Pissing Against the Moon
20 November – 31 December 2021
One of the panels of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Twelve Flemish Proverbs (c. 1560) depicts a male figure, seen from behind, issuing an arcing stream of urine toward a crescent moon on a reddish-orange ground. A motto, in Flemish, beneath the image translates as, ‘Whatever I do, I do not repent. I just keep pissing against the moon’. Somewhat akin to the more contemporary ‘pissing up a rope’, the connotation of this proverb for Bruegel’s 16th-century contemporaries would have have been something like: to waste one’s time with something pointless or futile; to continually occupy oneself with an activity that is unlikely to yield success. This is a situation that may have some resonance for many artists who keep on keeping on despite the very real difficulty of surviving day to day, let alone making a living from their work or building a successful career.
The related English language expression ‘pissing in(to) the wind’ shares something of the sense of futility indicated by Bruegel’s proverb (with the additional implication of collateral damage for oneself). But there is a sense in the earlier Flemish phrase that the English one fails to convey. Bruegel’s figures, presumably the worse for drink, convince themselves of the attainability of an objective that remains out of reach. In variations he painted on the same theme, they piss vainly against representations of the moon on a tavern sign, or its reflected image in the village pond.
In the decades since the Apollo 11 landing, the moon no longer feels quite as remote. Camila Cañeque’s The Sun On the Ground brings the solar object similarly within reach. Bruegel’s tavern window pisseur relieves himself against a painted depiction of the moon. Unconcerned with the niceties of representation, however, Cañeque performs an act of transubstantiation. Her sun is materially present, a puddle of yellow spreading out to find its own shape on the uneven tiling of the gallery floor. Sun, or puddle of piss? Cañeque has talked about her practice as a form of research into states of inactivity, tiredness and isolation. Whether as symptom or act of resistance, her sun remains grounded, unable or unwilling to prescribe its daily trajectory across the sky.
Discovering that it was possible to use supermarket self-checkout machines to buy nothing, systems interference artist, Micheál O’Connell, aka Mocksim, repeated this profitless transaction hundreds of times over a period of two years. The receipts were compiled in two books, Less and More Less. Mocksim presents a selection of these receipts, some now fading gradually to white, in Pissing Against the Moon. Although they may be judged of scant aesthetic value, they cannot be reduced to mere documentation as they are inseperable from the performative action that generated them. The receipts thus raise difficult questions about the ontological status of the work (where does the ‘art’ reside?) as well as the motivations of the artist (what would possess someone to buy nothing more than 200 times?).
As they endeavour to find their way as artists in the face of low paid and insecure jobs, high rents, the burden of student debt, and lack of access to affordable studios and exhibition space, the younger generation of recent art graduates will, no doubt, feel acutely aware of pissing against the moon. Courtney Snow does not make work about this situation of precarity. Rather, her practice emerges from and is shaped by it. Snow’s work demonstrates an expressionistic, visceral drive, incorporating graphic, graffiti-like elements, and employs as supports cheaply obtained or recycled materials (Poundland tablecloths, supermarket mushroom bags, employee’s time sheets…). Working for a month in borrowed studio space adjacent to DODO, Snow has developed a small body of work from which she presents the triptych of monoprints, Sad Sack Heart of the Lovely Woman.
In the present day, most metaphors related to pissing carry negative associations of dereliction or dissolution – the drunkard pissing his life away, for instance. In Bruegel’s time, representations of urinating figures could also connect to more festive notions of plenitude, renewal and the cycle of life. Wayne Lucas draws on this tradition in his ‘Queer Gardens and Wet Places’ series. The artist is fascinated by the behaviours that happen in the private space of the studio; the series began with a drawing of a figure (the artist) in his workspace ‘watering’ a pot plant by urinating into it. The studio comes to be understood as delicately poised ecosystem. At DODO, Lucas is showing a new embroidered work developing his ‘self-pollination’ motif, in which two male figures are connected by a pretzel-shaped body part, each seeming to generate the other.
When the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi died in 1957, he bequeathed his studio and its contents to the French state on condition that it was preserved complete. Today, a reconstruction of the studio exists as an annexe to the Centre Georges Pompidou. Since visiting this museum some years ago, the figure of Brancusi has haunted Daniella Norton‘s practice, reappearing periodically in her paintings. Habitually, we think of Brancusi as an artist driven to continually refine his work in pursuit of its purest expression. Norton allows herself to wonder, however, what other activities might have occupied the modernist master in his atelier. The paintings in her series ‘Brancusi in his Studio’ show him sleeping, reclining, embracing his dog (the Samoyed, Polaire), or satisfying bodily needs. ‘Create like a god; command like a king; work like a slave’, Brancusi implored. ‘Piss like a racehorse’, Norton wants to add.
Like Norton, Jon Carritt and Dan Palmer are interested in how the studio can become a site of display. One of the first works the pair made after moving into a new space, their short, looped video, Gust of Wind, explores the line between the constructed and the accidental, the performed and the unconscious action. In a space composed to suggest a studio or workshop, a piece of paper caught up on a sudden gust of wind repeatedly evades the grasp of a figure, clad in coveralls, who would retrieve it from the grey painted floor. In one sense, a simple sight-gag deriving from the perfectly-timed but unexpected event, the video might also be taken as ironically alluding to the breath of inspiration (or divine afflatus) that is said to stimulate the creative act. Gust of Wind provides a whimsical rumination on the things that continually elude us as creative beings.
Gallery DODO 