Dancing Umbrellas: An Exhibition of Movement and Light
‘Objects are people … living things whose language and gestures have to be discovered’, wrote Dadaist artist and filmmaker Han Richter.1 His short film Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927–28)2 vividly portrays this idea, with scenes of misbehaving objects engaged in rebellion against their dull morning routine—cups and saucers smash to the ground, a bowtie escapes from its wearer’s neck, and an errant garden hose spontaneously unwinds, spurting water at three flying bowler hats whose owners have been caught off-guard. Following Richter’s prompt in this film, it is not difficult to entertain the otherwise improbable notion of umbrellas dancing and twirling of their own volition, in wilful defiance of their intended function.
In this exhibition, Belle Bassin conjures such a flight-of-fancy, in her video installation It's Easier to Look At Your Skin (2013), a work that draws inspiration from André Breton’s surrealist notion of ‘dream objects’ and animist ideas about objects as living entities. Enigmatic yet lucid, the projected video sequences unfold across two screens. In one, a bouquet of colourful umbrellas with two human legs meanders through the subterranean walkways of the Paris Metro then ascends by escalator to the night-time streets above. Passers-by stare at this odd sight, but the figure presses on with an air of perfect normality. On the screen opposite, the same umbrellas hover untethered for several moments above the pavement in a Parisian square, before lowering slowly towards the ground, then breaking free and flying into the air.
This work inspired the title Dancing Umbrellas: An Exhibition of Movement and Light and was the starting point for an intuitive process of bringing together works by nineteen contemporary artists, including two artist collaborations. The fanciful leitmotif of dancing umbrellas introduces the exhibition’s broader performative and theatrical themes, and suggests the playful and surreal nature of many of the works displayed. Movement, light and performance are used by the artists in a variety of ways in paintings and sculptures, kinetic and light works, videos and GIFs, which together create a colourful and immersive environment. Here viewers may encounter all manner of unlikely and marvellous things including: an image of two children skipping across the glistening surface of a cocktail drink, a singing eye that holds a microphone; a skyscraper with legs, a painting of a blazing sun that spurts white heat, and a sculpture of a black sun which appears to melt and ooze.
In creating their imaginative worlds, the selected artists draw on cultural artefacts and concepts as diverse as a surrealist play by Picasso, 1960s counterculture, electric mandalas, the selfie as a new form of self-portraiture, and cinematic ideas of the contemporary sublime. Some works imbue ordinary objects with a sense of the wondrous and strange by harnessing the inherent effects of optical phenomena. In Rebecca Baumann’s Reflected Glory IV (2016), foil and shiny papers burst into myriad colourful reflections when spotlit, while in Taree Mackenzie’s Slinky Live Feed (2011) a coiled spring toy is transformed into a pulsating projection that exploits the seemingly magical effects of mixing coloured light. James Lynch animates two rainbow-hued umbrellas by making them revolve in his whimsical sculpture Umbrellascope (2008), a work partly inspired by obscure pre-cinematic optical devices, such as magic lanterns and anorthoscopes.
Several artists borrow ideas from theatre, presenting paintings and sculptures that function also as backdrops, costumes and props for performance. Peter Cripps’ works were part of his experimental play City Life (1981), ‘a play for no actors, a play for objects’, as he described it at the time, which looked for inspiration to early surrealist theatre, while Damiano Bertoli’s belong to an ongoing project Continuous Moment: Le Desir (2010–2016), which brings together details from an absurdist play written by Pablo Picasso in 1941, and its subsequent performances in 1944 and 1967. Justene Williams draws on aspects of Futurist theatre in her handmade costumes and sets for her video Radium Girls—Fan Fingernails (2014) and in her concertina-shaped sculpture Fan House (2016), which during the exhibition will be the site of a dance performance accompanied by music played on a squeeze-box. Briony Galligan uses colourful fabric and objects in She Imagines a City (2016), to evoke a theatrical setting within which two singers improvise an intimate exchange, while Michelle Ussher looks to a more structured musical form in Song of Two Eyeballs (2014), a surreal ten-minute opera performed by two singers who embody the psyche of her porcelain sculptures Camille (2014) and Ugo (2014). In their video Neon (2008), Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano perform a kind of dance using as a prop a vibrant chequered cloth made from paper, which, when animated by their movements, imparts a sense of weightlessness and fluidity.
In the kinetic and optical works in the exhibition the abstract elements of colour and light dance in ways that are redolent with meaning. Giles Ryder’s electric mandalas meld this sacred form of religious ornamentation with animated designs made using LED lights that would be appropriate to the fast-paced context of a nightclub, while Alexander Knox’s slow moving light sequences in 5.19 (2008) combine minimalist aesthetics with ideas of the sublime. Both Dale Frank and Leslie Eastman use mirrored surfaces, so that viewers become protagonists in their works. With two mink coats hanging from its corners, Franks’ painting The Jiff and The Jiffy (2015) lends luxury to the viewer’s image in a gleaming orange-tinted Perspex surface which bathes it in tangerine-hues. By contrast, in Eastman’s revolving mobile For the Time Being (2012), their reflectiona are split into faceted parts by the work’s structure of outwardly fanning concentric squares.
Some artists use collage methods to bring together elements drawn from across time and space, enabling their imaginative inventions. Minna Gilligan cuts images from 1960s and 1970s magazines and pastes them into loosely painted or texta-drawn backgrounds, which serve as psychedelic sceneography for the daydream worlds she creates. Looking more to a digital realm, A Constructed World’s spatially disorienting video, part of a wider presentation in the exhibition, combines overlaid and intercut footage from two previous performances in Paris and Sydney, Bertoli conceptualises his sculptural and video installation as ‘spatio-temporal collage’. Taking a different approach, Viv Miller uses digital animation to sequence beautifully hand-drawn images influenced by early Disney cartoons and Japanese anime.
The leitmotif of ‘dancing umbrellas’ may also conjure some well-known associations within popular culture, like the love-struck character played by Gene Kelly who, umbrella in hand, dances joyfully through a rainstorm in the 1952 Hollywood hit Singin' in the Rain. Or the colourful parapluies that lend visual ambience and delight to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), a bittersweet French romance about a young woman who works in her mother’s umbrella shop. Or Mary Poppins’ magical brolly with its parrot-head handle, which in a memorable scene from the 1964 film she uses to parachute from the sky. Connections between umbrellas and Surrealism are also of interest since they speak to the theme of animated objects originating in dreams. Consider Salvador Dali’s Sewing Machine with Umbrellas in a Surrealist Landscape (1941),3 a painting inspired by the poet Comte de Lautrémont’s famous image of a young boy ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’, a simile much admired by André Breton. Or René Magritte’s Hegel’s Holiday (1957) depicting a glass of water sitting on top of an opened umbrella, creating an object that, as Magritte describes, ‘has two opposing functions’ since the glass contains water, while the umbrella repels it.4
In making their works the artists in Dancing Umbrellas draw widely from both popular culture and art history, giving these fields of knowledge equal weight. The liberty to freely associate images and ideas and to creatively mix content from different sources and periods, first claimed by the Dadists and the Surrealists, is fundamental to their approach to making art. As appropriate to our digital age, the works displayed participate in the constant flow of information between past and present, apprehending time not as a linear continuum, but as circular, layered, and paradoxical.
When the clock strikes midday in Hans Richter’s Ghosts Before Breakfast, the spirited and unruly objects we encountered at the beginning of this introduction, return to their normal routine. But let it not be forgotten that for a few hours in the morning, the usual rules did not apply. It is hoped that this exhibition will evoke a similarly idiosyncratic and speculative realm, in which artworks, like Richter’s objects before noon, break free from convention, and invite us to see reality anew.
(Essay continues on individual artists pages ....) Â
1Â Handwritten note in personal archive of Hans Richter c.1960, published in Hans Richter by Hans Richter, Cleve Gray (ed), published by Holt Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1971, p. 145.
2 The film can be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikr9TL9txeE [accessed 10 January 2016].
3 See https://www.artcurial.com/en/news/press_releases/2012/2012_12_04_2212_Modern_Art.asp
4 René Magritte in a letter to Suzi Gablik, cited in Rex Butler ‘Sovereign Stain: On René Magritte’s Hegel’s Holiday’, http://www.artdes.monash.edu.au/non-cms/globe/issue3/hegels.html, [accessed online 5 January 2016].
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