CIRCA 112 review

Mark Manders: Parallel occurrence , 2001, painted wood and table with aluminium fox, iron chain, locks, keys, rope, aluminium letter, iron block and artist-made newspapers, dimensions variable; courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago, restricted gift of the Buddy Taub Foundation / Irish Museum of Modern Art

Among the attractions offered to visitors to the 2001 Venice B iennale was the opportunity to compare and contrast the work of three young artists from three different countries who had come to international prominence over the previous few years, all of whom have produced large-scale installations marked by a macabre, uncanny or melancholic sense of compromised domesticity or elaborate enclosure. While the grandfather of this particular genre, at least in recent times, is probably Ilya Kabakov, all three of these very different artists were actually in their thirties at the time. The German pavilion presented a reconstituted version of Gregor Schneider's Dead House Ur , the creepily customised family home in the small German town of Rheydt, which Schneider had gradually transformed over a decade into a ghostly grey cavern replete with fake walls, blind corridors, blocked up windows and dread-inducing pits. Over on the island of Giudecca one could find Mike Nelson's installation The Deliverance and the Patience , sponsored by the British foundation Peer Trust. This was a vast, disorienting labyrinth of musty corridors, salvaged doors and battered bric-à-brac, which invited the viewer to take several complementary if confusing journeys through fictive worlds of the artist's devising. Meanwhile, in the Palazzo Ca‚ Zenobio, Post-Nature , a group show of nine contemporary Dutch artists, included Mark Manders, one of whose signal works is a project he refers to as Self-portrait as a building , an ongoing, life-consuming project he began in 1986 at the age of eighteen.

The earliest work included in Manders' recent show at IMMA was a seminal work from that same year. Inhabited for a survey (1986) is an assortment of writing materials, erasers, scissors and painting materials laid out end to end in the shape of a rudimentary floor plan for a building in which two large rotundae are joined by a corridor off which there are a series of smaller rooms. This work constitutes the First floorplan for self-portrait as a building . A distinct continuity in Manders' concerns over the past decade is evident from Small isolated room (2004), one of the most recent works in the show, which also included elements suggesting a floorplan, delineated once again by a series of pens and other related materials. In this case, however, the floorplan was conjoined with a second element, a pitch-black, irregular ceramic form open at one end which managed simultaneously to look like a scorched landscape and a sawn-off, charred torso from which a number of spindly trees and two tall chimneys incongruously sprouted. These two works were separated by a number of interconnecting rooms, each of which contained substantial sculptural tableaux from the past five years, including the title piece of the exhibition, Parallel occurrence ‚ (2001). This work introduced another recurring element in Manders' lexicon of forms, sculpted animals: in this instance a fox, made of painted aluminium, suspended upside-down by a chain from a painted wood closet and carrying in its mouth a sealed aluminium envelope. While Manders has conjured up quite a menagerie over the years, including various dogs, cats, rats and mice, human beings also appear in the work, generally in dismembered, distorted or stylised forms, sometimes reminiscent of Etruscan clay figures. In Isolated bathroom (2003) three armless supine figures in painted aluminium and ceramic, covered in plastic sheeting, reclined in identical poses and wigs near a large iron bathtub with a fully functioning wooden tap. In a small connecting space between the two rooms containing the aforementioned works was a dense wall of stacked newspapers, courtesy of The Irish Times . This served, among other things, to highlight Manders' abiding interest in the printed word and image, as evidenced by his numerous artist's books and broadsheets.

Parallel Occurrence was Manders' second solo show in Ireland following an earlier outing at the Douglas Hyde Gallery back in the summer of 1997. Despite the comparisons suggested above with other artists of his generation, Manders generally gives the impression of being very much a loner, intent on giving sculptural form to the stunted narratives and obscure symbols of a deeply private, even dreamlike interior life. Various aspects of his work nevertheless suggest a quite particular continental European sculptural lineage. These include the sombre, muted palette in which black, brown and grey predominate, the displaced emphasis on the self, the preponderance of vessels, containers and enclosures, and a fascination with obscure numerological systems (the mysteries of inherent scale and the oddness of scalar distortion and discrepancy are addressed in a whole series of works, which ostensibly reduce pre-existing forms to 88% of their proper size). This lineage certainly includes Joseph Beuys, though unexpected parallels with Arte Povera, in particular with the figure of Mario Merz, suggest themselves at times. The works' atmosphere of melancholy and obsessiveness, and its sense of cruelty mitigated by dark humour, is not unprecedented in the art that has emanated from ýhe Netherlands and Belgium in recent times, though it is perhaps more marked in the latter. The grammar of Manders' art is, however, ultimately a private language to which the viewer is provided only limited access Ð much as the protective wires with which some of the more delicate sculptures were unfortunately but quite understandably cordoned off kept the viewer at arm's length from these fascinating examples, at once beguiling and disturbing, of what the artist himself has described as "still lives with broken moments."

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith is a critic, curator and Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish at University College Dublin.

Article reproduced from CIRCA 112, Summer 2005, pp. 86- 87

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