Like An Antenna For Cargo-cult Transmissions
The Age
Saturday October 1, 2005
ON A recent visit to the Aboriginal township of Gunbalanya in Arnhem Land I was told of a "spiritual radio" made by a shaman. The "radio" was created out of fencing wire and feral cat fat and was used as a wishing device.
Ten days later, in a cold and draughty warehouse in inner-suburban Seddon, something similar, albeit in different materials, sat glowering in the half-light.For a young artist, Nick Mangan rapidly became renowned for his sculptures and installations where the detritus of the 21st century lay forlorn on the gallery floor, growing odd icicles or strange moulds. Mangan was born in Geelong in 1979 and finished his bachelor of arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2001. Since then, he has been creating seriously unnerving drawings, montages, sculptures and installations.In an exhibition in 2003 at Fitzroy's Sutton Gallery, a photocopier lay under harsh light, with crystalline shards growing from its interior. Last year, for a major installation at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Mangan travelled from Ice Age to Stone Age. For all the thawing, the results were no less unsettling. A faded, worn Persian rug lay on the floor; large ceramic jars were scarred from misuse and decidedly bizarre talismans lay scattered throughout, strange morphings of petrified wood and bone. Cast in resin from real, found objects, cow teeth were grafted on to wood, remnants of creatures from another dimension.In his latest work Mangan has made another shift. Where in the past (un)natural forces seemed to be the major catalyst for his formations, in The Colony, the suggestion of natural formations is secondary to the power of clear structure. The result is like some kind of weird antenna for transmissions from a cargo-cult culture. At first viewing, it is almost an alien crucifix. Look more closely and shards of wooden spears and the hint of wholesale white-ant destruction emerge. Tufts of human hair hang limply. Nothing is particularly clear, but hidden in the carved chaos is the hint of the 1960s-style salad bowl, a carved spoon, the kind from the time when all things exotic, suggestions of New Guinean and Fijian artefacts, were in vogue.Mangan is fascinated and horrified with the often turbulent relationship of contemporary consumptive culture with history. The voracious appetite the civilised world has for the tribal or exotic has led him to investigations of exotic objects and, specifically, Philippine and Fijian monkey-wood faux-artefacts-cum-souvenirs."These teak objects are interesting as they are produced by a host culture to fulfil the desires and expectations of a tourist. Third World supply on demand," says Mangan. "There's a whole history imbedded in these objects that belongs to early European colonisation that established notions of the exotic, the primitive and the savage."What is interesting here is that the cultures that produce these objects are aware of the paradox, says Mangan. "What you end up with is a cultural signifier that sits in between the host culture and guest culture and doesn't belong to either. There's an interesting loop or a feedback."Indeed, the kernel for The Colony "kind of grew out of a leaf-shaped wooden bowl that looked like a shield", Mangan says. "Defensive nature. In a way I'm exaggerating a language that's already there."To an extent there is also a sense of nostalgia that creeps into Mangan's works. "I grew up with antiques around the house as my mum was heavily into Victorian and Edwardian period styles," he says. "I guess the objects that were part of that movement acted like strange clues to history that my mind would usually run amok with."The interest in these vague ethnographic objects is concerned with the fact that they are ubiquitous and they vary from the authentic to the imitation - cultural value versus an economy of appropriation."Like the work, Mangan's inspirations veer from the fantastical to the practical. If he is creating a bizarre new world, it is one in which he wants to survive."Fictional science draws on truths and expands possibilities," Mangan says. "There's some reference to disaster films or films depicting 'the apocalypse' or 'the end', but I think this work reads more in line with some thing like The Whole Earth Catalogue, which is a subsistence reference manual from the '70s. Do-it-yourself urban survival."The core structure of The Colony could be a possible communications device, an ancient talisman unearthed in recent times or a contemporary creation unearthed in the future. But it is one that is besieged by insect attack and internal mutations. Mangan becomes enthused by the notion of his structure becoming a "real" totem, something carried by a bedraggled, post-apocalyptic tribal group. But, simultaneously, it is a cult that co-exists with natural forces, shamans, warriors and termites."Everything in this work could be found in the domestic setting," he says. "I liked the idea that this totem could be erected by someone who had gathered all the teak elements from their house in an attempt to exhume an animistic and primitive state. By compositing these elements the object, with an antenna system at the totem's highest point, reads like a medium for channelling a resistance against the Western notion of the so-called capitalist civilised world."This is highlighted by sharpening and shaping domestic objects such as axe and shovel handles, teak utensils and other wooden debris which have been manipulated into a spear-like defensive apparatus. Architraves and sideboards have been requisitioned by termites."A collaboration with nature is emphasised as these termite nests drip down and over the whole structure like a parasitic organism that has been drawn to the antenna frequency and come to co-exist."Or to colonise."Nick Mangan; The Colony. Gertrude Street Artists' Spaces, Fitzroy. Closes today.Megan Backhouse is on leave.Around The Galleries resumes next Saturday.
© 2005 The Age