Love Hotel

Chiba City — a port city and dormitory suburb that feeds the Tokyo metropolis — is dominated by modern buildings and a new monorail. Within the urban grid is a peculiar building that startles the eye of local and tourist alike. This edifice is shaped like a small ocean liner, complete with masts, funnels and lifeboats. On asking about the structure, I was told it was a love hotel — a place where courting couples go for a 'dirty weekend', or parents can escape for some privacy in a society where space is at a premium and crowded accommodation is the norm. With its Love Boat facade, this short-stay hotel promises deliverance from everyday domesticity. It is not unusual for such establishments to have heart-shaped beds and fur-covered furniture or theme rooms designed to imitate the appearance of a medieval dungeon, a Louis Quinze boudoir, or a chamber as futuristic as a setting from The Jetsons, replete with techno-gadgets such as motorised beds and mobile video screens.

This love hotel, with its bizarre confusion of form and function, has an arresting appearance. It is neither great architecture, nor an efficient sign to broadcast its purpose; but it is, nevertheless, a powerfully charged site. It is intriguing to consider this building as a convenient trope for discussing contemporary art, for the cocktail of displaced narrative and kitsch metaphor in much of today's art is ambivalent yet somehow satisfying. The elements of voyeurism, of dressing up in disguises, the fetish, the perversion of 'good taste' and the defiance of parental rules are all here. The analogy of the love hotel, with its conflicting themes of belonging and estrangement, seems to fit art with an identity crisis.

Many of the works in this exhibition are self-contained objects, at home neither in the museum nor outside it. They seem to exist in a curious hyper-state, in which objects are patently fictions, but somehow more real than real. The familiarity of the works is reassuring: they have the appearance of functional objects, expected and banal. Geoff Kleem's Untitled 1995 or Richard Artschwager's Mantle 1990 for example, have the normality of domestic furniture, yet are somehow alienated from their environment. Like many of the works in Love Hotel, each is a deceptively 'bland' sculpture, laden with intense personal and psychological meanings. The love hotel is the place where reality and fantasy meet.

These works share a common parentage of Pop and Minimal art. Pop art is here in the transformation of domestic items into new images — often achieved with considerable wit, Minimal artists favoured severely formal relationships, striving to empty their abstract works of all pictorial content. Their language of straight lines and simple geometric forms was intended to be a self, sufficient aesthetic — a counter to illusionism and the emotive rhetoric of previous art — best summed up by the credo, ‘what you see is what you get'. Minimal art's respect for materials remains important in contemporary practice, but in most other ways the child is very different from its parents.

Minimalism epitomised the idea of 'art for art's sake', Today, the notion of a purely aesthetic work of art seems naive, and it is assumed that there is no such thing as a truly innocent object: everything carries a cargo of meanings and contradictory references. Geoff Kleem, like many of his contemporaries, refers to Minimal art in his work. particularly in the obdurate surfaces and clean lines of the mobile shelf, Untitled 1995. This minimal 'look', signifying order, is used ironically in contemporary art. It is doubly effective, as it describes the art of a period of apparent social harmony and technological confidence, and refers to the youth (during the 1960s) of many of the artists. The oppressive scale of Untitled makes us feel child-sized, but in a childhood of anxieties and nightmares. In its coolly functional shape and form, reminiscent of shelves bought from Ikea — here engorged beyond the parameters of good taste — lurk adult insecurities.

In many cultures the removal of facial or body hair is considered essential to achieve a perfect, if slightly sanitised, feminine beauty; there is a disorder, however — Trichotilomania — in which the sufferer, usually female, pulls out the hair on her head. It is generally thought to be a response to the stress of puberty, childbirth or change of life. The stainless steel pedestal that makes up half of Jana Sterbak's sculpture Trichotilomania 1993—96 refers to domestic tables or the hospital surgery, but also relies on the severe geometry of cold, minimal forms to signify logic and intellect. Materials are important to Sterbak, and are chosen for physical properties that can trigger association. The fetish object resting on the tabletop, ready for use, is the second part of the sculpture. It is a whip made from human hair, with a phallic-shaped glass handle, symbolising the subconscious and complementing the table's rational structure. This work relies on dualities: soft against hard, organic and mechanical, cold and hot. Sterbak couples the sting of the whip with the pleasure of a caress or the comforting sensuality of the hair and the confronting responsibilities of maturity. Trichotilomania addresses the boundaries between the normal and the bizarre. The play of opposites leads to disorientation and agitation, here invested with a disturbing sexuality.

Writer and critic Walter Benjamin has described 'the sex appeal of the inorganic', referring to the desire brought on by looking at clothing.1 Clothes, shoes and various fittings made to house the body — including chairs, tables and other accoutrements — are also extensions of the prostheses that can become the subject obsession They are the fetishes of a consumer culture. A work of art, too, can be an alluring super a fetish as beguiling as the body and all its parts. Sigmund Freud once flippantly suggested 'in shopping, all women are fetishists'.2 Both Vital Perfection 1993 (a fur-lined shoe box) and Rosemary Trockel’s Balaklava 1986 comment on Freud’s theory that repressed subconscious desire might be triggered by apparently unrelated or inappropriate objects. Such objects of displaced desire can evoke powerful responses, but ultimately fail to gratify. Consumer lust is without consummation: it is a state of perpetual arousal and unfulfilled desire. By summoning up the body while operating in its absence, these works blur the boundaries between the living and the inanimate.

The artists in Love Hotel use ordinary domestic objects as the subjects of their work, drawing out implicit meanings and associations. A palpable human presence is implied by the scale and anthropomorphic form of each entity: a mantelpiece, shelving. a chair, a shoe box, a table, clothing. Many of the works in this exhibition celebrate the body, as much through its absence as its presence. Clothing and furniture are parts of the socially-projected self — they can be a symbol of identity or a stand-in for the owner. There is a teasing element of disguise here: many works wear the look of earlier art styles (such as Pop or Minimalism) in order to claim the status of art for themselves. Things are not always as they appear to be in the love hotel, and surface appearance can be as deceptive as the imitation wood-grain veneer of Artschwager's Mantle.

Ronald Jones' Untitled (DNA fragment from human chromosome 13 carrying mutant Rb genes also known as Malignant Oncogenes which trigger rapid Cancer Tumorigenisis) 1989 is a cool, black-patinated bronze sculpture. It is roughly 'life' size, and composed of biomorphic forms strongly reminiscent of the work of Jean Arp or Constantin Brancusi. The meanings in Jones' work are not immediately apparent, although they are drawn from common cultural lore. This sculpture looks very much like the expected furniture of an art gallery — an object which, by its appearance, advertises itself as a work of art. Viewers already know the rules in an art gallery — abstract works such as this are usually a tribute to the human spirit, often expressing an uplifting emotion. Untitled 1989 relies on the information given in the title of the work, as much as the appearance of the work itself. Those who read the title will learn the truth about this work: this is not an abstraction at all, but a realistic portrait of a molecule of human genetic material. What abstraction is supposed to mean, Jones tells us, and what it actually does mean, depends on context. He constructs his work with cultural signifiers — the 'sign' for modern art (the biomorphic bronze sculpture) is combined with a symbol of science (the enlarged, deadly molecule) — to engineer the clash and contradiction of their meanings. With the end of the Cold War, atomic annihilation is no longer perceived as imminent. Death by disease has become our greatest fear. Jones juxtaposes the wholesome qualities of art with the potential for evil to blossom within our bodies should our internal systems go wrong. The viewer is required to make sense of the conflicts in the work in much the same way as they make sense of the world.

Michael Craig-Martin also comments on ways of looking. His Reading with shoes 1980 describes a number of simple images — a book, a fork, shoes, a pistol — with flexible black adhesive tape on a gallery wall. We recognise the images even as they dissolve into a welter of tape lines before resolving to familiar shapes again. The relationship between the pictured and the means of picturing is continually questioned. (In reproduction, lacking the physical presence of the black tape, the pictured is favoured.) The objects depicted are like archetypes, too perfect to be typical. Like many of the objects in this exhibition, these are facsimiles of things that have never existed: they are replicas and duplicants. Craig-Martin's association of objects also creates an engaging narrative, at odds with the cool, aloof images.

In Nan Goldin's or Nobuyoshi Araki's works, the association of individual photographs leads to a sequence. Their images are mundane — familiar territory for all of us — but the implied narrative creates a fantasy. Goldin asks us to share a diary of suburban menace and loss of intimacy: Nan and Brian in bed, New York City 1983 becomes Nan after being battered 1984. Even the most innocuous of Araki's images are eroticised by their association with each other, and by their subjects 'posing' for the camera. The sexual ambiguity of the everyday is heightened by our voyeurism. Peter Cripps' Public Projects (Fiction) Series 2, II 1993 is a work of art that disconcertingly returns our gaze — the viewer becomes the view in the distorting surveillance mirror. There is a sense of macabre narcissism and a disquiet that comes from the subtle combination of discomfort and pleasure.

The videos 100 reasons 1989 by Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley and Sheree Rose, and the tapes Gag 1991, Head 1993 and Craft 1994 by Cheryl Donegan are recordings of performances. Made as art, they are intended to be seen, but there is also a frisson of complicit exhibitionism. 'This is hurting me more than it is hurting you!' exclaims Mike Kelley as the paddle wallops Bob Flanagan in the video performance 100 reasons. This observation is almost amusing as parental cliché — clearly the pain is Flanagan's. But from sensation there is pleasure: Flanagan has lived with a life-threatening condition since his youth and each blow inflicted is an affirmation of life, of the complex pleasure of existence. Running through the works in this exhibition is an absurd, dark humour that combines provocation with seduction. The many ironies in Love Hotel make a wry and witty comment on the artificiality of contemporary life.

Beautiful and repellent, Jannis Kounellis' Untitled 1990 contrasts the gunmetal sheen of industrial steel with the textured and comforting surfaces of wool, felt and leather. In the formal relationships between its elements, this work retains the elegant clarity and strength of Minimal art; but the symbolic junction of the materials provides the motor for creating a complex and poetic narrative. The coupling of brutally strong and fragile elements informs our reading of the composition, as does as our knowledge of their practical use. The physicality of these forms makes us think of the outside world and also, by contrast, of the inner self. The artist connects the rise of technology to the oppressiveness of urban existence and a loss of faith, but his Untitled also expresses a passionate joining with the world. Kounellis acknowledges the eros and thanatos of crucifixion iconography: there is tenderness and vulnerability in this identification.

Kounellis' Untitled highlights the shell — clothing, the city — surrounding the body, to invoke the intangible, that is, the spirit or soul that flows inside the machine. Aziz + Cucher meld body and machine in their eerie photographs of fleshy electronic couplings. Ann Hamilton's two videoworks, Untitled (the capacity of absorption) [ear/water] 1988—93 and Untitled (dissections_they said it was an experiment) [neck/ water] 1988—93, are flush-mounted into the wall so that the almost life-sized images of ear or neck are part of the fabric of the display space. In these works, the sensual trickle and play of water across the body and its orifices is disturbingly sexual and spiritual.

There is an undefined sense of loss at the heart of our existence, which we romanticise. Post-industrial, postcolonial, post-feminist, post-modern — if we measure every thing in terms of 'what was', by definition we seem to be at the end of a historical moment. In our fin de siécle mood we see the metaphorical cup as half empty, rather than half full. The past seems to loom larger than the present, and we are nostalgic for the sureties of our recent golden age. Paradise is lost. In the art in this exhibition nature is replaced by technology, the State is increasingly in control, money is all-important and image is everything — or so it seems. The objects present themselves as neutral and deadpan, but we sense their perversity as much as their realism. Below the skin a powerful vitality surges, indicating an essential humanity. In Love Hotel each work houses something of the artist and the culture that created it. We imbue all around us with our passions.

Michael Desmond
Curator of International Painting and Sculpture
National Gallery of Australia

Plimsoll Gallery Hobart
30 August - 28 September 1997

and four other galleries finishing at the John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, October 1998.