Catalogue notes for an exhibition of sculptural works by Karl de Waal
Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane City Hall, October-November 2008
There is an inherent ambiguity in the exhibition’s title, evoking as it does a force of nature that may become the agent of both destructive floods and drought relief. The works on show articulate and interrogate the state and status of human nature in an era of uber-consumerism and invasive information technology, by gathering up some of the detritus and fragments in the wake of the cataclysm and reintegrating them in ways that trigger memories and awarenesses of essential human qualities and responses currently at risk of going under.
These new works by Karl de Waal hold a magnifying lens to peripheral or unnoticed details of contemporary society and the physical spaces people inhabit and traverse, illumining their subjects in such a way that they are shown to be indicative of current social values and symptomatic of the kinds of malaise that afflict those values.
Deluged by commodities and words, the individual may drown in isolation and sensations of disconnectedness, as in the works ‘Birds without a song’: an assemblage of cages containing lifelike but silent birds; ‘Virtual Boy’, where a solitary player occupies a soccer table, separated from the ball by a metal rod; and ‘Bed for Melanie’, where the human occupant is absent. The quilt and pillowcase covering the single bed are composed of found pieces of notepaper, hand-stitched to form a patchwork, inscribed with messages in the case of the quilt, blank for the pillowcase.
Working with found fragments, the artist engenders an awareness both of the tenuousness of connections and the possibility of re-establishing links. In ‘Hairtales 1-9’, found hair ties mounted and assembled in frames imply the unknown identities and narratives of the wearers as well as their potential for connectedness within communities. The large wall panel, ’35 Albert Street’, uses recycled scrap from a demolished house, the reconfiguration of the elements on a reduced scale evoking the magnitude of what has been lost.
In working with a vernacular of found objects and materials, a persistent, resistant form of nostalgia is generated for objects and structures humanised by contact, use and association, becoming an extension of the lives that shared the same locus. In the recovery, recycling and re-inscribing of trivial or superficially worthless items shed intentionally or otherwise, it is as if these abject material ephemera become mnemonics, metaphors and metonyms for humanity and humanising attributes.
Value and values are a subtext, a baseline underpinning the works on exhibit: what we value, and how we ascribe value; how face value correlates (or not) with personal notions of worth. This theme is developed in specific ways in relation to knowledge and money. The creation of the sculptural work ‘Knowledge’ entailed the page-by-page gutting of an old set of encyclopaedia in a deliberate act of reverse knowledge: a protest at, or a rejection of, the overconsumption of data. The twenty-four volumes have become hemispheres of semi-pulped paper mounted in a grid on the wall, in a transubstantiation of the informational challenge they once posed to an experiential and philosophical one. This process is in contrast, it would seem, to that employed in ‘35 Albert Street’, where the spirit of the house and, by extension, its occupants, are regenerated and re-inscribed in a way reminiscent of a shamanistic reconstitution of elements.
In an analogous way, ‘Enterprise’ challenges conventional assumptions about money. Small plastic bags assembled in rows contain found coins and banknotes, collected by Hugo, Imara and Karl on two hundred separate occasions over a period of fifteen months. Each find carries specific connotations, a specific narrative, for the finder/s, as well as the submerged narrative of the loser. So, is the sum of $100 contained in this work measured by its face value or its experiential value?
The creator of these works seems to be sending a wake-up call about the depersonalisation engendered by the consumer apparatus with its fake take on reality and its parallel but delusional ways of perceiving ourselves and our environment.
The precarious nature of what we assume to be our realities and the tenuous premises on which our society is constructed are alluded to in works such as ‘The End of the Dream’, which presents two towers constructed out of paperbacks ( ‘The Tower’ and ‘The Glass Inferno’), both written in the shadows of the construction of the World Trade Centre’s twin towers and subsequently combined to create the scenario for the movie ‘The Towering Inferno’. This and other works in the exhibition, such as ‘Living with War’ and ‘Proposal for Airport Departure Lounge’, reference the disaster iconography of blockbuster and bestseller, a perennial ingredient of contemporary popular culture, in which life tends to imitate popular art, as we have seen.
In the context of the present exhibition and its concerns, the more globalised themes engage with issues of depersonalisation, dehumanisation and the devaluation of our experiential selves; the ways our intrinsic human qualities tend to get lost in the bigger, but not necessarily more meaningful picture of disaster scenarios with their attendant paranoia.
By contrast, the reclamation and re-inscribing of personal space with ostensibly peripheral and discarded items, as is the practice in many of these works, creates a tentative iconography implying a reinstatement of the values that are in jeopardy, or which have been inundated by the material and media-driven glut of contemporary society.
In reclaiming what might be regarded as trivial and worthless items – found hair ties; remnants from a demolished home; found note-paper, both blank and inscribed – there is an implicit protest at the consequences of the erosion of personal interaction, nurture and connectedness, and at the same time an awareness of how these seemingly inconsequential objects can, through their integration in the present artefacts, be reconfigured so as to remind the viewer of the connectedness of things and the people whose lives are linked to and through and by them.
Exhibitions are usually a long time in the making, and titles may or may not prefigure events beyond the gallery walls. However, in the light of global economic developments of recent weeks, the rains might be said to have arrived.