of humble or insignificant materials, not unlike the Italian Arte Povera (or ‘poor art’) movement of the 1960s, where artists improvised with whatever media they could get their hands on to create fantastical structures. One celebrated example is the work of Piero Manzoni[1], which involved marketing Artist's Breaths (Fiato d'Artista) (1960), captured in a series of red and white balloons. The work advanced Manzoni's ideas about the limits of physicality, whilst parodying the art world's obsession with permanence. In Langford’s work the ‘magpie-ing’ of unwanted refuse is fundamental, and the materials ultimately dictate the form. Having worked in two recycle shops, Wanaka Wastebusters and currently Wellington City Council Recycle Centre shop, and from a bedroom studio Langford is often physically surrounded by her potential art-makings. Converting these objects is her act of alchemy, launching the mundane object into sparkling visibility.
Recent earlier work has often involved natural forms, or surreal landscapes. There is reference to the tradition of landscape as sublime, and offering access to transcendence (or in this case, the prospect of physical ascendance at least). Beyond Nowhere (2006)[2], a billowing cloudlike formation of plastic bags, or Down from the Nightlands (2007)[3], a suspended installation again featuring plastic bags and bamboo-skewer ladders extended toward the ‘clouds’, yield glimpses of a magical tier of existence very close, tantalisingly accessible. This year’s Brave Days installation at Enjoy Gallery was a precipitous terrain made of brown paper, the rugged contours supported by stilt-like bamboo struts, and lit with fairy-scale twinkling lights. In these three works we can trace the gradually increasing presence of a human element. The bamboo pylons and lights signify markers of a pocket-sized population in the landscape, the inhabitants of a surreal environment, and suggest ‘coming down to earth’ from the elevated perspective of works like Beyond Nowhere.
In The Beautiful and the Damned a firmly grounded urban environment emerges. The make-do aesthetic is turned on discarded computer parts, and a city is built. These found materials, the stuff of a white elephant stall, are thrown into a futuristic setting. The obsolete junk ‘damned’ by contemporary consumerist culture now forms an infrastructure seemingly outside of time. The process of material redemption constitutes at once a subtle political statement about the fragility of natural landscapes, the impact of a consume–and–dispose culture, and an ingenuous adaptation to an imaginative field. This time the process of imaginative transcendence is less of a blithe escape from the ground to paradise, rather the wilful act of the pioneer.
The title of the show, The Beautiful and the Damned, makes reference to F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel of the same name. Set in the 1920s Jazz Age, the narrative traces the heady path of two young socialites toward disenchantment. As social document it is a dystopic meditation on love, money, high society and ‘progress’. At the same time the novel seduces us with descriptions of the urbane sophisticates’ glittery existence, the decadent reel of life in the city. The cityscape in this installation pivots on a similar dualism. Where the lights glisten the grey façade is transformed, the drab everyday becomes momentarily romantic and alluring. Here is the moment of magic, the place where realism surrenders the foreground to something tender and lyrical, otherworldly. The Beautiful and the Damned prolongs this moment, simultaneously fantastical and real.
Abby Cunnane
[1] Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) was closely associated with the Italian Arte Povera movement. In July 1960 he exhibited Consumption of Art by the Art-Devouring Public, in which he hard-boiled eggs, thumb-printed them, and gave them to the audience to eat. Other works included cotton wool, fiberglass, rabbit skin and bread rolls.
[2] The work was part of a group show, ‘Out of Erewhon’ at Christchurch Art Gallery (2006).
[3] An installation in the dome of the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, completed during the artist’s Tylee Cottage residency last year.