Ricky Swallow’s Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra is a wooden carving of a cactus. Graffiti has apparently been carved into the cactus at different stages of its life. The sculpture’s immaculate realism is both dead-pan and utterly strange. It performs a kind of sucking on looking: we are drawn in towards the sculpture, which looms ever larger in our field of vision, alternately giving us the sensation of shrinking to Lilliput scale (as the surface of the sculpture, its every crevice and marking, becomes larger in our looking) or an expanded sense of our own scale (as if we were giants peering down over some lunar landscape). We scan the sculpture’s surface, and its ripples and undulations enact firstly one imaginary transformation (one plant into another, jelutong wood into cactus) then chains of associations less straightforward: the patterned surface of the sculpture becomes an ocean ruffled by the breeze, or some fossilised moment in the life of a micro-organism from another age. The sculpture’s intensity of description becomes hallucinogenic.
*
I recently re-visited Gianlorenzo Bernini’s great early sculpture in Rome, Apollo and Daphne. Perhaps because of (or part of) its odd hallucinogenic force, I found myself remembering my first encounter with Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra. Bernini’s sculpture is drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and it shows the moment when Daphne, pursued by Apollo, transforms into a laurel tree to evade his lecherous pursuit.
There is a curious morphological connection between the two sculptures. The ‘limbs’ of Swallow’s cactus, or hydra, are evocative of a human form (if not Daphne’s outstretched arms then perhaps some aberrant Belvedere torso which shoots out new limbs to replace those displaced by time). Both sculptures are also connected to narrative by illusionism. Bernini’s “life-like” sculpture, like so many 17th-century visual forms, was conceived and interpreted in relation to theatre, particularly set into the Villa Borghese, where his sculptures were often incorporated into the theatrical entertainments of Scipione Borghese. (01) In a related way, Swallow’s sculpture takes its cue from the illusionism of cinema. Earlier works, most notably the wonkily kinetic miniature dioramas constructed on portable turntables between 1997 and 2000, make this connection to “special effects” explicitly. In more recent work, like Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra, the connection is muted by monochrome (with its suggestion of a design prototype or model), but always present in the conjoining of illusionism and veiled narrative.
Most strikingly, both Apollo and Daphne and Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra are sculptures on and of transformation. Apollo and Daphne centres on an instant of violent movement: Apollo is mid stride, Daphne at the instant of transformation. Even as her hair indicates desperate running, her feet are rooted to the ground, her hands become leaves, her thighs bark. Bernini’s manipulation of carved marble is cacophonous: it evokes vision overloaded by desperate extreme movement.
For all this orchestration of movement, Bernini’s sculpture is (self-evidently) literally still. More than this, the sculpture shows Daphne evading Apollo’s pursuit by becoming still. She eludes Apollo, not by outrunning him, but by becoming still, by assuming the state of sculpture itself. In visual terms, Bernini directly relates this becoming still to the process of making a sculpture. The articulation of Daphne’s body - through bark, flesh, leaves, hair, air - simultaneously describes the process of transformation of Daphne into a laurel tree – and the process of transformation in making a sculpture – that is, the symbolic or imaginary transformation of one material (in Bernini’s case, marble) into a variety of other materials. (02)
Like Bernini’s sculpture, Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra sets two processes of transformation against one another: the process of the sculpture coming into being and the process of the plant coming into being. These two processes are also masses of time, and part of the intrigue of Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra is that these two masses of time are represented by the same object but incarnated by opposite processes. The hydra evolves by addition, all of its previous “states” implicit in the next. The carving proceeds by reduction, every change in its form effacing those previous in a sequence as irreversible time itself.
Time is the articulation of transformation in both sculptures. The double transformation in Apollo and Daphne plays with duration. One transformation (Daphne into a laurel tree) occurs in an instant. The other transformation (the block of marble into the illusion of the sculpture) is manifestly one of elaborate and prolonged labour, containing the accumulation of hundreds of hours of manual work. It is the structure of Bernini’s sculpture to set these two extensions of time against one another.
In Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra we read duration of making through intricacy of carving too.(03) Swallow himself has often commented on this: “I still think the time invested in a piece is somehow contained or embalmed in the object in the final result”.(04) In Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra, this indexical relation to time is intensified by the form of the hydra itself. We move around the sculpture, scanning each limb at different angles, so that the patterning of the sculpture’s surface, with its repetitions and permutations of ridges and hollows, reads like a syntax of and for the time of the object. Both the form of the plant, with its pronounced modular growth system, and the graffiti inscribed into its surface, stretched and re-formed by the subsequent growth of the hydra, map the passage of time. Swallow’s carefully rendering of the graffiti makes carving the subject of carving, setting haste (through the graffiti’s angular shapes and abbreviated language of initials and code-names) against slow (through the vast tract of time implicit in Swallow’s attention to the richness and variations of the organic patterns of the cactus’ surface).
Swallow’s sculpture, no less than Bernini’s, captures one instant. But it is one instant in a process of transformation – the growth of the cactus - that is invisible at any one moment to the naked eye and is potentially years in duration. There is, in this consideration of Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra as an instant, and in its cool exacting resemblance to its subject, the presence of photography. This presence of photography does not contradict its baroque elaboration. Rather, this presence intensifies it, drawing our attention to the duration of the sculpture through the disparity of time and ease between clicking and carving. It is this exacerbated duration - set into the remoteness of a photograph - that fills our experience of Swallow’s cactus with an odd sensation of distance, like the gap between some ancient object in a natural history museum and our living gaze and wonder.
*
“Has Passaic replaced Rome as the Eternal City?”, Robert Smithson.(05)
Memory and mimesis are embedded in one another. This is true in several ways. Even the most direct act of representing something is always belated. As a manual process, it always requires memory, recalling the subject as it was. The longer the mimetic act, the greater the gap between the representation and its object, a fact that Claude Monet eloquently bemoaned.(06) Swallow’s carving often draws on this paradox: that the duration of an object’s making is both a proximity to the world (through more exacting resemblance) and a distance from that world (through the time separating the representation and its object). The exact dimensions of staying behind, presents this paradox as narrative, casting the time separating the representation and its object as mortal.
Works of art also incarnate memory. This is surely their earliest function: to record or recall the appearance of things, to fix them against time. This function is overt in Swallow’s Killing Time, in which, in Proustian fashion, a specimen of every animal the artist can remember killing is called up, not as a flash of memory, but through months upon months of elaborate carving. It is also present in Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra, curiously concentrated in its graffiti. The graffiti is some moment in a past we do not know. The hardened edges of that graffiti, so carefully rendered by Swallow, measure the distance of that past.
Notwithstanding the obvious pictorial allusion in Killing Time, the persistence of memory - and time - as motifs in Swallow’s sculpture distinctly echo the painting tradition of vanitas. Produced prolifically in 17th century northern Europe, vanitas paintings are typically still-life compositions of objects intended to warn us against vanity and remind us about life’s brevity.(07) A characteristic of Swallow’s sculpture, even dating back to his cardboard model of a portable tape-player, The X-Bass Woofer, 1998, and his 1:1 scale plastic model of a BMX bicycle, Peugeot Taipan, Commemorative Model (Discontinued Line), 1999, is a queer silence gripping familiar objects. These sculptures, like Swallow’s cactus, appear as residues of vanished lives, like objects retrieved from some future Pompeii. Just as Swallow’s frequent use of the skull and skeleton (or, with a dark humour in The Arrangement, the bicycle helmet) presents to us what will remain of us, the illegibly stretched graffiti in Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra is the writing of life’s brevity and time’s irresistible progress.
The subject of vanitas paintings is moral. Their morality is specifically Christian. They are admonitions against worldly possessions. It is also part of the vanitas tradition that they are contradictory: the paintings record lavishly the appearance of the objects whose seductive beauty they repudiate. The paintings themselves are objects of seductive beauty, which, to a considerable extent, do resist the passage of time.(08) The erotic beauty of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne was, in the same way, regarded as contradictory of the sculpture’s moral message (against Apollo’s lustful folly), so much so that an epigram was added to the sculpture’s base to consolidate its Christian message: ““The lover, who would fleeting beauty clasp/ Finds bitter fruit, dry leaves are all he’ll grasp”.(09) Part of Swallow’s connection to the vanitas tradition is a connection to this contradiction. His sculptures are the result of immensely slow processes. They seem to insist upon a similar slowness as we encounter them, a space of being distant from the ‘speed’ of consumerism. But Swallow’s sculptures can also generate a way of looking close to consumerism. We gaze at his objects with a longing and desire we know from commodities of seductive beauty. Swallow has often played with this congruence, sculpting an up-turned i-book in Silence Kit/Up-turned PowerBook, 2001, and refashioning the aesthetic of i-macs into skulls in his iMan Prototypes, 2001. True to the vanitas tradition of 17th-century northern Europe, Swallow’s sculpture is ambivalent towards objects of consumption.
We can call Swallow’s sculptures a kind of vanitas, but they do not have a Christian moral or didactic content. So what is their “text”? The difficulty of this question is symptomatic of another. Even with a now impressive list of writing on Swallow’s work, the underlying subject of Swallow’s work has been oddly elusive. His early work, with its references to pop cultural forms of the 1980s, was often interpreted strongly, and excessively in my view, through its literal content.(10) Justin Paton, in his recently published monograph on Swallow, centres on time, an implicitly ontological rather than narrative reading, and the most convincing path to address the elusive macro questions about Swallow’s work: how do we specifically name the experience of these sculptures? what is the nagging preoccupation to which this work bears testament? what does this body of work, so far, “amount to”?
Thinking about these questions, I find myself revisiting Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra, and specifically the place named in its title, Highland Park, the suburb where Swallow lived and worked in LA in 2003. It was in the vacant blocks of Highland Park that Swallow encountered the inscribed hydras that his sculpture takes as its subject, the kind of left-over urban space which Francesco Careri has described as a “public space with a nomadic architecture”.(11) By “nomadic” Careri means that these spaces live and are transformed outside the regular planning schedules of the city, a characteristic which he likens to the city’s “amniotic fluid” and which, in Swallow’s hydra, is neatly expressed in those carved words and initials of graffiti. Careri’s thinking here follows, and acknowledges, Robert Smithson, whose voyages into New Jersey generated a remarkable body of writing and work, specifically around the suburban industrial landscape of Passaic. In his article of 1966, “Entropy and the New Monuments”, Smithson writes:
If the future is ‘out of date’ and ‘old fashioned’, then I had been in the future. I had been on a planet that had a map of Passaic drawn over it … That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’, because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built … the suburbs exist without a rational past, and without the ‘big events’ of history. Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend and a couple of curios, but no past, just what passes for a future.(12)
It is a passage that resonates with many features of Swallow’s work. Smithson is attracted to the monumental forms in the landscape (for their ironic relation to both historical ruins and the language of minimal sculpture). Swallow’s connection to this landscape is more private, through the living room or bedroom (or their archive, the garage). Even the hydra, which we might imagine in some open suburban wasteland, is sculpted into a pot, made domestic, even potentially nomadic.
The forms which have punctuated Swallow’s work of the last five years are the interior world of Smithson’s landscape. They are its portable or domestic objects, but they equally possess the characteristics of Smithson’s “ruins”. They seem to exist without a past, “just what passes for a future”. Smithson’s Passaic, of course, does have a past. (Not unlike Swallow’s home turf in southern Australia, it has a history of invasion, settlement, and economic exploitation, significantly underpinned by historical amnesia.) Smithson’s suburbia is “without a rational past, and without the ‘big events’ of history” in the sense that it is a landscape constituted by the logic of consumerism and its images: the endless promise of a future.
The curious experience of Swallow’s sculpture is perhaps due to this landscape of promised futures, “without a past”, being subjected to an intensely elegiac process. Its forms are called up by carving, a process which imbues them with a past physically (we are aware of them having been carved over a large tract of time) and in an imaginary sense (we read their resemblances, like photos, as memories from a previous time). Swallow’s vanitas sculpture, drawn from the margins of the urban spaces of consumerism, is the wrapping of elegy around “just what passes for a future”.(13) Objects constituted by an endless reaching for a promised future are reconstituted, through sculpture, by an inverse process, a kind of search for time lost.
Smithson’s photographs of New Jersey capture the landscape dead-pan and inert (which is part of the irony of his texts’ leaps of associations). Swallow’s carving, like Bernini’s in Apollo and Daphne, is an intense process of transformation. It gives to objects from Smithson’s landscape “without a past” precisely the fluidity of association which images assume as memories. Like memories, which return at odd times, out of place, it is also part of the experience of Swallow’s sculpture that they do not yield directly their meaning or origin. This character in Swallow’s work is perhaps at its most acute in Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra, a work which describesseveral acts of inscription – the graffiti - which we can scarcely read. We cannot retrieve the living to which these inscriptions are short memorials. The work recalls the biochemical process of the cactus itself, which photosynthesises within its stem and uses its “skin” to seal itself during the day to preserve its water supply. Swallow’s sculpture evokes the appearance of the cactus’ surface, but also its function: the keeping of precious matter, stored and sealed within.
TN 2005
01. Bernini himself wrote and directed plays, designing all their visual and technical apparatus, which were famous for their life-like effects (Genevieve Warwick, “Speaking Statues: Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne at the Villa Borghese”, Art History, vol. 27, no. 3, June 2004, pp. 353-355).
02. This is a central paradox of Apollo and Daphne: becoming still reads as an act of flight. Although Daphne’s transformation is to become rooted to the ground, the sculpture describes the act of transformation as one of flight, with her body apparently about to take off, and our gaze always ending up at her hands, their visual effect of fluttering suggesting a lightness which seems to defy the weight of marble, and even gravity itself. This paradox is perhaps central to Ovid’s narrative, and is evident in other visual treatments of the subject, most notably in Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo’s small painting on wood in the National Gallery in London, in which Daphne’s becomes rooted to the ground at the same time as her arms become two clumps of leaves, strikingly resembling a set of dark green wings.
Swallow’s Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra is, similarly, an interlocking of becoming still and flight. Notwithstanding the many formal and ideological differences, Swallow’s sculpture functions formally as a kind of perverse reworking of Brancusi’s sculptures Bird in space. The ‘limbs’ in Field Recording/Highland Park Hydra, like the main curved form in Brancusi sculptures, extend towards the sky, as if stretched optically by an arc of flight, even as the base of the sculpture, in both the Swallow and Brancusi works, visually clamps together sculpture and earth.
03. Justin Paton has written eloquently on the sculpture’s relationship to time in his recently published monograph on Swallow (Justin Paton, Ricky Swallow: Field Recordings, Craftsman House: Portside, 2004, p. 13, p. 104).
04. Ricky Swallow, as quoted in Paton, p. 13. The way time spent making work registers sculpturally has always been a preoccupation of Swallow, and is evident in the earliest records of his thinking. See interviews by the author with Swallow 1998-2000, especially the interview on 26 December 1999, in the John McBride Collection Oral History Collection, a collection of interviews with contemporary Australian artists whose work is held in the John McBride Collection. Transcripts of the interviews are now held in the Australian National Library in Canberra.
05. Robert Smithson, as quoted in Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2003, p. 1.
06. Monet often lamented the slowness of painting in relation to the speed of changes in light: “I want to grasp the intangible. It’s terrible how the light runs out. Colour, any colour, lasts a second, sometimes 3 or 4 minutes”.
07. The genre takes its name from Ecclesiastes: “vanity of vanities…all is vanity”.
08. Alexander Sturgis makes this point eloquently in relation to Harmen Steenwyck’s vanitas, Still life, which appeared in the National Gallery exhibition Telling Time: “Although Steenwyck’s Still Life may preach against the world of the senses and worldly wealth, it is designed to appeal to those senses and is itself a precious object” (Alexander Sturgis, Telling Time, exh. cat. National Gallery, National Gallery Company, London, 2000, p. 9).
09. Maffeo Barberini’s (later Pope Urban VIII) comment about the sculpture was the basis of the epigram, by Giuliano Finelli, inscribed on to the base of the sculpture to tame Daphne’s life-like beauty (Genevieve Warwick, “Speaking Statues: Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne at the Villa Borghese”, Art History, vol 27, no. 3, June 2004, p. 357).
10. Swallow’s work emerged in artist-run spaces in Melbourne towards the end of the 1990s, at a time when pop cultural forms from the 1970s and 1980s were employed by a range of young artists, often with an implicit nostalgia for childhood, figured through the space of the childhood or teenage bedroom. This tendency was evident in a number of spaces in Melbourne, including Grey Area, the inner-city artist-run space with which Swallow was associated, but perhaps in most pronounced form at the artist-run space First Floor.
11. Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002, p. 184.
12. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments”, 1966, in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Uni of California Press, Berkeley, 1996, p. 11.
13. This quality in Swallow’s work does not emerge in isolation. His elegiac treatment of the kind of landscape described by Careri and Smithson has parallels in the work of certain contemporaries in artist-run spaces in the mid-to-late 1990s in Melbourne. David Jolly’s small paintings on glass have often taken as their subject, in a process of embalming related to Swallow’s work, the “nomadic architecture” of suburban Melbourne. The sound-based work of Michael Graeve (also involved in Grey Area in the late 1990s, and one time collaborator with Swallow) has concentrated on the aural detritus on the margins of public space.
(This essay was published in the catalogue to Ricky Swallow's exhibition, This time another year, in the Australian Pavillion at the 2005 Venice Biennale).
[ home ][ email ][ cv or download as pdf ][ links ]