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The David M. Thomas Show ‘We think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions.’ (The Breakfast Club)1 Self-portraiture, according to David M. Thomas, should provide grounds for thinking of oneself as ridiculous. With self-effacing humour, his works key into the viewer’s desire to know the subjectivity of the artist and exploit the pitfalls that are bundled up with such a quest. Thomas’ self-portraits are also, almost always, performative. The performances, however, never seem entirely trustworthy and they prise open an awkward zone between our privately acknowledged self and the one we project to the world. His works emphasise
the anxieties and ambiguities that exist between perceptions of ‘being’ and ‘performing’ and reveal the self to be unstable, pathetic and, quite often, a laughing stock. Working across a diverse range of media, the artist’s self has variously been opened up as a space for the viewer’s own projections, revealed as an amalgamation of popular culture constructions and, above all else, inextricably bound up with questions of representation. There is an analytical attitude at play in his practice which seeks to understand the institutional and cultural mechanisms at work in the construction of subjectivities. Ultimately, however, Thomas reveals these mechanisms as incredibly flimsy, capable only of sweeping generalisations and reductive outcomes.
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Take for example Thomas’ two-screen video, I am quite sure I do not understand the question 2008. In this work Thomas interviewed himself according to the Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles (VALS) questionnaire — a trademarked psychographic survey developed in the 1970s and used widely by corporations to predict consumer behaviour. On one screen, the artist plays the role of a VALS market researcher and, dressed in drab business attire, intones the VALS questions: ‘I consider myself an intellectual’, ‘I like to dress in the latest fashions’ etc. On the other screen Thomas is heavily made up as a clown and responds with one of the four predetermined responses: ‘mostly disagree’, ‘somewhat disagree’, ‘somewhat agree’ and ‘mostly agree’. Designed to categorise respondents as belonging to one of eight different
personality types, the VALS questionnaire (which we might see as analogous to any of the systems and institutions that govern contemporary life) allows for only a limited range of possibilities for defining the subject’s self. The most rational option in the face of such as system, as suggested by Thomas’ clown, is insolence, and his maniacal voice and out of time responses are a childish way of not playing by the rules. An emblematic work in Thomas recent oeuvre, I am quite sure I do not understand the question short-circuits systematic means for defining each other and ourselves. The works brought together for the present exhibition examine sets of relationships implicit in the making and exhibiting of art. Ordinarily, when encountering an art work in a gallery, the viewer
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is called upon to think not of themselves but of the artist — to locate, as it were, the symbolic meaning of the art work and, especially in the case of the self-portrait, the specific subjectivity of the artist. The gallery then, is a space where the viewer experiences a highly differentiated manner of relating to objects and makers of objects. This issue of differentiation has been brought to the fore in recent, so-called, relational art wherein interactive and participatory situations have been deployed in gallery contexts as a means of incorporating the viewer’s own subjectivity in the work. Thomas, however, appears less interested in an attempt to overcome this issue of differentiation than in making a spectacle of it and revealing its structure to us. In doing so, he lays bare the system of relations enacted
by the art exhibition, of the fraught ambition for the subjectivities of the artist and viewer to communicate through the work, and prompts the viewer to adopt a playfully analytical attitude to what is at stake. The studio is a recurring motif in ‘Dream Job’. The exhibition begins with a transformation of the gallery, using projections and luridly coloured wall-paintings to evoke the atmosphere of a TV game show and create a zone in which the space of presentation (the gallery) becomes blurred with that of production and performance (the studio). The artist’s own studio also appears in several works with Thomas depicting himself performing to the camera and executing the very works we are looking at.
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In Empire of the Free Man, for example, we find a seemingly parodic self-image in which the artist poses in his studio, his face hidden behind an Emporio Armani advertisement culled from the pages of the fashion press. Depicting a young woman, the advertisement belongs to the subjectless type of portrait particular to the advertising industry. The advertisement is designed to elicit an emotional response from the viewer with the identity of the woman being quite irrelevant to the way we are intended to relate to her image. Where our analysis of a portrait by an artist would ordinarily consider the identity of the subject and the motivations of the image-maker, in the case of the advertising portrait our attention instead turns to the motivations of the system which generated it. In Thomas’ photograph the face of the artist is
replaced with that of the young woman, creating a strange amalgamation of two different systems of representation: one in which the image seeks to work on us, to elicit a particularly consumerist sense of desire; and the other in which we are invited to work on the image, to analyse its composition, to decode sets of references and, in doing so, to find the artist. In Five in One, One In Five, the first sequence of the new video work, the artist’s subjectivity is buried in a series of performances within performances. Thomas cast five teenagers in a scenario loosely based around The Breakfast Club, (John Hughes, 1985) a film that dealt with social cliques, popular culture and the construction of teenage identity. Hughes’ film revolves around five
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teenage archetypes — ‘brain’, ‘athlete’, ‘basket case’, ‘princess’ and ‘criminal’ — which Thomas transposed onto his five actors. The video’s script takes an interview format with an off-screen interviewer posing open ended questions such as, ‘what is important to you’ and ‘how do you feel about people’ to which the characters respond with propositions concerning the nature of the self, work and representation. The actors’ lines, however, belie their ages and have been appropriated from interviews with figures such as Charles Bukowski, Marlon Brando and Brooke Shields — pop and counter culture vessels, of sorts, for the artist’s own understanding of his self. In one particularly memorable moment teenage ennui meets the practical considerations of the professional rock and roll musician when the teenage actor channels Dinosaur Jnr frontman J Mascis: ‘I never thought I would have a home studio, like I always liked being in the studio, and then just one day I was sitting on the couch,
staring out the window, and thinking this is costing like a thousand dollars a day, just to stare out the window.’ Aping the look and feel of The Breakfast Club’s detention scene, Thomas’ footage cuts between graceful pans of the classroom and shallow focus close-ups of the five characters. Unlike Hughes’ film, however, where twenty-something actors performed teenage roles, Thomas’ cast are at the same formative stage of their lives as their Breakfast Club counterparts — a point between childhood and adulthood where personal ideologies are formed. Orating the artist’s ideologies as if they were their own, the actors are all too aware of the artifice involved in Thomas’ scenario and the artist, in turn, carefully allows hints of the actors’ subjectivity to creep into the video. As the camera lingers on an actor’s face after the delivery of a line we find an unscripted smirk, a pursing of the lips or a knowingly raised eyebrow which brings the relationship between ‘being’ and ‘performing’ into sharp relief. In these moments, the performances seem to pause
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and we feel that something trustworthy is being disclosed in relation to the actors’ selves. The ultimate effect, however, is an amplification of the differences between the levels of selfrepresentation contained within the work. We try to locate the artist but, at every turn, something else is revealed to us leaving Thomas well and truly beyond our grasp.
Nicholas Chambers, September 2010. Curator of Contemporary International Art Queensland Art Gallery l Gallery of Modern Art
IMAGES Cover: Intensifique in blackest black 2010, digital print on aluminium, 80 x 80cm A: No sags, no circles, no appointments 2010, digital print on aluminium, 160 x 162cm B: Dream Job (video still from 3rd sequence) 2010, HD video, dur: 7 minutes C: We don’t work with Bastards 2010, digital print on aluminium, 30 x 20cm D: Don’t try this at home 2010, digital print on aluminium, 120 x 160cm E: Griffith University Art Gallery installation F: Griffith University Art Gallery installation G: Five in one, One in Five (video still from 1st sequence) 2010, HD video, dur: 7 minutes
1. Quotation from the Breakfast Club’s letter to the principal in John Hughes’ 1985 film, The Breakfast Club.
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DREAM JOB: David M Thomas Five in One, One in Five (1st sequence) Dream Job (2nd sequence) Dream Job (Moving paintings) (3rd sequence) Script, Editing & Animation / Soundtrack & Music David M Thomas Performer & Camera (Dream Job) David M Thomas Performers (Five in One, One in Five) Eddie, Danny, Julian, Martha, Olivia Crew Director: Suzanne Howard Director of Photography: Mark Broadbent Location Sound: Chris Gillette Camera Assistant/ Data Wrangler: Jarryd Hall Photography credits Courtesy the artist and Mark Broadbent Installation images Mick Richards
Catalogue published by SP Wright Griffith Artworks, Sewell House Nathan Campus, Griffith University Editor: SP Wright Essay: ‘The David M Thomas Show’ by Nicholas Chambers ISBN 978-1-921760-19-8 Catalogue design by Liveworm Studio Designer: Yvonne Forshaw Tvedt Creative Director: David Sargent David M Thomas would like to thank Suzanne Howard for her help in realising this exhibition. Many thanks to Danny, Eddie, Julian, Martha and Olivia for participating in the video. Thanks also to Simon Wright, Vernon Ah Kee and Leesa Watego, Jo Besley and Stephen Godstone, Christine Roney, Nick Chambers, David Burnett, Josh Milani and Robert Leonard. Griffith Artworks would like to thank Bruce Thomas at Fine Print and Liveworm Studio, especially David Sargent and Jacqui Higgins. This project has received financial assistance from the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, and from the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.