Dan Arps’ Gestapo Pussy Ranch at The Physics Room, Christchurch. 15 November - 15 December 2007
Like many of the artists in the Gambia Castle group, Dan Arps in his installations is known for a freewheeling, unstructured mode of visual organisation that celebrates a lack of palpable order. As a dishevelled, freeform exhibtion, Gestapo Pussy Ranch is richly keyed into product that poses as process. The result is a funny, extremely wonky, satire on life management programmes - with personal coaches and analyses of interpersonal organising skills. Although the space is deliberately incongruous, with an old mattress, photographs of peculiar rituals in sleeping bags, cat boxes, scattered disintegrating clumps of straw, foil covered ventilation shutes, geometric forms made of twisted plant roots, surveillance cameras, and hilarious inverted pinup posters smeared with finger painting, the key elements seem to be a laminated pie chart and two typed lists of strategic corporate procedures. The project has an underpinning logic consistent with its brilliantly evocative title - from a Bret Easton Ellis novel - that suggests a Nazi brothel. Implying connections with Human Resource personnel perhaps.
Arps is a clever artist whose work is getting more interesting and less eclectic as his career progresses. He is moving away from his earlier Australian sources to developing his own sensibility. His humour is more hammy and anarchistic than the deceptively academic and systematic approach of Simon Denny, close to Tao Wells in its anarchistic mood, and though subtle, not understated like Nick Austin.
However, this is the sort of show you really have to negotiate yourself in terms of examining the elements, if you want to extract pivotal and considered components from the vaguely rhetorical and nihilistic elements. The anonymous blurb on the Physics Room website is depressingly uninformative and facile, clearly the result of being written long before the artist had decided what he would do in the space, and the images present with it give you no idea of the work’s experiential nature. Worth calling in and checking out for yourself, nevertheless.
8 comments:
A Nazi concentration camp brothel is a funny joke? "brilliantly evocative?" "post- conceptual" indeed. This is too boring to be offensive.
Lilith,I was paraphrasing the show's title, using it to ridicule the Nazis. There is nothing dictators fear more than caricature.
Humour though is a bit like art. Anything goes. There are no no-go zones. If it works it works.
The show, and your commentary, have absolutely nothing to do with political satire, of the Nazis or any other political entity. You yourself associate the Nazis with HR personnel. If that's supposed to be satirical, it isn't. HR are assholes. The Nazis were mass murderers. Satire, unlike conceptual art, has standards.
Howdy-hi Lilith. I was looking at the evidence in the gallery, some laminated documents on the wall, and interpreting them as satire.That was quite reasonable.'Conceptual art' is one of those terms that is so over-used as to have become meaningless.Like 'abstract painting'.I'm not sure if Arps is primarily a conceptual artist - though there are many types - for his exploration of meaning is based on an unusual approach to combining materials. His exhibition title was bad taste for sure, but a clever and catchy moniker nonetheless.
Interpreting an artwork as satire really requires that one has correctly identified the artist's intentions as satirical, but Arps seems fairly obtuse. He's certainly obtuse in person. I asked him once what sort of art he did, and he said "art historians describe me as a post- conceptual installation artist."
The moniker isn't so original- there's a reasonably good Japanese all- girl punk band called Pussy Cannibal Holocaust. They're the sort of Harajuku acid-heads that can get away with throwing terms like "pussy" and "holocaust" together owing to the charitable assumption that they have something akin to LSD-induced moral autism, but I wouldn't put Arps in that category.
Trust the work, not the artist! Don't bother asking Arps, look for logic in the display itself.
Wayne Booth once wrote a book ('A Rhetoric of Irony') about detecting irony - how certain cues give the game away. Then Stanley Fish, a deconstructionist & anti-foundationist, wrote an essay (in 'Doing What comes Naturally' for anyone who might be interested) attacking Booth, claiming there is nothing stable we can ever measure so-called 'ironic' cues against.
I think Arps is a leg-puller sometimes, and sincere on other occasions. Like us all. He must be so thrilled to be almost mistaken for a Harajuku Acid-Head. That's miles better than being a lowly post-conceptualist installationist who is LSD-induced morally autistic.
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