Snap, Crackle....

POP: Sean Kerr
A hardcovered artist’s book published by Michael Lett/Clouds
Essay by Natasha Conland
66 pp. and colour images
May 2009

This snazzy exuberant publication showcases the talents of Warren Olds as book designer and Natasha Conland as essayist. Just as much as Sean Kerr the inspiring artist. Olds and Conland are in top form, Olds with his design placement, sense of colour and brilliant sequencing, Conland with her observations, clarity and unusual quoted references, and they both have wonderful material to work with.

I usually find Kerr’s interactive googly eyed or gunshot works more irritatingly trivial than engrossing. I am far more entertained by Tony de Lautour (I like mischievousness) or Tom Kreisler (and appreciate absurdity) but Conland’s essay is so persuasive I‘ve started to doubt my own attentiveness. I’ve obviously missed something in those earlier sculptures – especially as his recent Newcall show was very striking in its conceptual layering and deliciously silly vulgarity.

This is a great little book. It presents Kerr’s working drawings so that their varied interconnections seep into you slowly, but Conland’s text attempts to analyse the humour in narratives based on moving images.

Kerr’s preparatory drawings are not comic strips. He doesn’t elaborate much via sequential graphics, so the static images exasperate if you allow yourself to get excited by Conland’s ideas. Drawing as such she tends to ignore. Her essay, though splendid, is in the wrong context. It needs an accompanying survey of noisy interactive sculpture to resonate properly.

Priapic phantoms

Sean Kerr: Ghost in the Machine
Newcall
April 8 -24 April 2009

It’s a great title Kerr has come up with, this reference to Arthur Koestler and Gilbert Ryle, and tying the whole philosophical package into sex on the smuttiest of levels. I love artists (and audiences just like me) who refuse to grow up. To realise its infantile virtues is to grasp the whole point of art as play.

Let me elaborate a little. The show features a massive pink ‘sleeping bag’ that lies flat on the floor - but when you enter the space it slowly fills up with air like a wobbly but tumescent penis. There is an electric eye on a camera aimed across the floor that the visitor’s movements triggers. It also switches on something on a table that looks like an agitated, erect willie under a sheet, wiggling back and forth in anticipation of lord knows what.

So on one level Kerr is clearly alluding to Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, his (oops I nearly said ‘seminal’) masturbation performance. On another he is being cute, pretending the table work is about comic book ghosts like Spooky or Casper, and having a pathetic whimpering ‘boo’ occasionally come out of a hidden speaker. Yet the main ‘pink torpedo’ sculpture is definitely threatening, despite its early Woody Allen overtones. It is more than a schlong. It is also a rather nasty finger (with nail), giving the viewer ‘the bird’. There’s lotsa aggro in the air.

I like to see an artist admit he hates his audience, and tell them so. Yet even beyond such love-hate ambivalences (after all he is trying to make them laugh) the tumescence theme is intriguing as a comment on dualism. It spot-lights that simple, apparently causal connection between thinking Thought A, and generating Bodily Response B that all growing boys love to discover. It also suggests a Central State Materialist argument that all spirit (or in this case, desire) is matter.

This is the best show I’ve ever seen from Kerr. I don’t say that because I’m pathetically infantile and am easily entertained by the basest of 'body humour' (yup, it's true), but because the show's well organised and has a structure that is simple, one that is loaded with complicated, contradictory resonances that you are likely to remember and think about for a long time.