Arlo Mountford
GrantPirrie, Sydney, Australia
Melbourne-based artist Arlo Mountford, currently showing at GrantPirrie gallery in Sydney, has a propensity for mining the annals of art history in search of iconic one-liners to use as dialogue in his slapstick video romps. In his 2007 solo show at Gertrude Contemporary Art Space in Melbourne, Mountford employed his - now well-known - animated talking head (which consists of nothing more than a black circle with a morphing red line for a mouth; Stand up, 2005) to pontificate to an applauding, cheering invisible audience, delivering lines such as: ‘Art will be the culmination of its pasts’; ‘Art will change the world’; and ‘I’m glad painting is dead because I can’t paint.’ In another video work, also show at Gertrude, two little road sign figures plunder the same resource as they wander around two split screens. One arrives, floating down on a Jeff Koons-like balloon dog, with a penis for a nose (á la the Chapman brothers’ Fuck Face, 1994) and promptly starts urinating into a porcelain urinal, whilst the other intently pulls canvases from the wall. First Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) is disposed of, followed by Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) and then the little figure turns to the pile of canvases, which has morphed into a luminous blue paint tray, pulls his head off, rolls it in paint and proceeds to lather International Klein Blue all over the wall. The scene culminates when Picasso’s Guernica (1937) appears, receiving a thorough blasting from a spray can in parody of the infamous Tony Shafrazi graffiti moment (1974) before being similarly ripped from the wall. All the while the other road-sign figure is defecating off the side of big black box whilst wearing a chef’s hat.
Clearly nothing is sacred when Mountford is involved. Yet the video works maintain a degree of freshness by means of the artist’s ability to unpack the iconic works and examine each as raw material with great comedic skill and timing. Because, let’s be honest, at face value a stuffed, shaggy angora goat slotted into a tyre and adorned with glittering paint is funny, regardless of whether or not it’s Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955-9). It would be remiss to consider Mountford’s practice as mere mockery, though, as this would ignore how research-based his practice is - here there is no reference left without a footnote.
For his current show at GrantPirrie, Mountford turns his attention away from the 20th century and looks to the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Mountford has painstakingly recreated three paintings - The Corn Harvest (1565), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, (c.1558) and Hunters in the Snow ( 1565) - by laboriously drawing directly into a flash programme with a mouse. The result, a triptych video piece titled The Folly (2008), is a respectful reincarnation of Bruegel’s village scenes in full movement. The figures are lock-kneed and stiff-jointed, making the animation seem amateur in comparison to the 3D worlds we are now used to in video games. However, this is truthful to the source material, in that the figures are depicted, not so much anatomically correct with distinct personal traits, but as forms we recognise as a human representation, and for once Mountford seems to maintain a respectful distance.
The three video pieces are distinct, but projected in perfect alignment on to a wide white wall. A looped audio track directs our gaze into each scene, the sound of baying dogs forewarns of the advance of the hunters and their pack, as the old woman continues to stoke the fire under the swinging sign of the inn in the first scene. When a church bell tolls, we are pulled from the hunters to search for the new visual reference point. And so it goes on, each scene is glided over with fragments of every-day sounds: blades through corn crops; a horse neighing; a cart-wheel bumping over a mound of dirt.
At one point the soundtrack is interrupted by a woman’s voice, at which point we reach a conundrum. The speech is barely audible over the clutter of the scene’s other sounds. But surely Mountford would have only included a monologue so it could be heard? After locating the source of the voice - a women sitting near the corn harvesters eating her lunch - I will give Mountford the benefit of the doubt and suggest that the monologue is simply not meant for the audience. We are expected to hear only muffled fragments and passing words.
Such an interpretation points to a subtle irreverence running through the entire work. The woman is quoting from an Aldous Huxley novel, Eyeless in Gaza (1936), which traces the implosion of the intellectual debates that raged after First World War as the second draws ever near, and the effect this has on the protagonist’s closest friends. Feverish idealism is rife among the novel’s characters, but, as history shows us, war pays a crushing blow to such grand ideas. Thus it is not entirely out of place that Mountford’s peasant woman should be quoting fragments from the novel such as, ‘blessed is the poorer spirit’. There is a sense that the scene is supposed to be prophetic of our current times in its depiction of the core values of community, but Mountford is wily enough to inject a level of scepticism. Huxley’s novel was marred by war, in turn implying that the scene before us and the grand speeches that accompany will face a similar dystopian reality at some point.
This scepticism is evident again in the final scene, which depicts the fall of Icarus. In Ovid’s account of the myth, from which Bruegel’s original painting was conceived, the three figures - a shepherd, a farmer and a fisherman - are too busy tending to their own chores to notice Icarus fall from the sky and plunge to his death, evoking the Flemish proverb: ‘No plough stops because a man dies.’ But in Mountford’s version, his trademark sense of humour creeps in: an apple is placed on the side of the turned field for the farmer to eat, which he does, taking a seat on the ground to savour the fruit and stare out towards the ocean. He is doing so when Icarus falls. But does he actually notice? It is hard to tell, but one gets the impression that if he had he would have likely shrugged his shoulders and gone about his business thinking to himself, ‘ah, what a shame but what could I have done?’
Mountford’s wonderful video installation reminds us that theorizing in times of crisis is often mere pageantry. Calls for a return to the simple way of life and to community values to stave off depression sound appealing, but we cannot ignore the last hundred years and the development of a western world who simply shrug their shoulders when things go wrong.
Nicola Harvey
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