|
|
|
Cloaked in a sea of fog, a parade of perfectly-stylised youths reveal themselves across the façade of a building. Inhabiting the upper quarters of this city dwelling like apparitions, they stare blankly into the night; their gaze remote and unresponsive. Tempting scrutiny, they expose little character and no emotion. Larger than life, the members of this line-up remain expressionless. Each one is utterly alone; they fail to interact and fail to communicate. A soft hum gently penetrates the night sky as they each croon a single, unique sustained note; impassive cries that coalesce into an hypnotic drone-like choir. Their song is incongruous with their appearance, and their passive disposition uncharacteristic.
Image is paramount for these poker-faced juveniles. Heavily-sculpted, velvety hair ripples in dense air, framing immaculately made-up faces and coordinated pouts that ooze with disaffected cool. Defined by their style, maintaining a specific look is critical.
Travelling in a steady motion like commodities on a conveyor belt, each randomly progresses to the fore. Here in the spotlight, under our intensified scrutiny, their distinct sound becomes more prominent. In a fleeting moment—like a premonition—time speeds up and a temporal metamorphosis occurs. Catapulted into the future, the adolescent’s features transform, unveiling a vision of time’s accelerated passage. Then, in a breath, youth is magically restored. In this moment, the formerly latent visual markers of character visibly emerge across the individual’s portrait, revealing the signs of a life lived and providing deeper insight into their personality and history.
Philip Brophy’s 10 Transforming Youths has echoes of Oscar Wilde’s celebrated novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. In this cautionary tale, Lord Henry impresses upon the protagonist the virtues of youth: “…youth is the one thing worth having…But what the gods give they quickly take away…When your youth goes your beauty will go with it…The world belongs to you for a season…There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!” After hearing this, Dorian Gray makes a pact: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! …I would give my soul for that!” Dorian Gray’s wish is granted; though he remains youthful, his portrait, locked away—in contrast to Brophy’s public installation—bears the marks of time and the ravages of a corrupt existence made manifest.
Written by Wilde in the late 1800s, Lord Henry’ s counsel is enduringly redolent of contemporary advertising and marketing. Similarly commandeering the benefits of youth, are brands that offer products and services promising to hold the secrets of eternal youth. Youth, beauty and vitality become merely synthesised, exploitable commodities with a defined use-by date. Furthermore, the young are identified by these marketing companies as an homogenised target demographic and a lucrative consumer market on which to capitalise.
Brophy presents composited images of youth sourced from marketing sites targeting the millennial generation. His flattened, hard-edged graphic pop style functions on various levels; his aesthetic is contemporary, familiar and accessible, though his characters’ paranormal powers to seamlessly transmogrify also invoke the transformative capacities of classic characters in popular nineteenth-century gothic literature or traditional fairytales. Phantasmagorical and untouchable—¬¬at the Signal site these adolescents, who transcend their usual relegation to advertising fodder, eclipse reality. Cast in an array of muted tones and submerged in luminous vapour, they slip in and out of a portal into the future. They are not here to sell something or to promise anything, billed out of context in this media-scape there is no instruction from these paranormal beings. Instead they seem to encourage independent thought, their precipitated aging seems to reiterate what we all have in common, rather than accentuating generational difference and division. Age is depicted as a continuum, part of a breadth of experience. Dissolving generational barriers, viewers of all ages are compelled to consider the inevitability of aging and its impact on identity and to reflect on their past, or imagine themselves in the future.
Contradicting a common dictum, in a 1998 essay, Brophy declared: “Youth is never wasted on the young. The minute you know what youth means is the minute you grow old. And the more you talk about it, the older you grow.” Twelve years later, this quote might be aptly applied to his two-dimensional graphic animation10 Transforming Youths, which resists the temptation to categorise, disconnect and judge the young, or the old.
Kara Rees, Melbourne International Arts Festival - Visual Arts Catalogue, Melbourne, 2009
The public spaces of cities all over the world are once again up for discussion. There has been a recent swell of activity among geographers and urban planners – alongside the usual suspects who are architects, artists and cultural commentators – about rights to the city. The right of every one of its inhabitants (well-heeled or homeless, long-settled or newly refugeed) to feel that they belong to the city, that the city is theirs. That they have a right to be there, and a right to enjoy being there.
One of the most recent formulations to emerge from this renewed discussion is the notion of the city as a sensuous semiosphere. What this means is very simple: that public space is not only the place where, ideally we can ‘make our meanings’ and leave our mark (thus the ‘semiotic sphere’ part), but also the place where we are able to make a noise, spread a smell, project an image (hence it is a ‘sensuous sphere’, a space where the human senses give and receive signals). Sociologists are using the concept as a way to dissect the thorny issues of bordering and overlapping public spaces cohabited by different cultural and ethnic groups (as all such spaces today inevitably are): for example, which sounds of religious worship (bells, chants, prayers) are to be deemed acceptable to all – and at what precise volume?
Philip Brophy is not a legislator of public space; he is not looking to establish a code of good and safe conduct for all. But, like many artists, he gets in there and intervenes whenever, wherever and however he can – working the cracks between the commissions of public art and the outlaw, ephemeral acts of graffiti. Ten Transforming Youths offers up a certain kind of animated billboard – an advertisement that advertises or sells nothing but itself. What do we see and hear in it? An audiovisual parade of young faces, arranged in a smooth, neat, uniform line. An indistinct hum as the aural bed of these images. Then, interfering with the parade and emerging out of it, an event that is cyclical and logical (we learn how to track its patterns and changes if we pay close attention) but also always a bit surprising, even off-putting: these same faces one by one, emerging closer to us as if in some ghostly apparition. The parts of the face move: mouths open, eyes close, and a rapid process of ageing occurs and then reverses itself. And each of these ‘characters’ produces a pure swell of sound, ethereal, choir-like. It could have been a horror show – of the kind that has often marked Brophy’s art – but, in fact, it becomes a kind of serene meditation. All this youth-on-display gets gently wasted, over and over.
For this eternal kid (now aged 50) who is Philip Brophy, youth is a both a mass media sign that needs to taken apart (often, as its corporate-commodified form changes with startling rapidity across all the platforms of modern urban culture) and a lived experience: an experience that is fluid, reversible, open to imaginary enhancements and investments. In the sensuous semiosphere that is the inner city of Melbourne, Brophy offers the multi-screen experience of Ten Transforming Youths as a strange, beguiling site that one might pass while walking, jogging or riding on a Flinders St train, bus or tram; he expects not so much that biologically young people will identify with it, but that anyone, of any age, might join in the artist’s reflection on the process of ageing, and experience that process as a poetic form of movement and change. As so often in his work, Brophy begins with the stereotype – the perfectly airbrushed, selected and exchanged ‘composite’ youths, faces drawn out of various insidious databanks – and takes it to a richer, more phantasmatic space of open, sensual possibilities.
Actually, now that I come to think of it, Brophy’s artistic output over many media, and over three decades, also could be said to constitute a sensuous semiosphere. We must not forget – he certainly never has – his grounding in semiotic analysis of the ‘decoding advertisements’ variety; indeed, some of his earliest Super 8 films are devoted to the analytic dissection (in images, sounds and montage) of billboards and TV commercials. This has been a constant thread in his work, taking many inventive forms of analysis-in-action. Across time, another major preoccupation emerged: the human body, its drives and energies, and in particular its uncanny ability to adapt, change, mutate, transform. This, too, has found multiple expression across the media at his disposal: his films Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat (1987) and Body Melt (1993), for instance, as well as digital installation works such as The Body Malleable and Vox.
Body, face, voice: the relations between these corporeal elements has forever been shifting in Brophy’s art, as well as in his critical, analytical and theoretical writings. Ten Transforming Youths is a new variation: is it a character that produces a sound, or a sound that produces a character? Which one resonates or vibrates within the other, exactly? Which is the vessel, which is the output? All this is especially tricky to pin down since the choral sounds in the work also seem to trigger (or at least accompany) the start-stop process of ageing. But not always. Some of these songbirds seem quite calm, placid, angelic. Sometimes eyes are closed, at other times they are open. There is less a sense of public performance – youth on parade, Australia’s Got Talent – than withdrawal, introspection, sanctuary. Perhaps exactly the kind of feeling that Brophy hopes to inspire in each passing viewer.
Popular culture has its Jekyll and Hyde fixations, and the post-punk artistic scene with which Brophy has long been associated has revelled in the ironic picturing of decay: dead celebrities (Cronenberg’s Crash), extreme cosmetic surgeries (Michael Jackson), Marlene Dietrich or Mae West-like divas propped up artificially in the twilight years of their Sunset Boulevard-style performance careers. The agonised message is always the same: youth is a fleeting illusion, old age is a crushing reality. But Ten Transforming Youths carries a sweeter tone; it tempts you to go with your own flow.
"Teenage Wasteland" - Adrian Martin, 10 Transforming Youths Catalogue, City of Melbourne, 2010
Perhaps the most memorable scene in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) is when American protagonist Indiana Jones and his entourage undertake a final dash against evil Nazi affiliates to uncover the site of the Holy Grail, that promises eternal life (or a permanent cessation of aging) to those who drink from it. The villains narrowly beat Jones into a chamber that houses the Holy Grail among many other imposter grails, and are able to choose first to find the authentic cup amongst these. A life-lustful Nazi affiliate Donovan drinks from a grail that was chosen incorrectly for him by his peer Elsa, and in a moment that appears intensely grotesque, he lets out a harsh wail as his body ages rapidly, becoming almost instantly a rotten corpse, and next a heap of dust and bones. Here aging is shown exclusively as the removal of life. The decomposition of Donovan's body is macabre and his scream marks the desperation of a soul having its vessel taken away and being left with a complete endpoint. This film shows clearly the binary of Hollywood doubling: good versus bad, desire and lust for life versus the inevitability of death. In this scene, as in countless other moments in popular entertainment, the good are rewarded with life and the bad are punished with death, but here life is marked literally by the preservation of the body, and death by its decomposition, or aging. Once his scream (of life) ceases to be heard, there is no hope in the unknown of Donovan's evaporation. With their immediate ties to the ultimate good/bad binary of life and death, we note the semantic leverage that the youthful body and voice hold, and as this text will address, can evoke in advertising and billboard culture.
Philip Brophy's 10 Transforming Youths toys with the fact that in the most obvious sense, the screens at Signal's site have explicit connotations towards billboard advertising. Their highly public, elevated position on a busy walkway and commuter hub, one that holds high visibility to a broad demographic daily, is unquestionably similar to those billboards, and now increasingly screens, that have throughout our lives been inevitable in our (un)consciousness of public space. The semantic power of youth noted earlier is ripe across public advertising near to Signal in the city of Melbourne, not simply adopted in fashion and beauty company ads but across everything from breath mints to public transport branding. These advertisements operate with what Brophy calls “the media mirror”; we as viewers come face-to-face with a representation of a human, and must negotiate our relationship to it. We stare into a psychological mirror where we don't see ourselves, but where we project ourselves, only to have to stop and consider the differences between the projection and the projector. If it is a classic depiction of youth that we are confronted with, it is more than likely not going to align with our realities, and hence we can be convinced that we are able to change elements of ourselves and move closer to this 'Holy Grail' by using skin products, chewing a breath mint or riding the train. Needless to say there are subversions of this in advertising; take for example the ads for the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival that depicted emo youths discussing a film. This was not what I have called a 'classic' depiction of youth in any sense; in this case, albeit in somewhat of a light-hearted jab, a play on demographic-targeting in advertising was humorously presented, working hand-in-hand with the festival's slogan of Everyone's a critic. In many ways this base marketing strategy is so widely discussed in popular discourse that perhaps in most cases even those being drawn into the appeal of a 'media mirror' are aware of its formal devices, even so if this is the case it is furthermore testament to the strategy's effectiveness. It is these formal devices that I believe are the essential focus of Brophy's critique in 10 Transforming Youths.
Philip Brophy employs technology to subvert the media mirror. His scrupulous attention to the artifice of his animation has an essential relation to its relevance regarding the subject matter of its critique. As opposed to the standard 25 frames per second used in animation, Brophy's makes use of 100, allowing for a complete smoothness in his characters' movements and elimination of any effects that would reveal the film's devices as an illusion; however at the same time, these animated characters have a caricatured flatness and their animated movements are intentionally unnatural. Hence any realism in Brophy's animation is betrayed by the plasticity of the animated characters, and rather than creating what could be pigeon-holed as the 'hyperreality' of a 'simulation' (as an airbrushed model in an advertisement may be), Brophy's 10 Transforming Youths is instead a representation of a construct, not of reality. It is a formal play on popular media languages.
More on the note of language: the voices of the characters seem to have none at all. They make a multi-tonal drone with their vocal chords (or those of their real-life actors'), and as Brophy states, "the idea here was to literally say nothing: the youths all make sounds with their mouths, but nothing is decipherable or comprehensible". This is the physically immersive component to a billboard that sells nothing. Consider the characters' indecipherable hums in relation to the wail of Donovan in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade: the sound is broken down to merely a sign of life.
There is a familiarity to the popular formal devices that we see in 10 Transforming Youths, but their language (and hence their message) is completely skewed. These are common semantics with the syntax confused, or pop devices imploding in on themselves. Philip Brophy's 10 Transforming Youths is a plasticised regurgitation of familiar signs, one that makes use of technological scrupulousness to toy with and subvert our identification with body, voice, and youth as life in contemporary media.
"Love The Skin You're In" - Jared Davis, 10 Transforming Youths Catalogue, City of Melbourne, 2010
Complete contents of this page © Philip Brophy