Dane Mitchell
Starkwhite, Auckland, New Zealand
It’s hard not to see why Jacques Rancière’s stock has shot up so dramatically during these fraught, apolitical times: as someone who saw the gap between art and politics as being indeterminate, Rancière spoke out against art that liberated at gunpoint. Which, as advice to the budding young revolutionary, effectively translates to: water, water everywhere, so best not drown your audience.
What’s so interesting about Dane Mitchell’s ‘The Barricades’ then is the way it manages to go against what Rancière prescribes without losing its footing in coy loopholes (à la Jeff Koons) or noisy pamphleteering. Instead, Mitchell arrives at a view of the gallery as problem-site through an aesthetic determination that’s almost accidental – and which never seeks to hold the audience hostage.
As per title, the idea for the show arose out a series of images of civilian-built street barricades, which Mitchell first began collecting as research towards a proposed project at Galeria do Centro Cultural María Antonia (a subdivision of São Paulo University). While the project never coalesced, it was the lone image of a Brazilian barricade built during the late 1960s which galvanized Mitchell’s thinking about barricades as a formal entity.
Name-checking Rancière in the show’s text, Mitchell claims that by salvaging the barricade from the street, and anointing it under the ‘cold, harsh light of the gallery’, he hoped to create an open dialogue with the past. On that account, the show fails – mainly because Mitchell’s visual taste ends up trumping history’s dynamism. But in the wake of his clean, precise sensibility comes a sense of physicality that declares the gallery – and the objects it houses – as a real site existing beyond the tidal flow of a global market (which itself remains a mirage built from lazy prophesizing).
Glancing at a work like Molotovs (all works 2007) – which, not surprisingly, consists of a group of Molotov cocktails made-up with cheesecloth and plaster – you get the feeling here that form amounts to a kind of imprisonment, especially since each bottle has been rendered in the same dead white. As such, the gallery inevitably becomes a site of amnesia, where the fetishization of objects trumps historical feeling.
Nevertheless, Mitchell doesn’t see himself as some rogue operating outside the system - a fact which becomes clear when you take into account Wheelbarrow. The work is essentially a barricade pulled together from surrounding materials (holes pointedly remain in the wall where Mitchell has removed sections of particle board), remaining both an (obligatory) assault on the gallery as well as an acknowledgement that any such assault will invariably be absorbed. Not that the gallery is wholly to blame; in the end, it only stands as an intermediary for the artistic impulse to categorize, aestheticize, and to vaporize.
David Levinson
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