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There is a strange poetry in the absurd. Lewis Carroll saw this, Marcel Duchamp saw this, and Geraldine Barlow, curator of Monash University Museum of Art's recent show 'Too Much of Me: 7 Paths Through the Absurd (With Detour)' sees this too. By grouping together the work of seven contemporary artists, Barlow's show revealed the way in which the subtle logic of the absurd is constantly at work, twisting and shaking the very forms and concepts that shape our ordinary lives.
 
The show began with the histrionics of Christchurch-born artist Ronnie Van Hout. Presented were two of his now trademark self-portrait dolls: End dolls, 2008, a trio of stern-looking miniature Van Houts, and Doom and gloom, 2009, which features two life-sized models of children, adorable with Batman pajamas and tousled hair, but with their faces covered by eerie masks of Van Hout's own recognisable face. While End dolls seems to be a wry dig at the marketability of an artist's state of self-absorption, Doom and gloom at first reads as a simple act of pseudo-self-analysis, an allusion to the child in the man, the man in the child. But there is something obscurely horrible about its realisation - the dolls' arms end in rounded stumps and the Van Hout faces hang off the children's heads like ragged masks. A grotesque moment of disintegration is captured, trapped halfway between the real world and the bizarre fantasies of Van Hout's mind. 

The dark obsessiveness of Van Hout was nicely balanced in the next gallery by the more light-hearted neuroses of Melbourne artist Stuart Ringholt. In On Wednesday he wore a plastic nose, 2003, documented by a photo in the show, Ringholt attempted to confront the self-consciousness he felt towards his body by spending a day wearing a large plastic nose. Against the psycho-drama of Van Hout's work, Ringholt suggested that true absurdity cleaves not to the mind, but to the very materiality of the body and the objects that frame it. This point was also made in a number of other works collected for the show - chairs made from halved bathtubs, collages and a baffling video of a Christmas tree crossed with an earth compacting machine. Understood in the context of Ringholt's ongoing practice, these simple acts of manipulation and recombination constitute a serious questioning of the coherence of the objects that frame our lives - a questioning that is in turn undercut by the humour and self-deprecation that characterises the deeply personal nature of his work. Isolated from this context, however, these works risk lapsing into incomprehensible acts of quasi-surrealism. But, then again, perhaps this is yet another deliberate act of self-sabotage. In the end, Ringholt's work cleverly twists and doubles back on itself to question not only the validity of existence, but also of his art itself ...


For this fifth Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and Art & Australia Emerging Writers Program review, Nicholas Croggon was mentored by independent curator, writer and lecturer Rebecca Coates, Associate Curator at Melbourne's Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2009 issue.