Someone Looks at Something/ with One Eye Close To... Shane Haseman at AFAAAR

REFERENCES TO FOUR key figures of the historical avant-garde appear in Shane Haseman’s latest work, ‘High Street’ at NEAR gallery. Three of them may be ascribed to Dada - Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball and Marcel Duchamp (although exactly where Duchamp ‘fits’ is questionable, a core component of his enduring influence). The other, Samuel Beckett, as is well known, was as an absurdist writer with a particularly dark sense of the comic. What is the ultimate relationship of these key modernist figures in Haseman’s work though? Is the work just an exercise in retro-hagiography? Or are there deeper currents that connect and illuminate their works in this instance?

Perhaps the most immediate connection between the personages evoked in this work, is their symbolic functioning as proper names (‘brands’ even, according to today’s parlance). These are inserted into the artwork as part of a series of gags that inflect our understanding of their particular historical legacies. The other connecting factor is the reframing of these names as old-fashioned shop signs hand painted on glass. Thus, Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball now run a speech pathology and literacy centre, Marcel Duchamp (with partners) operates a 24-hour massage parlour and Samuel Beckett conjoins the humorously paradoxical responsibilities of coroner, tax agent and ice cream vendor. Of course, this is art very much about art history and how it is received. Despite the appealing formal elegance of the painted signs, the audience is expected to bring with it - and contrary to the contemporary art world’s delimiting obsession with its own contemporaneity - at least some understanding of the figures and movements cited. Therefore anyone knowledgeable of Dada would know that in 1916 Tzara and Ball founded one of its most influential venues, the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. They would also know that here Ball developed and performed ‘poetry’ combining phonetic gibberish with primitivist vocalising all the while dressed in a costume of cardboard tubes. At the same time and place Tzara was writing and reciting a similar form of perhaps more aggressive absurdist poetry that looked on the page as though a bunch of random letters of varying font sizes had suddenly crash landed. The joke in Haseman’s work obviously pertains to the imagined results of the application of Dada procedures to a serious therapeutic environment aimed at helping people to speak more correctly. Duchamp (and Partner’s) 24-hour massage parlour alludes to the presence within that artist’s oeuvre of a pervasive intellectually inclined eroticism and also to his well-known disdain for monogamy. It simultaneously suggests Duchamp’s ongoing obsession with optics as a form of visual massage stressing, in opposition to a dominant Cartesian model, the physiological and sensually embodied aspects of vision. Lastly, Beckett’s fixation with extremes of privation and reduction relate as much to unavoidable reflections on mortality as to the stultifying demands of modern bureaucracy. Add to this the promised reward of ice creams (that in the true spirit of Godot, may never arrive) and you have the perfect Beckettian triad of despair, senseless repetition and escape through laughter.

Beyond a consideration of the meanings of these puns in Haseman’s ‘High Street’, there is also the fundamental question of the glass itself as a ground and medium. This recalls most directly Duchamp’s ground-breaking (and broken) work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (or The Large Glass [1915-1923]), but also related works of his such as To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour from 1918. If anything, The Large Glass was one of the first works in the history of modernism to highlight the relativism of the museum viewing experience: it is impossible to physically approach Duchamp’s intricate narrative without at the same time being made aware of everything around it, including the real desiring presence of other viewers. Thus, what is essentially an abstracted and obliquely arcane ‘picture’ about the futility and inescapability of desire and its (re-)creation, is also a screen that structurally emphasises the carnality of looking, as well as the framing conditions of any artwork. In ‘High Street’, this dialectic of viewer and subject functions in a similar vein albeit in domesticated circumstances (appearing on the glass doors of a kitchen). This fact redirects a reading of the works as shop signs, a fact obviously highlighted in the title, toward the essential perception of them as simulacra, paintings on glass. It also punningly leans towards an interpretation whereby the gallery or project space, often suggested to be a type of laboratory where things are invented, becomes a kitchen within which, even in the absence of the offer of food, the unspoken question on everyone’s lips is ‘what’s cookin’?’ This in turn slyly emphasises the gastronomic and digestive economy from which all concepts are ultimately born. Though traditionally a less heroic space than the artist’s studio, domestic space is also a space fundamental to the generation of thinking, and of thinking about space.

Finally, Haseman’s NEAR event is linked to its important AFAAAR counterpart in the guise of a limited edition publication. This publication however is no ordinary artist catalogue or booklet but a box containing three sheets of glass upon which each of Haseman’s window works are reproduced. In this case, it is impossible again not to think of a Duchampian prototype like his famous portable museum in a suitcase, the Boîte-en-valise (1935-1941). In the context of the AFAAAR box, the context in which you might also be reading this essay, the glass sheets are accompanied by a corresponding set of three obliquely linked images. These serve to both expand and further historicise the references alluded to in the artworks. For example, a severely formalist profile of an OIivetti ‘Praxis’ typewriter from the 1960s serves to suggest the contrary defacing of language performed by Tzara and Ball. A curiously labial Chinese ink painting of a landscape with waterfall directs viewers to the explicit content of Duchamp’s last major work the Étant donnés (1946-1966) while a grey stone covered in yellowish lichen (the only colour in any of these images) conjures a Beckettian paradox concerning the anthropomorphised decay of an otherwise impervious and supposedly timeless substance. Considered overall, Haseman’s ‘High Street’ at NEAR and its published echo in the AFAAAR box, indicate the simultaneously collapsing and magnifying frames of reference that enable concepts to speak through time, space and matter.

Alex Gawronski

Originally published for Shane Haseman’s, High Street, limited edition deluxe box produced by AFAAAR (Mitchel Cumming), Sydney, Australia.