Noé Sendas
13 Jun - 17 Jul 2009
NOÉ SENDAS
"THE CHAIRMAN, 2009"
Exhibition June 13th - 17th July 2009
Opening Friday, 12th June, 19h
"Watch the Birdie wait for the Flash" by Eliza Tan
"If she is a whole, it ́s a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble, a cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros, an immense astral space... Beauty will no longer be forbidden."
(Hélène Cixous, from "The Laugh of the Medusa", 1975).
The photographer says, "Watch the birdie, wait for the flash." She strikes a pose, bends a leg, and raises both hands to cup her breasts. Who will pin up her image? What face belongs to that body? On whom does she pin her gaze?
Noé Sendas THE CHAIRMAN (Sculptures and Paintings) refers neither to three-dimensional sculptures nor existing paintings but to a series of digitally-doctored images of pin-up "girlies". His new body of work takes the format of an archival collection of over 9000 risqué pictures from the 1950s, culled from public, unsigned sources on the internet. This exhibition reveals a select fraction of these and shows fragmented and surreal views of over 19 women posing within similar settings. Like theatrical clichés, they perform against a one-dimensional backdrop: sofa, curtains, floor; a stage comprising varying combinations but always with the same objects and pictorial elements. With little compositional regard, the pictures, which privilege the capturing of bodily motion for the maximization of its ́risqué effect ́, are documents of performances for the camera rather than artistic photographs per say. Consonant with his longstanding interest in situating artistic practice beyond formal visual categories, Sendas ́ renders the work of art and its subject in abjection - cast out from any one medium and created in the absence of such.
THE CHAIRMAN is as enticing an exhibition as it is uncomfortable. Sendas ́ images are uncanny renditions of often faceless, veiled and disembodied forms which yield to an aesthetic somewhere between beauty and horror. Topographies of bodies appear flattened and indistinct, merging through superimposition or collage with other pictorial elements, objects and surfaces. The images are at once familiar, yet strange, safe, yet disturbing, arousing yet repulsive. More compelling, however, is how these sexually-charged yet amorphous feminine, masculine and object forms succeed in resisting easy viewership, defeating any single reading due to their multiple allusions.
The works, as documents of actions, echo a matrix of references ranging from that of the cheeky, vaguely naïve burlesque dancer ́s peek-a-boo scripts of seduction to the art historical, such as Francisco Goya ́s La Maja desnuda / La Maja vestida (ca. 1800-1803) and Hans Bellmers La Poupée (ca. 1934-35). What THE CHAIRMAN then also recalls, is a long history of transgressive conflations which have taken place between categories of "high art" and "low" popular culture. Sendas ́ works raise further enquiry into margins which have been drawn around notions of beauty and eroticism, pornography and censorship, prohibition and repression - all of which remain non-exclusive and temporally elastic.
Tethering on the surreal, THE CHAIRMAN evokes a plurality of senses, blurring the definitions of body and object. Feminine shapes appear formless in so far as the models appear as wax casts or featureless mannequins who perform sexually explicit acts at once visible yet shrouded from the naked eye. On the other hand, certain objects acquire masculine signification; a chair and the composite forms of male clothing allude to another body in dissolution. Through a peeping hole on a gallery wall, in a room to which there is no physical access, a sculpture of a male figure, back facing and looking at another peeping hole, is seen. This surreal "chairman" figure runs parallel to the artist ́s assumption of a fictive and theatrical role that changes according to exhibition site and context. Here inserted against a backdrop of performing pin-ups, the figure, whose face is never visible and this time masked by a peeping hole, almost invisible, relates to our nameless lead character, a risqué man or silent narrator who moves covertly through the shadows almost like an anti-hero, collecting and consuming the sights around him. Viewers may themselves don a similar position, complicit in confronting and receiving the image and its associations.
The visually ambivalent pictures, self-contained and uncanny sculptural objects seduce but never succumb to easy consumption as they simultaneously include and exclude a viewer; their possible meanings are evoked through open association. The works raise questions pertaining to the very nature of art, sexuality, beauty and desire, censorship, cultural tastes and limits of acceptability. Dualisms and binary differences are not drawn between the ́who ́ and the ́what ́, the staged and the spontaneous, the pleasuring object or receiving subject, the viewed and the voyeur. At play is a game of power relations that remains uncertain, yet throughout, Sendas neither imposes an ideological chorus nor prescribes an explicit political stance. Instead, the artist seems to step away with ease, suspending any narrative conclusion, therefore giving place to ́showing ́, rather than ́telling ́.
Welcome to your peep show. What do you see?
Now here in my home, from which I am penning this piece on THE CHAIRMAN, Noe Sendas ́ unheimlich images have been pinned up on my wall for days, robbing me of my eyes through its uncongealing tensions. This is the sheer power of discomforture. Here is an abject limb, a hand on a knee, a high-heeled leg that emerges from the wall. There, a bench, a bed of luxurious hair, cleavage, a sofa, her lines between a chair. Shoe and brassiere straps. Featureless twinned torsos. Her absent body, doubled before a mirror. The relic of his body hangs over a chair. Woman, conjoined and in fragments.
The impossibility of locating a singular, objective perspective in THE CHAIRMAN stirs me to speak from the ́I ́, to appropriate the feminine realm of subjectivity. Since the images here remain un-nameable, Noe Sendas ́ THE CHAIRMAN, offers me more than a passing sensation, an invitation merely to gaze. The discomforture in THE CHAIRMAN invites my reading and re-identification in a space from which I conjure nouns and the names of objects. Here is the liberalizing possibility of re-naming, that which converges at a performative place of seeing, writing, claiming and reclaiming our own bodies.
Watch the birdie. Wait for the flash.
Beauty is no longer forbidden.
"THE CHAIRMAN, 2009"
Exhibition June 13th - 17th July 2009
Opening Friday, 12th June, 19h
"Watch the Birdie wait for the Flash" by Eliza Tan
"If she is a whole, it ́s a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble, a cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros, an immense astral space... Beauty will no longer be forbidden."
(Hélène Cixous, from "The Laugh of the Medusa", 1975).
The photographer says, "Watch the birdie, wait for the flash." She strikes a pose, bends a leg, and raises both hands to cup her breasts. Who will pin up her image? What face belongs to that body? On whom does she pin her gaze?
Noé Sendas THE CHAIRMAN (Sculptures and Paintings) refers neither to three-dimensional sculptures nor existing paintings but to a series of digitally-doctored images of pin-up "girlies". His new body of work takes the format of an archival collection of over 9000 risqué pictures from the 1950s, culled from public, unsigned sources on the internet. This exhibition reveals a select fraction of these and shows fragmented and surreal views of over 19 women posing within similar settings. Like theatrical clichés, they perform against a one-dimensional backdrop: sofa, curtains, floor; a stage comprising varying combinations but always with the same objects and pictorial elements. With little compositional regard, the pictures, which privilege the capturing of bodily motion for the maximization of its ́risqué effect ́, are documents of performances for the camera rather than artistic photographs per say. Consonant with his longstanding interest in situating artistic practice beyond formal visual categories, Sendas ́ renders the work of art and its subject in abjection - cast out from any one medium and created in the absence of such.
THE CHAIRMAN is as enticing an exhibition as it is uncomfortable. Sendas ́ images are uncanny renditions of often faceless, veiled and disembodied forms which yield to an aesthetic somewhere between beauty and horror. Topographies of bodies appear flattened and indistinct, merging through superimposition or collage with other pictorial elements, objects and surfaces. The images are at once familiar, yet strange, safe, yet disturbing, arousing yet repulsive. More compelling, however, is how these sexually-charged yet amorphous feminine, masculine and object forms succeed in resisting easy viewership, defeating any single reading due to their multiple allusions.
The works, as documents of actions, echo a matrix of references ranging from that of the cheeky, vaguely naïve burlesque dancer ́s peek-a-boo scripts of seduction to the art historical, such as Francisco Goya ́s La Maja desnuda / La Maja vestida (ca. 1800-1803) and Hans Bellmers La Poupée (ca. 1934-35). What THE CHAIRMAN then also recalls, is a long history of transgressive conflations which have taken place between categories of "high art" and "low" popular culture. Sendas ́ works raise further enquiry into margins which have been drawn around notions of beauty and eroticism, pornography and censorship, prohibition and repression - all of which remain non-exclusive and temporally elastic.
Tethering on the surreal, THE CHAIRMAN evokes a plurality of senses, blurring the definitions of body and object. Feminine shapes appear formless in so far as the models appear as wax casts or featureless mannequins who perform sexually explicit acts at once visible yet shrouded from the naked eye. On the other hand, certain objects acquire masculine signification; a chair and the composite forms of male clothing allude to another body in dissolution. Through a peeping hole on a gallery wall, in a room to which there is no physical access, a sculpture of a male figure, back facing and looking at another peeping hole, is seen. This surreal "chairman" figure runs parallel to the artist ́s assumption of a fictive and theatrical role that changes according to exhibition site and context. Here inserted against a backdrop of performing pin-ups, the figure, whose face is never visible and this time masked by a peeping hole, almost invisible, relates to our nameless lead character, a risqué man or silent narrator who moves covertly through the shadows almost like an anti-hero, collecting and consuming the sights around him. Viewers may themselves don a similar position, complicit in confronting and receiving the image and its associations.
The visually ambivalent pictures, self-contained and uncanny sculptural objects seduce but never succumb to easy consumption as they simultaneously include and exclude a viewer; their possible meanings are evoked through open association. The works raise questions pertaining to the very nature of art, sexuality, beauty and desire, censorship, cultural tastes and limits of acceptability. Dualisms and binary differences are not drawn between the ́who ́ and the ́what ́, the staged and the spontaneous, the pleasuring object or receiving subject, the viewed and the voyeur. At play is a game of power relations that remains uncertain, yet throughout, Sendas neither imposes an ideological chorus nor prescribes an explicit political stance. Instead, the artist seems to step away with ease, suspending any narrative conclusion, therefore giving place to ́showing ́, rather than ́telling ́.
Welcome to your peep show. What do you see?
Now here in my home, from which I am penning this piece on THE CHAIRMAN, Noe Sendas ́ unheimlich images have been pinned up on my wall for days, robbing me of my eyes through its uncongealing tensions. This is the sheer power of discomforture. Here is an abject limb, a hand on a knee, a high-heeled leg that emerges from the wall. There, a bench, a bed of luxurious hair, cleavage, a sofa, her lines between a chair. Shoe and brassiere straps. Featureless twinned torsos. Her absent body, doubled before a mirror. The relic of his body hangs over a chair. Woman, conjoined and in fragments.
The impossibility of locating a singular, objective perspective in THE CHAIRMAN stirs me to speak from the ́I ́, to appropriate the feminine realm of subjectivity. Since the images here remain un-nameable, Noe Sendas ́ THE CHAIRMAN, offers me more than a passing sensation, an invitation merely to gaze. The discomforture in THE CHAIRMAN invites my reading and re-identification in a space from which I conjure nouns and the names of objects. Here is the liberalizing possibility of re-naming, that which converges at a performative place of seeing, writing, claiming and reclaiming our own bodies.
Watch the birdie. Wait for the flash.
Beauty is no longer forbidden.