Nothing Before, Nothing After

4 – 22 JULY 2005

MIRA GOJAK
ALEX PITTENDRIGH

images

Alex Pittendrigh
Proposition for florid expenditure
wire, das, plaster, 2005

Alex Pittendrigh
Proposition for florid expenditure
wire, das, plaster, 2005

Mira Gojak
No where
door, paint, 2005

Essay

"Nothing before, nothing after"1 is a project about the interplay of subjectivity and spatiality, tracing the point where individuation (form) collapses or resolves into non-differentiation (formlessness).

Decorative ensembles and commonplace objects are enlisted in an effort to trace disturbances in parameters and boundaries. In this fanciful realm the interior space of a habitat becomes conflated with the psychic space of the subject and as such subjective wholeness becomes permeable. This porousness means that the environment becomes the consciousness of the subject and the organism takes on the features of the environment.

Ornament, in particular the style of art nouveau, was viewed by surrealism as a way to allow desire back into inhabited space and in so doing to resexualise space in terms of the body as against the modernist notion of the body and its habitat being part of a singular disciplined machine. Paradoxically the modernist Adolf Loos decried this ‘criminal’ style of art nouveau not as the surrealists have it in a loosening of desire, but for fixing desire, suppressing its free circulation by creating an all encompassing environment where individuation collapses.

Hans Bellmer wrote, "the body is like a sentence which incites us to disarticulate it so that through an endless series of anagrams its true contents may be combined"2. The recombinatory approach used in this exhibition explores both the constructive and pathological tendencies of assembling, cohering, tearing, collapsing and dissolving exchanges between subject and habitat. A disorientating spatial practice is generated: too much space, too little space, too far away, too close, dispersed, around and around unfolding frame by frame creating a vertigo of emotions that immerses you in a claustrophobic interior that is everywhere and no-where. Escape is merely deferred.

Recombination also allows for the remains of something thrown away reforming into a new concept, a new work, a new thing to live on beyond "nothing before, nothing after". The form or image that becomes more beautiful after its loss, a new frontier.

The work as a whole could be viewed as a form of negation, always circling around desire for the return to order: an ouroboros; the change and the return, a sloughing off.

Mira Gojak & Alex Pittendrigh

1. Lygia Clark, A line used in explaining her work "Trailing: "Nostalgia for the body"/ October, No.69 (Summer 1994)
2. Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety, MIT Press, 2000

Catalogue

Supported By

The artists gratefully acknowledge the support of Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and thank
John Brash for his assistance and patience. All photographs Tamara Slootweg and Krystelle Donald.