Michael Hirschfeld Gallery
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 inseparable. 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 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.
The built environment in this installation is urban, its construction methods exposed. Spatial and architectural concerns are central to Langford’s methods. She draws on a technique known as ‘simultaneous strengthening’, where structures are assessed and strengthened as necessary along the way. This accommodates spontaneity in the course of 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 found 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 cheap, lightweight and easy to glue together, they are also detritus in one way or another. In an opportunistic act they have been co-opted by the artist, 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 banal object into sparkling visibility.
The title of the show, The Beautiful and the Damned, makes reference to F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel. Set in the 1920s Jazz Age, Fitzgerald’s 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 it seductively describes urbane sophisticates’ glittery existence and 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.
This project was made possible by the technical assistance of Steven Uprichard. The artist would also like to thank Simon Wilson and Rebecca Guppy.
[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.