The Art Newspaper

Car surfing, roadkill and the epic outback: Shaun Gladwell reveals his plans for the Biennale

The Australian representative is set to bring his Mad Max vehicle to Venice

By Bruce Millar | Web only
Published online 29 May 09

Maddest Maximus (still), at the Venice Biennale

The first things you notice when you enter Shaun Gladwell’s central Sydney studio are the dozens of brightly painted skateboards stacked against the wall and a tangle of mountain bikes—there were nine on the day he invited The Art Newspaper into his studio, shortly before his departure for Venice, where he will occupy the Australian Pavilion.

On theartnewspaper.tv: Shaun Gladwell talks to Jean Wainwright

“Venice must be the worst place in the world for a skateboarder,” says Gladwell. “But I love it.”

He has no idea how many skateboards are in the stack—there must be more than 100 of them—although he quickly locates three particular boards kept in plastic to preserve their pristine condition, too precious ever to ride: one by Liam Gillick, who is set to occupy the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, and two by Jeff Koons. “I like having the collection near me,” he says. “I just look at them and they collect dust.”

And the mountain bikes? “Yeah, I have a bike fetish too, I love them. But they have to be black, to have dual suspension, and to be made by a firm called Specialized.”

Skateboarding is central to Gladwell’s idea of himself as well as to his practice as an artist. It links the 37-year-old artist—in early mid-career, as Doug Hall, commissioner of the Australian Pavilion put it—with his teenage years in a Sydney urban subculture, that links in turn with urban cultures from Tokyo to London, New York to Seoul. Skateboarding also provided him with the two defining video pieces he made in 2000, which still inform his work: Double Line Walk, in which he uses a handicam to video the tip of his board as he skates around Sydney—Gladwell’s take on Paul Klee’s dictum that drawing is “taking a line for a walk”—and Storm Sequence, in which he performs freestyle tricks on a board while a storm rolls in from the ocean behind him on Bondi Beach. Storm Sequence has become an important Australian work of art, and drew accolades at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

These two works introduced many of the themes that Gladwell is still exploring: the use of a found stage for a performance; some sort of journey or passage; an examination of the sublime; action portrayed in slow motion; the human figure seen as a moving sculpture; Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, using his own body to measure the world around him, striving for balance, both literally—as on a skateboard—and metaphorically.

The works are deceptively simple. In Tangara, 2003, for instance, Gladwell filmed himself hanging up-side-down from the hand-straps on a commuter train, then he inverted the image. But as he puts it himself, the imagery is “simplified but also complexified”. Tangara, he says, “is a performance that is very casual, drawn from a playful thing that would take place when kids are coming in to town by train from the western suburbs. I remember doing this with my friends.”

Other performances chronicled by Gladwell have included a stunt cyclist riding on one wheel through a McDonald’s, unnoticed by the eaters; a breakdancer doing headspins, again with the image inverted; two breakdancers locked in a frozen position for as long as their bodies can manage at a Tokyo underground station; and a Capoeira dancer performing exercises in a deserted 24-hour petrol station. “I like to think of the spaces and dynamics before the work, almost as if the space inspires the work,” he says.

He also explores these formal ideas in the least formal of settings, deploying what he terms “post-pop logic” and offering multiple entry points into the work. “I try to use the debris of the collision between pop and high art,” he explains, citing the human skull, a graphic image in youth culture but also the memento mori of art history. He’s interested in how skateboarders, for instance, will get something very different from his work to art world insiders—“I like things to be open-ended, to allow multiple interpretations.” This openness extends to allowing chance to introduce elements of broad humour or absurdity, such as a pigeon that wanders through the shot in the McDonald’s sequence, and a bright blue municipal garbage truck that chunters up behind the Capoeira dancer.

In Maddest Maximus, the new body of work to be exhibited in Venice, it is as if Gladwell has muscled up his imagery to face the responsibility of filling a national pavilion. He also addresses the vexed issue of nationality in a direct way, exchanging the intimate stages of his earlier urban pieces for the vast, epic space of the Australian outback.

This is the terrain of Australian naïve artist Pro Hart (1935-2006), a former miner from Broken Hill in the far west of New South Wales, whose work is often derided in sophisticated Australian circles. “I shouldn’t really mention him,” Gladwell says with a grin, “but Pro Hart is a key figure—his Stainmark carpet ad on television introduced abstract expressionism to the Australian public. His body was driven to his funeral in a car he had painted, which was one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen.”

Gladwell has borrowed his title from George Miller’s trilogy of “Mad Max” films (1978-84), which gave his generation of urban Australians—as well as millions of movie-goers around the world—their first view of their country’s parched interior. Max’s customised black Ford Falcon became another of Gladwell’s fetishised means of transport—“I’m obsessed with it,” he says, gesturing towards the extensive collection of scale models in his studio—and his own copy of the original, used in the shooting of his video works, will be exhibited outside the Australian pavilion, complete with the impacted red dirt of the outback.

It would be a security nightmare to exhibit this car anywhere else in the world, he notes. “But there are no roads in Venice, so we’re not worried about the car being stolen. And what could be a better symbol of futility than a car in a city without roads?” It is one of the cultural dislocations that so appeal to Gladwell.

In the video, we track the car as it drives down an endless straight road through the dusty scrub. A black-clad figure in a vizored helmet emerges from the passenger window, climbs on to the roof, and stretches his arms out—Vitruvian Man again, but in Venice also reminiscent of the crucifixions in so much Renaissance art.

“I set out to use aesthetic cues referencing the ‘Mad Max’ films by hijacking one of the props into a very different scenario,” Gladwell explains. “Also, I used to do car-surfing when I was a teenager,” he adds, characteristically rooting the image in his own experience as a suburban kid.

The artist is fascinated by “double looking”—we are looking from behind at the figure who is looking at the landscape, “like Caspar David Friedrich or the filmmaker Gus Van Sant”. Friedrich brings us back to the romantic notion of the sublime in nature, at once beautiful and terrible. “I’m still thinking around the idea of the sublime, a very old idea, but all these kinds of contemporary experiences we have connect us to this idea. The experience of the desert still offers the possibility of the sublime.”

Although his car surfing was performed at considerable speed—the viewer can see the scrub rushing by—it is shown in slow motion, like most of Gladwell’s pieces. “Slow motion gets away from the high-speed, high-impact imagery of MTV that was also part of the ‘Mad Max’ films. I’m more interested in distilling, slowing down.”

Perhaps the most haunting piece in the new series is Apology to Roadkill, in which the same black-clad figure rides a motorcycle through the Outback, stopping by the body of a kangaroo killed by passing traffic to lift and carry it, in a gesture full of tenderness and delicacy—a bush pieta, perhaps. Gladwell remembers being shocked by the sheer volume of dead animals he saw on the roadside when on a drive through the bush as a young child with his mother, and he wants to stress the harshness of life in this environment.

The recent history of Australia has been riven with debate—and guilt—over the treatment of the indigenous Aboriginal inhabitants, with politicians dragging their heels over issuing a formal apology to the traditional owners of the land. This lends the piece further layers of allegorical meaning. “Apology is a loaded term, so for me to pick the word has a resonance,” Gladwell says. “But for a viewer who is not aware of the political implications there is a still a range of possible readings.”

Who is showing where - download Venice map

Comments