No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout, Exhibition catalogue

NO ONE IS WATCHING YOU

RONNIE VAN HOUT

NO ONE IS WATCHING YOU

RONNIE VAN HOUT CURATED BY MELISSA KEYS

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No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout Buxton Contemporary University of Melbourne Published on the occasion of the first major solo survey exhibition at Buxton Contemporary 12 July – 21 October 2018 Director Ryan Johnston

Installation team Fergus Binns Beau Emmett Carly Fisher Wyatt Knowles Jordan Marani Liam O’Brien Patrick O’Brien Edwina Stevens Danae Valenza

Curator Melissa Keys

Exhibition carpentry and fabrication Brian Scales Simon McGuinness

Collection Manager Katarina Paseta

Copyediting and proofreading Clare Williamson

Program and Visitor Services Coordinator Ashlee Baldwin

Installation photography Christian Capurro

Visitor Services Olga Bennett Anna Dunnill Camila Galaz Anthea Kemp Rosie Leverton Anatol Pitt Eleanor Simcoe Gail Smith Megan Taylor Nikki Van Der Hortst Alex Walker Registration intern Megan Taylor Procurement Eleanor Simcoe

All images courtesy of the artist, STATION, Melbourne and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be directed to the publisher. © Copyright 2018 Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne The views expressed in this publication are those of the contributing authors and not necessarily those of the publisher.

Director’s foreword — Ryan Johnston

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No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout — Melissa Keys

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Q&A ­­— Ronnie van Hout with Melissa Keys

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A cast of thousands — Russell Smith

Authors Melissa Keys, Russell Smith, Ronnie van Hout

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Artist biography

ISBN 978-­0-­6482584-­2-­1

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List of works

Title No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout

Subjects Ronnie van Hout, Contemporary Art, Australasian Art Other creators/contributors Ronnie van Hout Design Studio Round, Melbourne Publication Design Tristan Main Printing Print Graphics Stocks: Sovereign Silk 350gsm, Knight Digital Smooth 140gsm Edition: 600 Buxton Contemporary respectfully acknowledges the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, their Ancestors and Elders, on whose land this book was produced, and who form part of the longest continuing culture in the world.

Buxton Contemporary Corner Southbank Boulevard and Dodds Street Southbank Victoria 3006 Australia www.buxtoncontemporary.com Contributors — Melissa Keys is curator of Buxton Contemporary —D r Russell Smith lectures in Modernist Literature and Literary Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra —R onnie van Hout is an artist

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Buxton Contemporary is very pleased to present No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout as the second exhibition to be held at our new museum. Spanning more than three decades of Ronnie van Hout’s protean practice, this exhibition brings together almost 80 artworks in the most comprehensive presentation of his work ever seen in Australia.

No one is watching you is also the first in an ongoing series of monographic exhibitions to be staged at Buxton Contemporary over the coming years. One of the defining principles of the Michael Buxton Collection has been its acquisition of the work of individual artists in depth and over time to create a nuanced record of each represented artist’s practice as it develops and shifts. At the same time, the Collection has encouraged and supported these artists to work ambitiously. As such, the format of a monographic exhibition that brings a long history of practice together with a major new commission – as this exhibition does – closely reflects the ethos upon which Buxton Contemporary was founded. Furthermore, the opportunity this affords to study highly significant oeuvres in detail and at length will also, we hope, provide inspiration and instruction to subsequent generations of artists, including those enrolled at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, where Buxton Contemporary is located.

No one is watching you has been expertly curated by Melissa Keys and I congratulate her on delivering an exhibition that demonstrates such remarkable sensitivity to, and nuanced understanding of, this complex body of work. I would also like to thank Dr Russell Smith for his erudite contribution to this catalogue and Max Delany for opening the exhibition.

Finally, I extend our deepest appreciation to the artist, Ronnie van Hout.

Producing a solo exhibition of this size and scope requires a major commitment on the artist’s behalf. We are extremely grateful to Ronnie for the intelligence, generosity and humour he brought to this project, for his production of a major new body of work to mark this occasion, and for entrusting Buxton Contemporary with the opportunity to stage this remarkable survey exhibition.

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Director’s foreword — Ryan Johnston

This exhibition draws extensively on major public and leading private collections from across Australia and New Zealand, and I thank all of the lenders for generously allowing so many key works to be seen here together. I’d also like to thank the artist’s commercial representatives, Jane and Simon Hayman and Jack Willet at STATION in Melbourne, Darren Knight in Sydney, Hamish McKay in Wellington and Ivan Anthony in Auckland, for supporting the development of this exhibition and for lending and facilitating the loan of many important works.

Buxton Contemporary is run by a small but highly dedicated team.

I thank Melissa Keys, Katarina Paseta and Ashlee Baldwin for all of their work, and also Eleanor Simcoe and Megan Taylor for their important assistance on this exhibition in particular. The Buxton Contemporary Committee, chaired by Professor Su Baker and Michael Buxton, also provides invaluable support and advice. I’d also like to acknowledge our brilliant installation team; Brian Scales for his expert exhibition fabrication; Tristan Main for his graphic design; and our casual visitor services team.

Director’s foreword

Ryan Johnston

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A multitude of likenesses of Ronnie van Hout jostle for attention, gaze inertly or appear to shy away from visitors to the exhibition. These hybridised, man/child, mini van Houts might be read as the artist’s mutant doppelgangers or miscreant self-­portraits. However, as one of the installations encountered in this exhibition attests, it’s not just about him, it’s also about YOU! To quote the exhibition title, no one is watching you – at least, not directly – but the artist has an uncanny ability to make you feel as if you are indeed under intense scrutiny.

Ronnie van Hout’s practice blurs the boundaries between self and other, artist and audience. The dynamics of outsider and insider, presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, watching and being watched are constantly played out in his work. For almost three decades, van Hout has explored these binary oppositions while tracing issues of identity, memory and mutability of self and more broadly questioning the meaning of art, representation and what it is to be an artist.

recur throughout the exhibition and include, for instance, a carved school pencil box; memories of his father’s off-­limits backyard shed; unsettlingly obsessive allusions to accounts of UFO abductions; a work trapped in the gravitas of iconic New Zealand artist Colin McCahon; a photograph of a futuristic model of a Concorde in flight above a cloud of cottonwool; and a series of embroideries of simple drawings (including a ‘Dad’ image), crude comic-­strip-­style thought bubbles empty of conversation, and images of intestines and poo.

Though they project a sense of authenticity, these objects and episodes are in many ways stand-­ins – they are sourced and processed from the media and history as much as from the artist’s own lived experience. At once semi-­autobiographical and semi-­fictional, they are reproductions, simulations and quotations that van Hout constantly reconfigures throughout his oeuvre to build a repertoire of stories, fragments and memories that suggest the ever-­shifting ways we construct new life narratives and are shaped by historic moments and social and cultural dynamics outside our selves. In particular, he is interested in our ‘desire to stitch our personal narrative together with a broader historical moment’.(1) Some of van Hout’s most recognisable works in the exhibition are pyjama-­clad figurative sculptures that bear resemblance to the artist.

These uncanny hybridised figures feature crude casts of the artist’s

Van Hout’s narratives frequently draw upon and revisit experiences of his childhood and youth spent in a small town in New Zealand. He often refers to or remakes artefacts from this time, evoking common and familiar episodes of everyday family, suburban and provincial life.

Engaging in role-­play, he summons and replays memories, frequently in the form of moving images that recall countless hours of escape into darkened cinemas or spent in front of the television.

Performance, installation, film, photography, embroidery, sound and music are used to recreate scenes of childhood and adolescence.

Fragments of 1970s and 80s science fiction, cinema, comedy, celebrity culture, music, art and popular culture animate van Hout’s work, combining to form an ongoing document of everything that influenced him during his formative years. These references signify moments in his life that have had an enduring impact on him – from experiences in the schoolyard in his home town to his discovery of art history and the European and American avant-­gardes. Traces of eternal youth

No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout

Melissa Keys

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No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout — Melissa Keys

The characters that inhabit van Hout’s absurd micro worlds take many forms and appear to have multiple or split identities. Their many incarnations include chimpanzees, sausages, robots, disembodied hands and the undead. Bananas are also regular cast members in van Hout’s ensemble. With their long history in comedy and the vaudeville halls of the nineteenth century – sometimes endowed with human limbs or other figurative references – these forms are a source of amusement and fascination for the artist. For example, his installation titled Bad traveller, 2010, which depicts the absurd hard luck of a gigantic Ronnie banana, is filled with comic pathos, and we are somehow nudged to feel for, or even identify with, this surrealist personage. Avoiding the schadenfreude of early slapstick humour that delighted in misfortune and often reinforced class, gender and ethnic stereotypes, Bad traveller instead elicits sympathy, triggering humour but also arousing a latent, universal sense of existential dread.

in his studio after the social event and became part of his performative experimentation and play. The chimpanzee is often presented by van Hout in video and sculptural form as corrupted, vomiting, inebriated or learning to paint. Embroiled in artistic and everyday struggles and pursuits, this character embodies personal and social forms of dysfunction.

Reflections on incompleteness, deficiency and failure, which are at once humorous and poignant, disarm us throughout van Hout’s oeuvre. For example, his Untitled embroidery (1993–2000) works, all 2000, which reference ‘band member wanted’ ads, might be read as analogous to aspiration, absence and the desire to perform – or perhaps they transcend some of these sensations. Van Hout’s focus on cover bands may also wryly reflect his approach to the mechanics of artmaking via processes of re-­making, re-­presenting and referencing experiences and memories found in television, cinema, music and art.

Not only do many of van Hout’s sculptures look like him, he also often plays all of the characters in his videos. In Brett and Michelle, 2014, van Hout performs the dialogue of two characters in multiple scenes from the menacing 1998 cinematic thriller The Boys. Deeply unsettling, this video continues van Hout’s interest in the psychopathology that simmers beneath the surface of daily life. Existing away from the ever-­ watchful gaze of society, the home these individuals share is presented here as an ungoverned and threatening space. Van Hout’s performances as both aggressor (Brett) and the subject of aggression and oppression (Michelle) disrupt the normative order and complicate notions of gender and violence within the cinematic imagination.

Another form of disruption is found in works from van Hout’s early practice, during which he regularly made use of the swastika, the ancient Eurasian emblem that was so infamously appropriated by the Nazis, its positive symbolism giving way to connotations of evil as a result.

Van Hout’s primate persona, one of his earliest characters, was born out of the artist’s creative frustration. He had purchased a monkey mask for a costume party that he attended as a character from the dystopian sci-­fi movie and television series Planet of the Apes. The mask remained

No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout

Melissa Keys

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face and hands, mismatched with child-­sized bodies. Each member of this troupe of replicants possesses an indeterminate relationship to the viewer and to the artist himself. While bearing a distinct likeness to the artist, they are not portraits in any true sense, nor are they reflective of any other particular individual or group. Instead, van Hout’s figures seem to combine a disjunctive and troubling mix of characteristics.

With their roughly painted faces, they remain at once recognisable and yet disturbingly unfamiliar. Despite their apparent lack of any sense of agency or purpose and their grotesque qualities, these beings manage to elicit a level of empathy: Dave, 2014, for example, is at once repulsive and eerily adorable. Macabre and mysterious, he and his fellow alter egos continue the artist’s use of cinematic and theatrical devices such as masks, costumes and prosthetics as means of exploring the concepts of shadowing and doubling.

The human impetus to create and accept irrational narratives has also long fascinated van Hout. His titles often incorporate the term ersatz – a German word that means substitute or stand-­in for something else, suggesting by extension something that might be false or artificial.

This notion is linked to van Hout’s investigations of the psychological imperative to believe in UFOs, super beings, phenomena and forces beyond our control. While he doesn’t necessarily believe that aliens are watching and studying life on Earth, he is interested in the absurd and often disturbing nature, as well as the tabloid qualities, of abduction narratives – encounters that sometimes entail bizarrely erotic, physically or psychologically invasive experiences. Van Hout’s work makes us wonder what these apparent incidents might say about humanity – and what they stand in for within the broader context of history and human experience.

act of reinvention and the ongoing process of ‘becoming’ in van Hout’s practice. This blockbuster installation says everything and nothing about the world we inhabit early in the twenty-first century.

Ronnie van Hout creates disquietingly strange yet somehow familiar micro worlds. Whether through sculptural installations or a cinematic lens, he offers a revealing and unnerving glimpse of the expanded field of theatre and spectacle that constitutes the social realm we inhabit every day. From being spied on through a hole in the wall – or via the gallery surveillance system – or challenged by a confrontational encounter with an embodied or disembodied ‘Ronnie-­figure’ via an installation, video or sound, we are always on alert and on notice. Watch yourself. This is not a time to relax. No one is watching you – or maybe they are.

Note (1) Ronnie van Hout, in conversation with the curator, 19 April 2018.

Images pp. 8–9 BED/SIT 2008 (detail) pp. 10–11 Installation view, No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout, Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, 2018 pp. 12–13 left to right: Bad Ronald 2013–18, Doom and gloom 2009 p. 14 YOU! 2016 p. 15 left to right: Untitled 1994, Untitled 1994, Untitled embroidery 1993–2000 2000, Untitled embroidery 1993–2000 (DEVOX) 2000, Untitled embroidery 1993–2000 2000 p. 16 Bad traveller 2010

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Van Hout is interested in the fact that, throughout the ages, art has often been thought of as inherently virtuous, good, ennobling, morally righteous or synonymous with beauty, but that history is littered with examples of its co-­option for evil, corrupt or bankrupt ends. Among other concerns, he explores the aesthetics of ugliness via B-­grade and lowbrow forms of culture, gritty human experience, stigmatised symbols that cannot be rehabilitated and repulsive things we reflexively look away from and do not wish to see.

p. 17 Brett and Michelle 2014 p. 18 Installation view, No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout, Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, 2018 pp. 20–21 King Vader 2018 (background), Bad fathers 2018 (foreground) pp. 22–23 Installation view, No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout, Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, 2018, with Paul 2014

A bearded messianic figure gestures grandly from a plinth. The loinclothed statue is surrounded by a heroic cavalcade of transhistorical naked male characters referencing classical mythology, Christianity, the history of art, music and popular culture. Think Jesus, Hercules, Titian, Star Wars and The Clash coming together in an epic and chaotic tableau. In the background is a video that combines Darth Vader and King Lear. Van Hout’s most recent works, made especially for this exhibition, are an absurd extravaganza of masculine meta-­histories.

Sublimely overwhelming, this confronting pastiche represents the very undoing of history. These works reflect reiterative dynamics, the endless

No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout

Melissa Keys

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MK Throughout your practice you have often made reference – in both the titles of exhibitions and artworks – to ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’. In 1996, you presented an exhibition titled Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, and you have used the title Mothers on a number of occasions for moving image works that reference cinematic narratives about the paranormal. Your most recent installation is titled Bad fathers. Can you speak a little about what the ideas of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ mean to you within your work?

RvH 1996 was the year I felt I could start to engage with, and explore with some freedom, ideas that I’d had within me ever since I could remember having a thought at all.

The exhibition Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, at Manawatu gallery in Palmerston North, emerged from my thinking about how ideas and concepts of being are passed from one person to another, and how ideas live longer than people. This thinking started when I was a child, as I was very afraid of dying and took comfort in concepts of fame and legend. I took the basic Catholic idea of the Trinity as describing this. We have the Father passing ideas onto the Son, and the Holy Ghost as those ideas being passed as well as the relationship between this exchange.

In my show it didn’t always turn out for the best. In other words it wasn’t a great system.

So, in this way mothers and fathers are not always literal or biological for me, and they are certainly not my mother or father, but these terms provide ways in which we can gauge ourselves in time.

MK Theorists of the unconscious speculate that our lives are shaped by forces that we are unaware of. Throughout your work you have variously explored alien abduction narratives and mythical and other unexplained phenomena. What interests you about these types of supernatural or uncanny phenomena – and what do they more broadly represent or stand in for within your work?

RvH I have an interest in what shapes each of us. UFOs and, in particular, being abducted by aliens are subjects that are fascinating and resonant for me. I never tire of reading the repetitive tales of missing time, the Oz factor, physical examinations and sexual abuse.

They express genuine trauma and strangeness, which are symptomatic of the failure of our own metabolisms and psyches. A bit like art, actually.

MK Alongside popular culture your work incorporates intricate references to modernism and European and American avant-­gardes. Can you speak a little about your interests in cultural history and some of the artists you admire?

RvH I am very relaxed about culture. I don’t distinguish between popular and whatever the other is (maybe elitism).

Really, I feel like I belong to a generation that has seen the end of history. My feeling is that you can take stuff from anywhere and you can work with abstraction in the morning and figuration in the afternoon. All the mediums and disciplines like paint, marble, drawing, whatever, I dislike them all. Painting isn’t art, like photography isn’t art, and the thought of being called a painter, sculptor or photographer is like being put in a coffin and being buried.

I like to read historical texts and comic books, I like blockbuster movies and arthouse cinema. I have loved and looked at the work of many artists over the years, but now I don’t really look at the mags or admire anyone, apart from my friends. It must be something that happens when you get older and you realise you only have time for your own stuff.

MK Over the course of your career your work has included the culturally appropriated swastika symbol, a deeply loaded and complex symbol that alarms audiences. Can you speak a little about your interest in and deployment of this unnerving, stigmatised, even taboo symbol?

RvH There are a number of reasons for using Nazi symbols. Again, it is partly generational, coming as I do from parents who went

Ronnie van Hout with Melissa Keys

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Q&A ­­— Ronnie van Hout with Melissa Keys

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In the 1970s punk rock used these symbols as a way of annoying the older generation, and also as a way of embracing things that had been rejected. There were many other reasons for using or looking at this imagery. In some ways I like to use subjects that are outside the typical middle-­class range of subjects. Things that stand outside the mainstream, like UFOs, perhaps reflect how I see myself in relation to mainstream ideas.

I used images of German soldiers from World War 2 because they were so loaded they felt blank to me, like minimalism. This work came from a moment when I was learning to lithograph (PEP scheme in the early 80s(1)) and my instructor/boss told me to make something that took a bit longer to produce, so that I didn’t use up so many materials.

So I drew on the stones a 3-­colour-­separation image of a German soldier, which resulted in a full-­colour photorealistic image. I did it to show that the subject of an artwork is unimportant to people – because they only focus on the technique or aesthetics. My thinking around this is also to talk about the idea we have that having an interest in art is healthy, that art is good for you, even beyond art therapy, that it signifies someone as being sophisticated and interested in things beyond the material. This is so plainly bull, because art is used by evil people and evil cultures.

It suppresses and abducts us as much as it frees and releases us.

films, so I think I picked up the language, and I also gained a way of thinking about images from film criticism.

I see myself more as a filmmaker than an artist in all my work. Some of those recent videos where I copy scenes from films came about from thinking about contemporary online culture and production. I’m interested in the fan film and the idea of identification, of becoming something, like the Christian idea of imitating Christ. Today we seem obsessed with authenticity, with the original, but this is often expressed in confusing ways, such as in growing a beard or collecting vinyl records, or it’s associated with food and the environment.

I really thought of these films as artworks that talked about being interiorised by a text. That ‘becoming’ within the text and the inhabiting of a role was kind of interesting, and I started to notice that some of the texts I chose for a variety of reasons (mostly because I liked them) seemed to have common threads, and this led me on paths to other forms of ‘becoming’.

MK Your work has explored ideas around art materials and the activity of artmaking itself as symptom, disease or therapy. Can you please discuss and elaborate on some of these notions?

RvH Art for me is a symptom of existence and the pay-­off for consciousness. Rather than the activity that shows our humanity, it is really the reflection of our failure to exist in a functional way. It is our distinctive activity, but I think if we were well we wouldn’t need it. Art therapy is basically telling us the same thing.

MK Consisting of figurative works and video, the new work made especially for this exhibition is titled Bad fathers. What are some of the new directions this takes your work in, and what does it continue and reconnect to in your oeuvre?

RvH Because this question is being asked when the work isn’t yet finished, it hopefully allows me to stop, but Bad fathers feels like a work that appears to be so overloaded with

signifiers that it is successfully meaningless.

It feels like it must be about something, but is really about being about something. It is too soon to know, but it also feels expansive, and connects me to thoughts of the past. But this is how I always work. The video is like the text, and the figures are the image, and it always ends up, or becomes, something else, for better or worse.

Note (1) New Zealand’s Project Employment Programme Images p. 24 I should’ve done that ages ago 2012 (detail) p. 25 left to right: Now I’ll never know 2012, Life sucks 2018, Zombie apple 2018, Being seen 2011, I can’t give up 2012, A distant friend 2012, I should’ve done that ages ago 2012, I didn’t see it coming 2012 p. 26 Ersatz (alien) 2003 Below, left to right: Nice and stupid 1995, Standup 2016

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through World War 2 and for whom the symbol evoked some terrible memories.

MK In Brett and Michelle, you perform dialogue from a number of scenes in the menacing 1998 Australian crime thriller The Boys. Throughout the film the characters engage in an intense and ricocheting dialogue that threatens, at any moment, to explosively erupt into violence.

There is a persistent interest throughout your practice in power relations and dynamics. Can you please reflect on this?

MK Cinema is one of the strongest influences on your work and one of the greatest sources of inspiration. Can you please speak about your use of cinematic references, scenes and tropes within the gallery context and, in particular, your verbatim re-­delivery of lines and scenes from movies? Is this a kind of cinematic karaoke?

RvH Cinema was one of the first ways in which I understood art, and I used to spend far too much time in the cinema as a kid than was healthy. I watched a great deal of arthouse

RvH It is all about power relations, but that is not the reason I wanted to look at The Boys.

I really loved that film and the performances, as well as the soundtrack. It reminded me of my childhood. Not of my own home, but the homes of my friends, and people you would run into. There was always violence. Even though there is no physical violence in The Boys, the dialogue is violent. I isolated all the dialogue between the two main characters, and their interactions seem to capture the film as a whole. I was drawn to the interiors of the film.

The characters are isolated within them, and the exterior world is a place where things go wrong.

Q & A

Ronnie van Hout with Melissa Keys

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Ronnie van Hout’s most recognisable artistic trademark is his own face.

We see it staring down benevolently over the rooftops of Christchurch from the back of a gigantic anthropomorphic hand in Quasi, 2016.

We see it multiplied many times over in video works where van Hout acts out all the parts in re-­creations of famous scenes from the sci-­fi classics of his youth, such as Alien, 1979, Blade Runner, 1982, and The Thing, 1982. We see it, most disconcertingly, on a variety of life-­size polyurethane and fibreglass figures, which have the bodies of children and wear children’s clothes, but whose oversized heads and hands are those of an adult Ronnie van Hout. The expression is nearly always the same: almost – but not quite – impassive. The eyes stare blankly but are slightly downcast, the lips are slightly compressed in a sulky pout.

When you learn that van Hout re-­creates scenes from his childhood and youth, it seems obvious to read this work as deeply personal. Is it narcissism – a self-­obsession that wants to gaze endlessly at its own image? Is it megalomania – a proliferation of Mini-­Mes who will eventually populate The World According to Ronnie? Is it confessional – an autobiographical impulse that makes a virtue of honesty, and even perversely revels in the vulnerability of self-­exposure?

I don’t think it’s any of these things. Rather than regard them as self-­portraits, I think we should view van Hout’s videos, sculptures and installations as performances, or what he calls ‘acting’. He likes to describe himself as a failed filmmaker, a director of movies so low-­budget that he has to play all the parts himself. So too, if he uses his own face and hands in his sculptural work, it is because it saves the cost of a model. On one level, the reasons for using himself as an actor and a model are practical, not autobiographical. But there is also something about the way van Hout uses his face and head, as image and object, that seems to push more consciously in the opposite direction to the autobiographical. He ‘casts’ himself in his films, just as he ‘casts’ himself in his sculptures, and in each case, various meanings of the word ‘cast’ are important.

To make a sculptural cast of an object is a two-­step process: you first make a mould, which creates a negative impression of the object, and then you use the mould to make a positive model in the desired medium. It can now be done with extreme precision using laser scanners and 3D printers. But van Hout clearly prefers the traditional

A cast of thousands

method, and the imperfections it introduces, especially when done as casually, or even carelessly, as van Hout does it: with lumps or holes in the medium, squashing or sagging of the cast, and visible seams where the pieces join together. Where artists like Ron Mueck or Patricia Piccinini strive for a startling and uncanny lifelikeness with their figures, obsessively detailing textures of skin and hair, van Hout’s casts are deliberately crude. The most obvious sign is that none of the figures have eyebrows, which is why the faces look so odd. Where an artist like Sam Jinks, to give another example, meticulously reproduces eyebrows strand by strand, van Hout wants you to know that he can’t be bothered. So too, while there is a bit of colour applied around the lips, cheeks and eyes, the pockmarked skin texture is not trying to be either falsely beautiful or truthfully realistic.

To cast an actor in a film is a bit different. Casting directors work from the outside in. First, they go through photos of hundreds of actors, looking for someone who, externally, looks the part. Then they hold auditions, looking for a performance that inhabits the role, that brings the character to life from the inside, as it were. It’s nice to think of van Hout casting himself in every role as an act of choice in every instance.

Supposedly Mike Nichols chose Dustin Hoffman for the lead role in The Graduate ‘because he had a face that suggested suffering’. Van Hout has such a face. As for the acting, he never overdoes it, delivering his lines with the classic New Zealand deadpan that is now a recognisable acting style in itself.

Van Hout’s approach to ‘casting’ his own face, in these two senses, is a deliberate subversion of art as autobiography. Deleuze and Guattari describe ‘faciality’ as a signifying apparatus: a ‘white wall/black hole’ system where the eyes open into the darkness of subjective interiority, while the face itself is a signifying surface, a page to be read by the outer world.(1) They contrast this with the notion of a ‘probe-­head’ that resists the signifying system of faciality, that is, the symbolic overcoding of the body by the face. Deleuze writes in his book on Francis Bacon that, whereas ‘the face is a structured, spatial organisation

Russell Smith

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A cast of thousands — Russell Smith

One of van Hout’s earliest and most unsettling figure works, Doom and gloom, 2009, is interesting in this respect. Here he has stuck plastic moulds of his own face and ears onto hairdressers’ practice heads in such a sloppy way that the edges are visible; the arms and hands are no more than nubby paddles; the hair and makeup are grotesquely incompetent. The work was made at the time of the global financial crisis, when the phrase ‘doom and gloom’ was in the air. Van Hout imagines the zeitgeist as a pair of grumpy and unlovable twins who have stayed up past their bedtime. People talk about the ‘uncanny valley’, the sense of revulsion people feel the closer that an imitation human approaches lifelikeness. But here the opposite is going on: the ‘dismantling of the face’ in Doom and gloom is so grotesque that it evinces a visceral sense of horror.

In the later figure works, van Hout is more nuanced in his deconstruction of faciality. A work like You!, 2016, for instance, is ‘lifelike enough’ to avoid a gut reaction of horror, but also not so lifelike that it produces the fascination of the uncanny. Instead, a deeper sense of ambivalence emerges from the disjunction of the elements: the adult head and hands on the child body; the adult karaoke singer’s microphone and cigarette, and the child’s pyjamas and ugg boots; and the rockstar gesture that a child might practise in the bedroom mirror, but which here, with the text behind it, directly addresses the spectator with a challenging return of the gaze.

In particular, the disjunction of scale and form between adult face and child body disrupts the usual way that the face ‘overcodes’ the body.

The face becomes only one locus of meaning – and by no means a

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privileged one – in an unstable assemblage that involves bodies, poses, clothing, furniture, words and objects, and a repertoire of images and gestures familiar from film and TV, music and advertising, art and everyday life.

In Dave, from the wonderfully titled show To Love and Be Loved in Return, 2014, the plucky youngster in his pyjamas and socks (with creepy adult head and hands) seems to pull off a successful version of Bruce Nauman’s Failing to levitate in my studio, 1966, a double-­exposure photograph in which Nauman is seen propped rigidly across two chairs, and then slumped in failure on the floor. In Paul, from the same show, a similar youngster stands like a sleepwalker, or someone playing Frankenstein’s monster, at an impossible angle on a sawn-­off chunk of a table. The poses are, like Erwin Wurm’s One minute sculptures, harmlessly stupid, but also, unlike Wurm’s, physically impossible. In other words, both Dave and Paul defy gravity in ways that immediately deflect any sense that we might be dealing here with real human bodies.

Surely it’s important also that, in Crawling figure, 2016, and Empty doorways, 2016, the knees of the crawling figures do not touch the ground, making the poses impossible for a real human body to hold.

They might suggest the indomitable crawling figures in How It Is

by Samuel Beckett, a writer van Hout often references. But the first figure crawls, not through a wasteland of mud, but across a mirror; once again it’s hard to know if the scene is a drama or a psychodrama.

So too, the second figure approaches what might be a mirror, but it reflects nothing more than a beige emptiness.

In the major installation work All said, all done, 2012, the black, white and red pattern on the stage is the design van Hout made as a student for the Mairehau High School yearbook in 1978. The installation throbs with the awkwardness and anxiety of adolescence.

The yearbook design on the wall could be an abstract painting, but repeated on the floor where the figures are grouped, it becomes a stage for familiar adolescent performances that carry the risk of exposure or humiliation: a dance floor, a basketball court, or high school itself as a world that is a stage, in both senses of the word. Van Hout uses a small number of motifs that reappear in different guises with the weird logic of a dream. Basketballs become heads, bodies or lampposts. Bananas become

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that conceals the head’, Bacon’s project as a painter is ‘to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face’.(2) Ronnie van Hout does something similar with his multiple casts of his own face. He fabricates an experimental, non-­subjective, non-­signifying ‘probe-­head’: it has eyes, nose, mouth and ears, but it doesn’t have a face that can be read in the subjective, signifying way that we usually read faces.

BED/SIT, 2008, is based on a work by American sculptor Robert Morris, called Hearing, 1972. The bed, chair and table are arranged, not for comfort or use, but in a way that draws attention to them as objects.

In Morris’s work, each of them is unusable, even life-­threatening: the bed is made of toxic lead, the copper chair is full of boiling water, and the zinc table is wired up to deliver an electric shock. Van Hout reproduces Morris’s objects and layout exactly, but his objects are made of fibreglass-­coated urethane foam and the arrangement is doubled in mirror image. The bodies of the miniature figures are reminiscent of Failed robot, 2007, while their heads, once more, are crude casts of van Hout himself. They stare at each other blankly across the abyss of the mirror. The bedsit, a single rented room with nothing but

A cast of thousands

the bare essentials, is the classic literary setting where young men sit and brood, like Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or the protagonist of Georges Perec’s A Man Asleep. Here, speakers emit a recording made by van Hout of an electricity substation at night, the droning hum evoking the solitude of the middle of the night, but also a kind of ‘potential’, in the electrical sense: a build-­up of difference that might discharge in a violent flash at any moment. But, like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, nothing happens, twice. The stage is set, but the actors do not move. A film projection on the wall nearby suggests an opening, a way out or in, but the door is an illusion and the threshold is always blocked. The ambience is Beckettian, also, in the sense that the theatre space may represent the space inside a head: the drama being a purely mental struggle, and self-­reflection an inescapable hall of mirrors.

A final meaning of ‘cast’ is to throw, in the sense that Heidegger describes individual human existence as being ‘thrown’ into the world. Van Hout’s figures are thrown into their particular worlds, but they persist in their predicaments, not with the sombre seriousness of philosophical existentialism, but with the full theatrical range of absurdist tragicomic emotions: boredom, tiredness, amusement, horniness, crankiness, defiance, regret, anxiety, indomitableness – all these expressive possibilities stare from the deadpan faces of Ronnie van Hout’s probe-­heads.

It’s a situation we are all cast into, ready or not.

Lights. Camera. Action. No one is watching you.

Notes (1) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Year zero: faciality’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987, pp. 167–91.

(2) Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, Continuum, London, 2004, pp. 20–21; emphasis in original.

Images p. 31 D.E.A.D. pronounced dead 2004 p. 32 Doom and gloom 2009 p. 33 Mairehau High School Magazine yearbook, cover 1978 p. 34 Installation view, No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout, Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, 2018, with Failed robot 2007 p. 36 Endgame 2012 (background), All said, all done 2013 (detail, foreground) p. 37 Installation view, No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout, Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, 2018, with All said, all done 2013 (foreground) pp. 38–39 left to right: Crawling figure 2016, Empty doorways 2016, Handwalk 2015 pp. 40–41 left to right: Steps (shit, fuck, piss) 2016, Sitting figure II 2016, Medicine cabinet (ha ha) 2016, Couch (standup sit) 2016

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cocks, sausages or turds. The mirrored chairs invert each other’s ugly colours, but also change size like Alice in Wonderland. The two large figures stand side by side like awkward dates at a formal. The black boy, if he is a boy, with his basketball head, gazes down despondently from his glass eyes, perhaps lamenting his lack of genitalia. The girl, if she is a girl, wears van Hout’s face and a girl-­length version of the flowing blond curls of van Hout’s yearbook photo, while a smooth flesh-­ coloured banana sprouts from her pubis in a way that would terrify any adolescent boy. The other figures have shrunk, Alice-­like. The small figure in the black sweater, with an adult-­size banana dangling from his prepubescent balls, wears the worried expression of the dreamer who suddenly finds himself naked in public. We’ve all had that dream. He faces the back wall like a naughty child. The older figure, in the chair, rising from (or sinking into) the stage, with his look of terror and fury, might be a teacher. He also recalls the wheelchair-­bound tyrant Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame, as well as Winnie from Beckett’s Happy Days, who talks incessantly while sinking progressively deeper into a mound of earth. The atmosphere of high school angst is rounded out by a video in which four Ronnies take turns to read out funny and poignant poems from the high school yearbook: an anthem to doomed youth with its refrain ‘I’m too young to die’; paranoid musings on schizophrenia; existentialist musings on mirrors; and, most memorably, a scathing indictment of the cruelty of mathematics.

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Ronnie van Hout, born in 1962 in Christchurch, New Zealand, attended the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University, majoring in film (1982), and holds a Masters of Fine Arts from RMIT, Melbourne (1999).

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Van Hout has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and his solo exhibitions include Art Basel Hong Kong, Darren Knight Gallery booth 1C43, 2017; You!, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, and STATION, Melbourne, 2016; The Dark Pool, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2015; To Love and be Loved in Return, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 2016; The Way Home, I.C.A.N., Sydney, 2014; The Leavings, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 2012; Brood, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 2010; Uncured, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2010; Who Goes There, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, 2009; Fallenness, Ocular Lab Inc., Melbourne, 2009; Hold That Thought, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington, 2008; RUR, Melbourne Art Fair, 2008.

His group exhibitions include Good Manners, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 2018; The Watched, Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), New South Wales, 2018; Hyper Real, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2017; Darren Knight Gallery at Spring 1883, Room 55, The Establishment Hotel, Sydney, 2017; The National: New Australian Art 2017, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Double A-­ side, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 2017; Design & Play, Design Hub, RMIT, Melbourne, 2016; Is This Thing On?, Counihan Gallery, Melbourne, 2016; 4th Bus Projects Editions

Exhibition, Bus Projects, Melbourne, 2016; DEADPAN, Goulburn Regional Gallery, New South Wales, 2015; Body Parts, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2015; Into the Void, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 2015; Writing Art, Artspace, Sydney, 2015; Hiding in Plain Sight: A Selection of Works from the Michael Buxton Collection, Bendigo Art Gallery, 2015; A Kitten Drowning in a Well – Mike Kelley Tribute Show, 55 Sydenham Road, Marrickville, Sydney, 2014; Spring 1883, The Hotel Windsor, Melbourne, 2014; Dear Masato, All at Once, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, 2014; Wingman – Presented by Dog Park Art Projects, Alaska Projects, Sydney, 2014; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013; Drunk vs Stoned III, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2013; Redlands Art Prize, National Art School, Sydney, 2013; Play Money, Counihan Gallery, Melbourne, 2013; Collective Identity(IeS): This is That Time, Lake Macquarie Art Gallery, 2013; Self-­conscious: Contemporary Portraiture, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2012.

Van Hout lives and works in Melbourne and is represented by Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, STATION, Melbourne, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland, and Hamish McKay Gallery Wellington.

Images p. 42 left to right: Sausageman 2010, I am hammer 2 2010, Bananaman (fallen) 2010 p. 44 Ersatz (no one is watching you) 2003 p. 47 Installation view, No one is watching you: Ronnie van Hout, Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, 2018, with Cold shoulder to cry on 2010 (centre), Timing that flawed 2009 (right)

Artist biography

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Artist biography

List of works

Conversations in black and white 1993 cotton embroidery on cotton duck 45 × 31 cm Collection of Rae-­ann Sinclair and Nigel Williams, Melbourne Painting from the future (sulphur) 1993 sulphur and acrylic on concrete with graphite 40 × 30 cm Collection of the artist

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Painting from the future (titanium) 1993 titanium and acrylic on concrete, marker additions

by Vito van Hout 2011 34 × 20 cm Collection of the artist Four days and nights, after McMahon 1994 digital print 49.5 × 72 cm Collection of Rae-­ann Sinclair and Nigel Williams, Melbourne Untitled 1994 cotton embroidery on cotton duck 46 × 70 cm Collection of Suzie Melhop and Darren Knight, Sydney Untitled 1994 cotton embroidery on cotton duck 68 × 60.5 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Untitled 1994 cotton embroidery on cotton duck 75.5 × 50.5 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

Nice and stupid 1995 silicone, fibreglass, insulation foam, CD player, speakers, plastic eyes, plywood, customwood 2 parts: 32.6 × 42.6 × 3.4 cm; 39.5 × 33 cm; installation dimensions variable Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

Hybrid 1999 exhibition print 2018 inkjet print 106.7 × 76.2 cm Courtesy of the artist

Dad drawing 1995–96 cotton embroidery on polycotton 44 × 40 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

Untitled embroidery 1993–2000 2000 cotton embroidery on cotton duck 100 × 60.5 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

Drawings of UFO 1995–96 cotton embroidery on cotton duck 40 × 35 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Backdoorman I 1996 single-­channel digital video, sound duration 00:03:00 Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Manson son 1996 collage of newsprint and plastic bag, school report 2 parts: 100 × 84 cm; 37.5 × 49 cm; installation dimensions variable Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Uhhuhhhhhhhhh 1996 cotton embroidery on cotton duck 40.5 × 91 cm Collection of Rae-­ann Sinclair and Nigel Williams, Melbourne Monkey madness 1998 single-­channel video, sound duration 00:14:19 Courtesy of the artist Painting again 1998 single-­channel video, sound duration 00:14:23 Courtesy of the artist

Monster 1999 exhibition print 2018 inkjet print 106.7 × 76.2 cm Courtesy of the artist

Untitled embroidery 1993–2000 2000 cotton embroidery on cotton duck 100 × 60.5 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Untitled embroidery 1993–2000 (DEVOX) 2000 cotton embroidery on cotton duck 100 × 60.5 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Drinking again 2001 single-­channel video, sound duration 00:08:09 Courtesy of the artist House of the rising sun 2002 single-­channel video, sound duration 00:09:48 Courtesy of the artist No exit 2002 audio file duration 00:02:51 Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Backdoorman II 2003 single-­channel digital video, sound duration 00:02:57 Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

Abduct 1999 exhibition print 2018 inkjet print 106.7 × 76.2cm Courtesy of the artist

List of works

Ersatz 2003 plastic, painted polyurethane and fibreglass, glazed clay, string, aluminium 7 parts: owls 42 × 17 × 17 cm each; branch 32 × 57 × 7 cm; clay and string 330 × 8 × 1 cm; sausages 3 × 18 × 10 cm, 3 × 16 × 3.5 cm; installation dimensions variable Collection of Andrew Grigg, Auckland Ersatz (alien) 2003 resin-­coated styrene, clothing, synthetic polymer paint on composition board, string 155 × 44 × 25 cm Private collection, Christchurch Ersatz (no one is watching you) 2003 synthetic polymer paint on composition board 39 × 29.5 cm Collection of Andrew Grigg, Auckland I’ve abandoned me (chimp and boulder excerpt) 2003–18 painted fibreglass, acrylic, synthetic fur, clothing, monitor, DVD chimp 90 × 116 × 66 cm; boulder 100 × 146 × 75 cm; duration 00:21:53; installation dimensions variable Long Term Loan Collection, Dunedin Public Art Gallery D.E.A.D. pronounced dead 2004 painted resin 43.5 × 24 × 27.5 cm Collection of Simon Hayman, Melbourne Planet B 2004 inkjet print, edition 1/15 105 × 80 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney End doll 2007 fabric, cast resin, synthetic polymer paint, plastic, synthetic hair artist proof 58 × 15 × 22 cm Collection of the artist

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Fly Concorde 1989 silver gelatin print 48.5 × 74 cm Collection of Rae-­ann Sinclair and Nigel Williams, Melbourne

BED/SIT 2008 pigment, fibreglass resin over polyurethane, single-­channel digital video, audio, wood 13 parts, installation dimensions variable The Michael Buxton Collection, University of Melbourne Art Collection Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by The Michael and Janet Buxton Collection Trust.

Hold that thought, Salazopyrin 2008 Salazopyrin and acrylic on MDF 29 × 20 × 7.5 cm Collection of Suzie Melhop and Darren Knight, Sydney

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Learnt happiness 2008 painted resin 7 × 26 × 12 cm Collection of Simon Hayman, Melbourne Doom and gloom 2009 painted fibreglass on polystyrene, painted plastic, clothing, modelling clay, wigs 2 parts: standing figure 108 × 30 × 36 cm; crouched figure 67 × 30 × 85 cm Monash University Collection Purchased 2009 Courtesy of Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Melbourne Timing that flawed 2009 painted resin 3 parts, 100 × 37 × 46 cm overall Bosci Collection, Melbourne Bad traveller 2010 painted cast resin 145 × 33 × 40 cm Collection of Rae-­ann Sinclair and Nigel Williams, Melbourne Bananaman (fallen) 2010 painted fibreglass and plastic, plywood 17 × 15 × 15 cm Michael Buxton Collection, Melbourne

Cold shoulder to cry on 2010 spray enamel on cast polyester resin fibreglass 3 parts, 100 × 50 × 50 cm overall Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney I am hammer 2 2010 painted fibreglass and plastic on plywood 38 × 15.5 × 15.5 cm Michael Buxton Collection, Melbourne Sausageman 2010 painted fibreglass and plastic, plywood 24 × 25 × 4.5 cm Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney The end 2010 single-­channel video, sound duration 00:08:44 Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Being seen 2011 painted fibreglass, plastic and cast polyurethane 130 × 14 × 12 cm Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne 1pm 2012 cast polyurethane, fibreglass, acrylic 119 × 89 cm Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne A distant friend 2012 painted polyurethane and fibreglass 127 × 25 × 13 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney All said, all done 2012 polyurethane, fibreglass, clothing, wig, synthetic polymer paint, basketball, shoes, plywood, wire, laser prints, high-­definition television, colour high-­definition video, sound 13 parts, 390 × 240.35 × 20.5 cm overall duration 00:07:15 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Michael and Janet Buxton, 2014

Endgame 2012 synthetic polymer paint on digital print on canvas 138 × 90 cm Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne I can’t give up 2012 painted polyurethane and fibreglass 150 × 30 × 28 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney I didn’t see it coming 2012 painted polyurethane and fibreglass 135 × 14 × 7 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney I should’ve done that ages ago 2012 painted polyurethane and fibreglass 135 × 20 × 20 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Now I’ll never know 2012 painted polyurethane and fibreglass 130 × 14 × 10 cm Collection of Rae-­ann Sinclair and Nigel Williams, Melbourne ATM 2013 audio file duration 00:05.51 Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney I can change 2013 painted polyurethane and fibreglass, graphite 7 parts, installation dimensions variable Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Bad Ronald 2013–18 MDF, wallpaper, cast resin, soundtrack of Bad Ronald, 1974, director: Buzz Kulik duration 00:74:00; installation dimensions variable Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

List of works

Brett and Michelle 2014 digital video, soundtrack Home (Parts l & ll), 1998, by Chris Smith from his album Cabin Fever; dialogue from The Boys, 1998, director: Rowan Woods, screenplay: Stephen Sewell duration 00:04:37 Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Dave 2014 cast polyurethane, fibreglass, acrylic, clothing, wig, glass eyes, wooden chairs 3 parts, 97 × 170 × 57 cm overall Collection of Rae-­ann Sinclair and Nigel Williams, Melbourne Paul 2014 polyurethane, fibreglass, acrylic, fabric, glass, plastic, wood 165 × 106 × 153 cm Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Hobart The way home 2014 cotton embroidery on cotton duck 2 parts, 110 × 80 cm each Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

Empty doorways 2016 painted urethane on expanded styrene, clothing, hair, resin-coated and painted MDF 60 × 40 × 120 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

Sitting figure II 2016 painted polyurethane on polystyrene, clothing, wig, cast epoxy resin fibreglass, MDF, stainless steel 109 × 90 × 110 cm Collection of Raft Studio, Melbourne

Medicine cabinet (ha ha) 2016 glue and urethane on polystyrene, T5 slimline fluorescent 90 × 123 × 35 cm Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne

Standup 2016 single-­channel digital video, colour, sound duration 00:10:49 Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne

Sick child 2016 painted resin, wig, clothing, plaster 150 × 45 × 30 cm Collection of The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū, Nelson Purchased from ‘Recovered Memory’, the fourth Goodman-­Suter Contemporary Art Project and funded by the Goodman endowment and Burton Bequest in 2006

Steps (shit, fuck, piss) 2016 glue and urethane on polystyrene, T5 slimline fluorescent 90 × 129 × 90 cm Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne

YOU! 2016 painted polyurethane, urethane-coated CNC polystyrene, clothing, wig, MDF, lighting 2 parts: figure 140 × 60 × 67 cm; panel 242.5 × 122 cm Michael Buxton Collection, Melbourne Bad fathers 2018 synthetic polymer paint on MDF, painted polyurethane and fibreglass on polystyrene, wigs, glass eyes, plastic, 20 parts, installation dimensions variable Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Gang of hands 2018 3D-printed resin, paint, steel 4 parts, installation dimensions variable Michael Buxton Collection, Melbourne

Hand holding a rock 2018 painted resin, plywood, aluminium 35 × 21 × 19.6 cm Collection of the artist King Vader 2018 single-­channel digital video, colour, sound duration 00:20:21 Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Life sucks 2018 painted polyurethane and fibreglass 70 × 8 cm Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Zombie apple 2018 painted polyurethane and fibreglass 70 × 8 cm Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

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Failed robot 2007 synthetic polymer paint on fibreglass over polyurethane 17.5 × 46 × 109 cm Private collection, Melbourne

Handwalk 2015 single-­channel digital video, colour, sound duration 00:06:28 Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne, and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Punk on a bed 2015 painted MDF, painted polyurethane and fibreglass on polystyrene, wig, clothing 254 × 170 × 100 cm Courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Couch (standup sit) 2016 glue and urethane on polystyrene, T5 slimline fluorescent 149 × 105 × 90 cm Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne Crawling figure 2016 painted polyurethane on polystyrene, clothing, wig, cast epoxy resin fibreglass, stainless steel plinth 140 × 80 × 70 cm Courtesy of STATION, Melbourne

List of works