You can rely on the Helen Gory Galerie in Prahran to provide some of the most vibrant and hip young art that's happening in Melbourne now. In early November you can catch one of her many stars, Marcel Cousins, in his third solo show there in as many years. Be prepared for exhilarating imagery. Cousins' work is as arrestingly beautiful as it is intelligent and masterful in technique.
His lush, dazzling patterns reflect intricate games with graphic devices, interrupting huge bubble-jet computer prints of Asian currency notes (enlarged thousands of times), for instance, with striking, superflat stencilled landscapes or bodies. Or blowing up low-resolution Japanese soft-porn imagery, which looks derived from thumbnail gifs downloaded off the Web, to the scale of crisply pixellated geometric, modernist abstractions.
And it's as difficult to summarise the themes that this prolific and exploratory artist is interested in, as it is to itemise the range of media he enlists. Commerce collides with culture, and historical tradition is flattened out by a process of graphic decoding, as if the icons that identify a culture are
"de-naturalised" and translated into the decorative insignia on international travellers' cheques. But this is not just a complaint against globalisation or the trivialising effects of tourism. At the same time, Cousins indicates an exhilarating vision of a future hybrid, borderless and even weightless culture - a kind of internet, fourth world culture - constructed out of these very processes of decomposition.
It takes humour rather than moral earnestness to make this vision convincing; and cheeky humour is one of Cousins' many gifts. Last year, the peak Australian graphic design body, AGDA, used one of Cousins' works from his first solo show at Helen Gory as the poster image for their annual conference. A happy nuclear family, as featureless and flat as the décor of their suburban interior, is disembowelled by a huge fragment of a black and white porno Japanese manga image that cuts through them - as effectively as a car bomb exploding outside a tourist hotel.
This sort of immediate hit is characteristic of Cousins' jamming of cultural icons; and that hit always resonates. He has a deep and ongoing affiliation with Asian culture, taking out a degree last year at the Tokyo National University of Art, and gathering up a host of awards there as well as in Australia. With work in the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Bank collection, Cousins is making the right moves. Do the same, and get along to this show. |
