RODNEY GLICK 

“Glick's work at times feels laidback and relaxed but the more you delve into it the more complex and enigmatic it becomes. Such is the way of the guru and the artlife of the bodhisattva Glick”. - Ric Spencer, Artlink Magazine

With a keen intelligence and biting humour, Glick’s complex and engaging practice investigates location, collaboration, and the processes of art making. Working in a wide variety of media including installation, video, painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, public art and furniture design, Glick has exhibited throughout Australia and internationally, including solo exhibitions in Korea, Germany and Switzerland. Sometime collaborator David Solomon has written of Glick’s work: “The proposition inherent in Glick’s work is not that some art is funny, but that all art is funny... Our laughter is the relief that we are not the subject of the joke.”

During 2005, 2006 and 2007, Glick International worked on a project entitled 'Everyone'. The resulting artwork was a series of digital prints and carved wooden sculptural statues highlighting people as 'Gods'.

They are portraits of adults and children in everyday western clothes adopting poses that suggest Buddhist or Hindu characters. All poses were digitally manipulated into one image for each of the four different camera views - front, back, left, and right side. Once the techniques to create the imagery and a photographic suite of poses with different sitters had been developed they then located wood carvers to sculpt the photographic images. They settled on Indonesian wood carvers from the village of Tengulak Ubud on the island of Bali to work with. In November 2006 they began carving eight figures some life size detailed as if they have clothing and with good facial and hand detailing pretty much like the photographs.

“ Fundamental to the Western notion of creativity is the idea of a creative individual as an independent thinker and non conformer. By contrast the idea of newness and rebelliousness is given a low priority in Hindu and Buddhist ideas of creative activity. The formulations of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology do not allow for an understanding of the universe as generating novelty as it moves through time and history. Time is seen as being cyclical a continuum in which history repeats itself thus allowing for no original quality. The questtherefore is to find the non- changing elements in life and to discard those that are impermanent. This also means that for an individual the goal is not to strive for unique achievement but rather to find the ultimate Self, which goes beyond the individualistic ego and connects to all humanity”

- Rodney Glick

THE EVERYONE PROJECT

For the past 24 months Glick International has worked on a project entitled 'Everyone'. The resulting artwork is a series of digital prints, carved wooden and gilded bronzed sculptures highlighting people as 'Gods'. They are portraits of adults and children in everyday western clothes adopting poses that suggest religious characters. All poses were digitally manipulated into one image for each of the four different camera views - front, back, left, and right side. Once the techniques to create the imagery and a photographic suite of poses with different sitters had been developed we then located wood carvers to sculpt the photographic images. We settled on Indonesian wood carvers from the village of Tengulak Ubud on the island of Bali. In November 2006 they began carving eight figures some life size detailed as if they have clothing and with good facial and hand detailing similiar to the photographs. Two of the smaller wooden carvings were then sent to Jogyakarta and cast in bronze. All the wooden and bronze pieces arrived in Australia early 2008 where final detailed carving and painting took place over a five month period ready for exhibition in June.

In the new work, I love animals and most of nature Glick and Voevodin have placed the pelts of feral animals a cat, fox, boar and camel in the gallery simultaneously exhibiting them as both specimen and trophy. The artwork builds on past design and manufacture of domestic furniture in which the feral animal pelts hint at landscape, oppression, hardship and death. The various flowers placed on the pelts shifts meaning away from the actual objects opening up opportunities for contemplation on other aspects surrounding our existence. The imagery of feral animals raises questions about the interdependence of man and beast implying a masculine violence behind a mask of heroic conquest.

 

Who, Me? When, now? Rodney Glick’s questions for everyone

Twilight is that moment of the day that foreshadows the night of forgetting, but that seems to slow time itself, an in-between state in which the last light of the day may still play out its ultimate marvels. It is memory’s privileged time.

For over twenty years Rodney Glick has been causing his audiences to turn around, to question who is talking to whom. Glick continually raises questions, twists expectations, distorts space and overturns the normal flow of time. His jests challenge, enmesh the viewer and leave them without a leg to stand on. He plays with scale, material and the boundaries which, in some places, allow art (and the telling joke) to be kept at a distance. Things that are assumed to be safely held in memory are dug up and turned over, revealing themselves as elastic as any other forms of representation. His stories, his art, operates at multiple levels, with layer piled on layer, and convoluted paths waiting to be found.

Throughout all of this runs an abiding interest in narratives, particularly those of origin or which explain and justify the world and one’s place in it.  The moment in-between, of suspension between two things, a slowing down of time and a sideways step from the boundaries of the norm, seems to lie at the heart of Rodney Glick’s work. It is not twilight itself, the half-light, half-dark that he concentrates in, but the period where more than one thing can be seen, or can be true, and where the absolutes that seem clear at other times become malleable and open. Time at this point is not linear, fl owing nicely along a clear path, but suspended, something that can be moved across and looked over and manipulated at will. It is this twilight moment in which two or more apparently unrelated things can be merged and simultaneously present; it is the time when conjunctions are fundamental.  Glick seizes the opportunities made possible by chance and coincidence, celebrating conjunctions which bring disparate ideas and experiences together in weird, off hand collisions. The title of this exhibition, Godfavoured, is at once a question—what does this mean, what might it mean to be favoured by God or Gods, or to become like gods—and a chance phrase Glick has come across, as the name of a brand of Chinese-made rubber used for table tennis bats. Glick is a skilled and avid player of the game (and used the rubber himself for several years). In this conjunction, as with many others in his work, chance mixes with humour which in turn mixes with speculative questioning of being, time and location. Just as with humour, where the timing of a phrase, the inversion of sequence, or the displacement of one thing by another, is at the unstable core of the joke, these conjunctions for Glick become the connection between disparate frames for looking at the world.

The carved statues of Glick’s Everyone series (2008) connect real people, the artist himself, friends and family, with a tradition of religious statuary, mediated both through the artist and through his assistants in this endeavour, colleagues in Perth, another in Bali and carvers in a small Balinese village. Starting with Everyone No. 1 (based on Glick’s partner, Lynnette Voevodin) and extending outwards through eight carved figures and a number of photographs (in this exhibition reaching up to Everyone No. 2,052,827,845) the series if ever completed would embrace everyone on the planet. Just as statues of multi-armed Hindu gods can make many, simultaneous gestures in this series so can everyone, and all can do more than one thing at once. Glick has speculated that the multiple arms of such statues may represent a figure in motion, rather than an unearthly, divine biology—acting as markers of the multiple facet’s of a god’s, or a person’s, being—and indicators of life and animation. To render humans as gods, and to place representations of living individuals on the statue’s plinth, is to conjoin divine and human, and to suggest a pathway that can allow everyone to gain the position of the paragon. For Glick, and for his collaborators in Bali, to do this is not merely a jest, though there is humour here, and most certainly not sacrilege. It is perhaps a reanimation of both tradition and living, breathing individuals—pointing to an opportunity that is perhaps available to all.

Alongside the statues are displayed a series of life-like fl oor rugs, I love animals and most of nature (2008), consisting of the skins of animals prepared for Glick by taxidermists. The animals are from feral species in Australia—a camel, boar, fox and cat—which have been killed as part of government pest control efforts. These species were brought here in an era of colonisation, but unlike human settlers they are subject to control and attempts at eradication. Strewn across their skins and their staring, glazed faces are colourful fl owers, as in a gesture of a blessing with blossoms strewn onto the ground or floating across a watery surface.

Several years ago Glick came across an image of a lion skin placed before the figure of a bodhisattva in a Rockefeller home in New York—and this image provided the impetus to join the Everyone statues and the animal skins. In the image the hunting trophy is placed before, at the feet of, a fi gure that represents both the divine and art and culture. The conjunction of fi gure and the animal skin also resembles the typical portrait of the hunter positioned next to his prey, wherein the dead animal, nature cut off , is posed to best advantage.

Such trophies are frequently used to form a narrative of the natural world, one that is only possible after death. The taxidermist works to resurrect the dead animal, and a semblance of life is recreated after death—the living animal is translated into a representation, the real into the unreal. The statues, on the other hand, represent real, living but absent persons. The preserved skins and their glass eyes and carefully modelled forms, and the carved, painted wooden fi gures—each an idealised representation—stand in for something that is not present in the gallery. Together they are a meeting point for animal, human and the mystical or divine.

Preserved animals have long been used in museums as central elements within dioramas that purport to be realistic representations of those same animals, spellbound in their native state. With their carefully modelled forms the animals in these dioramas have been reinserted into a nature that can be accommodated within the museum’s surrounds and be used to create a narrative of the absent world outside. Glick has created, in linking the animal skin and the fi gurative statue of an existing person, his own form of diorama, involving a highly crafted but unreal figure poised, like the bodhisattva, with nature at its feet.

Neither statue or skin are real, but both stand as representative and each provides context for the other.  Unlike the conventional diorama, however, what is idealised here is not nature but culture, for Glick’s tableau is a recreation, in the art museum, of the collector’s activity and the museum’s own propensity to model its institutional displays on the arrangements normally found in the collector’s home (whether they be a Rockefeller or not). The major story here is not of animals in their environment, but of art within its.  Rodney Glick and his partner and collaborator, Lynnette Voevodin, have borrowed forms from other nineteenth century technologies of display. In the last nine years they have made six panoramic video installations, which condense sweeping space into something much smaller. In Down on his Luck and Cubavision (both 2006-08), as with earlier works like Earthquake (1999–2001) and Life Plus TV (2002-03), a widescreen video image captures twenty-four slices of daily life in a particular location. Each of these slices is spaced an hour apart, and the video as a whole is an hour long, enabling the full diurnal round to be captured. Down on his Luck is set in a forest in Kent where woodcutters are at work, clearing a stand of trees. They use modern technology of chain saws and front end loaders but the forest landscape is oblivious to time or period. Equally, in Cubavision, the precise year or time seems irrelevant—the scenes of quotidian life on a street in Havana have their own rhythm, a cycle of hours and not a drama of precise and singular moments. Each hour is representative of that time of day and of that place, but interchangeable with the same hour the day before the fi lming and that on a day a year later. The locations have been chosen as representative but are without major landmarks or sites of dramatic interest—they are normal, average, characteristic, and within the bounds of their broad territory they could be everywhere...or anywhere.

The videos make the whole daily round simultaneously visible, splayed out in light and dark strips across the fi eld of the video projection.  Time is suspended, removed from its normal flow where one thing follows another, and the viewer is poised in a space where all can be seen and experienced at once. Glick has long been interested in compressing space and time, condensing them into forms that reflect on the repetitive nature of daily life and of the everyday and mundane, commonplace experience of human activity. These panoramas suggest infinite space and move the fl ow of the day outside that of normal linear time—they are at once everywhere and everywhen, and a highly compressed world presented on the gallery wall.  

The flow of time has been disrupted in other works by Glick, including in Clock (2001-03), an earlier work that used twinned office clocks and the Subiaco Train Station Clock Tower (from 1997-99, and done with Kevin Draper and Marco Marcon) . Clock is time stopped, two shadows cast by theatre lights of a nail on the wall. The shadow is immovable, held still, the clock always at precisely the same time, whatever the time or duration experienced by those looking at it—but twice a day time merges with it and it is briefl y accurate. Clockchallenges time— is it static or is it that the common experience of the flow of time is frenetic and unreal? Is the nail clock signalling the real or absolute time, and is any disagreement seen between it and other timekeepers merely relative, a pointer to our presence in its past or future? Just as the Greenwich meridian marks a zero line on the earth, can this clock mark a zero point in or outside of time?

The Subiaco Train Station Clock Tower, part of a large public art project for a new suburban train station, paired a clock and a mirror, one image moving ever forward and one back—and together cancelling, in one unchanging moment. From another angle the viewer would see him or herself refl ected alongside the clock—caught at the moment of establishing the time—while on the waiting area of the train station platform the clock was presented on video screen, seen as the minutes ticked down until the next train arrived.

The work for the train station, like a number of other public projects Glick has produced, was situated in a liminal space, one of everyday, repeated experience. The everyday can be characterised as routine, commonplace and repetitive—a physical and conceptual space between the other events or places that mark time and location. For Glick it is these in-between areas of the everyday which are more interesting—the panoramas are distinguished not just by their duration but by their concentration on the banal and the routine, the things that occur every day, unremarkably and outside normal consciousness.  Within everyday life there are markers, not of a particular day, but like twilight or the clock, of the passage of time. While occurring daily they mark not the flow of time but its essential continuity; that whatever may change there are constants. One of these within Jewish orthodox tradition is the thrice daily prayer service, which requires a quorum of ten adult males. Rodney Glick has recreated this with ten computers reciting the prayer, which was transliterated into a phonetic form of English to enable the computers to convert the text to speech and recite in Hebrew. The Ba’al Tefi llah or ‘Master of Prayer’ reads its text aloud, making its way through the eighteen parts of the prayer, with the nine others responding, each in its own voice, to the benedictions.

As with many other projects, Glick has called upon a number of collaborators to make the Master of Prayer(2008) possible, including a computer programmer, Chris McCormick, and Rabbi Moshe Bernstein, who has had several roles, including transliterating the text. As Rabbi Bernstein has suggested: “the installation appears to parody the human condition of prayer by rote but on a deeper level it asks a haunting question about the inherent nature of artifi cial intelligence. The Jewish sages require ’proper intent’ for prayer to be truly acceptable. To the extent that computers can be programmed to ‘think’ might they not be programmed to this ‘proper intent’ as well? In a tentative answer to that question Master of Prayer can be experienced as a high-tech, Jewish version of the Tibetan prayer-wheel or Christian rosary beads.2”

The prayer is a form of concentrated meditation in which interruption and distraction is to be avoided—and the computers remain forever fixed in the time of the afternoon service. In the Everyone series the humans take up a form that is normally that of gods, while in the Master of Prayer the computers take up a position that is analogous to that of humans. In both there is intense concentration in an extended moment which stretches out in both directions through time.

The everyday is not just the repetitive but the normal, commonplace and mundane. In Joe Binsky’s Tree of Life(1995) and Beth (1998) Glick has gathered the personal memorabilia, letters and photographs of an Australian Jew, along with boxes full of the possessions of his girlfriend, Beth. Together they appear as an archive of personal memories and stories documenting the dynamics of a family across generations and in all their complexities. On close examination, however, it appears that Joe, a Holocaust survivor, has purchased a variety of picture frames, with photos already displayed in them, and collected domestic kitsch and empty boxes to write his own story around them. Joe’s work was an attempt to keep alive the possibility of connection through imagining a fictional present and past for himself—a way of countering the real, of assuaging horror to climb out of isolation and loss. The pathos of Joe’s story is not undermined when the grim jest is realised—that Joe Binsky was himself a fi ction created by Rodney Glick and David Solomon. That Joe Binsky’s Tree of Life is absurd does not preclude it from speaking of the unspeakable and even assists in preventing that being forgotten

and isolated in a now distant past. The sheer normality of Joe’s letters, with comments on his grandson’s dog, his granddaughter’s baby photos or his son’s divorce makes them apperar real—and they are a fiction that is representative, at least, of the real.  Glick frequently confronts his audience’s expectations in ways which are humorous but where the joke, if it is one, jolts and disturbs. The Everyone statues and the furry skins of I love animals and most of nature both skirt the bounds of sacrilege, yet in ways which leave one awake and upright, not really certain where or if something essential has been transgressed, or if rather one has suddenly realised the unstable nature of social and cultural categories. The Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan has, like Glick, used animals in his sculptures and challenged religious propriety. In Cattelan’s suspended horse, Novecento, with its elongated legs and slumped body, or his sculpture La Nona Ora, of the Pope struck down by a meteor, the element of shock is moderated by both the sense that there must be humour at work here (if only we can find it) and by an elegiac quality, which counters the tendency to read these works as simple mockery. Glick, as withJoe Binsky’s Tree of Life, shares with Cattelan a deep and troubled humour, telling stories that demand ‘cosmic-scale laughter, tears and rage’—a response which we cannot easily produce in the face of our anxiety when confronted with these jests. Instead it is much easier to respond by pushing the works back, away and hiding them ‘in the back of a dark, forgotten drawer.’

Glick and Solomon worked together for many years, creating a number of works of ‘fictional realism’—stories that could be true, and that explain art, the art world and the position of artists and others in ways that are striking but just and convincingly within the bounds of feasibility. In the late 1980s and early 1990s they uncovered the writings and philosophy of Jean Bernard Klus and created the Glick International Collection, one of the world’s greatest, but under recognised, collections of modern and contemporary art. Klus’s book JoseÅL Palermo and the College of Disciples (1991) could be read as an elaborate parody of the power of art theory and critical writing, but also as an excerpt from a latter-day kabalistic text. In it, Klus outlined the development of his thinking, as well as an analysis of the numbers zero to nine, each with its particular properties but together linked to his nine steps to physical and moral perfection. The exhibition that accompanied this publication, The Condension of Ideas, at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne, including a room of giant numbers, hung in an apparently random order, and illuminated only from behind. Light leaked through the interstices, just as illumination might be seen as lying behind the mystical text. In other projects Glick and Solomon inserted the Glick International Collection into the forefront of contemporary art. In 1993, using real publications including the catalogues of the Biennale of Venice and the Sydney Biennale, they inserted freshly printed and very convincing new pages which proclaimed the GIC as a major force in the visual arts. For all the satire of contemporary art discourse in the GIC projects, there was more to it than that; getting the joke did not exorcise the disturbing echoes of the uncanny. Their explanations of the origins of art and its current conditions were odd but compelling. Rodney Glick sets out to create traps in his work and to see Glick’s humour, to appreciate the joke is to be complicit, to be wrapped into a warped but so familiar world.  In the writings of Jean Bernard Klus and the related Alice Black projects, Glick and Solomon had constructed a history which brought alive forgotten figures of art history and celebrated their status as unknowns.

In doing so it mocked the master narratives of art history and of art centres, debates, both modern and post-modern, on originality and suggested a new theory of origins that was every bit as convoluted and obscure as any, more mainstream art history. Klus revelled in the esoteric and the concealed, and set out to reveal alternate pathways to truth. As the Manifesto of Fictional Realism said: “The artist is what he says he is. Not what he is. The artist creates a myth, to obscure art.” It was all both a fiction and so real.

Snowdomes, miniature tableaux contained within a transparent shell have long been a passion of Glick’s. Such things are typically souvenirs, devices that condense and sample fragments of events, places and experiences and which slip the bounds of the world as experienced to establish their own hermetic world outside of normal time and space. These fragile spheres miniaturise the world, strip it of essential detail and provide tiny stages on which a new and better story can be displayed. The play with scale, as with time, has been central to all that Glick has done. In his own early snowdomes from the late 1980s he undid the isolation normally characteristic of snowdomes—they were miniature, and hermetic but still stretched beyond their glass domes.

Some included tiny figures looking beyond their own transparent enclosure to ponder their relationship to fi gures enclosed in other snowdomes—or setting up a tango lesson in miniature, the dance floor reduced to Lilliputian scale. To do so was to play with distance between the viewer, out in the world, and the sphere of art, creating tiny vignettes to peer across the void between them.

In recent years Glick has set out on a grander snowdome project, to create the world’s largest snowdome, providing a field on which real art and real human fi gures can stand, encased within a bubble. His quest, to raise funds for this 4 metre high structure is at once quixotic—a somewhat bizarre and sometimes impossible seeming project—and sincere—carefully thought out, well engineered and with a solid business plan behind it. The giant, portable snowdome would again turn scale around, miniaturising the normal humans who might stand within it, or taking existing art from a museum’s collection and setting it within a new spectacle. For Glick the project is not an exercise in the ridiculous, or a parallel in the art world of other giant structures in Australia. Rather it is to create a stage which overturns the hermetic boundaries that surround most art or performance, whether in an art museum collection or on the proscribed platform of a theatre. Just as much of his other work has done, it would invert boundaries, scale and categories; it be would be strangely funny but it would be unsettling, with its most interesting viewpoint from inside, looking out.  Snapshots taken as family photographs are created as vehicles for memory, objects which like souvenirs allow past experience to be carried forward into the future. They get used performatively, in the telling and retelling of family stories, functioning as devices to create and firm up shared memories. Through these images can be traced an individual’s experiences, the dynamics of family gatherings or the particular social or physical physiognomy of familiar people. In his recent Defaced series Glick has done some violence to his family and their memories, and the real begins to resemble fiction. He has taken photographs that his parents were passing on, as they left the family home, and scratched out many of the faces that made these characters familiar and known. In doing so the people are cast adrift,

rendered anonymous, their outward gaze cut off . Their relationship to the viewer is severed, and they are no longer known, living individuals but representatives of anyone (or everyone). In the initial group Glick erased only those now dead (or possibly dead, where the subjects were unknown to the artist or remaining family). Later he moved on to erase, to depersonalise, the living as well, and later yet to begin working with anonymous portrait photographs found in fl ea markets.  Photographs like these can function as condensed, solidifi ed memory, memory made material but what then are inherited or abandoned photographs—are they memories that have been sloughed off ? Have those for whom they had relevance and reference edited those events or persons from their lives, or simply lost track of the pasts these objects were intended to hold on to? The Defacedphotographs include some of Glick’s maternal grandfather’s images taken at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, before he and his family fled Germany and even faceless they remain chilling. It would be straightforward to read the erasure of the faces here as a metaphor for what was to come or as a signal of mortality more generally. Set alongside other images of his paternal grandfather, in sharply pressed pants and jacket holding a large, trophy fish there is a strange collision—just the sort that is so much part of Rodney Glick’s work. With other images of the same grandfather dressed as a bride, or threatening a (stuff ed toy) cat with the barbecue, a group travelling to Australia by boat or at other social gatherings they point to a spread of experience, with all its echoes of past threat or of celebration. For Glick to erase the faces is to allow imagination free reign, for the real features can now only be guessed at and new stories can be made up.  

To do so is to signal, too, the movement of memory into history, and the decline of the concrete and known subject into the anonymous past. Facelessness displaces the personal history that made these things in the first place. It allows one to build one’s own relationship with these figures, in which they can become stand-ins for one’s own family or for creating one’s own fi ctions of origin and relationship. Identity is not just erased but concealed—and now it is possible to speculate about new levels on which they can and must be interpreted.

Memories, the stories we tell ourselves to fix time and articulate the past, to delineate and solidify lived experience, have no concrete substance.  They are for us, as for Glick, ways of representing the past for the present and tools for imagining the future. They exist in that twilight moment, on the edge of something, poised between one place and another.  This place of stillness is not though static or fixed, but rather of poised readiness, of clarity and precision. It is, too, the moment at which one finally uncovers the concealed meaning, or in Glick’s work, realises the joke—but what to do next? Throughout all he has done over twenty years Glick continues to keep one guessing, in that moment of looking over one’s shoulder to ask who, me? When, now?

John Barrett-Lennard, 2009

Notes:

1. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: marking time in a culture of amnesia, New York and London: Routledge, 1995, p. 3

2. Rabbi Moshe Bernstein, Didactic text for Master of Prayer, 2008

3. Tom Morton, ‘Maurizio Cattelan: Infi nite Jester’, in Jennifer Higgie (ed.), The artist’s joke, London, Whitechapel, 2007, p. 209