The Dunedin sculptor's exhibition, on now, sends a message about consumption with its customised "gym equipment".
Lower than Low Rider and a Sidecar Named Desire, photo/Simon Higgs
What is sculpture but a form of body-consciousness? Jane Venis takes this idea to its logical extreme in her exhibition Gymnauseum, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, with its display of customised “gym equipment”, relentless jazzercise surround-sound, and strident claims about an “exercise-free, diet-free, guilt-free” way to obtain a “firm-toned six-pack”, which was broadcast from the tinny speakers of a tiny computer screen. Here, the cult of physical fitness, as promoted through the hyperbole of TV informercials, is examined by an artist with subversion of the notions of “consumption” and “leisure” on her mind.
As the bemused spectator wandering into the space of the installation, you become the recipient, from the artist herself as motivational trainer on the computer screen, of a revved-up sales pitch, delivered as if to your inner couch kumara dug in at midnight amid greasy junk-food containers and unable to roll over and hit the off-switch.
And then there are the low-rider exercycles – interactive; you can get on and pedal – with their apehanger handlebars decorated with narcissistic wing mirrors, as well as a small silvery sidecar contraption with a fur-lined interior. There are also lifting weights on a black rubber workout mat, where the injunction to “pump iron” is demonstrated by a dumb-bell made from two clothes-irons.
The presence of spikes in this object functions as a homage to Man Ray’s Gift (1921), while the fur in the Sidecar Named Desire is an “appropriation” borrowed from Meret Oppenheim’s Fur-Covered Cup, Saucer and Spoon (1936).
So, then, the exhibition pays obeisance to Surrealism’s “crisis of the object” – the dream-object that expresses the anxieties of the machine age, by way of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, and the intentionally irritating kinetic artworks of Bruce Nauman.
Moving into the 21st century – the 20th century’s futuristic consumer paradise – Venis turns the indoctrination of advertising’s promises into a kind of perverse farce, where a black vinyl exercise bag studded with shiny metal spikes makes the sports-jock catchphrase “punishing routines” literal, and the kids’ bikes refashioned into body-perfecting equipment point to the infantilisation of “the idealised body image”. The polished extended forks of her low-rider cycles, and the chromed, bullet-nosed shape of her sidecar – a turbojet toboggan – also offer a send-up of must-have industrial chic.
Toys and playthings, pain and pleasure, sadism and masochism: the tyranny of compulsive consumption as seen on TV – all ultimately leading to boredom – are made a mockery of by Venis’s humouresque machismo. Her actors – male and female – fling their girth at plastic grids suspended from bungee cords, and recite the slogans and maxims of the gratified consumer. Gymnauseum offers the skew-whiff version of contemporary mass-production, where, bedevilled by postmodern design imperatives, form pretends to follow function, where gym accessories have to create a state-of-the-art impression, where a kind of camp aesthetic rules and where counter-iconographies drawn from the language of science fiction movies and elsewhere have produced quirky craft forms such as steampunk and chindogu: comically repurposed obsolescent industrial objects.
In producing kitsch ornamental sculpture with a satirical intention, Venis confirms the emergence, over the past decade, of a sculptural group busy exploring capitalist realism’s depictions of generic and stereotypical consumers. This group or movement is linked to the Otago Polytechnic School of Art, and includes sculptors Michele Beevors, Scott Eady, Inez Crawford and Rachel Rakena. Rachel Rakena’s Haka Peep Show (2011), which had been installed in the lower Octagon for the duration of the Rugby World Cup, offered a giant black aerosol can (like that featured in a TV campaign featuring an All Black with a brand of deodorant) as a pou or Maori territorial post (and also, of course, reminiscent of a phallic totem). Into the sides of this slinky object niches had been cut to allow passers-by the peep-show opportunity to view four haka performed by contemporary Maori celebrities. Among the glut of promotional artworks for the RWC, this was the best example going of the sublimated polymorphous perversity that is the intersection of sport and commodified idealism.
GYMNAUSEUM, by Jane Venis, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, until December 15.