Exhibition

BLIND MAN SEES UFO and ESPRESS YOURSELF: AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTISTS KAIN PICKEN & ROB MCKENIZE BY UPLANDS GALLERY DIRECTOR JARROD RAWLINS

What are you making for this new exhibition?

There will be nine paintings and two sculptures. Each painting states 'Blind Man Sees UFO'. The two sculptures will be different propositions for how one 'takes' their coffee. The sculptures will be called 'Espress Yourself'.

'Blind Man Sees UFO' doesn't really make sense, the guy is blind, what do you mean?

The blind man and the UFO are companions. We are told that one cannot see and the other cannot be seen. Most evidence, though, points to the contrary. We all know blind people 'see' something, even if it is not with their eyes and we all know that UFO's have been seen by many people, even if these people are not always believed. So this double negative (of sorts) illustrates a moment where rationality falters. Any claim of fairness in regards to language and truth must be seen as misleading, even dishonest.

'Blind Man Sees UFO' is an attempt to expand the severe limitations we currently place on 'knowledge'. It is an inclusive proclamation. We want to encourage the generous exchange of reluctant subjectivities, those hidden for fear of persecution or disbelief.

You could describe the text in these paintings as against-representation, or at least against the restrictions placed on us by the systems of representation we are taught in high school. Ultimately, though, it is a metaphor. Do you remember Plato's Cave? 'Blind Man Sees UFO' is a related proposition. It is part of a project to render Greek philosophy void and to find a more productive relationship to how we 'know' the world. A treatise on faith, belief, knowing, and truth.

What do you guys have against Greek Philosophy, what does it have to do with the coffee sculptures?

Our problem with ancient Greek Philosophy is a direct reaction to our perception of it being the root cause of Western Society's obsession with all forms of essentialism. In our opinion, complete relativism cannot come too soon.

The coffee sculptures are about self-identity and personal expression. We attempt to communicate our inner workings, the minute subjectivities of our emotions, thoughts and reflections, through the espresso machine of cultural paraphernalia. The objects with which we 'espresso' ourselves create a voodoo subjectivity. If we remember lessons learnt from advanced semiotics, these objects of our everyday life must be tied to the very condition of all signifiers. The objects can only ever be both full and empty of meaning. So these voodoo objects of our 'advanced subjectivities' (or more simply modern identity) is based on something dreadfully unstable and tentative, but always true.

In an interview, the writer, translator and publisher Paul Foss alludes to this metaphor of coffee and coffee grounds and how it might function as an analogy for the contrivance or aspirations of subjectivity.

This is why the question of influence (or, as I earlier adduced, 'difficulty') in intellectual communication is so fraught with ambiguity in my particular case--for better or worse, I'm totally addicted to recycling the image of now-ism, to retooling or expressing it (like coffee from grounds).

What are the objects included in the coffee sculptures, I don't get it?

Each sculpture is crowned with a fairly simple, though elegant and well designed, espresso pot. These coffee pots are for practical purposes the same but they differ slightly in design. If you allow a little bit of poetic license, these coffee pots should be metaphors for different perceptions, experiences or preferences of the 'real'. And in our opinion, all are valid.

What colours are the paintings? Do they have a relationship with the sculptures?

The colours in the paintings are taken from a pre-set interior design colour system. A codified idea of subjectivity and taste. We saw an exhibition by Sherrie Levine at Jablonka Galerie where she exhibited a series of monochrome paintings. The paintings were square canvases that were placed along the wall, evenly spaced. Behind a group of 14 canvases was a long rectangular wall painting done in a single colour. This seemed to be a very poetic way of creating 'scientific' quantities of intensity. The colours in the 'Blind Man Sees UFO' paintings attempt a similar thing.

Both the paintings and the sculptures are about the impossibility of representation. Representation never actually functioned as it was meant to. Like our mobile phone network, we are forced to replace older systems with newer technologies. Currently our technologies of representation are being renovated, or perhaps, completely replaced. Let's hope we can make it a liberating experience.

What is the reference point for the sculptures?

The sculptures are channelling two artists in particular. One is the West Coast American minimalist John McCracken and the other is the Israeli-born American post-conceptualist Haim Steinbach

John McCracken is known for his very beautiful lacquered rectangular objects. They were famously revealed as an attempt by the artist to communicate with extra terrestrial beings. The New Zealand-born art writer Giovanni Intra wrote a terrific essay about these works. The final paragraph of his essay should suggest our interest in these particular works, and the possible wider application of these ideas in aspects of the everyday.

The smiling, thin lipped Gray [Alien] doesn't seem like a bad person. He thinks about art and knows what he likes, and although he appears in a Buck Rogers-style spacecraft, sporting the baroque clichés of late-twentieth-century interstellar chic, there's no apparent reason to doubt his existence. McCracken's work, in fact, is a good deal more sober than Jeff Koon's, for example. The deadpan paranormality of such accounts are fun - "fun" being a word McCracken often uses to describe time travel - but it also is a precise metaphorical register of what the sculpture achieves in a material sense. These alien dialogues are compelling, but even without such an index, McCracken would have conceived of an extraordinary use for Minimal art, turning primary structures into exploratory vessels of complete expansiveness.

Haim Steinbach is famous for works where he placed different objects on laminated shelves. The objects, often products of industrial manufacturing or consumer society, were placed alongside each other, providing a moment for comparative analysis. The strangeness of these objects as abject presences really comes to the fore. In a project for the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Haim Steinbach studied the pre-arranged settings people are always, every moment of the day, arranging in their homes. In an interview about this work, titled North East South West, he explains;

The hospitality ritual of first sitting together and having coffee or tea was most often a prerequisite. Looking around I discovered that everyone has a little arrangement of objects, somewhere right up front or stacked in a niche. Why is it that aside from basic needs and functions we have to express ourselves through objects by playing a game with them? Very often this is done unconsciously, impulsively through some hidden drive or desire. Even in very wealthy homes where status objects take on another kind of importance, like a self-conscious class statement, the more personal intimate attitudes towards objects are revealed in unexpected places. What is interesting is this play, which is an art game, a search for transcendent meaning and communication.

The important thing here is to de-emphasise the deterministic reading of this sort of 'cultural expression'. Rather than finding some essential expression of character, what we are looking at is much more a 'gestalt' into meaning. A haphazard accident of 'sense'. For this reason, the thought of cultural identity is practically impossible. We are only ever an accident of meaning. Although I want to say again, this accident is an important sort of truth.

I have been hoping for a while that someone would channel something in the gallery, thanks.

Perhaps everyone at the gallery is channelling something. Just look at David Noonan. If that isn't channelling, or voodoo communication, I don't know what is. This idea is very close to the heart of the exhibition. It is the idea that rather than representing some essential subjectivity, we are all simply vehicles for channelling a million different inputs into some cohesive framework. We provide that framework. It is a very fragmented and chaotic process of creating the illusion of our selves

Is channelling a political gesture, like group work used to be before it became indulgent?

Perhaps, there is certainly plenty of evidence to support that opinion, but I think it is difficult to make such clear-cut distinctions. From our perspective, politics can only ever come from the individual. Channelling is perhaps a way to connect the individual to something that might resemble a greater, more totalising, and therefore possibly more powerful, political whole. I doubt though whether this would still function after future work has been carried out on all our other, even unknown, core technologies.

A deleted extract from an extended interview between Paul Foss and Rob McKenzie, from the forthcoming publication, The Ampersand Files: Art & Text 1981-2002.

Giovanni Intra. "John McCracken: Alienbait." Artext. p.51

Haim Steinbach, "Interviewed by Alexander Tolnay." Haim Steinbach: North East South West. Hatje Cantz Verlag. 2002. p.54