Exhibitions
The New Silhouette
Sarah Tutton
One fine morning I woke up and decided that I was no longer happy with my physique. Although I was overweight, I had gotten along fine and had no health problems. But I suddenly wanted to dress differently, to wear clothes designed by Hedi Slimane.
—Karl Lagerfeld, fashion icon and co-author of The Karl Lagerfeld Diet
The New Silhouette1 brings together the work of two Melbourne artists, Emily Floyd and Julia Gorman. The culmination of their joint residency at the City of Melbourne's Meat Market, the exhibition presents new sculptural installations that extend and elaborate on the artists' individual practices and concerns. Originally titled Reasons To Be Together, the show does not have an overarching theme. Bucking the assumption that group exhibitions must conform to a simple theme or clear argument, Floyd and Gorman have created an exhibition about instability, fragility, open-endedness and uncertainty. There are obvious commonalities in their works: a boldness; an interest in shape, color and form; a love of the absurd and comic. However, these neither ultimately define the artist's individual practices nor offer a particularly useful framework to think about their work together. For Floyd and Gorman, 'themes are no good'. What interests them is the interplay between intuitive and rational processes, between experimentation and strategy, argument and coincidence. So, how should we approach The New Silhouette? Perhaps we should take as our starting point the artists' 'mutually productive studio environment', and follow the way their separate bodies of work converse, intersect and diverge.
Playful and irreverent, Julia Gorman's installations combine a provisional materiality with a bold graphic aesthetic. Her wall drawings and sculptural installations bound across floors, walls and ceilings in bursts of colour and movement, placing the viewer within a flux of influences and styles. Gorman has a flair for re-purposing motifs, styles and techniques from the past. Her tastes are eclectic and she finds sustenance and inspiration not only from the world around her but also the vast archive of art, design and craft that she plunders on her regular research expeditions into the library, internet, and video store.
Gorman's adhesive-vinyl wall-drawing The Thirties was inspired by imagery from that era: the tight sprawling line you see in Josef Frank textiles and Constance Spry's floral arrangements. It moves across the wall in industrial hues of blue, orange, yellow, purple, and green, unraveling onto the concrete floor below. The drawing has a sculptural quality. It swirls and stops-and-starts around an imaginary focal point, like a self-contained tangle of disengaged limbs. The seductive sticky colorful lines duck over and under each other, appearing to loom in and out in space. While the drawing has a free organic feel, a set of rules determines its compositional balance: only certain colors can cross; some can pass over other lines, others must always remain below.
Gorman also presents five freestanding sculptures based on her sketches for wall drawings. Tall Friend, Green Friend and Spiky are custom-painted sheet aluminum sculptures. They are like abstracted figures, cartoon totems. Rome and Vienna are made from sceneboard, a garden-variety cardboard, cut into amoebic shapes and assembled like a child's puzzle. Into holes in the shapes Gorman inserted party balloons in various degrees of inflation (which deflate and fall out over the course of the show). The cardboard shapes suggest stylised cartoon figures and the abstracted fragmented bodies of early modernist art; and the balloons, rude fatty globules, withering bodily vestiges. It is hard to get a fix on whether to see the figures as female or male. Do we read the balloons, which go from taut-and-perky to saggy-and-withered, as breast-like or phallic? It's not hard to sense Gorman's humour as she plays with forms, shapes and materials: cutting, opening, slotting together, inflating and inserting, then watching things disintegrate.
In Emily Floyd's works, letters have come off the page to become three-dimensional forms in space. By approaching language as material, Floyd aims to highlight and expose contradictions in discourse. By making language big, wooden and colourful, like children's toys—by making it something you can touch and manipulate—Floyd aims test its power within the context of the gallery. She is interested in the malleability of language and its connection to knowledge and power.
Her source texts have a specific resonance to her intellectual and artistic development. They are emblematic of her life and the cultural landscape she inhabits—a bibliography to her biography. Many of her installations take as their starting point novels, such as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Kafka's The Trial and Camus' The Outsider, or theoretical texts such as The Melbourne University Cultural Studies Reader. Floyd is attracted to texts that focus on identity and place that offer new ways of thinking about these issues in the light of globalisation and post-colonialism.
Floyd's Feminist Essay starts with 'Minimalism and Biography', a seminal essay by American art historian Anna Chave, which critiques the way that male artists such as Robert Morris and Carl Andre were given precedence over female artists such as Eva Hesse and Yvonne Rainer in the canonisation of New York Minimalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Floyd's work takes the form of thousands of black letters laser-cut from MDF. The letters wind their way around the entire perimeter of the gallery, spelling out segments of the essay and then falling into jumbled clumps. Floyd suggests that discourse is never far away even in the white cube, always lurking around and spilling out of the architecture. Floyd's treatment of the letters is at odds with the gravitas and authority of the sans serif font. The letters sit at comic angles, drunkenly falling over, then regaining composure, persevering. Is Floyd presenting Chave's feminist text as atrophied, a ruin; or is she implying that feminism is a long road, a tale of survival and longevity? In reintroducing this text, perhaps Floyd is proposing that it is time for feminism to come back into fashion.
The gestation of this exhibition was long and complex. Floyd and Gorman worked alongside each other for six months, talking through their aesthetic and thematic concerns, solving practical and material issues, and planning the installation. When the time came to finalise the exhibition's title Floyd and Gorman decided to abandon Reasons to Be Together and opt for the more oblique title The New Silhouette. It's an in-joke about the increasingly ridiculous, self-absorbed and shallow nature of celebrity and lifestyle culture and the instability of any formal language—be it the discourse that shapes contemporary art, political debate or haute couture. It just seemed to fit.
1. The title refers to iconic fashionista Karl Lagerfeld and his quest for a new slimmer physique. Inspired by the taut 'silhouette' of Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane's slimline trouser suit Lagerfeld co-opted the talents of Dr. Jean-Claude Houdret to transform his body. So impressed was Lagerfeld by his diminished shape that he wrote a book about his mission, billed on his website as 'both an instructional guide and a motivational coach … the ultimate accessory for healthy living'.