Love is just a four lettered word

Derrick Cherrie
Starkwhite
2 November - 28 November 2009

Derrick Cherrie is most well known for his series of witty furniture sculptures (Supraluxe Suite,1992) that slickly blended beds, swimming pools and gymnasium accoutrements into hybrid, body-sized, fetish objects. (The funniest, most entertaining sculptures ever created in this country, in my opinion.) His new show at Starkwhite’s backroom annex is infinitely more serious, though in parts, hinting he still has his tongue firmly in his cheek.

Framed two dimensional collages, with a surprisingly raw and gritty finish, these wall images make acerbic comments on the institution of marriage as perpetuated by romantic love – more specifically its commodification. The six works on paper, made with glossy pages from bridal gown catalogues, cigarettes, plastic gold-sprayed chains, and rendered peace logos and cagelike trellises, give out hard-hitting messages - firmly rejecting ideals of eternal conjugal devotion. The notion of a continuing partnership is rejected not so much for widely accepted, commonsense reasons like the fact that people change, but because for it to succeed, it involves the attendant proviso of male compromise.

The work seems antifeminist because there is no woman’s voice expressed. KING is an oft repeated noun here, and in one work, behind a heart of chain are the words HE WEARS. It seems to be angrily lashing out at loss of masculine sovereignty. If love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, Cherrie’s horse swiftly ends up as dog tucker and the carriage, as splinters and kindling. His assault is merciless.

So much so, you wonder: (a.) Is this personal and genuinely emotive? Some hitherto private unhappiness in Cherrie’s own domestic relationship that’s bubbled to the surface. Or is it really (b.) just an abstract concept, a meditative art work about the ideas behind marriage, putting forward a ‘male viewpoint’ to generate debate – with no biographical input at all. Maybe it is about marriage’s marketing and selling to women. The consumerist side of public vow-taking that many men aren’t so enthusiastic about.

Or is it perhaps (c.) some much broader sociological statement about the institution; an anthropological examination of those human behavioural mores that underpin the social structure of families? Or is it (d.) - as part of the Starkwhite exhibition blurb suggests - really a specifically honed critique of the Eurocentric tradition of bridal glamour in high fashion? Or a homosexual attack on the heterosexual convention - when exclusive.

Like Bob Dylan with his song title that I head this review with, is Cherrie being ironic or deadly serious? Perhaps he is having a laugh at the artworld’s eager propensity for gossip and scandal? Hoping that his audience reads the work as somehow confessional and misogynistic. And that his partner will find it a bit of a hoot too?

According to Wayne C. Booth (A Rhetoric of Irony, Chicago 1974) and his analysis, for irony to be grasped it must have clues inserted by the artist; signposts that through calculated contradiction state to the viewer – ‘don’t take all that is before you at face value.’

There seems to me to be at least two distancing devices within Cherrie’s imagery: the Longbeach and Holiday cigarettes that he uses to write ‘King’ or render spiked dog-collars, and the lavender paint already alluded to (as a homosexual colour code) used in the top half of one work. To my knowledge (and general art-public knowledge too I think) neither he or his partner is gay or smoke, so these codes are deliberately placed to separate artist from art, as well as to enrich the theoretical content. Cigarettes could mean ‘love addiction’ and fear of loneliness, their brand names allude to honeymoons, and lavender could mean bisexual (‘pink’ and ‘blue’ mixed) non-marital distractions.

There are other possible meanings too. The spunk-like silicone portcullis of overlapping inverted and upright hearts present in one image could, like the cigarettes, refer to Stephen Heath’s famous essay The Sexual Fix and his discussion of our society’s construction of the desire for romance. It could also refer to Norman Mailer’s anti-feminist book The Prisoner of Sex.

Cherrie has created a clever exhibition that teases his audience on an autobiographical and anti-progressive level (if they want it), while providing other alternative examinations of philosophical and social issues too (if they want those instead). Much like his Supraluxe sculptures in fact – but with greater ambiguity and not so immediate experientiality. This work is more obviously coded, more complicated because of its back flips. Ostensibly it is angry not cool. You spot a trope and have to pause to evaluate if the work is joking or serious, is it from the viewpoint of an unreconstructed redneck or a SNAG? It forces you to mentally engage.

Looking Glass

Derrick Cherrie: Blind Glass
Starkwhite
March 11 – April 5, 2008


Derrick Cherrie is highly regarded for the superb sculpture he created in the late eighties and early nineties, art that initially posed as household furniture, but actually was a hybrid between a gymnasium or indoor swimming pool and accoutrements found in a sex club. With a fastidiously detailed finish these fetish items were made long before Matthew Barney appeared in New York with his silicone devices and films. Cherrie used a domestic setting to conjure up imaginary bodies seeking physical exertion as a form of pleasure, even without any intimate interactive bodily contact of any description.

Blind Glass as a title might imply a thwarting of the voyeuristic gaze, but the mirrored discs on the floor can be straddled (or squatted over) by visitors' partners at will, as can the horizontal line of small reflective mirrors on the seemingly skin-covered box be used to furtively observe other Starkwhite ‘club’ members. One very large mirror – like those for observing oncoming traffic on winding mountain roads – is attached to a fragile massage table/bondage horse with spindly turned legs and mysterious tubes projecting out at inexplicable angles. The whole installation, with its Dali-like surrealism, seems to allude to the past history of the Starkwhite premises when they were used as a strip joint and massage parlour.

Interestingly, compared to Cherrie’s earlier projects the new work is particularly austere, lacking physically enticing padding or fabric, and with pre-constructed elements. It is oddly agricultural in its design references. Using lots of wood it is akin to a suburban swimming pool mixed with stock-sorting gates, drenching pens and foot-rot troughs. Ceramic vases on collapsible Formica tables ineptly signal ‘homeliness’ amidst the bland pre-assembled units. For the happy family, small vertical columns of golf balls on wires connote sex aids such as ben wah balls, maybe with animal partners in mind.

While Cherrie’s work is rich in subtle and not-so-subtle humour, that mirth is mostly icy and cerebral, not bodily. These minimalist works don’t beckon to you to clamber on board like the early sculptures used to - you keep your distance. You don’t want to get inside the enclosures. They may be sexual or recreational – as in swimming - but they might also be places of torture or compelled restraint. They are also scary.

Cherrie in his artist’s statement talks about these works as having a semantic absence, but despite being more ambiguous emotionally than previously these sculptures are semantically just as loaded as his work has always been. And although the artist states he is avoiding an articulated rationale, the sculpture is still deeply imbedded in discursive structures, and its responses socially constructed. As Cherrie projects go Blind Glass is quite dry and understated. There is no hint of theatricality yet it gives out a lot. It has many palpable layers that, despite his intentions of working within ‘another order’, encourage articulated thought.