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Catalogue Essay by Tim Griffin,
2003
Artificiality has a beautiful history behind it. More than a century
ago, Baudelaire praised cosmetics, saying that they enabled people
to approach divine immortality,making skin more like porcelain
and complexions more like marble-evoking sensibilities not belonging
strictly to this Earth. Oscar Wilde soon followed, saying that
art should be unnatural, since the best art changes the way people
observe nature: Only after Corot and Constable were people able
to recognize certain aspects of the world; even the fog in London
was invisible until the Impressionists painted it. Yet, closer
to our time, the idea of artificiality has been met more critically.
In the 1980s, Baudrillard confronted the magic kingdoms of global
capitalism,amusement parks of media culture that are totally virtual
realms, existing independent of physical reality. And now, Zizek
quotes novelist Christopher Isherwood, who once said-well before
the inception of postmodernism-that Americans love to live as
if they were dwelling within their advertisements. Any contemporary
intrusion upon their intoxicated state belongs, Zizek asserts,
to Òthe desert of the real.Ó
In the work of Michael Phelan, that relationship between real
and unreal seems more resolved. Maybe itÕs because, after all,
Phelan is an American artist. Artificial places actually exist
as a part of the nature around him; they have a material ground
and emotive force which must be acknowledged. And, more than simply
being observed, these places may be remade through art in a way
that absorbs the criticality of Baudrillard and Zizek without
abandoning the beauty of Baudelaire and Wilde.
Phelan was born in 1970 and grew up among the middle class towns
outside of Houston, Texas. These were the sorts of places that
hosted the descendents of Dan GrahamÕs suburbia: Overtly artificial,
uninterrupted repetitions of tract housing had given way there
to perfectly manicured lawns and winding roads, and model homes
with slight permutations among them. Nature here was not eliminated,
masked or opposed. It wasnÕt even duplicated (not in the way that,
say, Central Park was designed to have an untouched, natural ÒlookÓ).
Rather, nature was packaged, sent away for, or prefabricated en
masse.
Today, we recognize this phenomenon as one of the early signs
of an ethereal kind of commodity, in which product dissolved into
the very landscape, and even into the simple, intimate act of
living itself-selling itself as lifestyle. (Appropriately enough,
logos also eventually gave way to human beings like Martha Stewart
and Oprah Winfrey.) And it is the ephemeral substance of this
real, psycho- social landscape that Phelan continually remodels
as sculpture. ÒBut not as any kind of cultural reportage,Óhe says.
ÒIÕm improving upon it, and using its materials to create new
constellations of it.Ó
Some of PhelanÕs earliest works were simple reconfigurations of
the do-it-yourself backyard deck and furniture arrangements that
pervaded the world of his Texas youth. Taking the objectsÕ instantly
recognizable structures and grains-usually they are made of recycled
plastics that, endowed with their own brand of immortality, never
warp or fade-he set them apart from their vernacular context and
function. In effect, he took household settings out of the real-life
advertisements of Isherwood’s
Americans and, in so doing, distilled the impulse behind their
original creation. Their aura of a suburban
comfort zone suddenly stood by itself, transformed into something
vaguely unfamiliar.
Probably this uncanny effect is displayed most powerfully by Phelan’s
sculpture of a taxidermied golden
retriever curled up on a shag rug. As one looks at the canine,
it continually slips between seeming
dead and alive, artificial and actual, decorative and functional:
something impossible to categorize, a
prop that no longer belongs to its stage. (One thinks of Huysman’s
bejewelled turtle in Against
Nature remade for an age of mall-strip pet stores.) For Phelan,
objects that typically blend seamlessly
into the field of suburban experience are often isolated as figures
of an idealized, floating world.
In a sense, such pieces are microcosms of culture that one may
watch unfold at length. In fact,
Phelan’s signature works feature stacked aquarium and terrarium
vitrines that contain miniaturized,
faux-natural environments composed of epoxy, plastic and foam
injection. While organized in grids
that evoke both painting and the architecture of Graham’s
later Modernist houses (not to mention
Legos and other playpen building blocks), they appear in both
numbers and variation: While reproducing
themselves like so many images, each receptacle is also somehow
unique. Glass tanks arranged
together may all feature replicas of wood or white coral amid
gravel, but each branch and stone
will point in a different direction. Phelan calls one such work
Diamonds Are Forever, a title which was
inspired by a De Beers diamond advertisement. It is as if Phelan,
having crystallized the artificial environment that exists all
around him, goes on to turn the crystal of culture for the consumer-showing
all of the stone’s reflections to his audience at once,
reanimating the advertisement’s sublime concept
by detaching it from its ground, leaving it exposed in an artistic,
aesthetic light.
Still, Phelan’s sublime is always mined out of the ordinary.
Whatever its otherworldly value, the
organization of his sculptures often arises from research done
on such Internet sites as Fountains of
Tranquility, or in such Barnes and Nobles best-sellers as Feng
Shui for Dummies. Indeed, Phelan’s
work, ultimately, applies a corollary of the Zen garden principle
of ma-which is Japanese for “interval,”
and pertains to a kind of placement of rocks in sand that is based
as much on the composition
of the rocks themselves as on spaces between the rocks. Similarly,
Phelan’s sculptural objects navigates
intervals in the aesthetic space of culture, and offers a kind
of American Zen in which the
worlds of natural and artificial, real and unreal, may exist without
contradiction.
—Tim Griffin
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