Aishla Manning | Soft Verges
In 2015, performing live in Seattle, stand-up comedian Tig Notaro ditched her planned set for several minutes of inexplicably funny impromptu prop comedy. Slightly moving a stool onstage, the strange noise produced made the audience collectively laugh. “So I just kept pushing the stool, and they kept laughing…So I just kept pushing the stool, and they stopped laughing…So I kept pushing the stool, and they started laughing again…And it just kept going like that for a while.”1
It is similarly difficult to articulate precisely why and how the humour works in Aishla Manning’s art. Something is hard to reconcile. Some things are literally hard: bricks, graters, a fork, wooden poles, rigid plastic, the metal of a kettle. Others are soft: underwear, rubber gloves, balloons, a cooked sweet potato, indeterminate goop. Often a sensually anthropomorphic creation strokes a familiar home appliance, or vice versa. Sometimes existing tools are taped together to make impractical inventions, or useless versions of ordinary objects are constructed out of flimsier materials, ridiculously not to-scale.
This stuff is deliberately disparate, suggestive of various sensations and connotations when brought together within the unremarkable domestic/urban spaces of Manning’s videos and occasional exhibiting of objects. Traces of minimalist art historical lineages and the whiff of industry or the inorganic meet with the intimate, the eaten, the everyday, the amorphous. Contact occurs through repetitive movements with no clear purpose: bouncing, lifting, falling, stroking, smacking, scraping, puncturing, grating, rolling into, tugging at…Manning likes to keep shifting the stool around. These repeated, even ritualistic, motions harness chance, but are not robotic or random. Controlled by the artist’s hands just out of frame, they appear animate, and as a result seem to express frustration, desire, and exhaustion – especially where there is a lack, or loss, of comportment (or the promise of this loss) entailed in objects falling, slipping, and otherwise yielding to gravity or missing the mark.
These are encounters between spaces, objects, and materials in which the human body becomes paradoxical, everywhere and nowhere, particularly through this study of comportment via non-human actors. Comportment is about social observation and self-policing. It encompasses gesture and posture, how one routinely holds and moves ones’ body in space and in relation to other bodies, objects, and materials, including tools, clothing, furniture, architecture etc. Somewhat like the movements of Notaro’s stool and Manning’s objects, elements of comportment are (must be) repeated over and over. This necessity entails tension in the “subtle ruse of power”: the ever-present threat, or guarantee, of inevitable faltering, of “trouble”2. The bodies of the audience watch and listen. The body on-stage moves. This is not the script. For a moment there is silence…
A failure of comportment or its deliberate subversion troubles norms, produces anxiety, threatens order. This can incite punishment, but when framed or contextualised as unthreatening, it can also be deeply funny, especially when this ‘bit’ involves repetition: the slapstick of Charlie Chaplin; the verging-on-horrific accidents on Funniest Home Videos; Eddie Murphy as the Nutty Professor; the unguarded female bodies on Lena Dunham’s Girls. Like these onscreen bodies, Manning’s objects are ‘set up’ to fail, to look awkward, come a cropper, fudge their landing, run in place. They have a touch of the brazen air of a stunt man manoeuvring towards organised disaster, but the more quotidian clutz of TV infomercials is there too, in the domestic materials and spaces, Manning’s
entrepreneurial constructions, minor challenges theatrically presented, and an implied exasperation at the barely confined chaos of everyday life. So I just kept pushing the stool, and they kept laughing…
Manning’s pathetic Sisyphean motions both playfully produce or locate absurdity in the everyday, and hold a mirror to this part of the absurdity of every day, filled with the promised rewards and repercussions of maintaining composure in various socio-culturally enforced roles as a hard worker, a healthy and desirable body, a happy psychological subject, a binary gender, among others. In pursuit of “that moral-intimate-economic thing called “the good life””, sooner or later we are bound to flail/fail.3 We, like Manning’s objects, have been set up. This is the darker edge of Manning’s love of repetition, and the chaos and absurdity it wreaks. Repetition can be a comedic device, but in this light it can also be disturbing. It can signify an absence of freedom, of possibility, of alternatives. A sign of things gone wrong, of breakdown, of madness. Repetition itself, in the creation and reinforming of beliefs and expectations, can be a more effective mechanism for control than physical violence. So I just kept pushing the stool, and they stopped laughing…
This tension is apparent but expanded in new ways in Soft Verges, which mingles gestures of intimacy and cruelty. This exhibition emerges through a collaboration between Clutch Collective and another Brisbane-based Artist-Run-Initiative, Outer Space. The videos are projected via the former’s truck, in the loading zone and interior of the latter’s small concrete brick building, a University studio-cum-covert ARI. In these videos a non-descript moving truck meets the body-like stunt doubles of a pillow and its flimsy doppelganger, a pillowcase filled with ambiguous ooze. In one, Manning carefully drives the truck over the pillow in a carpark, slowly circles around to face it from the other direction, and repeats this vaguely violent, almost devoted, metaphorical murder. The pillow, momentarily flattened, springs back quietly to its original shape bearing only a faint tyre mark. In the other, we see a more close-up (money shot?) view of the fluid-filled case bursting under the weight of the slowly rolling truck wheel. With some confusion perhaps, we watch this version shift shape under the pressure, before a white liquid spurts out, pooling somewhat unspectacularly but beautifully incongruent to the solid black tyre and concrete bitumen.
In some ways we’ve shifted mythical scripts here, from the self-induced perpetual punishment of Sisyphus to the unpredictable struggle between David and Goliath. Manning has used the Clutch truck – the interior of which is an alternate version of, or stand-in for, the space of a more conventional gallery - not as a final destination for her finished work as we might expect, but the essential driver of her experimentation and key component of the outcomes in which we see it ‘dominating’ more vulnerable objects. As in Manning’s broader practice, these seemingly pointless interactions speak to absurdity and failure in everyday life, particularly as the truck and accompanying objects come laden with associations that proliferate on contact with each other and these spaces, such as travel, transit, limbo, gender, fatigue, private and public realms, imitation, abjection, agency, and power.
They also exist as a metaphor for the process by which the site of exhibition shapes the artwork, something that happens more and less consciously for contemporary artists seeking an audience. Crushing pressure, stifling rule-maker, caring devotee, force to creatively bounce back against, catalyst for messy, unpredictable outcomes – amidst other layers of signification, Soft Verges reflects the varied, complex, and unstable relationship between spaces of art exhibition and the living bodies of artists. By virtue of existing perhapsnot quite in opposition to, but nonetheless beyond the border of, the more established institutional realm, ARIs too have a varied
relationship in this way. They are at the same time spaces of potential. Like the truck’s parked position in Outer Space’s industrial building, they can work as a ‘loading bay’ for emerging artists seeking the endorsement of more powerful or professional institutions. They can mimic these same institutions and/or initiate a break in the repetition of their conventions, a temporary hijacking of their spaces, a “loss of memory” regarding their criteria for inclusion, a deliberate ‘failure of comportment’ in terms of orthodox display. In theory at least, they promise a “moving sideways” with regard to the limitations of the wider art world.4
Verge means variously: to be very close or similar to; an extreme limit beyond which something specified will happen; an edge or border.5 Manning’s works, like the ARIs collaborating to present them, at the very least verge on or share the border with more traditional or grandiose forms of success within the realm of art making and display. They are self-conscious and deliberate in their ‘failures’. Nonetheless, they offer a degree of breathing room, space to look around, a loosening of the grip of the expectations that shape the way we live, work, move through space, structure time, as well as think about, value, and ‘do’ art. In this sense, Soft Verges evokes the co-opted-for-capitalism Ralph Waldo Emerson misquote, “success is a journey, not a destination”. As in all Manning’s works, things move repetitively, uselessly, on a journey towards collapse, anticlimax or stasis, but it’s not always predictable how. Objects verging on identical in appearance react differently to force, thus achieving different outcomes. Body stand-ins as always, they are alternately resilient, or yield and become fluid, but nowhere are there obvious winners and losers. There is no clear or easily occupied oppositional position to ‘success’ as a human being living in the present moment either, nor as an artist that wants an audience, nor as an art space that wants to make something happen. The show/s must go on. So then, if this kind of trouble is inevitable, “how best to make it, what best way to be in it?”.6
The interactions of Manning’s objects in the spaces of this exhibition suggest we could attempt to traverse the present as they do: with strangeness, via unexpected exchanges, with a lack of purpose, by circling back, trying something else, going nowhere…And it just kept going like that for a while…Perhaps awkwardly moving the stool is the point, a repetitive act made meaningless and meaningful through it’s conscious undertaking. In this there is the makings of a strategy for approaching the verge and softening it, to allow for unspecified experiences and outcomes.
1. Daily Motion 2015, Tig Notaro – Stool Movement [Online Video], https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2z1veq_tig-notaro-stool-movement_fun Accessed: 24 May 2017.
2. Butler, J 2006, Gender Trouble, Routledge, New York.
3. Berlant, L 2011,, Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, Durhamp.
4. Haberstam, J 2011, The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press, Durhamp. 5. “verge.” Merriam-Webster.com 2017. www.merriam-webster.com Accessed: 24 May 2017.
6. Butler, J 2006, Gender Trouble, Routledge, New York.
