ALASDAIR MACINTYRE SPLATSVILLE Memoirs of a Failed Painter
Alasdair Macintyre's small sculptures present an intelligent and humorous antidote to all that tut tutting about the demise of wit and cleverness in current art making practices. Only just beneath the surface of the uncluttered, visually delightful and entrancing nature of Alasdair’s pieces – lies depths that are at once psychologically insightful and spiritually effervescent.
Alasdair Macintyre is a Brisbane-based artist and is one of Australia’s foremost emerging sculptors. The miniature sculptural installations made by Alasdair Macintyre are like battlefields where high art encounters popular culture. Alasdair’s dioramas heighten the theatre of artistic enterprise. Regularly set in the studio, galleries and museums, Alasdair’s amplified art-world scenarios are strongly suggestive of film narrative. He embraces themes from art history to mythology, and from religious symbolism to the role of the artist. Popular culture is the entry point into Alasdair McIntyre’s work, creating a democracy for audiences experiencing the work.
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE ARTIST STATEMENT
Splatsville incorporates many of the themes which I have explored over the previous decade, however I have decided to not incorporate as many identifiable figures from pop-culture in this new body of work.
The elements and characters within Splatsville are not literal denotations of individuals or situations that I have encountered over my career as an artist, rather, connotations and amalgams that directly relate to my experiences and my responses thus.
In many respects, Splatsville is a new concept for me… originally created solely for a video installation (hence only intended to theoretically exist in two dimensional form, in a fourth dimensional medium), I took a liking to the aesthetic qualities of the objects, therefore decided to extend the concepts explored in the video pieceSplatsville (installed in the Gold Coast City Art Gallery in October 2007) into a body of object-based work.
Splatsville: Memoirs of a Failed Painter is a culmination of an exploration of concepts which had its origins in theJourneyman series (2006), however the admittedly downbeat title of this body of work belies the humour within. The central character (protagonist) is ultimately an “everyman” type character, while also fulfilling the role of the hero-myth, an archetype which must go forth on a quest or a journey to save his social order, therefore saving himself.
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE ESSAY
by RD Bardon
Some art can transport you to another place.
Alasdair Macintyre’s art transports you to another world.
Take a walk down the streets of Alasdair Macintyre’s imagination and you’ll find yourself in a universe traversed by daleks, stormtroopers and Roswell Aliens encountering on their way Picasso, Duchamp and Bacon.
Alasdair Macintyre is a Brisbane-based artist and is one of Australia’s foremost emerging sculptors. His work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He was a finalist in the 2005 National Sculpture prize and his debut at the Melbourne Art Fair earlier this year was a sell out.
His work was described by art critic Tim Morrell as a ‘battlefield where high art encounters popular culture’. His work is at once funny, bizarre and enchanting. But these are anything but whimsical works. They are laden with meaning and references. He embraces themes from art history to mythology, and from religious symbolism to the role of the artist. His worlds are populated by science fiction characters, the ‘great’ artists and himself clad in a baseball hat cast as the young ‘emerging’ artist.
In his piece ‘Luminous Being’s We Are’ the bookstore of Queensland Art Gallery is brilliantly reproduced with each and every book painstaking crafted. It’s so reassuring in its precise reconstruction. But in the place of regular gallery goers there are cyborgs casually browsing through the shelves looking at books on ‘great artists’. The effect is both bizarre and funny. But here Macintyre offers us a disturbing vision. Generic droids who seek culture through the commodity of books. Is this what is to become of us?
In what has become one of his most iconic early works ‘Reconstructing the Babylonian Artifice’, Macintyre features a group of eight Storm Troopers carefully examining Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. Their reactions are unnervingly human. It’s almost as though the movie has stopped rolling and the extras have wandered out in their costumes. They stand with their hands on their hips, or lean holding their hands behind their backs. One relaxes lying down on the gallery lounge, another examines the canvas intently almost touching the paint – but not - possibly weary of the gallery attendant. They consider, ponder, examine.
It is the juxtaposition of one of the world’s most famous cultural treasures being critically considered by one of our most treasured commercial icons that makes the work so enlightening and entertaining. It both questions the legitimate value of art and discusses the many and varied ways of looking at and appreciating art. Just as the Storm Troopers contemplate and critique the Picasso, so too do we with Macintyre’s art. As Dominique Angeloro describes it ‘the more you contemplate it the more you consider how strange and complicated the act of viewing art really is’.
By allowing us to look through the eyes of aliens, Alasdair is helping us reconsider the place of art in our world today.