A Cool Armageddon
by Ashley Crawford
“With acceleration there is no here and there, only the mental confusion of near and far, present and future, real and unreal…” – Paul Virillio, The art of the motor – The shrinking effect, 1993.
The car crash is one inevitable end-point of contemporary Western culture. The clash and klang of advertising – the neon pulse of fast food and fast life is the other. These glittering collisions are the landscape of Giles Ryder.
In 1970 the British writer J.G. Ballard exhibited the hulking bodies of crashed automobiles at the New Arts Laboratory gallery in London, appropriately called Crashed Cars. This aestheticisation of the car crash was an ongoing obsession for Ballard, whose novel Crash explored the erotic potential of grinding metal and shattered glass. This was the ready-made in extremis, the visceral remains of mayhem relocated into the pristine world of art in a violent surrealist gesture.
“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status – all these in one event,” Ballard has said. “I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really; a liberation of human and machine libido….”
Perhaps comparing Ballard’s fascinations with the work of Giles Ryder is going too far, but there can be no doubt that the two share a fascination with the automobile in its most abstracted forms. With his harshly lit fluorescents and reflective automobile paint, Giles Ryder is also exploring the aftermath of modernism. His metallic constructions grip the gallery walls like immovable bulwarks, while his neon constructions dominate the floor space like a sprawling street map of a glowing and pulsating Tokyo.
While Los Angeles may be the ultimate ‘automobile city’ Ryder’s process is in fact more reminiscent of the compact, neon-drenched reduction of Tokyo. As opposed to an urban sprawl, Ryder deals with compression, with the condensation of colour, a miniturised metropolis, a compact Shinjuku.
In early 2006 Ryder was chosen to participate in New06 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Perhaps inevitably Ryder’s work was read in the context of modernist art practice, with the exhibition’s curator Juliana Engberg comparing his work to such American artists as Dan Flavin and Bruce Nauman.
But far more relevant than the New York school that Engberg espoused would be such Californian artists as Billy Al Bengston, who reflected the automobile culture of Los Angeles. Many of Bengston’s paintings were finished with a surface of liquid wax, creating the hard, mirror-like sheen of a cherry roadster. Bengston was one of the Los Angeles ‘car culture’ stars of the 1960s, utilising sprayed layers of automobile lacquer on aluminum in soft colors, achieving a highly reflective, translucent surface.
An associate of Ryder’s has described his work in Australian art world parlance as a collision between Ian Burns and Dale Frank. This is many ways an apt description; an unholy marriage between Burns’ cool intellectualism and Frank’s calculated anarchy; the professorial meets the punk. Ryder’s work may look slick and finished, but the intent is much more adversarial, even menacing. With the reflective surfaces of his wall-works we, the viewers, are entrapped in this garish aftermath of a cool Armageddon.
The visceral, painterly approach of Frank is captured in Ryder’s Flurochrome/mirrorchrome [transparent radiation] M.I.R.H. 06 Portrait which was exhibited in New06. With it’s fleshy pinks and rendered in coloured and mirrored Perspex this work both reflected the viewer and immersed them in its cloying wet pinkness, which was not unlike the interior of an artery. That analogy becomes all the more chilling when one considers what the acronym M.I.R.H could stand for; Male Involvement in Reproductive Health or the MIRH Eye Surveillance system for real-time multi-face recognition for airport security. Both are strangely apt, suggestive of paranoia and deceptive surfaces.
Indeed, the materials Ryder utilises do seem deceptive. Glossy on the surface, the suggestion is there of considerable physicality. He uses metals and glass as though scavenged from some strange future.
Ryder spent six years working as an industrial painter on Brisbane’s aging Story Bridge. The intense physicality of such work filters through in the manufacture of Ryder’s creations. Ryder is not one of those artists who sketches an idea and then sends it out to the workshop to be custom-manufactured. Ryder knows his steel and he knows his paint; he is a hands-on alchemist, converting base materials into powerful, luminescent objects.
But the process is decidedly reductive. As Ryder states: “The concept of reduction comes from the language of speed – of racing cars having stripes – that then produces a format for presentation of the machine. The interior and exterior surfaces are part of the whole simultaneous experience of modern life.”
Ryder also plays a kind of music with these objects. Utilising the rainbow hues of the highway, he marks his aluminium ‘canvases’ in disparate, clashing colours, creating a sonic resonance. The vertical stripes recall the fret of an alien guitar suggestive of the kinds of feedback one hears on early Sonic Youth albums. But Ryder is cooler, recalling the Germanic man-machine approach of Kraftwerk with their decidedly antiseptic approach – the diametrical opposite of the gritty fashion of punk.
But for all the slick presentation there is a sense of anarchy at play here; a cool immersion into a scalding hot world of consumerist collisions; Ryder reaches into the future and plucks back polished artifacts from a crash that is yet to occur. In Ballard’s words: “eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods….” Ryder’s work has all of that and more. The moment after tomorrow’s crash. Ryder is a Rodin for the Dystopian age.
RIPE: 2006 ANZ Private Bank and Art &Australia Contemporary Art Award
by Jesse Stein
The secret to experiencing the art of Giles Ryder is that the installation of his work - carefully arranged in a gallery space - is crucial to understanding his methods and his message. As Ryder explains, his practice involves examining the psychological and phenomenological aspects of colour and light, in addition to a consideration of 'reduction' - of form, colour, line, medium - and a 'compaction' of modern art history.
Ryder works in three modes: hand-rolled aluminium wall-works coated with pearlescent auto-lacquers, neon-light constructions hovering above ultra-shiny panels, and reflective 'mirrorchromes' created from mirrored and coloured Perspex. Ryder has commented that 'the appearance of the painting changes with the fall of light and the position of the viewer'. When installed together, the neon works placed on the floor bounce luminescent colour in complex nuances throughout the architecture of the gallery space.
The artist is a co-founder and Director of Peloton Gallery in Sydney, and describes his curatorial and gallery management activities as an extension of his practice. In 2006 his work was shown at its best: in a large installation at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art's annual 'rising star' artist showcase 'NEW06' in Melbourne. The space enabled him to show his largest work yet, Spectragraph [galaxy 5000], 2006, a rolled-aluminium work at over 6 metres
wide.
Ryder's choice of materials is by no means arbitrary. The artist spent six years working as an industrial painter on the Story Bridge in Brisbane, and describes his technical skills as self-taught, having developed out of his previous employment, as well as study in Brisbane, Edinburgh and Sydney (he completed his Master of Fine Art at Sydney College of the Arts in 2005). Ryder's selection of materials produces a collision between the mass-produced
factory product and the custom-made object. He combines 'readymade' industrial materials, such as aluminium and auto-lacquer, with recycled commercial items like old neon signage. There is an element of the production line when he hand-rolls the aluminium works, but to complete the process each work is meticulously rendered and coated. The resultant works achieve a level of material complexity and resist easy classification.
Nonetheless, some obvious connections can be made. The artist's use of auto-lacquer and stylised stripes evoke car culture and the aesthetics of the automotive industry. Ryder's choice of neon colours and his layering of autolacquers and enamel brings to mind the retro 'kustom kolors' described in Tom Wolfe's famous essay 'The kandy kolored tangerine flake streamline baby' (1963), where colour, layered coats of paint and an impressive 'in-your-face' materiality is of paramount concern, and that obsessive strand of 1960s car
culture is unequivocally described as an art in itself. That said, although Ryder's earlier works, such as his 2002 series 'A Night at the Drags', explicitly reference the optical sensation of headlights and taillights speeding along a highway, he is cagey about the relevance of the car to his more recent - notably vertically striped - pieces.
Describing his work as a 'hybrid between minimalism, abstraction, op and pop art', Ryder suggests that his work is actually 'more abstract' than a direct reference to automobile culture and aesthetics. 'It comes back to art and art history. It's pop but it's not. It's not pure ... it has more to do with Australian culture.' With this comment, a whole new set of references emerge - from striped awnings to RSL Club decor. And unlike earlier modernist forms of abstraction, Ryder's abstraction does not preclude references to popular
culture and society.
Academic Carolyn Barnes has commented that Ryder's abstract work has 'moved far beyond its modernist origins' and has opened up to include 'simultaneous allusions to commodity culture and vanguard art practice'. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ryder's Fluorochrome/mirrorchrome [transparent radiation] M.I.R.H. 06 portrait, 2006. Constructed from coloured and mirrored Perspex and aluminium, this large, pink, luminous 'mirrorchrome' is the perfect antithesis to a classic modernist monochrome. The 'traditional' monochrome denied subjectivity, rejecting all references to the outside world. Ryder manipulates this art history, and uses the reflective yet painterly surface of his mirrorchromes to literally pull in the contents of the exhibition space, dragging the viewer, and
the other artworks in the room, into the surface of his mirrors in a distorted, radiant blur.
In his work Daze of disco (silver strutter), 2006 (as shown on the back cover of this issue), recycled neon lettering from an old Chinese sign is combined with custom-designed neon lines and a high-gloss door panel. This rests at a slight tilt on the floor, flowing colour out into the exhibition space. Ryder named this work after the band Yo Lo Tengo's song 'Daze of Disco', and it recalls the peculiarity of the disco era, the instability of subculture identification and the
intangibility of memory. Daze of disco also clearly celebrates - with impurity - the pure concepts of colour, light and form.
GILES RYDER Jessica Matrakis (Block Projects)
At the heart of Giles Ryder’s practice lies an exploration of oppositional relationships, combining the experiential nature of painting with the spatial relationships generated by sculpture. His work refers to the traditional painting methods of the past whilst riding a neon wave of light and colour into a shiny not-too-distant future. Surface, light and movement are some of his main concerns; these are reflected in the materiality of his work: aluminium, neon lights, pearlescent paint, and layer upon layer of clear auto lacquer.
His works on aluminium consist of layers of graduating, fluorescent columns of colour. Flat, but slightly curved, as the bonnet of some technicolour automobile, the luminous surface of the work moves and changes according to light source and the movement of the viewer. As such, these industrial slabs of hand-shaped metal present a challenge of perception and an exploration of form, surface and the psychological effect of colour.
Within Ryder’s practice the readymade coexists with the handmade, as does light with dark and monochrome with colour. In his neon light works he trades the anonymity of industrial spray paint for the more gestural approach of creating lines and shapes from fluorescent tubes of light. Combining found neon signage with custom made lights presented on a monochromatic painted surface the work achieves an immediacy made possible by the merging of painting and site. Through his use of the reflective surface Ryder concerns the viewer with their own presence in the space and their relationship to the work. Traversing a line between minimalism and abstraction, Ryder utilises materials that are the remnants of modern life in a big city: the shiny new car as a symbol of status, the garish glow of 24 hour advertising and the gleaming reflection of polished interiors.
Recently awarded a 2008 Anne and Gordon Samstag Visual Arts Scholarship, Giles Ryder will travel to Europe later this year to embark on 12 months of study. He was also the recipient of the 2006 RIPE emerging artist award (ANZ and Art & Australia Contemporary Art Award). Since completing his Masters of Visual Arts at the University of Sydney, he has exhibited extensively, including NEW06 (curated by Juliana Engberg) at ACCA. Recent solo shows include GR06 at John Buckley Gallery, Lightworks at George Petelin Gallery, and Some Kind of Electric at Peloton Gallery where he is co-curator and founding director.
Jessica Matrakis (Block Projects)
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Giles Ryder’s work is preoccupied with abstraction, but his interest is in minimalism. He started life as an artist later than some, having worked as an industrial painter on Brisbane’s Story Bridge for six years before entering art school. The industrial influence, alongside that of the great abstractionists such as Rothko, is visible in his art with glossy, hard surfaces of colour evoking ‘car culture’. He also uses neon signage and the reflective surfaces of advertising and consumption, and pared back, pearlescent and glossy striped paintings. All of these require interactivity with the viewer - the position from which the work is seen directly influences its effect.
In a recent (2007) exhibition at Peloton, a non-profit space he directs in Sydney, minimalist stepped coloured shelves, suggesting Donald Judd, protruded from the wall. Coated in reflective and glossy surfaces they were paired with a series of visceral, synthetic shapes made from expandable aerated foam, spray painted in bright colours, on aluminium rods - anything but sleekly sculptural - in the centre of the space. A pair of minimalist striped paintings, auto-lacquer on aluminium, completed the group. This collision of styles describes Ryder’s interest in a reduction of form, colour, line and medium as a parallel to the compaction of modern art history.
Louise Martin-Chew from her Samstag essay;
Alternative Realities