MH monumental obsessions

1st December - 18th December 2004
This show consisted of mixed media paintings from the Monumental obsessions and Eternal measures series

couch & bath 2360 mm x 1360 mm; box, bags, fireplace, case & sheets 1150 mm x 1360 mm

Close your eyes for a moment. Now with your mind’s eye, try to capture images of some key objects in your home environment that speak volumes about the most fundamental functions of that space – be it social interaction, the unfolding of relationships, the caring for and sharing with others, the exploration of self. The domestic environment is potentially a space for some of the most challenging experiences in our entire lives. It is here we can encounter powerful emotions wrapped up in the complexities of relationships and human endeavour.
The objects at the core of this intensity, those items of furniture or utensils that you might now be thinking of, are often those embroiled in the most social or the most mundane of activities: a living room couch, the open fire, the clothes line, beds, the bath, the dining table, the laundry buckets and everyday kitchen items. Now remove the myriad of emotions surrounding these objects. Consider them instead for their potential symbolic nature, for what they can, in turn, tell you about a world far beyond their domestic context.
This is the world that Maree Horner is interested in, a world where the artist demands that the domestic objects she paints tackle a bigger job than that dictated by their obvious daily functions. They must work hard to create new and potent associations, indeed to challenge and provoke. As writer Roger Peters has said, “The whole weight of culture might, in the end, find its denouement in relation to a piece of furniture.”
Not every object is up to the job but by using selected ones from around her home as her primary visual imagery, Horner principally explores the nature of the relationship between the feminine and the masculine, between the mind and the body, between eroticism and fantasy. She deals with the internal and the external, the unspoken and the articulate, the provocative and the familiar.
A cardboard box, painted fleshy pink, could be read in feminine, nurturing terms, for example, while it can also be seen as an element in a still life composition. (The same can be said for her buckets, jugs and pots.) It can also operate as a monumental landscape element, taking on architectural forms and dictating the equation between space, form, volume and scale. In another example, the couch is a strong metaphor with direct human associations – it also has arms, legs, a back and spine but the shadows and crumpled cushions also create a new landscape within its folds.
The mixing up of scale serves to undermine existing power structures symbolically inherent in objects such as monumental marble archways and erect columns and to establish new, more meaningful ones. Horner paints each central object at a life size scale. Her passion for minimalist sculptural installation brings an aesthetic here of a pared down, controlled environment where the viewer’s body, placed in front of the life size objects, instinctively reacts as if standing before a three dimensional scene. You can, in fact, measure yourself in relation to the objects in front of you – like a fireplace or doorway – and therefore in relation to the internal dialogue of the works.Taking these three key genres, the associations to body, the interest in still life constructions and the manipulation of internal and external landscapes, Horner dislocates the objects she paints and re-contextualises them, often with theatrical effect, so they become players in an uneasy socio-cultural debate

Sue Gardiner

The archaeology of the ideas in this work can be traced back to much earlier works and series. ’The Chair’ (1974) could be said to be the concept godparent of this work, for it too was a work which dealt with a familiar object, and had radicalising features which opened up new spaces for contemplation. In that case it was caused by enmeshing and electrification; a bitter commentary on the anomie and stifling indifference of the era. However ‘The Chair’ lacked the tropes of modernist monumentalism which have become a leitmotiv of Horner’s subsequent work. (1)

The Monumental Obsessions series features renderings of articles of domesticity such as boxes, sheets, bags, suitcases and a couch at life size with addition of diminutized monuments; disassembled archways and pyramidal columns. At first glance, Horner’s work appeals simplistic, perhaps even banal and the product of arcane aggrandizement, but this impression is an entirely false one. Intertextually, the works create a hubbub of conversation, highlighting the frisson between mind and body, the erotic, the corporeal and the cerebral. Her work has a decided architectural quality. Her detail lines are illuminating, and deeply subversive. The real subversive quality however lies in the rendering of the various images in contrapuntal connection, creating a landscape which fetishes the monumental and eroticizes the familiar; the notes playing harmony and discordance. The pictorial incongruity belies a sardonic fidelity. The pieces offer tantalising glimpses of alterior space; what is not revealed is just as powerful as what is. (2)

Wallpaper, a work on a grand scale, continues this approach. The ‘characters’, a couch, a lampshade, and a pyramidal column and an archway seem burlesque but it is the dialogue between which is intriguing. As a backdrop to this milieu, the wallpaper backing is culled from the hatches, matches, and despatches’ columns of The New Zealand Herald. Moments of joy, grief and celebration become the background, seemingly inconsequential, but anything but. Life affirming, the wallpaper reminds of how glibly we live our individual lives, and how the cycle of life is ever present but sometimes barely detectable. The works materiality and its particular action through time have necessarily been elided.

The life size couch is a kind of inversion. It looks monumental, dwarfing the more monumental structures that march towards the doorway. The couch appears as a benign object, but it is the principle auteur. Its size enables the work to induce in us a sense of familiarity, a sense of immediacy, an appeal to our nostalgic memories, and a possible unravelling of our public defences. For me, the artist’s exploration of phallocentricism and gender relations makes her work so fecund. The couch, shimmering clitoral pink, reinforces the subterranean eroticism that inveigles the viewer subconsciously into a reverie of homeliness and creature comfort.

By re-drawing the landscape in the domestic, Horner may be valorising the domestic labour of women and the private sphere, whilst lamenting the fixation with large public erections, and the world dominated by masculine morays. However, it is the suggestibility, the multiplicity of readings which is a feature of her work. The pieces are contemplative and interrogative. New puzzlement can be found in each panel, as intricate detail takes on new connotations.

Although her technical proficiency is admirable, it is on the conceptual plane where the artist generates her font of ideas and inspires paradigmatic shifts in the viewer. Recasting the traditional paradigm, where the male is in the ascendency and female is subordinate and an object of sexual desire, also could be seen as a critique of marriage, domesticity and female subservience to ‘the monumental’. "

The background to this is the wallpaper itself, which features both monuments as a repeating motif. This is where the monumental and the quotidian meet, as if each is jostling for the viewers’ attention, a complex interplay of the familiar and the erotic. The pyramidal column, like a tumescent penis, (or worse, the impersonality of a marble dildo), is juxtaposed against a softer archway, uterine or cervical in nature; an unmistakeable feminine form, the undulating surface perhaps a labial imitation. There is opining dialogue between the two articles, a process of inquisition and re-positioning.

Trevor Landers

1. new art, Some recent New Zealand sculpture and post-object art, edited by Jim Allen & Wystan Curnow, Plb Heineman (1974) www.imageandtext.org.nz

		Maree Horner 1998-2002 1970s 1995-1996 2003-2004 2005-2006 2007-2008 2009-2010
	Monumental obsessions
	couch box bags case fireplace sheets chairs door book bath	Exhibited at Bath Street Gallery, Parnell, Auckland www.bathstreetgallery.co.nz 1st December - 18th December 2004 This show consisted of mixed media paintings from the Monumental obsessions and Eternal measures series couch & bath 2360 mm x 1360 mm; box, bags, fireplace, case & sheets 1150 mm x 1360 mm chairs & door 1840 mm x 1230 mm; book 300 mm x 420 mm Eternal measures 1080 mm x 880 mm Close your eyes for a moment. Now with your mind’s eye, try to capture images of some key objects in your home environment that speak volumes about the most fundamental functions of that space – be it social interaction, the unfolding of relationships, the caring for and sharing with others, the exploration of self. The domestic environment is potentially a space for some of the most challenging experiences in our entire lives. It is here we can encounter powerful emotions wrapped up in the complexities of relationships and human endeavour. The objects at the core of this intensity, those items of furniture or utensils that you might now be thinking of, are often those embroiled in the most social or the most mundane of activities: a living room couch, the open fire, the clothes line, beds, the bath, the dining table, the laundry buckets and everyday kitchen items. Now remove the myriad of emotions surrounding these objects. Consider them instead for their potential symbolic nature, for what they can, in turn, tell you about a world far beyond their domestic context. This is the world that Maree Horner is interested in, a world where the artist demands that the domestic objects she paints tackle a bigger job than that dictated by their obvious daily functions. They must work hard to create new and potent associations, indeed to challenge and provoke. As writer Roger Peters has said, “The whole weight of culture might, in the end, find its denouement in relation to a piece of furniture.” Not every object is up to the job but by using selected ones from around her home as her primary visual imagery, Horner principally explores the nature of the relationship between the feminine and the masculine, between the mind and the body, between eroticism and fantasy. She deals with the internal and the external, the unspoken and the articulate, the provocative and the familiar. A cardboard box, painted fleshy pink, could be read in feminine, nurturing terms, for example, while it can also be seen as an element in a still life composition. (The same can be said for her buckets, jugs and pots.) It can also operate as a monumental landscape element, taking on architectural forms and dictating the equation between space, form, volume and scale. In another example, the couch is a strong metaphor with direct human associations – it also has arms, legs, a back and spine but the shadows and crumpled cushions also create a new landscape within its folds. The mixing up of scale serves to undermine existing power structures symbolically inherent in objects such as monumental marble archways and erect columns and to establish new, more meaningful ones. Horner paints each central object at a life size scale. Her passion for minimalist sculptural installation brings an aesthetic here of a pared down, controlled environment where the viewer’s body, placed in front of the life size objects, instinctively reacts as if standing before a three dimensional scene. You can, in fact, measure yourself in relation to the objects in front of you – like a fireplace or doorway – and therefore in relation to the internal dialogue of the works.Taking these three key genres, the associations to body, the interest in still life constructions and the manipulation of internal and external landscapes, Horner dislocates the objects she paints and re-contextualises them, often with theatrical effect, so they become players in an uneasy socio-cultural debate Sue Gardiner BACK TO THE TOP Monumental obsessions - wallpaper cameo project - tetuhu-the mark, Manukau www.tetuhi.org.nz 6th March - 12th April 2004 mixed media on building paper - 6000mm x 120mm The archaeology of the ideas in this work can be traced back to much earlier works and series. ’The Chair’ (1974) could be said to be the concept godparent of this work, for it too was a work which dealt with a familiar object, and had radicalising features which opened up new spaces for contemplation. In that case it was caused by enmeshing and electrification; a bitter commentary on the anomie and stifling indifference of the era. However ‘The Chair’ lacked the tropes of modernist monumentalism which have become a leitmotiv of Horner’s subsequent work. (1) The Monumental Obsessions series features renderings of articles of domesticity such as boxes, sheets, bags, suitcases and a couch at life size with addition of diminutized monuments; disassembled archways and pyramidal columns. At first glance, Horner’s work appeals simplistic, perhaps even banal and the product of arcane aggrandizement, but this impression is an entirely false one. Intertextually, the works create a hubbub of conversation, highlighting the frisson between mind and body, the erotic, the corporeal and the cerebral. Her work has a decided architectural quality. Her detail lines are illuminating, and deeply subversive. The real subversive quality however lies in the rendering of the various images in contrapuntal connection, creating a landscape which fetishes the monumental and eroticizes the familiar; the notes playing harmony and discordance. The pictorial incongruity belies a sardonic fidelity. The pieces offer tantalising glimpses of alterior space; what is not revealed is just as powerful as what is. (2) Wallpaper, a work on a grand scale, continues this approach. The ‘characters’, a couch, a lampshade, and a pyramidal column and an archway seem burlesque but it is the dialogue between which is intriguing. As a backdrop to this milieu, the wallpaper backing is culled from the hatches, matches, and despatches’ columns of The New Zealand Herald. Moments of joy, grief and celebration become the background, seemingly inconsequential, but anything but. Life affirming, the wallpaper reminds of how glibly we live our individual lives, and how the cycle of life is ever present but sometimes barely detectable. The works materiality and its particular action through time have necessarily been elided. The life size couch is a kind of inversion. It looks monumental, dwarfing the more monumental structures that march towards the doorway. The couch appears as a benign object, but it is the principle auteur. Its size enables the work to induce in us a sense of familiarity, a sense of immediacy, an appeal to our nostalgic memories, and a possible unravelling of our public defences. For me, the artist’s exploration of phallocentricism and gender relations makes her work so fecund. The couch, shimmering clitoral pink, reinforces the subterranean eroticism that inveigles the viewer subconsciously into a reverie of homeliness and creature comfort. By re-drawing the landscape in the domestic, Horner may be valorising the domestic labour of women and the private sphere, whilst lamenting the fixation with large public erections, and the world dominated by masculine morays. However, it is the suggestibility, the multiplicity of readings which is a feature of her work. The pieces are contemplative and interrogative. New puzzlement can be found in each panel, as intricate detail takes on new connotations. Although her technical proficiency is admirable, it is on the conceptual plane where the artist generates her font of ideas and inspires paradigmatic shifts in the viewer. Recasting the traditional paradigm, where the male is in the ascendency and female is subordinate and an object of sexual desire, also could be seen as a critique of marriage, domesticity and female subservience to ‘the monumental’. " The background to this is the wallpaper itself, which features both monuments as a repeating motif. This is where the monumental and the quotidian meet, as if each is jostling for the viewers’ attention, a complex interplay of the familiar and the erotic. The pyramidal column, like a tumescent penis, (or worse, the impersonality of a marble dildo), is juxtaposed against a softer archway, uterine or cervical in nature; an unmistakeable feminine form, the undulating surface perhaps a labial imitation. There is opining dialogue between the two articles, a process of inquisition and re-positioning. Trevor Landers 1. new art, Some recent New Zealand sculpture and post-object art, edited by Jim Allen & Wystan Curnow, Plb Heineman (1974) www.imageandtext.org.nz 2. Trevor Landers, ‘Monumental Obsessions’, Vibe, issue 7, (2003).
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