Andrea Bell tells us about the recent Richard Orjis / LA Lakers / Death Throes performances in Christchurch

Richard Orjis: Silver Park (with LA Lakers and Death Throes)
HSP
Christchurch
16 April – 8 May

Dirt, heavy metal and pyrotechnics: what more could you want from an exhibition?

After a long wait on the stairwell outside the gallery we were finally let in. The lights were out, and any natural light was banished with the windows sealed in shiny black plastic. The gallery’s candle lit floor was littered with straw, crumpled tinfoil, the occasional photograph, amongst other detritus. At the end of the room, someone (something?) was throwing clods of dirt through an open window into the gallery. To the right of the window sat a robed shaman-like figure. A tinsel wig covered his face, disguising his identity. A small circular stage sat in the centre of the room, set up with a drum kit, microphone and amps.

The first performance was by LA Lakers (the robed figure). Crouching near the stage, his low-tech cassette tape and a-lyrical vocal performance echoed the pagan sentiment of the setting. Bells were rung and Walkmans were methodically flung across the floor. Following the performance, LA Lakers shuffled blindly around the gallery, lighting sparklers and offering them out to members of the audience, marking the close of the initiation. After a short interlude Death Throes took the stage. At this point, some of the audience there for the art left, replaced by an influx of teenage metal fans. This was my first metal gig. Although I couldn’t make out any of the lyrics, the throaty vocals and sustained power and aggression was hypnotic.

Coupled with the music, the Silver Park installation suggested the same dark anthropological sense of ritual and contemporary gothic that Orjis’ is known for. Having only ever seen Orjis’ Empire of Dirt photographs of young men, smeared in mud, and adorned with phallic flora garlands, Silver Park was not quite what I’d expected. Described on the gallery’s website as a “crepuscular ceremony” rather than an exhibition, Orjis’ installation set the scene for a performance-based manifestation of his interest in mysticism, and transcendence.

The performance aspect of Silver Park showed certain continuities with Orjis’ 2008 Physics Room show Welcome to the Jungle (For this work Orjis invited Christchurch locals to cover their bare skin in soot and be photographed in the gallery. On opening night bodies writhed in the black coal while the portraits of coal-faced individuals were projected on the wall. Meanwhile a black station wagon parked below the gallery, brimming with orchids in lush fushias, purples and marigolds alerted those at street level to the activity above.)

Formally, the circular stage in Silver Park echoed the circular mound of coal central to Orjis’ earlier show. Circles are ubiquitous in pagan rituals, symbolizing the changing seasons, wheel-chart of astronomy and the cyclic nature of life itself. Orjis’ act of casting a circle creates a place suggestive of earth worshipping and ritual in the gallery.

The relationship between the performative and installation based elements inherent to Orjis’ work is one of evolution. Whereas in Welcome to the Jungle, the relationship between the material and performative aspects of the exhibition was cohesive and unified, here Orjis’ stage, dirt, foil, candles and floor-based photos were less polished, and more open and anarchistic. This is perhaps suggestive of a desire to move away from the formal and thematic aspects that he has become known for.

Bloodless

Richard Orjis
Starkwhite
12 October - 7 November 2009

Richard Orjis is well known for his luscious coloured photographs that with their botanical props and oil-stained faces, are half portraits, half still lives. This show has the orchids as images, but it is in essence an installation, and the photographs are black and white.

The exhibition shows Orjis moving away from the overt theatricality and chromatic and tactile sensuality of his earlier photography to attempt something new. It is comparatively austere in its lack of colour and more about process as an image, rather than process as content or an ongoing sequence of events. It is a sort of contemplative tableau, an arrangement of symbolic props to be pondered over.

Central to the display is a circular podium on which is presented a fake gym with a weight-lifting bench, a stand for bodybuilding gear, and assorted barbells on the floor. These are all made of wood, painted white and on the night of the opening they served as supports for burning candles. Molten white wax has therefore poured down their sides and set hard.

On the nearby Starkwhite walls are three black and white photographs. One is of dispersing wisps of smoke, and the two others are of orchids – as young, unflowered, leafy bulbs in rows in a nursery, and later as fully developed blooms. On another wall is a large disc painted gold that is slightly smaller than the circular stand for the mock gym.

So what is Orjis up to with this array of symbols that he clearly wants the visitor to decode. In this puzzle, how do the various components interconnect?

First of all the photographed smoke could be candle derived, as an evaporating or disappearing gaseous substance, and the two discs some sort of alchemical process, with the smaller one ending up as condensed gold – residue from some sort of distillation perhaps?

The presence of the candle wax implies stasis and inertia over a fixed period of time. So with the gym symbolism, the implied ‘no pain no gain’ ethos is thwarted. The gold is not attainable. Unlike the orchid bulbs that eventually over time reach a state of bloom, the process necessary to reach that goal has not begun. The sequential chain of causal events has not been kick started.

Orjis here seems to be thinking about human agency and drive. The fact that the candle flame could incinerate the gym implies perhaps that ambition is useless and that maybe passivity (even fatalism) is a good thing. There is a strange conceptual oscillation going on in this work where a certain path is embraced, rejected, and then advocated again, then re-rejected.

While this wavering idea is intriguing, this show is missing something visually. It doesn’t have that necessary finish that Orjis normally has to resolve the whole project in a compelling way. This could be because there is a tackiness about the wooden gym that extends to the golden disc. It might be deliberate, but even his black and white photographs (especially the orchids) lack memorable impact.

Here I’m guessing, but Orjis seems to be resisting his natural inclinations for full throttle sensuality – as if by wanting his work to be ‘conceptual’ he is frightened of being too visually seductive. Yet many conceptualists, from Kosuth to Apple, don’t hesitate to use visual seduction to draw their audiences in towards their ideas.

It’s an odd show, disappointingly anaemic but admittedly adventurous with the tropes which were always in his colour photography anyway. It’s clever but dry. It doesn’t thrill.

Two Orjis images: one old; one new

Richard Orjis: little black flowers grow, in the sky
Starkwhite
29 August – 20 September 2008

There are two images here upstairs at Starkwhite: one is in a new Orjis exhibition; the other is in a stock show.

The old one has been around for a while and is unforgettable. A smeared mud-caked man with pink nose, mouth and chin, stocky pale arms and dressed in orchids, peers at us impassively from behind his elaborate costume/bouquet. He was born of the earth - along with these floral delights - and is a perfect synthesis of man and plant. There is a hint of Archimboldo mixed in.

The new work is even more utterly wondrous. A hairy brown bearded man lies on his back, face up, with his extraordinarily pale, naked baby girl straddling his neck. The image is a transparency in a lightbox so she really glows. Her white skin is unnervingly intense. So bleached it seems supernatural. Dribbly transparent goo is running down her baby chest.

He lies on a dark blanket of blue-grey velvet. His dark trousered legs in the distance form a blurry vee while two lit candles on his shoulders make him into a sort of altar. The luminous child has been sent down on a moonbeam and is an avatar to be worshiped. With such a compelling image how can we refuse?