Exhibitions
Shaun Gladwell and the Art of Extreme Makeovers1
Simon Rees
Not even Jean Baudrillard could have predicted the ever-diminishing distance between television and reality.2 A distinct feeling has developed, within culture, that a life isn't lived unless lived televisually. It's as if a breath isn't breathed if its mist isn't captured on camera.
Warhol's '15 minutes' only counts for the poor suckers who get kicked off set after the first episode, or the players in pilots that go straight to the sit-com graveyard. Losers. To make the grade in the 21st century Andy's ruby would have to read '15 episodes of fame (and a reunion show next season)'.
What-the-hell has this got to do with the art practice of Shaun Gladwell you might ask? Nothing. And everything. It's similar to what the tortured feline face of the 'bride of Wildenstein' has to do with aviation-fuel burn victims (who were the war era progenitors of facial repair by prosthetic surgery).
You see Shaun Gladwell's practice has undergone an extreme makeover in the last 18 months. And he is now a star—in the same way as the 'poor' victims voted onto the slab by their friends-and-family on the reality show in extremis, the ABC Network's Extreme Makeovers, which now plays on screens globally.
Cut to the cover of Australian Art Collector 30 (2004). (If we believe their spin, this is 'Australia's most prestigious and high profile art magazine, offering the most informative and up-to-date coverage of the Australian art market'.) A virile and handsome Gladwell stares out at us, emerging from the water, at the Bronte Beach pool (down the road from where he lives in Sydney). The art directors of the mag do their best to make their cover girls and boys into pin-ups. The artists always seem none the wiser, none the poorer for it. (I happen to know what the water temperature was and the chilling effect it had on Gladwell's cremaster: Sports Illustrated calendar girls go eat your bikinis).
Because I feel sorry for Gladwell and his gonads, and just might be one of the friends and family who voted him there in the first place, I thought I might write an essay that cut things up a bit. Christ, even skate-sneaker brand DCSHOECOUSA has a model in their classics line called 'Decon', so who can blame me.3
And if the writing seems a little bloody-minded, and the allusions monstrous, don't forget how bloody the action can get off-camera. (Dear Ed., please insert photo of Gladwell's foot split between the big and second toes all the way to the instep: and stained sickly yellow with surgical iodine).4
In fact, thinking on prosthetic surgery, Gladwell could well be one of the electric wheelchair bound Wildensteinian cronies from Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) before too long. Imagine the cover shot at 60. Just a collagen-ripe sutured head floating an inch above the water: wheelchair hidden beneath a 'photoshopped' surface reflection. Indubitably, Gladwell will have more hair in 2032 than 2004 (the bald-patch was off camera for last year's shoot).
If this reads like a parallel text it is inspired by the earliest work on show, a twin-screen piece, Double Line Work (2000). Like all diptychs it provokes the allegorical impulse, and in turn a dialectical analysis. Viewed with the purchase of 'history' it neatly enfolds the parallelism of Gladwell's project, in which gallery and street face-off. Any number of binomials could be used to describe the relative position: gallery / street; performance / documentation; high / low cum hi / lo; counter / cultural; subcultural / popcultural; staged / real. The binomials could roll on infinitely, much like the symbolic signifier emblazoned on the nose of Gladwell's skateboard.
The structure of the work —a video diptych or split-screen—is however categorical. Twin images are destined for exhibition. (They do not belong to the California Games genre of video). The same can be said of long single-takes. Each image in Double Line Work (and a number of Gladwell's other works) is a continuous shot, that, cinematically speaking, bears the cinema verite hallmarks of the French New Wave. (Skate videos are all jump cuts, splices, and elaborated dolly shots.) Gladwell's hand-held camera, which often produces vertigo (and nausea) in the viewer, also speaks of the French New Wave, who hit the streets 40 years before Hollywood embraced the steadicam.
On reflection, Sydney is to Gladwell what Paris was to Godard, Rivette and Truffaut—canvas and palette.5 While Gladwell doesn't show us the riots of May 1968 we do at least get a civic parade rolling down Oxford and South Dowling Streets, celebrating the centennial of Federation. It's hardly overturned Citroens and Molotov cocktails, yet Gladwell's ambivalence—he's rolling away from the parade not with it—expresses the ambivalence of informed Australians towards (symbols of) public life under the Howard administration and for what 'nationalism' means to Australian Aborigines.6
If skating seems an unlikely vehicle for critique, let's not forget that Jean Luc Godard's most direct reflection upon May 1968 appeared in his film One Plus One (1968) that had as much to do with the Rolling Stones recording their song 'Sympathy for the Devil' on Beggars' Banquet (1968) as with the protest itself, and nobody ever categorised that film as anything but radical. By giving the Stones his high-art imprimatur Godard introduced them to a new audience (of cinephiles). And by working with the baddest band in the world Godard also won himself a new audience. Gladwell's relationship with skating is hardly as calculated as Godard's with rock-n-roll as Gladwell is a skater, yet the outcome is the same. Enter the halls of culture. It's the nature of (the) game.
Gladwell doesn't stop short with skateboarding he commits a number of street-culture forms to video and represents them in the halls: grafitti in Planet and Star Sequence (2003); BMXing in his collaborations with Hikaru Iano; breakdancing in Godspeed Verticals and Fountain (both 2004) (with Morganics); in his apogee of 'bad taste' Cycles of Radical Will (2001) he even tests the subjective potential of Moto-X; and Tangarra (2003) is paean to late-adolescent physical tomfoolery.
In his most recent work, Woolloomoollo Night (2004), he choreographs a Capoiera dancer in the forecourt of the Shell service station across the road from Harry's pie cart, the iconic Sydney 24hr eatery. (Capoeira, from Brazil, is a Tai-Chi-like hybrid: part dance, part martial arts. It's extreme dancing so-to-speak).
This wide-angle of reference recalls the textual recording of Paris by Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord, who found meta-critique in shopping arcades and railway stations—the same spaces in which Gladwell shoots his work —in as much as in galleries and salons. In the spirit of exhaustive critique or veritable reportage they wrote about everything they saw: anything goes. Benjamin and Debord constructed their writings as physical acts, in as much as they were connected hyper-pedestrian imagination, associated with flanerie and the derive. What is skateboarding but an auto-topic pedestrian extension? Debord writes in the Society of the Spectacle (1967) about the movement of culture from the particular to the general: the negation of the avant-garde. Empowerment as an artist—a Situationist artist—is to predict one's disappearance. Gladwell has read Debord and knows full well about negation and consumption within culture. After all every skater is a sneaker aficionado and has their favourite duds. Skating itself is as much an act of fashionable, as deconstructive, will in the new century. He knows the payoff of bringing the popular gaze to any left-field act.
The attitude, or reality, is embodied in the work itself. The police car rolls by without stopping and seeing what-the-hell the Capoiera dancer is doing in the service station forecourt. Not a single motorist looks across to their right to see what the gasmask-wearing spray painter is up to on the William Street/King's Cross off-ramp. There are no commuters or security personnel to interrupt the break dancers on the railway platforms. Amazingly not a single person in the queue at one of Sydney's busiest McDonald's (at Town Hall, George Street) notices Hikaru roll through the restaurant pulling a front-wheel-stand. Ambivalence rules. There is no audience. Until the resulting work is exhibited in an institution—then they make a scene.
1. An alternate title for this piece could be 'Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Bit the Hand that Feeds'.
2. I mention Baudrillard specifically as he was the subject of Gladwell's work Baudrillard's Scenes (2001).
3. DC also has models named Avatar, Vista, and Alias, all ripe for metaphoric comparison.
4. An injury sustained by Gladwell while skating in 2003
5. Gladwell has been to Paris. He produced work both at the Louvre—Self-spinning Louvre and Roller-Blade Police Unit (both 2002)—and in the banlieue.
6. For a cogent expression of this critical ambivalence see Tom Nairn 'Diary' London Review of Books, 18 November 2004, vol 26, no 22, pp30-1.