Higgie, Jennifer, Scenes, New York: Marc Jancou Contemporary, David Noonan Scenes

Transcription

1 David Noonan Scenes

2 Scenes by Jennifer Higgie Time is stilled in the second it runs amok. Moments merge with materials: a teardrop, some lipstick; a painted face, a dance; masks and make-up, ink, plywood, linen and jute. Arms are flung towards the sky, bodies are bent, faces glow softly with concentration. Rituals are implied but never explained. A wistful boy, eyes raised cut upwards, is bathed gently in geometric shapes; girls with painted faces are absorbed in worlds of their own making. It s like looking at strangers through stained glass, bathed in mist. A group of concentrated actors perform a layered, ecstatic dance. Sculptures are paused at the instant of expression. Scenes blend, separate, re-group. It s like entering a crowded room. Someone looking at someone else will always hold a world of meaning. Individuals become one and disconnect. They ve always done this; it s impossible to imagine they won t. (The world is not the one we know without the proximity of another person.) The appropriation of an instant long gone saturates these scenes; they re reborn as apparitions, surfaces on which non-sequiturs fuse to form their own logic. The world, they seem to say, doesn t need

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4 any more reproductions, it needs reinvention. Time and gender are confused and confusing. Baggy clothes allow the body both to hide and sing, while camouflage let complications conceals complications. Actors play games with enigmatic rules, their pleasures and complications hinted at in ghostly configurations. The gesticulations of hands are as expressive as words; lines of energy move between figures and fingers and shimmer. Faces are distilled in shrouds woven from smoke. Collage is often chaotic. A movement is carved from wood; fluid signs emerge from static materials. Contradictions abound the softness of flesh, rendered in rough linen and jute; the disguise that reveals, the feverish activity that is silent, the simple gestures that are too complicated to read. (In dance, the question has never been can never be adequately answered: what do movements mean? And how do they mean it? Hence, the choreographer s work is infinite.) Silkscreen prints on jute and linen; pliant bodies fuse from something so stiff it could snap. Silence saturates the atmosphere. Most of the pictures and sculptures are untitled. Occasionally, words can be too reductive. Nonetheless, much is implied: a faint hum of music is never far away. (This is all, this is everything; the silent image an homage to introspection.) Disclose by covering up: glue becomes another medium; cool sections of linen alternate with deposits of warmer tones. Some elements are emphasised with pieces of material that are crudely cut, stuck down, and re-assembled: assemblages of different forms, made to create a new whole.the texture of skin mingles with the texture of cloth and ink. A rough coir floor covering creates a stage for private ceremonies in public places. Flooring is important, it s what eases our way. Architecture saturates our moods and affects our state of mind; we cannot move, without design. People make shapes against the ceiling or the poor bruised sky. Movement is a relentlessly renewed repetition. The same man and the woman recur again and again, but in every second, for every scene, they shimmer differently. Faces are both full of life and inert. Mythologies are hinted at, without provenance expectations that meaning or perception (or a mixture thereof) might be straightforward are futile.

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6 Creating and looking at an image is, to a certain extent, about levels of expectation. You see what you want to see, rarely what the artist wants you to see; what you ve seen before, where you re from, what you know all of this informs how you relate to what is in front of you. Considering all of this, it s astonishing a consensus is ever reached. There is something here that is tired of explanation; tired of convincing anyone of anything beyond the physical fact of a presence. It s as if both a renunciation of the physical world and an embracing of it are equally important and equally appealing. You can accept this, or you can refute it. It doesn t matter. Someone is always watching someone else. It s hard to find room to be alone. The world has never been this crowded. These images ready-mades reassembled hint at archaeology; they mine time via its residue. Faces are covered, fragments surface; an eye, a lovely cheek, a strand of hair, vague skin. Hands are privileged, simultaneously capable of great tenderness and awkwardness. Intimations of freedom through creativity are mirrored in a specific design aesthetic a clean minimalism inflected with hallucinatory explosions of figuration. Colours are muted, often sepia, but full of dramatic shifts in mood and tone. A lack of respite is as sly as snow (despite an appearance of solidity the urgent world can swallow you without warning.) Textures change mood and rise without warning. Flesh is unpredictable. Our imaginations are disobedient. It can be cruel to light a scene too brightly. Shadows can be comforting too much of modern life is illuminated too fiercely. It s a fallacy to assume that light equates clarity. Arms are raised, spines arched, bodies bent in strange dances. Points of view zoom in; faces are focussed upon before asserting their need for distance from scrutiny, their need for space. Communication is a prerequisite of theatre; but here, theatre emphasises the differences between us, our need for solitude and silence. Bodies are collages of experience, now and then distorted to a point of abstraction.

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8 It s hard to say when or where these people are from. Why do we need to know? Why isn t it enough to know that they are fellow human beings, creating something that absorbs them, in an indeterminate occasion? It is impossible to gauge what is going on. This is a world that thrives on innuendo. Explanation here is counterproductive; what is important is the gradual accretion of meaning. (In a world so full of brutal convictions, slippage in certainty can every so often offer more comfort than a dossier full of facts.) Tempos shifts without warning: from burlesque to bathos, from sober deliriums to unbalanced sobriety. Mirrors shiver, reflecting back on themselves rituals full of psychological energy. (Mind-reading is more common than we assume). People turn away from each other, hiding their intentions, their secrecy critical; masks are a beautiful camouflage. The smoky, textures of the picture obscure clarity in a varnish of melancholy dramatics. Skin may be thin, but is a surprisingly sturdy border. Narratives flow around the walls; scenes bleed into each other. Chance, longing, intuition and free-association are the life-blood of these pictures and sculptures. They reiterate the impossibility of reducing the description of a personality, a life, to one line, one signal, one feeling. This work is clear about its construction; it engages in an enigmatic dialogue with both itself, and whoever might be blown into its orbit. In other words: each image and object is self-absorbed while individual isolation feeds the atmospheric whole. The plays unnamed, the lines unspoken, the scenes unnumbered, the acts untitled. Silence is all, irreducible and eternally ambiguous. Grimaces, wrinkles and distortion, laughter, fear, acting and hiding all have a place here. The exaggerations and nuances of theatre echo the strangeness of being human back on ourselves a state we are forever struggling to articulate. Sometimes, music is more accurate than a conversation.