Yes! Congratulations to Shirley Tse, 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Shirley's latest cluster of poly-everything sculptures can be seen at Barnsdall (4800 Hollywood Blvd 90027) in the 2009 COLA Prizes show, through July 12, 2009 -- for which I wrote the attached essay.
“Just one word: Plastics.” This pithy line, the straw that breaks Benjamin Braddock’s antidisestablishmentarian back in the enormously popular 1967 film The Graduate, encapsulates a remarkably pervasive archetypal association between synthetic polymers and a wide range of (mostly negative) social, political, and even spiritual conditions. Dating back at least to the beatnik era - and continuing as a current running through subsequent cultural moments right up to the present – plastic has been a word, an idea, and a material inextricably commingled with notions of inauthenticity, alienation, superficiality, disposability, waste – indeed, virtually all the perceived negative changes wrought upon our species’ 10,000 years of relative agrarian stability by the Industrial Revolution. Polyester doesn’t breathe!
One of the first things that struck me as remarkable about Shirley Tse’s sculptures – after their initial and persistent formal impact - was their function as indicators of a deeper and more complex understanding of this human/plastic relationship – encompassing and acknowledging plastic’s pop-humanist demonization as an important but reductivist aspect of a much larger, finely nuanced, multi-layered and multivalent narrative.
One aspect of this underlying narrative has been an engagement with the history of plastic in art, most conspicuous in Tse’s avoidance of the kinds of plausibly deniable irony that characterize Pop usages of this most modern of materials – as well as the mute fetishism of its Minimalist incarnations. But Tse has cast a much wider net. Before even leaving grad school she had identified the circulating global stream of cheap plastic consumer goods – in which both Los Angeles and the artist’s hometown of Hong Kong act as major hubs – as a central underlying motif in her work’s formal and conceptual gestation.
The geopolitical and systems theory implications arising from this specific template are extensive, yet only hint at the mycelium of interlaced ideational threads underlying the mandala of synthetic ‘shrooms that comprise Tse’s oeuvre. Through intentional research and reference as well as unusually lucid intuitive and associative connections, Tse has imbued work that reads at first glance as playful but enigmatic formalism - brightly colored inflatables, intricately incised slabs of foam, mutated beverage coolers - with the distinctive sense of elaborately interwoven symbolic sets lying just outside our comprehension, elaborately modeled entry points for a vast interdimensional metro system (if only public art looked half as good!)”
Read the catalog version of my essay for Shirley's COLA show here
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Shirley Tse: COLA
“Just one word: Plastics.” This pithy line, the straw that breaks Benjamin Braddock’s antidisestablishmentarian back in the enormously popular 1967 film The Graduate, encapsulates a remarkably pervasive archetypal association between synthetic polymers and a wide range of (mostly negative) social, political, and even spiritual conditions. Dating back at least to the beatnik era - and continuing as a current running through subsequent cultural moments right up to the present – plastic has been a word, an idea, and a material inextricably commingled with notions of inauthenticity, alienation, superficiality, disposability, waste – indeed, virtually all the perceived negative changes wrought upon our species’ 10,000 years of relative agrarian stability by the Industrial Revolution. Polyester doesn’t breathe!
One of the first things that struck me as remarkable about Shirley Tse’s sculptures – after their initial and persistent formal impact - was their function as indicators of a deeper and more complex understanding of this human/plastic relationship – encompassing and acknowledging plastic’s pop-humanist demonization as an important but reductivist aspect of a much larger, finely nuanced, multi-layered and multivalent narrative.
One aspect of this underlying narrative has been an engagement with the history of plastic in art, most conspicuous in Tse’s avoidance of the kinds of plausibly deniable irony that characterize Pop usages of this most modern of materials – as well as the mute fetishism of its Minimalist incarnations. But Tse has cast a much wider net. Before even leaving grad school she had identified the circulating global stream of cheap plastic consumer goods – in which both Los Angeles and the artist’s hometown of Hong Kong act as major hubs – as a central underlying motif in her work’s formal and conceptual gestation.
The geopolitical and systems theory implications arising from this specific template are extensive, yet only hint at the mycelium of interlaced ideational threads underlying the mandala of synthetic ‘shrooms that comprise Tse’s oeuvre. Through intentional research and reference as well as unusually lucid intuitive and associative connections, Tse has imbued work that reads at first glance as playful but enigmatic formalism - brightly colored inflatables, intricately incised slabs of foam, mutated beverage coolers - with the distinctive sense of elaborately interwoven symbolic sets lying just outside our comprehension, elaborately modeled entry points for a vast interdimensional metro system (if only public art looked half as good!)”
Most recently, beginning in 2004 with the installation Power Towers at the Pomona College Museum of Art, Tse’s work has begun adding further – or perhaps closer – layers of meaning to the already complex moiré of secret histories, grounding them in newly accessed realms of representational physicality and personal history. There has always been a hint of autobiography to Tse’s choice of plastic as the subject and substance of her art - not only because of Hong Kong’s centrality in its political realities and popular mythologies, but because Tse’s position in the art world – as an Asian woman staking out a place in contemporary Western art history by way of the schizophrenic LA art scene – she has had to devise a persona and practice as malleable and adaptive as her chosen medium.
This delicate balancing act has been embodied in much of Tse’s work – from her overarching fusion of the mass-produced with the handcrafted and her juggling of plastic’s minimalist, formalist, and narrative potentialities to a series of landscape interventions that literally perched a miniature bench on the meeting point of the American and Eurasian tectonic plates in Iceland.
Quantum Shirley – her most recent work (destined at the time of writing for the COLA show) combines Tse’s recent interest in figuration and autobiographical allusion in a sculpture that takes this ambivalent equilibrium to a new level literalness, conflating – among the usual polymer theory referents – Tegmark and Wheeler’s “balanced playing card” illustration of the Schrodinger equation with a moment in her childhood when the artist’s mother was contemplating sending her to live with prosperous arts-oriented relations in Tahiti.
Webster defines ‘placticity’ in part as “the capacity for continuous alteration of the neural pathways and synapses of the living brain and nervous system in response to experience or injury.” I can’t recall hearing a better statement about the ideal function of art. Mirroring this physiological process in the external material world through her art, Shirley Tse’s resolutely indeterminate, continually evolving sculptures manifest both as the blossoms of her own subterranean psychic rhizomes and as depth charges to reconfigure ours.”
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