Fastidious foam: the not so exquisite corpses of Hany Armanious

Hany Armanious
Empathy Chart

The old surrealist game of exquisite corpse was once again rinsed off and hung out to dry at Roslyn Oxley9 last Thursday night. If unfamiliar with the game, its what Breton and the rest of the surrealists used to make - something from bits of nothing in the early days of the movement a century ago. This was of course, the sculptural beginnings of found object turned modern mythical edifice that filtered on through the rest of the 20^th century.

And now here again almost one hundred years out of date, Hany Armanious has given us something that can only be distinguished from a retrospective by the fact that he worked fastidiously with foam to reproduce found objects instead of simply using them: a manikin head on a sphinx on a box; cardboard tubes, under a log, under a gray thing...it was beautiful. At least that's what I overheard. The 20-something up-and-comers in attendance went out of the way to exercise their extended adjectives that night, though all their theater only fell on deaf ears while the older patrons of Oxley9 simply wandered around seeming a little more puzzled than usual.

Everyone agreed with admiring relief on one wall piece-slash-torn notice bound. Seems it was the only work that was almost similar enough to something that could safely be comment on...sounds confusing...go see the show and find out for yourself.

But seriously, Roslyn Oxley9's press writer Amanda Rowell leads us to believe that through these works we find an 'otherness' in the slippage of the real and unreal of every day objects. Hmmmm...despite the ambiguity of these works delaying our judgment, in no way do they transgress the object/observer relationship to mitigate the encompassing experience of the 'Uncanny Valley'. Juan Munoz or even Felix Gonzalez Torres have been extending further into anthropomorphic sculpture and found object than Armanious' work dreams of, and with no need for expensive fabrication techniques for validation. Really, these sculptures don't boil down to answer the 'intriguing' question “What is it”, as Rowell claims, they only incited the assumption that 'they don't mean anything'.

Art should insight us shouldn't it? It should move us deeper into our understanding of the human condition. And isn't there a much greater discussion of 'otherness' in that than in a reductive, labored critique of the uncanny?

A bitter taste came to my mouth whilst watching the next generation of art school students work their way through the free beers and giggle about finding their next sculpture in a wheelie bin. Seems the only insight from this show was a cheap hangover and a couple of contacts.

A.A. Gabriel