Featuring Ken Unsworth, Mike Parr, Jenny Watson, John Nixon, Tony Clark, Dale Frank, Robert Owen, Vivienne Shark LeWitt and Hilarie Mais.

Exhibition Dates: 13 May – 31 May 1986

"The forbidden objects", a long-travelled conceit of frustrated desire, gives repeated testimony to an ancient and lost battle. Its contradictory motifs enflank a gap that has been forcibly bridged. It carries an interior post-scriptum to a primordial struggle of human consciousness through which the order of culture overpowers, domesticates, articulates and dis-places the order of nature. 

The order of nature itself is instated through a perverse historicity, installing an anterior condition to the colonising order of culture.

The concept of nature congeals through dislocation, compression, abbreviation and domination. The limitless fantasies of the new-born are trimmed and trammeled, made to yield to the accession of the human and the social with their delimited realms of action and controlled navigational circuits for the channelling of desire.

Prescription and interdiction establish a culture of liminal positions and regulating dimensions. The articulated order of culture forbids the pluri-dimensional universe of nature.

Thenceforward the dis-order of nature registers its presence through fugitive messages, vestigial stains, trace marks and after-images, propulsive signals given back from beyond, from the shadowed and hidden realm, the womb of unbridled desire.

The discourse of culture is a discourse of rupture. It is also a highly derivative discourse: appropriating, ingratiating, making over, stitching together, quoting and referring.

Culture always monitors its progressive absorption of the individual as if endorses, modulates, and constrains. Some of its operations occur softly and silently, imperceptibly. Others more sharply and violently. Sutures bracket the lips of closed wounds, through which things have been excised or interned.

In our fettered, encultured condition, we experience a restless lateral shift. Inextinguishable deflected desire propels an associative movement outwards, a metonymic expansion of possession and dispossession. Wedded to our alienation, we seek recuperation through perpetual transaction, through substitutive conditions of circulation and exchange.

"Individuality" is achieved only through a process of inscription and insertion within the order of culture, which controls and dictates sociality's terms. The cultural order precedes the individual's entry into it. It is laid out already, permitting small spaces through which to act in some particulars. Individuation is anticipated within culture's operational repertoire. Acting individually, we complete culture's design and hold.

 
The order of culture.
The ordination of culture.
The ordeal of culture.
The ordure of culture.
(Manzoni's faecal casket.)

 
Some of the more thoughtful art of the present is moulded and mediated by a critical consciousness of the delimiting conditions of culture and the objects it forbids; in addition, the dimensions of exploratory, uncanalised activity it forbids through an overarching materialist, instrumental emphasis, which reinscribes the regime of the social to the exclusion of other forms of consciousness.

Culture disguises its subsistence on relentless expropriation and exchange through its favour and production of self-images of a counterfeit whole-ness and stasis. Reversing the displacement, art may present images of disorder, adulteration, substitution and disguise, expressing the restless libidinal deferral and dissimulation that are the operational conditions of the regent order of culture.

Defensive and proactive strategies may occur through art. Some projects seek the reopening of the pointillist and aleatory character of intuitive thought, a resistant retrieval of a poetic dimension.

Others have recourse to displaced, mutant or neglected forms, through which the erasures entailed in dominant, convergent perspectives, may be expressed.

Culture's instrumental impulses may be disclosed through representation of its interdictions and proscriptive devices. New, reversed meanings may be salvaged from the shadowed spaces in the interior of the dominant conventions, or in overlooked spaces that lie outside them, thereby re-presenting in altered, reconstituted forms the power of reproduction of a pre-emptive Reality, in contrast to what this opposes.

BERNICE MURPHY

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Jenny Watson The Forbidden Object, 1985; oil, gouache and haberdashery attachments on velvet; 209 x 108 cm; enquire
Jenny Watson The Forbidden Object, 1985
oil, gouache and haberdashery attachments on velvet
209 x 108 cm
Jenny Watson Evening landscape in Freudian Vienna II, 1986; oil acrylic, powder pigment and collage on cotton duck; 122 x 184 cm; enquire
Jenny Watson Evening landscape in Freudian Vienna II, 1986
oil acrylic, powder pigment and collage on cotton duck
122 x 184 cm
Ken Unsworth Temperature, 1986; painted timber, steel, water and oxygen cylinder; variable dimensions; enquire
Ken Unsworth Temperature, 1986
painted timber, steel, water and oxygen cylinder
variable dimensions
Ken Unsworth The Problem of Weight and Lightness, 1986; painted timber and stones; variable dimensions; enquire
Ken Unsworth The Problem of Weight and Lightness, 1986
painted timber and stones
variable dimensions
Vivienne Shark LeWitt Frith, 1986; oil on wood; 33.5 x 38 cm; enquire
Vivienne Shark LeWitt Frith, 1986
oil on wood
33.5 x 38 cm
Tony Clark Designs for a Mural Painting with Sections from Clark's Myriorama, 1986; oil on canvas board and acrylic on paper; each section 22 x 30.5 cm, each panel 150 x 112.5 cm; enquire
Tony Clark Designs for a Mural Painting with Sections from Clark's Myriorama, 1986
oil on canvas board and acrylic on paper
each section 22 x 30.5 cm, each panel 150 x 112.5 cm
Mike Parr The Wanderer and His Shadow (Jughead Meets the Angel of Death), 1986; acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas; 243 x 480 cm; enquire
Mike Parr The Wanderer and His Shadow (Jughead Meets the Angel of Death), 1986
acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas
243 x 480 cm
Mike Parr The Wanderer and His Shadow (Jughead Meets the Angel of Death), 1986; acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas; 243 x 480 cm; enquire
Mike Parr The Wanderer and His Shadow (Jughead Meets the Angel of Death), 1986
acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas
243 x 480 cm
Mike Parr The Wanderer and His Shadow (Jughead Meets the Angel of Death), 1986; acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas; 243 x 480 cm; enquire
Mike Parr The Wanderer and His Shadow (Jughead Meets the Angel of Death), 1986
acrylic, pastel and charcoal on canvas
243 x 480 cm
Robert Owen Holding Down A Shadow (for George Alexander with reference to Perseus), 1986; powdered lead and encaustic, wood, graphite, bronze, lead, steel and gold leaf; 81 x 122 x 122 cm; enquire
Robert Owen Holding Down A Shadow (for George Alexander with reference to Perseus), 1986
powdered lead and encaustic, wood, graphite, bronze, lead, steel and gold leaf
81 x 122 x 122 cm
Robert Owen Untitled - (from the Footprints of Dreams), 1985; wood, steel, aluminium and brass; 230 x 40 x 70 cm; enquire
Robert Owen Untitled - (from the Footprints of Dreams), 1985
wood, steel, aluminium and brass
230 x 40 x 70 cm
John Nixon Self Portrait (Monument), 1984; wood, tin, plaster, mallet; 289 x 53.5 x 53.5 cm; enquire
John Nixon Self Portrait (Monument), 1984
wood, tin, plaster, mallet
289 x 53.5 x 53.5 cm
Hilarie Mais One, 1986; wood board and oil paint; variable dimensions; enquire
Hilarie Mais One, 1986
wood board and oil paint
variable dimensions
John Nixon and Jenny Watson Cross & Horse, 1983; oil and acrylic on canvas; 61 x 51 cm; enquire
John Nixon and Jenny Watson Cross & Horse, 1983
oil and acrylic on canvas
61 x 51 cm
John Nixon and Jenny Watson Cross & Horse Head, 1983; oil and acrylic on canvas; 61 x 51 cm; enquire
John Nixon and Jenny Watson Cross & Horse Head, 1983
oil and acrylic on canvas
61 x 51 cm
Dale Frank The Very Bad Mother and the Landscape, 1986; acrylic on canvas; 200 x 300 cm; enquire
Dale Frank The Very Bad Mother and the Landscape, 1986
acrylic on canvas
200 x 300 cm