UNIVERSAL REMOTE WADE MARYNOWSK Y
Universal Remote 2012, installation view
As Marlow tells it in the beginning of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “when I was a young chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all looked like that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there.’” In Conrad’s tragic account of progress, the white spaces, the places suffused by light, are not those of the civilized world, but belong to the uninked, unmarked blanks of the globe. In those blanks, culture raw and strange, exists outside of the iron cage of a totalising bureaucratic order, an order that we experience as familiar and thoroughly cooked. For Conrad, colonization is a kind of horror, if horror is understood as a kind of forced education, a rape of the mind in which innocence is replaced by experience, and naivety by a knowledge of a world that no one
could wish for. What is particularly acute in his writing is that this horror, this loss of innocence and disenchantment, is one that is experienced by the colonizer and the colonized alike. And civilization, for its part, is the embodiment of darkness: “…by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery — a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.” By the twentieth century, the world had been fully explored. In Conrad’s terms, that meant that it became completely dark. Permanent night had fallen over the surface of the earth. Now, in the twenty-first, knowledge has penetrated this surface, and through fibre optic cables and instant telecommunications darkness has begun to irradiate the volume of the world. Even the familiar obscurity of our private lives have
Remote Tribe 1 - Sweet poison 2012, in-situ
been radiantly alienated from us through the tools of psychopharmaceuticals and incessant social networking. Wade Marynowsky moves through this world, this utterly obscure and obscene world, like a bemused anthropologist, ill-equipped by his training to deal with what he finds. Universal Remote is a kind of field report from his journey into our current heart of darkness. A conventional universal remote is a device that can be programmed to control, at a distance, a number of different brands of TV. The more universal the remote, the more brands and appliances it can master, until ultimately it can control every appliance. The more remote the remote, the further the distance it can operate over. Taken to its logical conclusion, the ultimate universal remote can control from a distance the whole world. And in perfect suburbia, as everyone knows, the world is encompassed by the walls of a free-standing house. This is the structure that Wade Marynowsky has chosen as
the basis for his in situ ethnographic research. Like the future archaeologist excavating a long buried highway motel in David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries, Marynowsky has unearthed the key elements of the contemporary domestic space and reconstructed them in a life size diorama that you can enter, in order to contemplate the strangeness of your times. In the kingdom of the Luba, which lies deep in the Congo, there is a particular kind of wooden board that is carefully and systematically carved to resemble, in some respects, the shell of a tortoise. These boards are called Lukasa, and were traditionally used by the council of scholars as mnemonic devices. That is, the shapes carved into their surface, the perturbations and reliefs, were a physical record of the memory of the community, containing information concerning court ceremony, genealogy, and maps of ‘spirit capitals’, the abandoned palaces of dead kings. They are, in their own right, maps of a four dimensional world. The Lukasa, often brightly
One room, one button; composition for padded room 2012, installation view
ornamented with beads and shells, are fetishized by wealthy Western collectors for their aesthetic value. This barbaric ignorance has often done great damage to the collective memory of the Luba, for the Lukasa are not designed for aesthetic contemplation at all, but are rather tools, like pocket calculators, and shorn from their context, the memories associated with them quickly wither, leaving the device as dead and as useless as a photocopier at the bottom of the ocean. As if in revenge upon the Luba’s behalf, Marynowsky performs the same reificatory operation upon the universal remote. Rather than leaving it to its function, he amplifies it, carves it in wood, and presents it as a kind of totem pole to be contemplated as a mystery of art, rather than a magic wand of couch potato hubris. But then, what is the function of a universal remote? If function is understood in terms of cause and effect, then the universal remote is really chiefly designed to stimulate the
growth of adipose tissue, to pacify its owners, and to render them sedentary and diseased. As such, it is only fitting to see it rendered in the scale of a tombstone. And what of Marynowsky’s other ethnographic exhibits in the contemporary home? What of his mirrored ATM, his padded walls, his endlessly restless harmonic oscillator? What kind of society would produce such things as artifacts? Some of them seem to have no function at all, but resemble broken ritual devices, or rather ritual devices for a broken culture. It may be that such a culture is not as alien to our own as we would like to think, but rather, these are relics of our own frustrated culture, amplified and played back to us. Adam Jasper, 2012
They live, we sleep 2012
BIOGRAPHY Dr. Wade Marynowsky is a Sydney-based artist and academic working across visual art, inter-arts and music. His work critiques the way in which, ‘new’ media art has engaged – or failed to engage – with an audience. His robotic /media installations combine ‘artificial-life’ and ‘live art’, causing technology to perform within a system of programmed parameters that allow the work to continually unfold and evolve. In Universal Remote, in addition to the computer-mediated works he has returned to his fine art practice. Through wood carving, photography and installation he explores Pop Art themes of high and low culture within contemporary techno-fetishism. Since 1998 Marynowsky has exhibited and performed extensively, highlights in 2010 include The 2nd International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Poland, the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Artspace, The Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art award, QAG, St Paul St Gallery, Auckland NZ. In 2009, he was included in Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art and a solo exhibition The Hosts: the Masquerade of Improvising Automatons at Performance Space, Sydney. Wade Marynowsky is represented by John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne. www.marynowsky.net
LIST OF WORKS 1 2
Minima tech 2012 painted plywood frame, plastic arcade buttons, 120×90×12cm One room, one button; composition for padded room 2012 ply wood, foam, vinyl, plastic arcade buttons, LED lights, electronics, custom built software, sound, installation dimensions variable
3
Blue horizons 2012 custom built software, audio and video, endless
4
They live, we sleep 2012 camphor laurel, 150×80×6cm
5
The robot is home from a day’s work in cyberspace 2012 lambda print on aluminium,127×85cm
6
Dissolving landscape, Banff 2012 lambda print on aluminium, 127×85cm
7
Remote Tribe 1 - Sweet poison 2012 Canadian rock maple, camphor laurel, 195×80×8cm
8
Remote Tribe 2 - Cherry poison 2012 cherry, camphor laurel, 170×60×6cm
9
Remote Tribe 3 - Cherry poison 2012 cherry, camphor laurel, 195×80×8cm
10
Remote Tribe 4 - Sweet poison 2012 Canadian rock maple, camphor laurel, 170×60×8cm
11
In case of emergency break glass 2012 Canadian rock maple, glass, frame, plastic arcade button, 26×20×5cm
12
The balance of your bank account is reflected in your face 2012 sandblasted mirrored glass, wood, 240×120×4.5cm
Above The balance of your bank account is reflected in your face 2012, installation view. Left Dissolving landscape, Banff 2012. Right The robot is home from a day’s work in cyberspace, 2012. All photography by Wade Marynowsky except above installation shots: one room one button composition for padded room, They live, we sleep and Universial Remote 2012, installation view.
UNIVERSAL REMOTE Wade Marynowsky 24 April - 1 June 2012 ACCOMPANYING PUBLIC PROGRAM Wade Marynowsky in conversation with MCA curator, Anna Davis Tuesday 22 May 5.30pm
Wade Marynowsky would like to thank Aras Vaichas for electrical engineering assistance on One room, one button, composition for padded room; Cydonia Glass for fabrication of The balance of your bank account is reflected in your face & Daniel Morse for framing In case of emergency break glass, Thomas Esamie and UTS Gallery staff. Universal Remote has been supported by Artspace Sydney and Arts NSW International Residency, The Darling Foundry, MontrĂŠal, and the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding & advisory body. UTS Gallery supported by Oyster Bay Wines & Coopers. Media Partner: 2ser
ISBN: 978-0-9807595-6-3
UTS:GALLERY Level 4, 702 Harris Street Ultimo NSW 2007 Australia +61 2 9514 1652 www.utsgallery.uts.edu.au Monday to Friday 12 - 6pm