Joint installation features collages and canvases
Last week, Zavitz Gallery featured Refigure, an exhibition of the work of Rory Steels and Allanah Vokes. At first glance, the show represents one of the most accomplished and substantial Zavitz exhibitions in recent memory, but I remain ambivalent about the work’s significance. It certainly occupied the space beautifully, due not only to the number and size of the works on display but also to their elegant arrangement. Steels’ paintings and Vokes’ collages joined two collaborative pieces: a large pseudo-sculptural performance portrait in the centre of the gallery and, for the souvenir hunter, a series of six customized postcards in editions of 10.
In Rory Steels’ paintings, exactly rendered coloured shapes contrast with loose black lines that trail and arc across the canvas – a bit like calligraphy, a bit like abstract expressionism, and a bit like a Sharpie doodle on a napkin. In Allanah Vokes’ collages, thin strips of magazine cut from Playboy centrefolds form towering polygonal figures on austere white backgrounds. These two bodies of work differ in aesthetic terms, foregrounding wiggle and rigidity respectively. Steels’ “natural drawing” suggests spontaneity and haphazardness; Vokes’ “reconstitution of the pornographic centrefold” suggests assiduousness and accuracy. Both involve conflict: sharp angles and hard blocks of pigment corral Steels’ unruly scribbles, while hints of image-flashes of fabric and flesh – and minor compositional irregularities mediate Vokes’ seemingly sheer symmetry.
Part of the pleasure of Vokes’ collages – I like to think of them as “post-nudes” – that of private jokes and dirty ones. The Playmate’s naked form is both concealed and exposed, and one peers closely at the lines as if through a keyhole, searching for a glimpse of forbidden fruit. Steels’ lines also hint at aspects of anatomy, but purport, instead, to record or represent the artist’s own movements and mindset. His canvases become allegorical: the lines stand for Steels’ subjectivity, the slabs of colour for the societal structures imposed upon it. Steels thereby explains his work in terms of a pair of facile binaries: subjective and objective, nature and nurture. But the purportedly naturalistic black lines really tell us nothing in particular. They reveal Steels’ to us only insofar as hen scratchings imply a hen. They project impulsivity, but may, for all we know, be as studied, contrived, or “objective” as anything else. It is silly and cliché to equate squiggly lines with subjectivity and tidy shapes with objectivity. Surely the humanities oppose this sort of simplistic thinking.
Vokes’ collages, meanwhile, aim at “transformation, crystallization, and elevation.” This last term is key, because it figures them as morally redemptive. They certainly possess a chilly, crystalline beauty – like so many snowflakes – but they constitute an exercise in elevation, only if one believes a mathematical figure is more beautiful, poignant, or sensual than a human one. There is also a more grotesque, lurid dimension to her work, aside from its ideological critique of formalized beauty: the pleasure taken in mangling the object of desire. Perhaps these collages represent the liberated postmodern dismantling of gender, sex, and desire, but a darker interpretation of Vokes’ antiseptic vision reads it as the imposition of Puritanical control.