All things are
transmutable, we learn as children: anything can become something else and
every place can be somewhere else. Objects can be animate: independent lives
can be created in toys, images, and abstractions. Mysterious presences,
experiences of extraordinary scale, transforming characters and demons – these
are the very content and fibre of the dream and nightmare world, spectres that
pursue us throughout our lives. The imaginary life of the child, and the fears
and fantasies of the adult, are connected by a common capacity for physical joy
and the awareness of physical frailty.
In his
development of the inflatable as kinetic and interactive artwork, and in his
other multimedia installations, Max Streicher has created images of our
greatest joys and our deepest terrors, the site where the imaginary lives of
children and adults meet. Drawing on imagery from literature, mythology, and
the Bible (Streicher studied theology before going to art school) his work
provokes strong spontaneous, psychological reactions in people of all ages and
backgrounds – reactions that run deep and reveal insights into the socially
constructed ego.
A dream was the
source for an important early work by Streicher entitled We Will Name This Place... 1988 (fig. 1). In the Winters College
gallery at York University in Toronto Streicher removed a large section of
ceiling tile to reveal the building's inner structure. Through this opening he
installed three papier-mâché
gargoyles – dogs that appear to be charging from the sky. The figures are a
hybrid of Streicher's childhood dog, George, and gargoyles seen by the artist
on the cathedral in Swäbisch Gmünd, Germany. Gargoyles, in the Middle Ages,
were put on the outside of buildings to ward off ghosts and malicious spirits.
Dogs may be associated with the hunt or the fear of being hunted. The same icon
can be a benevolent sign, however – a messenger, a pet, or a companion on a
spiritual journey. Streicher used the gallery's acoustic ceiling panels as a
metaphorical skin, standing for the separation between interior and exterior,
conscious and subconscious realities.
The title We Will Name This Place... is a
quotation from the Bible referring to the dedication of sites where miracles
had taken place. At such a site a rock would be anointed with oil and the place
would be named. For the most part, miracles today are confined to the pages of
supermarket tabloids. But what of the world of dreams and spirits, of
clairvoyance and prescience? None of us can detach completely from a world that
is dark and irrational – those aspects of our experience that don't quite
square with our mechanical, physical understanding of the cosmos. Cracks
occasionally occur in this structure, puncturing our logical explanations and
our propensity for ordering – “our cosmology.” Through these cracks we catch
glimpses and we experience moments of insight, clarity, physical ecstasy, and
existential terror, coming to us in drips and drops and splashes and waves –
like dogs pouring forth from above.
Perhaps this
interest on the part of the artist in the leaky parts of reality is less an
attempt to describe the faults in our cosmology than it is an attempt to
describe the sacred in contemporary life. What is sacred to us, what motivates
our lives may not be sublime images of heaven and earth, God and humanity, but
rather the simple prospect of financial gain, a new purchase, or a promotion at
work. In The Life We Are Living, 1990
(figs. 2 & 3) Streicher created a work that was based upon his observation
of the demolition of a church and the construction, in its place, of a luxury
condominium. The church tower, a historical landmark, was preserved and the
condominium structure built to incorporate it. He imagined the construction
worker as a spiritual worker, a latter-day Levite constructing a temple to “speculative
real estate,” embodying the spiritual values of Toronto in the late eighties
and early nineties.[1]
It may be a
holdover of nineteenth-century romanticism in contemporary culture that artists
are directed to identify with the mental patient, the prophet, or priest –
calling for spiritual values in a materialistic and instrumentalized world.
Condemning pleasures of all kinds as vices, the spiritual outsider (read here
the artist) distrusts the world of sensation, preferring instead texts and the
interpretation of signs. Coming out of a Master of Fine Arts programme,
Streicher had absorbed these values; in effect not much different from the
values of the seminary school he had earlier attended. Streicher's installation
Panic and Fear, 1990 (fig. 4) is an
ironic skewering of such contemporary spiritual values. The installation, in a
vacant retail space in the Eaton Centre, Edmonton, consisted of a slide
projection of a mental patient carrying a sign that read, “I know,” and on the
opposite wall a text: “Seeing now the possibility of stilling forever our
predisposition to panic and fear.”[2] It is a bitter
reflection and an outsider's observation on the habit of pacifying existential
anxiety through shopping.
The first
inflatable by Streicher was the work Breathe, 1989 (fig. 5) installed at the
Bloor Street United Church. It was his first work after graduate school, a
piece he describes as whimsical, and at the time not intended as a new direction
or a sign of things to come. It consisted of a sewn nylon bag, inflated by a
vacuum cleaner. When fully inflated, Breathe took the shape of a giant ram's
horn. Each time it inflated its motor and fan made a remarkably loud and
high-pitched sound and contrasted dramatically with the otherwise serene church
interior. There is something slightly rude about the piece: its size and noise
and its suggestion of a male erection.
Breathe made an
impression on many people, including John Dickson and Lyla Rye, who around that
time found their own work tending to the surrealistic and were looking around
for like-minded artists to form an artists’ collective. They invited Streicher
to exhibit with them and other artists who later came to be known collectively as
Nether Mind.[3] Nether Mind's first exhibition took place
in an old industrial basement in the King Street West area of Toronto. Perhaps
it was a combination of factors: a collapsing economy (Streicher had just been
laid off from his day job at Bell Canada) and a dank, dark industrial basement
as a venue for this first show that generated the spirit that only a scarcity
of means and complete independence from institutional structures can afford.
Streicher again
returned to the inflatable for this group exhibition and produced Boiler, 1991
(fig. 6). The figures in Boiler were
originally conceived as tripedal bunny suits – each with three ears, arms and
legs tapered to points, like abstracted jesters. Viewers animated the pieces by
engaging switches that inflated them. The inflation was startling, much like Breathe. The gloomy setting only
enhanced their ghostly presence. In the same exhibition, Streicher exhibited Cellar. A blue sliding door in the same
room as Boiler opened to an even darker, danker space with water on the floor.
Through this door one could see limp, uninflated and very sad looking “bunny
suits” (the rejects of the Boiler research) simply hung as though on meat
hooks.[4]
The white, airy
lightness and billowy softness of the Tyvek, the synthetic, non-porous fabric
that Streicher uses to make his inflatables, inevitably recall clouds. In Where There Is Smoke, 1992 (fig. 7),
Streicher executed a private commission in the manner of a baroque ceiling
painter. The piece suggests the illusion of an opening through the roof to the
sky. It is a caricature of a cloud or of smoke, a pulsating vision animated by
the variable air currents of a rotating valve mechanism.
Another play on
this theme is Pillars of Cloud, 1992
(fig. 9). The Pillars of Cloud were mounted on modified golf carts and inflated
by the squeezing of a hand break mechanism. The title is a Biblical reference
to when God was leading the Israelites out of Egypt and he led them “by a
pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.” In the process of
realization, the soft billowy cloud forms gradually came to resemble more the
sharp “peaks of church steeples and Thai architecture.”[5] These pillars
of cloud are like modern conveniences or consumer appliances – personal augers
to the Promised Land – and seem as though they should be available at any
department or hardware store.
In
The Life We Are Living, Panic
and Fear, and Pillars of Cloud,
Streicher suggests that the character of our individual lives is in fact the
acting out of our deepest spiritual beliefs in the vernacular of mass
consumption and entertainment. As such, the promise of salvation and the
spectre of perdition guide us in every consumer selection and choice of
diversion. This theme is also unmistakable in the work this flesh... 1993 (fig. 10), exhibited in a solo exhibition at
Galerie Articule in Montreal. this
flesh... featured a 16-mm film loop of an appropriated inflatable -- an
effigy crudely painted to resemble the Toronto discount retailer Honest Ed with
two sewn-on arms spread wide to welcome (or bless?) shoppers. The image was
projected on an arrangement of four mirrors that fragmented the image as well
as enhancing the cruciform character of the inflatable. An LED scrolled a text
from Tertullian, from the treatise On the Flesh of Christ: “(I mean) ... this
flesh ... suffused with blood ... built up with bones ... interwoven with
nerves ... entwined with veins ... as born of a human ... and knows how to die
... undoubtedly human ... (I mean) ... this flesh...”[6]
The cruciform
resemblance of the Honest Ed effigy may be merely coincidental, but the
Christ-like death and resurrection character of many of Streicher's figurative
inflatables is hard to miss. These figures, even at their most abstract, remind
us of physical life as both miraculous and ephemeral. In the same exhibition at
Galerie Articule, Streicher installed in the office the ceiling-mounted
inflatable My Dear One (fig. 11). Recalling the earlier ceiling-mounted Where
There Is Smoke, My Dear One featured two large inflatable arms, angelically
hovering and embracing the office workers. Its message, that of a Walmart greeter
or of Honest Ed himself – one of throbbing, all embracing love.
In contrast to
the cotton-candy sentiment of the inflatable, the Galerie Articule exhibition
also included a third piece demonstrating Streicher's acidic side. Alchemist's
Tongue: of which my rage is made / of which my fear is made, 1993 (fig. 12),
was an installation of approximately fifty tongues, some cast in sulfur and
some in lye soap. The tongues had been cast in flexible molds and bound
differently for each casting so that every tongue was unique.[7]
As a piece of
human anatomy, the tongue is perhaps second only to the representation of the
genitalia in its suggestiveness. It may be for its unique sensitivity that
modesty insists that the tongue remain private and contained and shared only in
the most intimate relationships. Streicher views the tongue as a threshold
organ between inner and outer, a basic surface for the investigation of the
world, and here, a literal description of emotion in both form and substance.
The example of
Joseph Beuys's sculpture and installations from the 1960s through the 1980s, as
well as the work of other artists, encouraged many to explore an alchemical
relationship to their materials. Contemporary sculptors may now use a broader
range of materials – materials that in themselves may stand for feelings,
emotions, or abstractions. For Streicher, Alchemist's Tongue in lye and sulfur,
and later kaolin, is about inner transformation, like the dogs in We Shall Name
This Place breaking through the ceiling. Illuminated by flashing lights, there
is a Faustian character to these glow-in-the dark tongues – eloquent and
impossible to resist, yet bitter to the taste.
Three
installations / interventions followed in 1994 that had fun with the
conventions of language, interpretation and political postures.[8]
Streicher returned to the inflatable in 1995 with the site-related piece Stalk
(fig. 13) in a temporary exhibition space in the Scotia Plaza concourse in
Toronto's financial district. Directly across from the exhibition was the men's
clothier Moores, whose promotions for various lines of clothing featured models
in wilderness and hunting scenes. The artist, interested in the culture of
business and how it is expressed by the language of the hunt, decided in turn
to produce his own homage. He fashioned four rifle-toting hunters in peaked
caps following their five bloodhounds. A rotating valve inflated and deflated
the figures by turns to mimic a slapstick chase. While the human figure had
often been implied in Streicher's inflatables, Stalk gave the artist the
opportunity to work out his first full figurative work.
Stalk
again situates the artist in the outsider position. The physical and
ideological lives of the financial district are seen from the outside. The
cartoon-like figures of Stalk can
only be read as the artist's comment on the absurdity of the maniacal hunt for
gold. The piece also allowed Streicher to find a figurative role for the
inflatable. The carnival figure, the caricature, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day
parade inflatables now became points of reference.
“Where my work
does make reference to popular culture it is, I feel, to such things as freak
shows, carnival and the tradition of the grotesque; expressions of 'low
culture' that assert the body as undetermined, disrupted, leaky and in direct
confrontation to the contained and controlled body represented by the dominant
culture.”[9]
If not of the
exuberant body, Quartet in a Box,
1995 (fig. 17) seems to communicate a body out of control, eliciting strong
feelings of fear and loathing. Four inflatable figures arranged in a circle,
each connected to an air source through the top of the head, pulse and writhe
in response to changing air pressure. It may be their horizontality or the way
they seem to jerk and quiver as they inflate, as if in some kind of seizure,
that inspires such feelings of revulsion and morbidity.
Sextet,
1996 (fig. 18) was an enlargement on the Quartet
in a Box model, but by subtle changes in articulation and the location of
the air source Streicher could achieve an entirely different effect. In Sextet
the figures are inflated through the navel area and they come to life in a way
that is even more dramatic than Quartet
in a Box. The inflation is coordinated so that each figure is in a
different state of inflation or deflation at any one time. This movement takes
place quickly and creates the impression of a certain type of childish play
energy – manic, reckless, dizzying, out of control.[10]
The occasion of
the last Nether Mind exhibition in 1995 was the stimulus for Balancing Act (fig. 18 & 19
opposite), one of the artist's most elegant and eloquent pieces. Balancing Act
consists of two pair of figures suspended from the ceiling and inflated by fans
through rubber tubes in the area of the mouth.[11] As a figure
quickly inflates, its chest fills and its arms thrust forward, its back arches
and legs and feet stiffen to a point. As it deflates, the stiffness slowly
disappears and the legs dangle down and cross over. Streicher likens the effect
to a dance, “as if dancers had an exercise of having to make it appear as if
all of the air were draining from them.”[12]
Indeed, there
is a grace to the awakening and expiring acrobats, yet within that grace there
is also a startling and disturbing truth. When, in the ballet Giselle, the
tragic heroine dies after her dance with the spirit of the woods, she
gracefully succumbs to the stage floor, her death the dance's denouement. The
dancer acts as if dead and the audience plays along, the saddest part being
that she has finished dancing. However, when the acrobat in Balancing Act loses
air, it is the illusion of physical life itself that disappears – vanishes in
front of our eyes – and becomes nothing more than a limp cloth bag. Moreover,
we have become intimate with these figures. As they inflate and we hear the air
rush into the body, we form a strange bond – the kind of feeling we experience
with the breath of the other on our skin. Yet, as Streicher is aware, “the
source of that breath, industrial fans and rather crudely fashioned valve
mechanisms, are reminiscent of respirators or some equally intrusive medical
gadget, and this breath is not life, just its sobering mechanics.”[13]
Perhaps more
than any other piece, Balancing Act
makes us focus on the central role of air and the imitation of breathing in
Streicher's inflatables. We relate to varying patterns of breathing, and the
action of air filling a body can suggest many things and elicit many emotions.
We breathe differently when asleep and awake, when we are nervous, when we are
calm. By adjusting and controlling the rhythm, the sound and the speed of
inflation and deflation, the artist manipulates those perceptions and tells a
story. Air, in the work of Max Streicher, is indeed one of the substances of
feeling.
The dragon
exhibited with Balancing Act in the
last Nether Mind exhibition may have been an afterthought, in part because the
warehouse space for the exhibition was so vast. Streicher calls it a gift to
the show, “a prop, because Nether Mind shows were always more like events or
three-ring circuses.”[14] However, he had
been exploring the idea of scaling up his inflatables probably as early as 1993
when he appropriated the image of the Honest Ed inflatable in this flesh.... The version of Boiler exhibited in the Naked State
exhibition in 1994 was a scaled-up version of the original to twice life-size.
It was also around that time that the idea began for the gigantic Swan Song
(fig. 20), which he designed for the exhibition Once Upon A Time at the
Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge in 1996.[15]
In Swan Song Streicher was seeking “threatening
beauty.”[16] He chose the
swan because as an animal it is commonly known as a symbol of beauty and
elegance, but at the same time feared for its strength and its potential for
violence. Yard upon yard of silky white Tyvek in softly undulating and
pulsating forms created a dreamlike state for the viewer to wade through. As in
a dream, scale is distorted and no contour is solid – everything collapses to
the touch or seems beyond reach.
“My intention
is to overwhelm the gallery space and impose on the viewer a sense of scale
like that which a toddler might experience. I am attempting to recreate a
situation like that of childhood encounters with humongous snow banks or
haystacks; structures that invite a physical exuberance which in turn leads the
imagination . . . In this work I want to physically embrace the viewer within a
tension between pleasure and threat, enchantment and self-reflexive awareness.”[17]
Sleeping
Giants, 1998 (fig. 21, 22 & 23), exhibited at the Cambridge
Galleries, brought together the phenomenology of the physical body first
ventured in Quartet in a Box with the scale of Swan Song. The giants in their
great mass heaved and sighed to the timed intervals of the fans. Lying on their
backs and sides, heads rose from the floor, legs stiffened, chests inflated,
only to relax again, as if in some futile attempt to get out of bed or off the
couch. The giants recalled the body as gross anatomy – of a soul trapped within
spoilable flesh – the dispirited body, incapable of action because of the
sentiment of futility. The giants also recalled the tragic body – the
self-perpetuating machine – needy, voracious, desiring, independent of
consciousness and will.
The inflatable
as art – the balloon, the soap bubble, the inflatable toy – until now, has been
dedicated to children. Max Streicher has taken the inflatable, the prepubescent
symbol of wonder and tragedy and rehabilitated it, or rather, he has given it
an adult life. He has done this not by stripping the inflatable of those
characteristics that appeal to children, but by probing those aspects that are
fundamental to understanding ourselves. We favour children with balloons and
they in turn are fascinated by their lightness, enthralled by their buoyancy,
and devastated when they break. With each balloon, we create a round, pudgy,
brightly coloured life – symbolizing at once our joy in creation and our
awareness of life’s fragility. And therein lies its magic: the inflatable makes
the abstract character of our organic existence visible. We know we were born
from nothing, we feel our breath now, and we know that we will expire.
Gordon Hatt,
1998
Illustrations
at http://maxstreicher.com/
End Notes
[1] College
Street United Church was a designated historical building protected from
demolition by the local architectural conservancy committee. The building was
preserved in part by the incorporation of the bell tower within a new
condominium structure. The redevelopment of the site was planned to include a
church facility that would take up a large part of two lower floors. Revenues
from the condos were to help fund the church.
[2] “They were feelings of
warmth, attentiveness, serenity, and happiness, and I sensed that I had to
banish forever my predisposition to fear and panic.” Peter Handke, “Short
Letter, Long Farewell,” 3 X Handke (New York: Collier Books, MacMillan
Publishing Company, 1988), p. 90.
[3] Other artists exhibiting
with Nether Mind included Tom Dean, Catherine Heard, Greg Hefford, Mickey
McCarty, Mary Catherine Newcomb, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Carl Skelton, Anastasia
Tzekas, Manrico Venere.
[4] A scaled-up version of
Boiler (tallest figure 15.75 ft. high) was created for the exhibition Naked
State: A Selected View of Toronto Art at the Power Plant, Toronto in 1994.
Another version consisting of two figures (tallest figure 10 ft. high) was
shown in the exhibition Outrageous Desire, Rutgers University, New Brunswick,
New Jersey, 1994.
[5] Interview with the
artist, March 20,1998.
[6] Tertullian's Treatise on
the Incarnation, translated by Ernest Evans (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1956), Latin p. 18, English trans. p. 19.
[7] For a 1993 show in the
Czech Republic Streicher made the tongues from kaolin, “which doesn't bind to
together and has a Jell-O-like consistency.” It is a substance used with clay
to make porcelain. The installation site was in a damp chamber in the basement
of an eighteenth-century monastery, adjacent to a pool of water that monitors
the water level necessary for the preservation of the oak foundation of the
monastery. The tongues, made of the locally mined kaolin, remained moist at all
times. Heavy rains slowly eroded the tongues and as this occurred the dissolved
kaolin formed milky trails, leading into the subterranean water system, which
flowed beneath the monastery. Interview with the artist, March 20, 1998.
Another version of Alchemist's Tongue was shown in the exhibition Communion, at
the Johnson County Arts Center, Iowa City, Iowa, 1993.
[8] These installations
included Within / Without, 1994, a collaboration with Lois Andison installed in
the foyer and stairwell of the Jesuit institution, Regis College, Toronto; and
Surrender Gringo, 1994, part of the Mediatrics exhibition sponsored by the
cooperative gallery Cold City in Toronto.
[9] Artist's statement,
November 1997.
[10] Sextet was also part of
an installation and performance with Petr Nikl, Los Kabayitos Puppet Theatre,
New York, 1996.
[11] As shown at the 1995
Nether Mind exhibition, Toronto, Balancing Act originally consisted of a pair
of figures and an inflatable dragon made of reinforced plastic. When the piece
was shown in Prague the next year the artist replaced the dragon with a second
pair of figures. This new version was also exhibited in 1996 at the Loggia
Gallery, Koffler Centre of the Arts, North York, Ontario.
[12] Interview with the
artist, March 20, 1998.
[13] Artist's statement,
1995.
[14] Interview with the
artist, March 20, 1998.
[15] A version of Swan Song
(Lamentation) made from reinforced plastic sheeting was installed in the
ice-cellar, Hermit Foundation, Plasy, Czech Republic. (Now in the permanent
collection.)
[16] Interview with the
artist, March 20, 1998.
[17] Artist's statement,
February 1998. Viewers were invited to step inside Streicher's Pleasure Dome,
1997, exhibited at Pyramida Centre for Contemporary Art, Haifa, Israel.
Streicher wanted to share the sensations of being inside the piece, which he
had experienced while working with the swans.
