Rowan Smith at Whatiftheworld / Gallery
by Katharine Jacobs
A crack appeared on my cellphone screen quite out of nowhere one day. Around it, a grey slug-shaped bruise formed. The slug has since been a malevolent force in my life, obscuring from me the subtlety and tone of the SMS's I receive, preventing me from checking the messages I send out, resulting in some horrendous misunderstandings and embarrassing social blunders. I have noticed, peculiarly, that the bruise is healing. The damaged pixels are slowly, perceptibly coming back to life. It has been almost three months now, and although the healing is going well I still can't read anything in the second line of SMS's.
But I'm going to wait for it to heal, if it can. Like Dostoyevsky's Underground Man who does not consult a doctor for his ailing liver, I suppose I am doing this out of spite for the experts. That and poverty. But there is, I think, another reason why I haven't surrendered by cellphone to the broken electrical appliances man yet. I've become attached to this injured and failing appliance which I use everyday. I can't seem to acknowledge its death.
Freud, no doubt, would have diagnosed my denial as representing an inability to face up to the reality of my own death. He believed that 'Our own death is indeed quite unimaginable, and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we... really survive as spectators... At bottom nobody believes in his own death, or to put the same thing in a different way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality' (Freud 1953: 304 - 5). In Freud's terms then, the preservation of the things we use everyday, of obsolete technologies and broken electrical appliances, has to do with the denial of change and the endless march towards our own demise. By preserving some playthings with which to animate our nostalgic daydreams of an imagined past, we are able to make ourselves immortal.
Rowan Smith's 'Future Shock Lost' might be read as a poignant memorial to the obsolete and the dead artefact. His preservation of an old turntable, four pocket calculators, three glorious dot matrix printers and a tower of obsolete video tapes, is a veritable graveyard of dead technology. Robbed of their function in society, they are destined for the undertaker, but rescued by Smith and re-animated with a new task to execute. The objects are allowed to live on, albeit silently, in an art gallery. Like treasured grandparents who have been moved to the old age home, they engage outside of society's hustle and bustle in a kind of endless occupational therapy, while they speak rosy-eyed of their youth.
In Dot Matrix Loop 2007, the three granddames of the exhibition (all called Dot) are suspended obsolete printers. Looping between them is a skein of paper, which they, like three elderly women in a knitting circle, pass between each other in perfect synch. Each prints her own ration of little figures onto the loop before passing it on. Slowly they overpopulate the paper with the little figures of memory; like Alzheimer's sufferers who repeat relentlessly their stories, they surrender a functional existence, yet assert their continued survival by means of repetition and the endless loop.
Likewise, the four pocket calculators of Florian, Karl, Wolfgang and Ralph mimic their own use value. Smith has assigned them to endlessly repeat the score from 'Pocket Calculator', a song by Kraftwerk, the pioneering electronic band. Playing across their screens, and input into their memory, is an endless record of Kraftwerk's homage to their technology; the song's lyrics proclaiming, 'I'm adding and subtracting/ I'm controlling and composing' (LyricsDepot.com: online).
Elsewhere, Smith's memorials are more static, yet invite a connection with the deceased which suggests they might not be quite out of reach just yet. Extensions of the Universe consists of four acrylic on board renderings of the sky on the night of two American and two Russian shuttle disasters. Emerging from the centre of these painted rondos are masterfully carved wooden extension cords. As Ralph Borland has suggested, their form suggests an umbilical cord, or a node of connection of some type (2007:online). Indeed, their alternate plug and socket ends seem to invite a re-connection with the departed astronauts and cosmonauts; a time-tunnel which might suck one through the paint and deposit one in deep space, amongst the stars.
Elsewhere, Smith connects with the dead spirits through that tried and tested device, the backwards-spinning record. When first broadcast on the radio, Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds prompted mass hysteria as many listeners believed that Martians really were invading. The vinyl record in Smith's Goodbye Enemy Airship however has had its topography sanded down and has been repainted with the night sky as it was on the night of that first broadcast. As such, it takes us back in time to that naïve era of the first broadcast, when Auschwitz was yet to end poetry; and mass killing and genocide by means of the machine gun or atom bomb were yet to destroy the logic of technological advancement. The world and the future (we might believe) is a much more innocent, optimistic place.
This kind of 'Back to the Future' effect is mirrored in Smith's ceiling-height tower of video cassettes, Nice People Rewind. Here history is re-conjured by means of its traces. Old video tapes, like old manuscripts, carry the palimpsest of all the histories (and sci-fi visions of the future) they have been used to record. The labels give a clue to this history; The English Patient is scored through, and taped over with MTV Radiohead. Bushmen is superceded by Sauna Girls. Other signs on the surface declare ownership; a clue for some future anthropologist seeking to construct the elusive character who taped Van Wilder, Jackass, and Skateboard Movie'.
The exhibition as a whole is executed with impressive skill and craftsmanship. Atari Marquetry and Nintendo Marquetry employ age-old woodworking techniques that make a certain nerve in the back of one's neck twinge, so painstakingly constructed are they. As such, Smith's work harks back to the era when the artist was also a craftsman, when woodwork and needlework were unproblematically assigned to the sexes and taught in school.
As a beautifully and painstakingly constructed memorial then, Smith's 'Future Shock Lost' is a poignant, somewhat sad show. Leaving the work behind is like going home after a visit to one's grandparents at the old people's home; one is sad to leave those who have been consigned to the borders of society alone, and one can't help but think about one's own eventual obsolescence. And here, of course, we have come full circle. When we embarked on the nostalgic rescue mission of failed technology it was to deny our own death anxiety. But here we are facing up to it again. This is a sneaky trick from a very young artist. It represents a level of ambiguity and polyvalency which seems to be lacking in the work of many of our more mature artists.
Oh yes, and if anyone has an old, unused cellphone, I'm looking to adopt.
Opens: August 5
Closes: August 30
Whatiftheworld / Gallery
1st Floor Albert Hall, 208 Albert Road, Woodstock
Tel: (021) 448 1438
Email: info@whatiftheworld.com
www.whatiftheworld.com
Hours: Tue - Fri 10am - 4pm, Sat 10am - 3pm
References
Ralph Borland. 2007. 'Terra Nova'. [online] Available:
http://www.whatiftheworld.com/featured-artists/rowan-smith/ Last accessed: September 4, 2008
Freud, S. 1953. 'Thoughts for the Times on War and Death' The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 4. London: Hogarth Press
LyricsDepot.com. 2008. 'Pocket Calculator Lyrics'. [online] Available: http://www.lyricsdepot.com/kraftwerk/pocket-calculator.html Last Accessed: September 4, 2008
