 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
 |
||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|
 |
MARCEL COUSINS;
BUILT ENVIRONMENT A somewhat unnerving stillness pervades. No breeze or tremor rustles the foliage of Marcel Cousins' latest body of work. The paintings are absorbed in silence; no whispering in the branches, no flutter amongst the leaves. What should we make of this mute canopy of trees, so inanimate and undisturbed? Cousins utilises a wide variety of techniques and media within his practice- freehand airbrushing, ink-jet printing, conventional painting, printmaking, computer graphics, screen-printing, collage, stenciling, and montage- to create these heavily stylised works. He is uninterested in assuming the role of artist-as-communicator, preferring to explore the parameters of surface, abstraction, and the distortion of visual memory. Cousins distils and filters what he depicts down to interchangeable templates, valid anywhere as a global artistic currency. By excising identifying elements and extraneous forms to make his subjects ubiquitous and commonplace, Cousins' imagery is neither privileged, nor surrounded with the aura of 'specialness' expected from modern art. "More recently my work has made a conscious shift from appropriating images, and dealing with the way images affect other images, to how the images we create have an effect on the way we see, and ultimately interact with, the world around us", he affirms. The artist's hand is deliberately distanced in order to serve a conceptual goal; these trees have been 'pollarded' and displaced from their original forms and geographical context. A decade of travel, work, and study in Japan has left its influence on the deliberate placement of elements, and spatial control of the canvas typical of Cousins' work. Indeed, one can discern the aesthetic rigour and discipline reminiscent of bonsai and ikebana (or kado¯) in his depiction of nature. By refusing to codify what is depicted according to time, location, or purpose, perhaps Cousins is seeking a way in which to bridge the residual gap between traditional and contemporary artistic forms. Cousins presents a vision of the natural world reconfigured by the preoccupations of a digital media age, perennially evergreen and climate- controlled. A limited palette strips the work of any organic variance, rendering the representation paradoxically 'lifeless' and strangely inert. This is a manufactured landscape, as if suspended, or hermetically sealed. Cousins seeks to address the issue that so much of what we view and 'experience' has already been mediated for us, to the extent it is rendered functionally inauthentic. The manner in which we commonly receive visual information is already distanced, it lacks immediacy or originality. "How has the fragmented image- based world we live in changed the way we see what is around us?", Cousins asks. He invites us to construct a narrative for his works, to focus innumerable individual responses upon an image purposefully devoid of that quality. With this artistic 'deforestation', Cousins invites us to contemplate our surroundings free of any directive, and to reconnect with them as more than just a bombardment of disparate images vying for our limited attention span. He harnesses the ability of displaced objects to reveal to us what we no longer notice. Cousins wants us, in fact, to see the wood for the trees.
|
||
|
PARALLEL
LINES In the past, Marcel Cousins’ relentlessly pop-styled reworking of Japanese imagery may have earned him Japanophile status. The Japanophile obsesses (to varying degrees) over the Other’s cultural imagery: manga, anime, bonsai, fashion, advertising, shrines, temples, and so on. The interest, in this case, is reciprocated - like Cousins says: “put a 25 year old, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual male in the middle of Tokyo and suddenly they’re exotic”. Superflat is, or was, a Japanese contemporary art movement. Takashi Murakami, the hugely successful artist and author of the Superflat Manifesto writes: “Society, customs, art, culture: all are extremely two-dimensional. It is particularly apparent in the arts that this sensibility has been flowing steadily beneath the surface of Japanese history… “Super flatness” is an original concept of Japanese [people] who have been completely Westernized.”(1) Drawing on diverse traditions including Japanese courtly painting, manga and Western pop art, Superflat renders these aspects of high and low culture onto a 2D plane. By absorbing and assimilating the Superflat style while working the Westerner who has, in turn, become Japanese. Following this (speculative) shift, Cousins has consciously moved away from the identifiable “Japanese” imagery. His new work is still sourced from pop cultural imagery, but not for any obvious striking graphic qualities or exotic aura. These works are at first glance the distilled, contemporary art versions of signs. For example “tree”, “tram timetable”,the numeral “5”. It’s a kind of ‘Zero degree’(2) art making, where ‘communication’ is no longer its primary function, and instead, a range of ‘surface effects and internal textual relations’(3) are brought forward. The images, rendered in muted greys, blues and fluorescent pinks and greens, hover on glaringly white backgrounds. Cousins’ airbrush technique has achieved a nearly nauseating balance between the perfection of a repetitive mechanized gesture and the inevitable, but slight, home-made blemishes. Beyond the coolly banal world of the sign system, the intensity of this now consummate Superflat series of work is in the detail - in the subtle manipulations and distortions that describe the sometimes-marginal difference between representation and misrepresentation. (1) Murakami, Takashi, Superflat, pg 5 (Tokyo: MADRA, 2000).
|
|||
|
ALIEN
CULTURE The Far East. A mysterious world of strange customs, odd foods, dazzling colours and delightful – and repugnant – smells. A world where the Buddha meets Astro Boy, where geisha girls bow to salary men and samurai, where ultra-violent manga is read on the train on the way to pray at the nearest peaceful Shinto temple. Japan is a world of ancient customs and timeless skills. It is also a world of cybernetic innovation and surreal juxtapositions where politeness and ritual cover the extremes of bondage and pornography. If you are a man, go to a urinal and as soon as you spray the trough an advertisement will automatically pop up on a plexiglass screen at face height. Telephone boxes are plastered with offers of exotic services and Asahi beer and Suntory whisky are available in dispensers at every street corner. Everywhere the neon flashes, giant screens battle for attention while, in a mildly hidden underworld, little girls underpants are traded for substantial prices. It is both surreal and beguiling and Marcel Cousins has been seduced. Cousins, took up took up a scholarship at Tokyo National University of Music and Fine Art in 1999, two years after graduating from Victoria College of the Arts. His specialty was printmaking and naturally he was attracted to the sumptuous approach that traditional Japanese printmaking, especially Moku Hanga (Japanese style wood blocks), is renowned for. Of course he was aware of the Western fascination of contemporary Japanese culture, which had been inflamed by the release of such classic manga as Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 animation Akira and the Asiatic influence so clearly seen in Ridley Scott’s BladeRunner. The impact of Tokyo on the young artist was far more profound than he could ever have expected. In his last Melbourne exhibition, Japan was the overwhelming influence, with hints of pornography, literal and liberal quoting of advertising and garish hints of neon. In his current work he has embraced other Asian iconographic imagery, including Chinese currency. More importantly his utilization of a diverse range of media – including computer print outs, spray paint stencils on canvas and colour photo copies – has resulted in a unique and powerful language. Cousins initial reaction, as a stunned, round-eyed Westerner, has settled into an elegant, albeit confronting, series of works. If you don’t know the language, you may be forgiven for seeing some of these works as complex abstractions. Those familiar with Manga, will also see truncated curves of young women in pornographic poses, hints of hidden narratives. Blues and pinks explode across the canvas and a translation of a sound bubble says “aaaghh!” The works buzz with static as though the canvas is being received over malfunctioning wires direct to the gallery wall. Even when Cousins’ depicts his more voyeuristic images of partially disrobed Asian girls, they are rendered with a knowing humor contrasted with first-hand knowledge of the not-so hidden world of Asian pornography. The demure versus the temptress, the whore and the angel. Experience leads to awareness and to an extent these are socio-political works. Asia, most especially Japan, is a realm of contradictions. When Cousins depicts a Chinese bank note it is hard not to notice that for a regime that has attempted to destroy its Buddhist tradition, it is a Buddhist temple that adorns the national currency. Cousins has come of age in this body of work. It is less pop and more painterly, his meticulous stencil work rising to new heights of skill. While the central theme is clearly apparent – that of his fascination for other cultures – where this show succeeds is more in the artists’ ability to create a highly personal and unique language. Many Western travelers approach a new culture via the protection of a camera lense, rather than embrace the odd, the new and the strange, they tackle ‘experience’ as though it were a television screen. It is fairly obvious that Cousins is not that kind of traveler; he has allowed the new into the pores of his skin, searing lasting images on his retina that are then developed into a new approach to the visual. There is only one thing to do. Pick up an Asahi and be enveloped in an alien culture that in so many strange ways we can be obsessed – and seduced – by.
|
|||
|
AUSTRALIAN
ART COLLECTOR You can rely on the Helen Gory Galerie in Prahan to provide some of the most vibrant and hip young art that's happening in Melbourne now. In early November you can catch one of her many stars, Marcel Cousins, in his third solo show there in as many years. Be prepared for exhilarating imagery. Cousins' work is as arrestingly beautiful as it is intelligent and masterful in technique. His lush, dazzling patterns reflect intricate games with graphic devices, interrupting huge bubble-jet computer prints of Asian currency notes (enlarged thousands of times), for instance, with striking, superflat stencilled landscapes or bodies. Or blowing up low-resolution Japanese soft-porn imagery, which looks derived from thumbnail gifs downloaded off the Web, to the scale of crisply pixellated geometric, modernist abstractions. And it's as difficult to summarise the themes that this prolific and exploratory artist is interested in, as it is to itemise the range of media he enlists. Commerce collides with culture, and historical tradition is flattened out by a process of graphic decoding, as if the icons that identify a culture are "de-naturalised" and translated into the decorative insignia on international travellers' cheques. But this is not just a complaint against globalisation or the trivialising effects of tourism. At the same time, Cousins indicates an exhilarating vision of a future hybrid, borderless and even weightless culture - a kind of internet, fourth world culture - constructed out of these very processes of decomposition. It takes humour rather than moral earnestness to make this vision convincing; and cheeky humour is one of Cousins' many gifts. Last year, the peak Australian graphic design body, AGDA, used one of Cousins' works from his first solo show at Helen Gory as the poster image for their annual conference. A happy nuclear family, as featureless and flat as the décor of their suburban interior, is disembowelled by a huge fragment of a black and white porno Japanese manga image that cuts through them - as effectively as a car bomb exploding outside a tourist hotel. This sort of immediate hit is characteristic of Cousins' jamming of cultural icons; and that hit always resonates. He has a deep and ongoing affiliation with Asian culture, taking out a degree last year at the Tokyo National University of Art, and gathering up a host of awards there as well as in Australia. With work in the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Bank collection, Cousins is making the right moves. Do the same, and get along this show.
|
|||
|
THE
AUSTRALIAN APPETITE FOR ASIAN ART IS SOARING, AND MARCEL COUSINS
IS TAKING THE RIDE. Marcel Cousins has just returned from living in Japan for five years and he’s feeling a bit disorientated. Ironically, adjusting back into a world with friends who speak English and a cultural environment where he’s not treated like a foreigner is hard work. "I’ve been living in my own head for a long period of time,’ he explains. Cousins took up a scholarship at Tokyo National University of Music and fine Art in 1999, two years after graduating from Victoria College of the Arts. Having watched Australian interest grow for both traditional and contemporary Japanese art and popular culture, he wanted to explore Japanese ideas and techniques of art, and chose to focus on the medium of printmaking. His forthcoming show at Helen Gory Galerie is the culmination of nearly three years work created in Japan. He uses kirigami (cut paper stencils) and a dye technique to transfer images, replacing ink with spray paint to create the opaque block colours. He also works with screen prints, facsimile machines, lithography, wood blocks, photocopies, computer printouts and spray paint to represent cultural ideas. "I like the philosophical ideas and communications that come across from the print,’ he say. While clearly influenced by his time in Japan, and indicative of Australians fascination with Asian art, Cousins portrays a variety of images and themes in his work, such as brand icons (both Japanese and western) and the way media and marketing can distort them. He explores the cultural relationship between Japan and the west. "I’m interested in the cultural slide and misinterpretation. The Japanese are masters of it, but we do it here as well." Bringing up his past involvement in street art, graffiti and stencilling, and cousins groans, then explains: "I liked the anonymous element of it- to get away from the hierarchy of the highly educated." He still believes art belongs more than the snooty, chardonnay-quaffing crowd, and that as a visually aware culture we can appreciate it on many levels. "You don’t have to be an artist in order to appreciate or understand something," he offers. Nor does art not have to be deep or contain a message, as the title of his exhibition advocates: If You Want To Be Moved Take The Bus.
|
|||
|
|
LOOKING THROUGH
A LANDSCAPE OF SYNTHETIC MEMORIES Considering these ideas, Cousins latest works extend this dialogue relative with the idea that the interpretation and visualisation of a landscape is now the product of a machine. Reproducing images initially based from photo-media, Cousins re-makes these images through production methods that give his paintings a look and associate to a commercial type process. A process that enables Cousins to control the representation and experience of an environment as exampled through works such as Tree in a Park (2007), showing how an image, derived from photo-media, is not only reproducible as an image but through Cousins detached treatment of the referent becomes non-specific. A factor achieved even though the titles of Cousins works such as “Tree by a river next to a bridge” (2006) and “Tree in the grounds of a well to do family” (2006) actuate a dialogue that is specific to an actual and physical encounter of the referent. Consecutively Cousins sets up a dichotomy between an actual memory
and experience and a rationalised and overtly stylised representation
of memory and experience that we see here as the works presented
in this current show. Cousins develops his subject through a series
of stages that serves to displace the viewer inclusively from the
referent, whilst distancing quite literally Cousins/the artist’s
hand, that in method becomes nothing more than a tool to create
a very reproducible commercial item. Cousins paintings translate
an image as a memory filtered through a computer-orientated representation
that mimics an industrialised production. Memory and experience
in the world that Cousins portrays is as synthetic as the material
he uses to paint them with and allude to outside influence that
structure these artworks from a perspective of simulation.
|
||
|
MARCEL COUSINS;
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE There is a long history of Western artists being influenced by Asia. But despite Australia’s proximity to Asia, and aside from such obvious practitioners as Brett Whiteley and Ian Fairweather, that influence is a comparative rarity over the history of Modernism in this country. Recently, though, things have changed. The masterful work of Sydney-based Chinese-born Guan Wei is currently holding pride of place at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Another Chinese-born artist from Sydney, Lindy Lee, has just finished a show at Sutton Gallery in Fitzroy that explored a recent journey to Beijing.Sutton has followed Lee’s show with the work of Kate Benyon, which depicts the exploits of her fictional Asiatic hero, Li Ji. At Christine Abrahams Gallery in Richmond, Catharine Woo is currently showing complex abstractions that can also be read as reflecting her Chinese heritage. Meanwhile, The Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square is exhibiting Living Together is Easy, a group show of 12 artists from Australia and Japan. The helengory galerie in Prahran has also recently shown Japanese artists along side Australians and has followed that show with the work of Marcel Cousins. To say that Cousins has become enamoured with Asia as a subject matter would be an understatement. Hailing from Melbourne, he has been living, off and on, in Japan since 1997, where he studied print-making under master printmaker Masao Ikeda. Following that, in 1999, he received a scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education. The rewards and grants from Japan have continued to roll in since. Cousins’ earlier work was somewhat tongue-in-cheek and fairly overt in its imagery. The titles of his earlier shows reveal a kind of self-mockery, as though the young artist wasn’t sure just how far to push his themes. “Careful, I know judo and four other Japanese words” was the title of his 1999 show in Melbourne. But Cousins’ current show reveals how far he has outgrown his initial, somewhat clumsy, admiration for an alien culture. Those who don’t know the language could be forgiven for seeing some of these works as complex abstractions. Those familiar with Manga the violent Japanese comics so popularin Japan will also see the truncated curves of young women in pornographic poses and hints of violent narratives. Blues and pinks explode across the canvas and a translation of a sound bubble cries out “aaargh!” The works buzz with static as though the images on canvas are being received via malfunctioning wires. Whether it be Cousins’ own juxtapositions or those he finds around him, there is something “off” about his subjects. When he depicts a Chinese bank note, for instance, it is hard not to note that a regime that has attempted to eradicate the Buddhist tradition has chosen a Buddhist temple to adorn its national currency. Cousins uses a diverse array of media to achieve an almost jittery restlessness in his work. There are liberal references to pornography, advertising and comics, all filtered through computer print-outs, spray-paint stencils on canvas, and colour photocopies, and all melding to reflect a culture that is both new and old, familiar and alien.
|
|||
|
AUSTRALIAN
ART COLLECTOR After five years in Japan, Melbourne native Marcel Cousins is ready to come home. “There’s a limit to the amount of time I think you can spend in Japan,” he says, speaking from his room at Tokyo University. “I need to come home, to be able to reflect on the experience I’ve had here.” Cousins has just graduated form the prestigious Tokyo University with a Masters degree in Printmaking. With a grant form the Japanese Ministry of Education, Cousins was able to spend two years working as a post-graduate student studying printmaking. His approach to the discipline isn’t traditional, combining painting, drawing, and computer technologies as well as more mainstream approaches such as screen-printing and wood blocks into work that is a free-ranging interpretation of print techniques. “The University didn’t know where to put me,” says Cousins. “They ended up putting me in the lithography (studios) but I never used the facilities. The whole set up at the University was fairly free and I could do pretty much what ever I wanted.” How did the course affect him? “The experience of working in Japan was relevant to me as an Australian, because it made me reflect on what it means to be Australian, to reflect on my thought processes and how it changes you. In 2001, Cousins exhibited a series of works at helengory galerie that displayed the long-standing fascination the artist has with Japanese art and culture. The works were a study of Eromanga, the erotic and often violent Japanese comic books. Cousins’s interpretation was a multi-layered and abstract take on the hyper-kinetic lines of these apparently “still” images. For his May 2002 show at helengory galerie, Cousins has taken a different approach. With approximately 25 works covering five series he has produced over the last three years, the latest series of works study the ukiyo-e style of Japanese printmaking. These prints stylised portraits of Geisha and landscapes – are well known in the West because they typify traditional Japanese aesthetics, being finely balanced in both composition and execution. For these new works Cousins has played with the scale and context, creating oddly disturbing pieces that alter a viewer’s perception of what is being represented while creating subtle distinctions with various printmaking techniques. It’s a mixture of traditional and contemporary aesthetics that sits well with Cousins’s inspiration.
|
|||
|
AGDA The varied works on paper of Marcel Cousins utilise a diverse range of media and techniques: screen printing, lithography, wood blocks, computer prints, spray paint, stencil, canvas collage, paint and photocopies. He is highly competent approach to his work acknowledges the historical and conventional relevance of printmaking whilst extending it into new realms and techniques. Thematically his works both in Australia and Japan are characterised by an accumulated diversity of trans-cultural images and sophisticated sense of colour and visual composition. Conceptually he is motivated by the potential presented by reproductions and multiples and by the maze of associations offered up by contemporary urban life’.
|
|||
|
BREAST
IMPLANT Like a vinyl record that reveals a subversive message
when played backwards, Marcel Cousins’ prints of domestic
bliss are underlaid with an erotic manga scene. For the artists,
it reflects the tension in Japanese society between the formality
of public life and it’s simmering undercurrents.
|
|||
|
MONUMENT Cousins can be rightly considered as one the original "graffiti’ artist. In stark contrast to the anonymous "taggers", Cousins would paste his politically motivated op/pop posters on obscure walls of the Melbourne CBD. Currently completing a degree at Tokyo National University, where he has been residing for some five years, Cousins is an exciting and confronting talent. With the National Gallery having already purchased four pieces for Cousins’ previous solo show in 1999, this is an exhibition not to be missed.
|
|||
|
MCV Marcel Cousins’ current exhibition was produced for his Masters degree, which he studied in Japan using traditional, and modern printmaking techniques; except here he is the "mass" rather than the "master" printmaker. Cousins observes that mass reproduced images are as popular in Tokyo as Euro-"kitsch" is here, and in his thesis he uses both the newest digital print methods and the oldest Japanese stencil techniques, replacing traditional dyes with spray paint and slipping the odd bit of wallpaper to novel effect. Although inspired by mass-produced art, all the images are unique. Some are laboriously assembled in fragmented grids, others are stencilled but individually and subtly finished like the Frames and Screen or the Indoor plant, Out door Plant duos. As an "outsider" observing, he pastiches traditional wood images, travel brochure photographs or subversively combines them with the underground "Ero Manga" adult comics to reflect the jumble of real, unreal, traditional and contemporary associations in any modern society.
|
|||
| © 2007 Marcel Cousins | site by kat mew |