Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin, 2013
Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, 2014
HANDJOB began as a convalescence activity after a broken thumb, not some onanistic occupational therapy but something else entirely. Like many minor personal moments in the life of an artist it has now morphed into a more public presentation. For several months last year Phelan posted and re-blogged endless photos of hands on social media. These accumulated and formed the broad basis of a project inspired in part, it should be noted, by a trend amongst self-harming Tumblr kids who fixate on monochrome hand photos.
HANDJOB does not pretend to be an exhaustive archival, or encyclopaedic treatise on the subject of the hand. Nor does it pretend to engage in any curatorial games, or progressive public strategies. What it does pretend to do is present a range of clustered connections between what should mostly appear to be random images, people, and objects.
Thinking of the gallery space as an open notebook would be useful if it were not so trite. There are over thirty pieces on display in this proposition of an exhibition and thousands of images so it’s better to maybe think about circulation instead of appropriation. Source, author, and intent, are loose – diffused to an even greater extent as much of the work was produced by Phelan on instruction or collaboration with the others involved. The result should be completely makeshift, possibly provisional, imbued however with a tentative connectedness, and a bunch of contingent language games that have ensued.
Others involved in the project are friends whose various practices have co-incidentally involved hands in recent projects. This was probably, in part, a reaction to the anonymity of the net and the intense ubiquity of the hand not only in art but everywhere else as well. Distance then became no enemy and so it was great to be able to work with Douglas Rodrigo Rada from Cochabamba, Bolivia; Sascha Bolt from Franfurt/Berlin; Cut Hands/Not Abel (William Bennett/Ian McInerney) from London and Cork; as well as those closer to home like Brenda Moore McCann, art historian; and artists Lee Welsh, Sarah Pierce, and Roisin Lewis all living in Dublin.
In the end what is fascinating are the choreographed systems of chance that are sometimes in synch and then again not. When they do, they seemingly obliterate each other or maybe just quietly cancel each other out. Is this hedging towards an expanded sense of meaning or some semiotic collapse? Not sure anyone cares. Whether subjectivity can break free of the subject is only something that can happen when concept and material are absent. These are other people’s ideas. Cultural delivery systems seem to be central to the way things get understood when distribution not reception is key, or at least less relevant. For the moment there are only elusive fluxes of memories, shifting identities, open-ended narratives, contrapuntal dialogues, diffused authors, and other circulations related to the hand.
Associated text
Handjob List of works
Window:
1. Alan Phelan
Cockatoo, 2013
marble, rubber glove
OPW Collection
2. Douglas Rodrigo Rada
Finger Ring, 2003
vinyl adhesive on window
Large White Table:
3. Douglas Rodrigo Rada
Wedding Ring in Ice Block, 2012
ice, ring, glass
4. Sabina Mac Mahon
The Relic of Salome The Doubting Midwife, 2008
modelling clay, paint, polish
VAI Collection
5. Douglas Rodrigo Rada
One Finger Glove, 2013
welding glove
6. Alan Phelan
End of Days
acrylic box, metal, paint, inkjet print
7. David Monahan
La Libération, 2009
newspaper, mylar
8. Alan Phelan
Charlie, Charlie, 2013
post-it note, carbon ink
9. Alan Phelan
Magneto, 2013
paper clip, acrylic dome
Left Wall:
10. Alan Phelan
Just-a-hand, 2013
digital photo frame, 1,400 images
11. Sarah Pierce
Rodininconnu, 2013
inkjet print, plastic frame
12. Sarah Pierce
Fired Clay Studies of Hands, 2012
inkjet print, box
13. Sarah Pierce
“Rodin inconnu” Museé de Louvre Paris, 1962
box lid, book
14. Douglas Rodrigo Rada
Boxing Glove with Watch, 2012-13
boxing glove, watch, paint
Back Wall:
15. Alan Phelan
Dark Tracings, 2013
paper, ink, glue, glitter
Private collections
16. Alan Phelan
Beginnings, 2013
pink paper, toner
17. Róisín Lewis
Jelly Baby Hands, 2012
paper, pencil
Private collection
Black Table:
18. Cut Hands / Not Abel
Impassion, 2013
digital photo frame, headphones,
inkjet printed poster
19. Lee Welch
The Rods, 2013
wood
20. Not Abel
Stranger, 2013
inflatable hand, spray paint, concert tickets
21. Alan Phelan
Fingers, 2013
pastry, almonds (please enjoy)
Corner:
22. Alan Phelan
Just-a-hand, 2013
tissue, ink
23. Alan Phelan
Red Hand Of, 2013
disco light, rubber work glove, sequins
Smaller White Table:
24. Alan Phelan
The Cardboard Box, 2013
cardboard, papier-mâché ears, beads, string
Private collection
25. Alan Phelan
Stump Warmer, 2013
faux fur
26. Alan Phelan
Becky Wilson’s Celebrity Hands, 2013
bespoke photo album, paper, toner
27. Brenda Moore McCann
Medical Semiotics, 2013
bespoke hardback, ink
28. Alan Phelan
Les Mains Dans L’art, 2013
inkjet prints, glass
Back Right Wall:
29. Sascha Boldt
Handymania, 2013
digital photo frame, 500 images
edition 3 plus 2 AP
30. Douglas Rodrigo Rada
Mutilated Rake, 2013
garden rake
31. Alan Phelan
Seaman Stains, 2013
plywood, stain, metal
32. Alan Phelan
Lucy Liu Statement, 2013
inkjet print, acrylic
Private collection
Wall at door:
33. Douglas Rodrigo Rada
Glove Fingers Exchange, 2013
5 coloured rubber gloves
34. Alan Phelan
Bald Zebra, 2012
paper, ink, collage
Private collection
35. Alan Phelan
Pointing at Stuff, 2013
offset, acrylic
36. Alan Phelan
How to do a Hand Transplant, 2013
paper, ink, frame
http://www.billionjournal.com/time/50c.html
James Merrigan_JUNE_2013_It was the Butler with the Candlestick in the Library
ALAN PHELAN_‘HANDJOB‘_14 March – 26 April_2013_Oonagh Young Gallery_Dublin_
Within any other context Róisín Lewis’s nicely rendered pencil drawings of monochrome hands holding high-coloured Jelly Babies would be passed over as overtly sweet and whimsical, even when you learn that the artist completed a channel swim from England to France in 2012 (Jelly Babies being a channel swimmers energy fix). However, considering Phelan’s history of using malformed sci-fi humanoids (‘Odo’ from Star Trek Deep Space Nine), along with mutant comic-book heroes (‘The Thing’ from The Fantastic Four), Lewis’s Jelly Babies take on layered meaning and resonance in a type of accidental homage to Phelan’s quirky aesthetic.
Interestingly, and perhaps appropriately, ‘aesthetic signature’ turns out to be the default thematic of ‘HANDJOB’. No more so than with the inclusion of the medical doctor and art historian, Brenda Moore McCann, whose gallery statement leads with: ‘Medical Semiotics and its influence on Art, Psychoanalysis and Sherlock Holmes’, outlining the [Giovanni] ’Morelli method’, whereby “hands, ears, noses, fingernails, the small part of the anatomy, became the basis … of connoisseurship in painting the the late 19th century.”
McCann’s thesis takes the form of a hardback notebook with handwritten text; at moments a hard task to read. On the same table, however, the conceptual dots begin to join with the placement of Phelan’s The Cardboard Box (2013), a delicately boxed pair of papier-mâché ears, with a photo album entitled Beckles Wilson’s Celebrity Hands (2013). Both artwork titles reference the subject of McCann’s Medical Semiotic treatise (The Cardboard Box was the title of a Sherlock Holmes story, the author of which, Arthur Conan Doyle, was rumoured to be Beckles Wilson).
Such ‘Who Done It?’ amusement and narrative knots by Phelan are extended into some very sticky puns. With the use of a stencil the artist has ‘stained’ the character seaman (semen) ‘Willy’—from the ’70s British animation series Captain Pugwash—on a sheet of plywood. Willy’s sailor neckerchief is a delicately folded metal ‘hand’; a (hand)kerchief perhaps…
Other works of note include Phelan’s faux fur Stump Warmer (2013) and framed tongue-in-cheek article on How to do a Hand Transplant (2013). However, the pièce de résistance is David Monahan’s delightfully casual readymade, a copy of the French daily newspaper La Libération from 2009, which, with sophisticated French humour, addressed the Thierry Henry’s ‘Hand of God’ moment in the World Cup qualifier against Ireland in 2009, by insidiously populating each page of the issue with hands.
Reading through the artists’ statements that accompany the exhibition, the dance between ‘meaning’ vs ‘image’ is rehearsed once again, but a question that is relevant when you consider the great potential to corrupt the ‘intentional’ meaning of the thirty-six artworks that make up ‘HANDJOB’. Douglas Rodrigo Rada writes: “In a consumer society, to favour an image over a thought is not only more convincing but also more convenient: ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, and besides, it spares us from reflecting.” While Jason Oakley quotes conceptually slippery Daniel Birnbaum in reference to Lee Welch’s “multi-referential” artworks: “artists are often suspicious of meaning as it is produced through narration, they could be said to introduce caesuras of non-meaning into the thick web of sense.”
As is proven in ‘HANDJOB’, the potent imagery of multifarious hands are the seeds for thought: without one, there is no other. The onus is on the viewer to activate the artist’s meaning, which, a lot of the time, ends up being indiscriminate.
Phelan adamantly states that “‘HANDJOB’ does not pretend to be an exhaustive archival, or encyclopaedic treatise on the subject of the hand. Nor does it pretend to engage in any curatorial games…” (my emphasis). Because Phelan’s hands aesthetically fondle the ‘hands’ of his collaborators—through remote instruction, or his choice of readymade object to ‘illustrate’ the artists’ concept—this exhibition naturally and intuitively becomes a “curatorial game.“ Is it not the case that group exhibitions are fundamentally curatorial constructs? Furthermore, the individualistic, ideological, conceptual and aesthetic intent of the artist and his or her artwork are traded off for an over-arching thematic that is not devised by the artist, but by the curator? In such curatorial scenarios it is my contention that sometimes (not all of the time), that the artist’s left-of-field conceptual underpinning is lost under an umbrella theory that is, sometimes, casually administered to the artwork. Other times, however, headless artworks and artists need to be herded into the curatorial pen.
Phelan also testifies to a sort of “makeshift” … “provisional” … “tentative connectedness” in the shared responses to the hand thematic in this hybridised exhibition. It is true that the thematic ties that bind the show together are loose, sometimes untied. But what is important here in not the apparent disparate connectedness between the objects, but the fun in ‘re-narrativising’ them by extracting a personalised connoisseurship from the artworks—like Morelli might do.
Notes
[1] Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e), MIT Press, 2005.