Another Art Forum Series advertisement i received via email:
ART FORUM SERIES 12: Artist Talk with Christina Mackie
Thursday 2 September, 12.30pm
Highly regarded British artist Christina Mackie makes sculpture, in which layers or elements are often separate and complete in themselves. The final constructions are composites, and abstractions of meditations on subjects that can be emotional, physical or socio-political. She uses a wide variety of materials that have ranged from DNA to watercolour, in scale from microscopic to monumental.
The installations have a definite physicality which is secondary to the idea. The "making" is a method and an instrument to contemplate the idea. The work is not a narrative or an illustration but an exploration. She is currently working on geological formations, the landscape as a character. Christina Mackie is Arts Council Oxford Melbourne Fellow, 2010. Her work has been shown at Tate Britain, the British Art Show, in the Pusan Biennial 2008, CCA Kitakyushu amongst other places.
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Imagine stepping in a dog turd, or at least you think its a dog turd. Until you inspect the sole of your shoe and see within what was first a rather homogenous brown mash cute little pieces of corn, fennel seeds, strands of spinach. Considering the contents of the turd, we may be led to believe that the "meditation" we trod in was sculpted not by a canine but by a homo sapien. Maybe they are not layered through the turd (the spinach strands would provide an exception), but we can surely call these constituents of the turd "elements", each still "separate and complete in themselves". I'm going to claim that feces - that each feces - is a sculpture, which i could argue via the writings of Freud. Yet i needn't leave the confines of the art market - i mean art world - to prove my contention: Piero Manzoni's famous "Artist's Shit" works are now part of art history; Will Delvoye has made a machine-installation, called Cloaca, that produces human-like feces; and Chris Ofili's use of elephant dung fetches great re-sale prices for his paintings. These days, to make shit art, one only need be an artist.
But what, you may ask, does this have to do with the work of Christina Mackie? Maybe not much, which is also what the above advertisement for Christina's artist talk tells us about what it is that Christina the artist exactly does or makes. The terms are so general as to be able to represent almost anything, telling us nothing other than a jumble of contextless art-theoretical keywords in the process. Thanks. For example, "The final constructions are composites, and abstractions of meditations on subjects that can be emotional, physical or socio-political." So Christina meditates on a a range of diverse subjects and makes "abstractions" from these meditations. Does that mean she talks about her thoughts? Quite profound. And these abstractions, installed in an art space or presented as art, "have a definite physicality which is secondary to the idea." Is Christina here being Platonic, or is she being Kantian? What is accomplished by stating that they have a "definite physicality"? Even the most conceptual art works take some corporeal form, even if only as text on paper and performative human behaviours that perform an understanding of the language game. Since the corporeality of all art is mundanely self-evident, "definite physicality" must mean something else. It must be a philosophical statement. It is obviously not Kantian, since physicality is only definite with reference to the form of human intuition, which brings the form of space, oh, and good ole' time, to experience as experience. As the form of all possible human intuition (the other i'll let you time-keepers guess at) space - in which physicality must be sensed - is neither an idea nor at the mercy of the idea (otherwise a-priori synthetic judgements would not be possible). Physicality is then, in its specificity, a synthesis of intuition and the categories. But again i've been sucked into a segue, by way of which i hope i have partially elucidated what a complex philosophical claim is being made in the statement "definite physicality", which is made even more complex by adding that this "definite" (not uncertain but certain) "physicality... is secondary to the idea." Whoa, where's my valium.
With such general claims made about works, we can only be moved ever further away from what it is that Christina actual makes. But wait, maybe Christina does not simply make...
Now is the time we must turn towards the odd bracketing, vis quotation marks, of "making". Such bracketing means we must reconsider what making not only means, but is. It problematises making. Yet the way in which this concept and/or act is problematised is not further explained. Although the rest of the sentence may qualify this "making": "The "making" is a method and an instrument to contemplate the idea." Hence this problematic, bracketed "making" is both a method and an instrument. Towards what? Towards contemplation of the idea. This sounds all very deeply Platonic. Yet it cannot be: for Plato, the physical things of this world only illustrated, in a fallen, imperfect form, the Idea (well, that's the knuckle version of the story). Art is hence destined to illustrate ideas. But Christina's works are not an illustration, but an exploration. An exploration of what? If the contemplation of the idea is tied to the process of "making" as "method" and "instrument", but the finished work is an "exploration", where does this leave the idea, which the "definite physicality" of the finished, installed work is secondary to?
Admittedly, i am quite at a loss with trying to extract from the Art Forum email exactly what it is that Christina Mackie "makes" (or, rather, methodologises and instrumentalises into a contemplative being directed towards the idea). So i looked her works up on google, and i must admit i definitely like them! But I can find no correspondence between the description of her "practice" i received via email and the very corporeal, sculptural works that showed up on google images.
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