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| Lady with Green Stripe, 1905 Sanné Mestrom, 2013 marble, steel, timber, found objects |
The Internal
Logic: Schindler Sanné creates new habitat for endangered moderns.
Sanné Mestrom creates art’s equivalent of an ecosystem
and each individual work is comprised of numerous competing parts that jostle
with each other for the opportunity to grab just enough air and nutrients to
cling to life. She champions Art’s endangered species.
The fundamentals
of art that have been abused, mutilated, tortured and wrongly imprisoned flock
to Mestrom like refugees to our shore. These, she mothers back to life with all
the care and consideration they dearly deserve. Like anthropologists and the
inquisition, she can only ever interpret through the ears and eyes of her own
time and culture.
At the core of Sanné Mestrom’s work is an understanding
that modernism was not a simple reductive progression from spotty realism
(Impressionism) towards an ultimate final bland abstract statement. She seems
to appreciate that there were, in fact, two equally viable modernist
approaches. One typified by Picasso, Matisse and Morandi, (all referred to in
this exhibition) who chose “traditional” subjects including the still life,
portrait and standing figure. Each artist then interpreted their subjects
according to their own modernist bias; we could describe this approach as a
newness or modernism of content. As an aside I do have to admit that one of the
only artworks to ever give me goose bumps was a small painting of a bowl of
apples by Courbet at the National Gallery in London. It still puzzles me, there
is nothing original about the subject, there is no apparent narrative, it makes
no great leap forward in re-evaluating what can or cannot be art, but all the
same, the more I look at this humble little effort the more I can see that here
was an artist writing the history of his time on the day that it occurred.
Maybe Courbet just gave us the living Courbet on that day and the magic in his
bowl of apples is that through them, we can comprehend immortality.
Devotees of the other path saw the primary role of a
modern artist as being an inventor of new looking art forms, avoiding anything
that had been seen before and purging art of any traces of its past. It was a
comprehendible process that appeared logical, objective and was easily
arguable. It completely suited the Americans in their vigorous push to create a
national world ranking artistic presence after World War 2.
The only American works referred to by Mestrom in
Internal Logic are Black Painting 1959
and Black Painting 1963 by Frank
Stella and for them she reserves her harshest and most disrespectful criticism.
Stella was an extremely articulate artist who, in the remarkable Emile de
Antonio 1972 documentary, Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene
1940-1970, stated that Jackson Pollack took on Picasso (implying that
Pollock knocked Pablo clean out of the ring) and all that Frank and the newer
American artists had to do was take on Jackson. An unambiguous statement about
a competitive art made up of domino like components that would fall one after
the other.
Mestrom’s version of Black
Painting 1959 shows she completely understands Stella’s criteria but
criticises them by taking them forward on their own terms. Spitefully witty,
the cold hard edge of Stella has become a hand woven object made with undyed
wool, an example of traditional craft and popular retro décor: the ubiquitous
Scandinavian Rya rug.
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| Black Painting 1959 Sanné Mestrom, 2013, unspun, undyed woolen tapestry |
By singling Stella out as a major contributor to
modernism’s dead-end proposal driven demise, Mestrom seems to be siding with
the idea that art is just one of the ways that human beings make personal sense
of the world they find themselves in.
The process that took Sanné Mestrom to this point is
most instructive, trained as a painter she avoided all the strange values that
are often espoused in Sculpture departments. These include weird ideas like;
stone is an old fashioned material that is totally unsuitable for contemporary
use, or any art made before Minimalism is not worth looking at and worst of
all, the totally illogical, craft should be avoided. Even the history of
contemporary or modernist sculpture that is most regularly taught bears little
resemblance to truth. In many ways the absence of a formal sculptural education
has given Mestrom carte blanche to do whatever she likes and it is this
portrayal of personal freedom, liberation and inventiveness that greets us in
this exhibition.
I suspect Mestrom is one of those artists who genuinely
needs to make things with her own hands and knows the value of manipulating
material because it continually offers up alternatives and even brand new
ideas.
Choosing well known paintings as motivators for
sculptural invention can be fraught with danger for the unsuspecting artist as
it gives reviewers (and viewers) the opportunity to self-aggrandise through
their knowledge of art history - which in reality means that the artist
provides people with a reason not to look at the work on hand. Mestrom
negotiates this deftly because in the cases of works pinched from Picasso and
Matisse her versions are so far removed from the originals that they stay
intact in our memories.
This is true of the largest work in the exhibition, titled,
Weeping Woman (Picasso) gushing water from a bronze eye; it splashes
tears wherever it is placed, to me owes a lot more to an Alexander Calder
“stabile” than Picasso. It also shows the advantage of not having a normal
sculptor’s education. Most sculptors who had conceived a huge aluminium work
like this would automatically opt for a homogenising surface treatment, like
the vastly overdone David Smith style swirly, light catching, angle sander
stereotype. Mestrom makes no such mistakes and simply lets us see the truth of
its manufacture, finger prints, rivets and all. This is most refreshing as it
gives new meaning to Henry Moore’s, “Truth to materials” quote. Lurking in my
mind is a thought that this work is, in fact, a slightly, “woe is me”, sobbing
Sanné self-portrait walking in its courtyard with exactly the same gait as the
artist herself.
The direct, honest Truth to Materials and processes
approach is the glue that holds this exhibition together. It is there with
everything that Mestrom does, from the fabulously sensitive and thoroughly
beautiful clay constructions, based on equally calm Morandi’s, to the mother
and daughter Stella weavings and on to her seductive use of finely crafted
marble (Matisse’s Lady with green
stripe), a la Arp or Brancusi.
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| Still life with nine objects 1954 Sanné Mestrom, 2013 ceramic, steel. |
We are always surprised by the twists and turns that art
makes, we can rarely predict what is going to capture our attention next but
one of things that is almost guaranteed, is that the last thing you’d ever
expect to see is exactly what we get. Many or even most of the current crop of
sculptural fashions are simple presentations of things masquerading as art,
like the pre-occupation with taxidermy and hyper-real waxwork models.
Mestrom on the other hand seems to have found art’s
great op-shop, a great barn of a place, stacked to the roof with long forgotten
ideas, refugees from the time when American art and artists, to validate their
own achievements, brutally bludgeoned everything and anything that smelled even
remotely of European culture. These poor strays of accumulated wisdom speak
languages that we often do not wish to understand. Things get lost or altered
in translation. The generation gap is so great, that all Mestrom can do, is
care for these great grandparents using the values of her own time.
These encounters with The Masters of High Modernism have
certainly payed dividends for Sanné Mestrom. Fossicking she finds an exciting,
bargain price, Picasso top, she wears it for a day and wonders if she could
make her own. Whilst making the pattern
for it she notices that she’s made something like a Calder as well (most
important: nothing is more exciting than two for the price of one deals), and
on it goes, discovery after discovery.
There is one extraordinary thing about this exhibition
that I have never seen in my life before. Over the course of little more than a
year Mestrom has invented four totally different and original bodies of work,
each enough in themselves to sustain most artists for a lifelong career. There
are the delightfully irreverent marble heads, capable of working on just about
any scale. Similarly there is the clay still life works and the natural fibre
wall hanging/rugs, all perfect and extendable. The set of small slot-together
bronze Picasso/Calders set up on a low table top are possibly a light hearted
dig at Caro’s table sculptures but their implications are profound. To get a
closer look at them I got down to their level and discovered that the table had
become a plaza inhabited by very engaging monumental public sculptures. They
were probably little cardboard studies for the “Weeping Woman”.
The fundamentals of art that have been abused,
mutilated, tortured and wrongly imprisoned flock to Mestrom like refugees to
our shore. These, she mothers back to life with all the care and consideration
they dearly deserve. Like anthropologists and the inquisition, she can only
ever interpret through the ears and eyes of her own time and culture.
Clive Murray-White
2013
A review by Clive
Murray-White of The Internal Logic, an exhibition by Sanné
Mestrom at the Latrobe Regional
Gallery running from 19 October 2013 – 2 February 2014
