Review / Aldo Iacobelli: A Conversation with Jheronimus

In South Australian-based artist Aldo Iacabelli’s exhibition of new works, A Conversation with Jheronimus, the artist engages in an imaginative response to the work of the early Renaissance Dutch painter Jheronimus Bosch, and in particular one of the artist’s final works, The Haywain triptych (1512-1515).

Bosch cast aside artistic conventions of the time to develop a highly personal pictorial style that was characterised by formal and iconographic invention. He was recognised in his lifetime for his idiosyncratic and macabre vision and has continued to influence artists from the Surrealists to contemporary artists such as the British Chapman Brothers.

Iacobelli, now in his 60s, has over four decades of artmaking experience. He trained as an artist in the 70s and 80s and his approach to artmaking has been shaped by the methodology and principals of conceptual art. His practice is guided by a set of concerns including, but not limited to, contemporary politics, art history, popular culture and as a Catholic, working-class migrant from Naples, Italy to Australia at the age of sixteen, an ongoing investigation into place, culture and artistic traditions. In South Australia Iacobelli has exhibited for close to thirty years as both a solo artist and in group exhibitions in a myriad of visual art institutions but linked closely the Experimental Art Foundation (1974-2016) and the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (1942-2016), both important organisations to the contemporary art scene in Adelaide.

Iacobelli, a regular visitor and occasional resident of Spain, and where he has exhibited on and off since the mid noughties, has had a long-standing fascination with Bosch, nurtured through repeat visits to the Museo del Prado, where many of Bosch’s paintings are housed. The museum’s major exhibition commemorating the 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death in 2016 brought Iacobelli into fresh contact with The Haywain.

Bosch’s moral preoccupation with human folly and sin: avarice, greed, aggression and lust are detailed in countless inventive ways through symbols and metaphors that combine fantastic and diabolic creatures with observation of daily life – in The Haywain it includes a dentist inspecting a mouth, and a mother washing the bare bottom of a baby. In short, the comings and goings of a medieval Town Square; on which Bosch himself, not un-coincidently, lived.

What does it mean for an artist to engage in a conversation with another across time? English painter Francis Bacon’s study of European painters Velazquez, Titian and Rembrandt and response is characterised by a dismantling of the spatial plane; Cindy Sherman’s photographic history portraits, in which she reimagines herself as the subject, are a means of exploring the nature of representation. What then is the nature of Iacobelli’s exchange with the artist Jheronimus Bosch? What does he bring? What does he take?

From the gallery entrance at the Anne and Gordan Samstag Museum, and even without engaging with individual works, one is struck by the sense of confidence and purposeful curiosity that animates the exhibition.

Dominating the space in centre of the gallery is an imposingly scaled wooden cart measuring over three meters high and six meters long and neatly stacked with hay-bails.

On the floor and in proximity to the cart, more than a dozen small trolleys – each individually assembled and in different sizes offer a range of objects for us to scrutinise: a fish head, a cage, a water colour of musicians here, a painting of a flower over there, feet, a frog, a conical hat, a collection of vegetables. These have been realised by Iacobelli in a range of idioms; from found objects to sculpture and works on paper, traversing the symbolic and the representational. Even without strong familiarity with Bosch’s work it’s possible to detect his symbols and metaphors in conversation with Iacobelli’s own perspectives. A watercolour of a musician bent over his double bass, for instance, evokes the experience of the town square.

From a distance Iacobelli’s neatly and smoothly constructed haywain has the fantastic surrealistic quality of an apparition, or an unspoiled toy. It’s the first of several surreal touches, or symbols, that mirror Bosch’s own pictorial strategies. Step closer and The Cart’s sheer volume of hay – tufty, golden straw – fills your field of vision. Something about the insistent materiality of the work and its rich sensory associations with agriculture, rural and peasant life achieves a strangely intoxicating effect.

The artist utilises the immersive effects of scale elsewhere in the exhibition. In Triptych, a series of three large-scale works made by pulping South Australia’s daily newspaper The Advertiser, muted sheets hang in the air off old butcher’s hooks. Certainly, this work can be viewed as a statement about the impermanence of political discourse: all those words, opinions, stories, photos turned into compost. With the hay bales a stone’s throw away, the work also underscores peasant wisdom: an unobscured familiarity with mortality, a turn of the wheel, the cycle of life.

In other works, such as a series of delicately rendered watercolours of human figures, Iacobelli engages in a critique of our government’s response to asylum seekers. Covered from head to ankle by a bucket, a lampshade, a swag or a conical hat, and titled with depersonalising numbers, these figures bring the comedic tragedy of Bosch’s vision to contemporary Australian politics. These paintings – and the presence of feet in the exhibition – carry a refrain from the pedlar from The Haywain’s closed triptych panel Pilgrimage of Life. As Pilar Silva Marato writes in his catalogue essay accompanying the del Prato exhibition “On the pilgrimage of his journey without destination, the direction of which is unknown to him, he has succeeded in avoiding the angers of the road and knows he must press on despite not knowing what may await him when he crosses the bridge”. 1

Iacobelli is a skilled draftsman, adroit at installation, sculpture, painting and works on paper. His fluency in regards to medium has a lightness to it, yet his art practice, and this exhibition in particular, is rooted in weighty, dense working materials: viscous glossy bitumen, bricks, wood, steel, linen and bronze. Of the range of moods that the exhibition traverses, it’s very strong on a state of anticipatory disquiet.

A roll of linen hung high off the ground to the right of the gallery entrance introduces a theatrical element. If it was to be unfurled, what would it reveal? Directly across the room Iacobelli’s painting The Cloud similarly presents a poetic constellation of objects – a boat, a large cloud, rain drops, and almost imperceptible ladders – suspended against an inky black field of colour. They relate to one another with the symbolic logic of a dream.

To the left of The Cloud, sits a bronze sculpture of Iacobelli’s head resting on a mobile plinth. Like the cart and the collection of trolleys at its feet, it too invites viewers to consider that its position may be temporary, as though the elements in the room might be called upon to migrate at a moment’s notice.

What are we to make of the expression on the face of Aldo Iacobelli’s wax sculpture? It carries no vanity. Rather with eyes and lips parted in surprise, shock or perhaps drawing breath, the life-size head conveys a degree of agitation. Far from Bosch’s Flemish town square of the 1500s Iacobelli observes the labours and failings of humankind from the vantage point of Adelaide. In this work, the artist engages most explicitly with Bosch the moralist, concerned with the actions of his fellow humans.

In Aldo Iacobelli: A  Conversation with Jheronimus the emotion is held and contained by the finely realised constellation of objects in the gallery space. Iacobelli’s own rich symbolic allusions simultaneously pay tribute to Bosch’s artistic and moral courage – his resolutely singular subjectivity that is inescapably modern in sensibility – while at the same time offering a paean to a pre-modern peasant way of life. This is the central tension and mysterious force that is contained by the large haywain and its companions on North Terrace until the end of the month.  

1. Pilar Silva Marato in Bosch: the fifth centenary exhibition, ed Pilar Silva Maroto , Museo Nacional del Prado, 2016, p. 283-284.

Aldo Iacobelli: A  Conversation with Jheronimus until Friday 31 August.

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Anne & GordonSamstag Museum of Art
Hawke Building, City West campus, University of South Australia, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide
(cnr Fenn Place and North Terrace)

Image: Aldo Iacobelli: A  Conversation with Jheronimus installation view. Photo: Sam Noonan
 
 

Our hearts that beat as one

I always undertake a period of reflection at this time of year. It's not exactly circled in the calendar, in fact it's largely an unconscious process. But I can roughly break it down into 'giving thanks' and 'getting sad', followed by a sense of gratitude. 

Giving Thanks. Picture me driving with the windows down handing out large Toblerone's and bottles of Moet to those on the fringes of my friendship circle that displayed generosity and kindness. This year it included a school mum with a home yoga studio who invited me to use the space as often as I liked and the excellent Nat Thomas, whose blog Natty Solo, a natural born investigator and agitator that has taken a blow torch to the gender inequities of artworld in true style.  

Just as I'm gearing up for Christmas Cheer and Getting Jolly, confusingly I find myself Getting Sad. This always takes me by surprise. I usually cotton on when I catch tears leaking down my face for no apparent reason. But this year there are reasons a-plenty to cry. The feature length film script that didn't make it into production -– only fourteen years of hopes and dreams in that 90 pages – now consigned to the metaphorical trash. And children who are properly unwell. 

This was a year when I stepped off the hamster wheel and into deep time or 'only being' in the parlance of wellness guru Elizabeth Lesser by way of Albert Einstein. Just being. There was no other way. 

It was a year in which I often felt isolated; bad times can be like that. Sharing problems felt like a risky proposition. For every friend who met my woes with an open heart there were just as many who looked at me with pity, glad that misfortune had not visited them. 

It was a year in which I became softer – and a year in which I toughened up. 

Once my tear ducts, the very ones that had put in touch with my feelings of disappointment and pain ran dry, I wandered into the living room where I found my man playing the bass guitar.

Thump, thump, thump. 

The sound was like a beating heart. My heart. His heart. Our hearts. 

Nocturnal Animals

Tom Ford’s second feature, the wonderfully named Nocturnal Animals, confirms him as a filmmaker interested in exploring interiority by paying close attention to the surface of things. Though I haven't revisited Ford's debut A Single Man since it screened seven years ago, I recall being struck by the beauty of its costumes (no surprise there), interiors and cinematography and Colin Firth's moving performance as a British widower in the grips of depression and suicidal ideation. The film's pedantic attention to mis-en-scene articulated not only a aesthetic sensitivity but also a compelling sense of interiority that deftly shifted between on the one hand a crushing melancholy and on the other, a kind of wonder.

In Nocturnal Animals, also an adaptation of a novel, Ford shifts his attention to a haunted American; in this film the tone is considerably darker. Amy Adams plays Susan Morrow, a successful but fragile gallery owner whose marriage to an emotionally unavailable alpha male is in difficulty. She receives a package in the mail from her first husband, the 'sensitive' Edward (Jake Gyllenhall), who Susan left in her mid-twenties because he could not fulfil her material ambitions. 

The arrival of the package, which contains a proof of his soon to be published novel, provokes a crisis in Susan. The film unfolds in noir fashion, as a film within a film, cutting between the present, the world of the novel and the past. 

The novel casts Susan and Edward as parents to a teenaged daughter on a road rip that ends in a run-in with a car load of hoons in the dead of night on stretch of lonely Texas road. I found viewing this sequence harrowing, not simply because it draws out the victimisation of its female characters but for the film's preoccupation with Edward's inability to protect his wife and daughter. In short, it calls into question his masculinity. When he is taunted by his adversary, he is called a vagina. The fictional scenario imagined by Edward is a masochistic reimagining of Susan's rejection of him. This is not a film in which anyone moves on, so to speak. Instead it seems to be in the thrall of the agony of loss, and where that leads. Nowhere healthy, is the short answer. Given the constraining ideas that the film exhibits in relation to gender – how it is felt, lived and performed by men and women – Nocturnal Animals makes an argument that the injured ego retreats to the symbolic. In its preoccupation of what it means to be a man, and by association a woman it feels strangely rigid and inflexible.  

At its most engaging Nocturnal Animals arranges the events of the novel, Susan's memories of the past and the demands of her present life to intersect in a fragmented reverie. But it's not without its oddities. Ford is a Romantic; he is very invested in Susan and Edward's first marriage and very hard on Susan for not believing more in Edward's promise. But is it cause for revenge? I had a hard time buying it. 

What Happens Now?

I spent each Saturday between the ages of 12 and 18 at the Vic Market. It was here that I discovered food pretty much, formed an idea of the person I might be when I grew up observing other shoppers while I waited with a second hand copy of a James Balwin novel in my hand, boxes of fruit and vegetables at my feet, for my parents to return with the car. 

For this very personal reason I'd been following the development of the City of Melbourne public art commission event, What Happens Now? closely.

In June the organisers were hosting a 10 day "lab" with the shortlisted 14 artists who had been whittled down from 150. The warehouse location at the edge of the Queen Victoria Market site was facilitated by a team spearheaded by Lab curator Natalie King, UK Public Art champion Claire Doherty and ideas man David Cross along with choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, historian Robyn Annear and artist Veronica Kent. This approach, designed to challenge existing approaches to commissioning public art, focused on engaging the artists in the stories, histories, materials and sounds of the Queen Victoria Market site by way of 'Triggers and Provocateurs'. If that sounds worrying, the artists I heard interviewed on RN's Books and Arts were surprisingly exhilarated. They obviously didn't mind having to dance for their supper.

Curators and arts bureaucrats like to talk about public art as 'activating' spaces, arguing that that artists and artwork contribute to creating new understandings and new ways of seeing. Those not familiar with the Vic Market might not appreciate how 'activated' it is by its everyday economic activity and exchange.  It is a vast sprawling collection of sheds, halls, stalls, stuff, smells and noise where produce, product and sellers exchange goods for money with the public. This is a place with a lot going on. Just ambling along, even without a shopping list, can be intense. What happens when you come across art in this context? I was curious to find out.

What Happens Now? largely features works by artists engaged in a practice that is participatory. Immediately this makes sense. Of course, it's a market.  

Hiromi Tango's textile work titled Wrapped that combines ideas about brain health and yarn into performance workshops that on the final day included musician Dylan Martorell and dancer Benjamin Hancock (on the day that I visited the work rested like a sleeping dragon on trestle tables), Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine's stop-motion animation screening amongst metal storage boxes while the artists recreate and sell market wares in miniature along side. And at Over Obelisk, a response to the John Batman monument by SIBLING, the duo have created a complex mobile hoarding that encases and frames the original monument in a variety of ways to 'reveal its contested histories'. 

I didn't get to everything. There was a wait for viewing and participating in the biennials most intriguing work, A Centre for Everything by Gabrielle de Vietri and Will Foster. This hands-on guided tour took the hand gestures and cultural codes used by stall holders to communicate with each other as its starting point. I was immediately drawn to the sight of drawings of hands pinned to a makeshift partition. It reminded me of the cartoon portraitists that plied their trade in the halls.

A bit tuckered out I passed Field Theory, a fruit box clad van broadcasting non-stop radio for 9000 minutes. No one was going home there. They were bunkered in for the duration of the biennial. Like kids on school camp they were pretty lively. By mimicking the colour and matching the noise level of its surroundings Field Theory worked on the principle of amplification. And it worked. I literally felt my mood lift.

Back in my car, I was glad to be out of the wind. I felt glad to have visited. I hadn't known it two hours earlier but quite possibly I was parked on an unmarked indigenous grave, a disturbing discovery thanks to Steven Rhall's subtle, formally complex work in M Shed. Why didn't I know that? It's easy to feel sceptical of the rhetoric of contemporary art and yet events like this can produce moments and insights like that. 

Image: Anna Zagala and Katrina Raymond viewing the sweet, sad Out In The Open by Isobel Knwles and Van Sowerwine. Photo by Bryony Jackson.

What Happens Now?
Public Art Melbourne Biennial Lab
17-23 October 2016
Queen Victoria Market

Michelle Nikou: aeiou

How is it that some exhibitions disarm you from the outset? Michelle Nikou’s survey exhibition, a e i o u, had this beguiling effect. Not familiar with the artist or her work, it was an encounter without preconceptions. Nikou’s unabashed curiosity for the world of objects, internal psychological states, alchemy and transformation was matched by my own. I wanted to know about her cultural background, age, life experience which is to say the work and exhibition intrigues, even possessing a surprising and unexpected quality.

No doubt this had something to do with the gallery space itself. The celebrated former home of John and Sunday Reed is a modern architectural masterpiece. As a repurposed gallery space it retains the structural qualities of a mid 20th century house: a combination of small rooms with garden outlooks, tight little corridors finishing in cul de sac spaces and an austere but light filled living room. Viewing artwork in this space is a different proposition to the model of the white cube space located next door and elsewhere. For a start it’s not possible to scan the room and get the exhibition’s measure. The experience is more like a series of close encounters. And while the building is not home-y by any stretch it’s nevertheless unmistakably domestic.

This seems important somehow since Nikou’s work draws on the inanimate objects from everyday life, though in Nikou’s multidisciplinary art practice the detritus of domestic life – food, food trays, laundry baskets, clothes, tissue boxes, spoons, buttons, and handkerchiefs – have been either literally recast or repurposed in ways that imbue them with a uncanny quality. 

Take three steps and you are literally upon a cabinet in which 13 spoons Spoons (2000) are arranged like crusty museum relics. Recast in lead they contain the shape of food stuffs, or is it cotton wool? Regardless, their arrangement possess a neat seriality totally at odds with their feralness.

Nearby a row of five cast cubed shapes reveal themselves, on close inspection, to be a series of propped up cast bronze tissue boxes Untitled (2001). The boxes perforated lids are similarly recast and appear framed like matching puzzle pieces.

This work, like many others in the exhibition, engages in juxtaposition: domestic and industrial idioms say, in which a laundry basket is interwoven with neon, or the material, reimagining something disposable such as a cardboard tissue box as a durable metal object. The juxtaposition contains a tremulous emotion, grief, sadness, melancholy. 

Pop art and its interest in popular and consumer culture, as well as Surrealism, the avant-garde movement which sought to uncover the irrational and unconscious mind, hover at the edges of Nikou’s work. But its seriocomic quality, its oftentimes pared back monochromatic palette, and its existential longing – seems very rooted in a middle-European tradition.

Objects, letter forms and faces, appear and reappear in Nikou’s practice in a kind of personal symbology that imbues them with a unsettling psychology. Eggs, for instance, appear in different iterations: cracked and dripping as sculptures mounted to the wall and whole as an photographic element in an etching elsewhere. While it’s tempting to read into them metaphoric meaning – say about the origins of life for instance – the prevalence of food (and food containers) situates the work, on the one hand, in a more prosaic realm and on the other hand in a broader discourse around consumption, issues of sustainability and humanity’s capacity for survival. None of this struck me until much later.

Last week in Heide II I was simply wowed by Nikou’s technical and conceptual flair and strangely enthralled by her capacity to convey feeling through materials, and the artworks ability to capture – though how I’m not even certain – some essential quality of time, the expanding and contracting duration of life, no less.

Michelle Nikou - aeiou
23 April - 28 August 2016
Heide Museum of Modern Art,  7 Templestowe Rd, Victoria 3105 

Image: Christian Capurro. Read an edited version on the Artlink website.