louisewinter

The NGCA’s latest offering, charts the artist Simon Martin’s extended enquiry into our relationship with objects and the material world around us. Through a series of four short films, he queries how and why we attribute different values to inanimate, man-made objects and how objects in turn, exert power over us. What is this power play? And what is it capable of revealing about the means of production and the production of meaning?

‘Louis Ghost Chair’ combines a series of hypnotic tracking shots and monologue to create a complex narrative that reflects on the history of Philippe Starck’s iconic plastic dining chair. The reference to ghost in the video’s title acknowledges Starck’s object as an echo of an earlier piece of Louis XIV furniture as well as its striking physical appearance in that, being made of clear plastic, it is almost invisible.

Aside from the obvious dichotomy of the artisan hand made wooden object and its later mass-produced plastic doppelganger, the video forces us to consider more difficult, abstract propositions: do the qualities imbued within the chair upon its creation still persist and, if so, what is this ‘psychic substance’ that clings to the material?

The gallery refers to the camera’s technique of slowly surveying the surface of the object as seductive, yet its perverse lingering, combined with the mystical qualities attributed to it by the voiceover, render it decidedly fetishistic. The painstakingly shot visuals are inseparable from the overarching monologue whose identity, unlike the objects surveyed, remains unknown: are the thoughts projected those of the artist so the voiceover functions as an absurd act of ventriloquism? Does this matter? It’s not quite HAL from Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey yet its uncertain allegiances prompt our suspicion.

The same female voiceover accompanies the next video ‘Carlton’ which takes as it subject a shelving unit of that name designed by Ettore Sttsass in 1981. It queries whether the principles of ‘good design’- of form following function, of truth to materials, and the display of structure over superficial décor, are timeless truths or merely the tenets promoted by a particular group or class, at a particular moment in history.

Our earlier scepticism of the voiceover is tempered by its now self-reflexive stance, it asks ‘how do we make a film of a piece of furniture?’ and in so doing, questions its own premise. A question we might pose as viewers is not necessarily how but why are videos made of these objects in the first place? Why are the objects that are the subject of the videos not displayed in the gallery itself?

The next video ‘Untitled’ provides a clue by forcing us to examine what happens to an object’s materiality when it is experienced only as image and without an accompanying voiceover. The video, which presents a stylised facemask shown from various angles, initially seems puzzling. What is this object? Who is the author? What is it trying to communicate?

If the video holds your attention long enough you will realise that your inability to answer any of these questions is precisely the point: in the absence of the contextualizing narrative of the voiceover we are left, much like the object in the video, without coordinates, floating in space. Arguably then, the video’s role is largely functional and the object itself is incidental; after all, any object could be plucked from its context to make this point, even something as ordinary and banal as a lemon which brings us to the fourth and final video.

‘Lemon 2 Generations’ is also devoid of narrative and is oddly reminiscent of the very first video in that it is a ghost of an earlier work, made in response to a video by Hollis Frampton that Martin uses this as a starting point for an investigation into what differentiates our age from the earlier artist’s one.

What is ironic here is that, in contrast to the previous video where we were desperate for context, here it seems irrelevant. The video, revealing the simple beauty of natural light passing over a lemon, reframed here as an aesthetic object of contemplation, is compelling enough in its own right for us to reject any supplementary narratives.

Martin’s strongest tactic throughout the exhibition is to force us to reconsider how we make sense of the world. How many of us are guilty of spending more time in a gallery reading the accompanying texts than looking at the objects themselves? What Martin offers, is the refreshing opportunity to engage with a range of interpretive possibilities that depend on our willingness to bite the hand that feeds.

http://www.artselector.com/review/19902/simon-martin-northern-gallery-for-contemporary-art-sunderland-sr1-1re