 The
Asialink Rimbun Dahan Residency Exhibition
Kuang
Malaysia
28th August to 27 September 1998
In
the six months Tasmanian sculptor Mathew Calvert has resided at Rimbun
Dahan, his glass monoliths have attracted the attention of his fellow
artists and visitor alike. Within the Balinese Hindu-inspired water
temple surroundings of Rimbun Dahan's guest-house studio, these pieces
are quasi-architectural forms which reflect the on-going modernist desire
for pure clean forms, that comment upon eclectic post-modernity and the
trace of Asian ideals inherent in their setting.
Each
sculpture is composed of up to a thousand pieces of broken plate glass
formerly used as building material which Calvert salvaged from a nearby
kampung dump (below). These pieces tell the story of their own salvation
from the melancholy fate of rejected industrial materials. Each
piece extends our perceptions of how these materials can be used and viewed,
as objects with intelligence and meanings they would not have enjoyed
had they fulfilled their original utilitarian purpose as glass for high
rise.
 Each
piece attests to the artist's ritual of collection, cleaning and sorting
the colour and thickness of each single shard before its actual placement.
Such a process requires the will to discipline the chaos of the dump,
to arrest the process of decay, to rescue perfectly usable material from
industry's unthinking wastage. Each piece yearns to be something spiritually
complete, an ideal which an industrialising landscape struggles to realise.
From
the detritus of a boom gone bust Calvert has transformed the ugliness
of broken 10 millimetre plate glass into things conventionally beautiful
on the outside, but haunting and threatening inside, a solid oblong and
two "sarcophagi'. Each piece seems to mourn at the unmarked
grave of an industrial disaster. Over the largest piece hangs a
billboard sized back lit photograph of a landmark familiar to the KL commuter,
a large abandoned skeleton of what could have been just another condominium.
Its bare stairwells and lack of cladding reveal the emptiness of real-estate
denuded of its "face", its loss of status as well as the evidence
of KL's suddenly arrested modernisation. Through its empty floors
one can view bare laterite hills and the transient outlands of the shabby
city fringe. The building has colonised what was once a useful,
perhaps picturesque space with its own semi-rural complexities of people,
space, work and environment.
 This
juxtaposition of image and glass pike is a reflexive gesture and a reanalysis
of the urban environment, as well as a poignant commentary on the history
of all overreaching development. A wan fluorescence lights this
edifice t failed vision, each piece emanating the same milky-white pallor
of transience, decay, vacancy. Twentieth century modernity seemed
to promise a simple mode of being, but is this an empty promise
after all, a conceptual dead end?
The
material to a certain extent has dictated Calvert's choice of form, and
every shard has been placed carefully to achieve a layer-cake of fractured
light and resonance. Through judicious placement of each shard,
Calvert has captured both the beauty and the ugliness of glass, which
lies in its unpredictable nature: two perfectly flat surfaces, but
the edge can be either ruler-straight, or jagged and chaotic depending
how the sheet breaks.
Like
Petronas Towers, the viewer is astonished at the weighty impact of something
so abstract, single minded, and virtually colourless. But Calvert's
pieces are ironic commentaries on ideals of giantism, purity and perfection.
Like the generic office tower of curtain glass the surfaces of these sculptures
shine with autonomy, and a power expressed through total dominance of
medium.
 Most
of the shards have had minimal but intensive handling, with no intentional
breakage. The edges of each fragment are aligned in perpendiculars,
each a brick in the wall that might go on forever if the artist had given
full rein to his obsession. In "Recovery" (right), the
viewer, from a confident position of privilege, seems to be walking around
disciplined walls of glass, only to find this complacency shaken on looking
down into a menacing shark's mouth of broken edges.
Glass
is fragile yet potentially dangerous to the flesh. Each piece says,
"come and view me, but keep your distance!"
The
paradox of glass is the fact that it is both solid and transparent, and
each piece exploits this double identity. There are no false bottoms
or hollow spaces in "Platform" yet the sarcophagus hints at
containing the organic trace of life (below). But what life?
Does the oblong bury a living thin, an essence of life? Like Narcissus,
we gaze from Rimbun Dahan's soft watery surrounding, we run aground o
the force of these surfaces. The viewer apprehends the work as a
sublime force, both beautiful and terrifying; it promises everlasting
life for itself, more permanent and immutable than us. It refers
to a technological future which is frightening, because the abandoned
building signifies the incompletion of human creativity and our loss over
control. The abandoned structure will never know the warmth and
familiarity of human activity, and is haunted by the disquietude of ghosts.
 Ross
Wolfe, director of the Samstag Program wrote of Calvert's early work as
being in the nature of "a barricade which assaults and offends the
aesthetic, rendering itself unapproachable through gross physical attributes
alone. It's spirit is open. As art, it is naked and vulnerable".
* In this installation Calvert has disciplined his earlier
sense of violence and grossness. Perhaps these pieces carry a new
subliminal message: that meaning lies beyond cliches of economic
rationalism. It's wastefulness, is revealed, when the "used"
must pay as much as the user in terms of lost space, lost greenery and
blotted out horizons. One question Calvert's work asks is whether
the broken and rejected junk of a throw-away culture can be redeemed.
Calvert's pieces make us look at the piece itself, and contemplate the
labour that makes it a thing in itself with its own aesthetic value, but
they also express the human yearning for permanence. It is also
art that risk ugliness and generates a slight feeling of repulsion and
alienation one much feel when confronted by effective political art.
These sculptures, born of the scrap heap, are perhaps windows, or more
mysteriously looking-glasses for those who can read their destiny, but
all they reveal is the law of their own grim presence, one a lot less
illusory and therefore more strikingly truthful than the vision of "development"
has every quite promised.
*Samstag
Catalogue 1994
Adam
Aitken has published two books of poetry, he is associate editor of "HEAT",
the Australian literary journal and was the Asialink Writer in Residency
at Rimbun Dahan during Matt Calvert's residency.
This
is an Asialink project assisted by the Commonwealth Government through
the Australia council, its funding and advisory body; arts Tasmania
and the Australian High Commission, Kuala Lumpur.
Special
thanks to Angela and Hijjas Kasturi.
Matt
Calvert
Curriculum
Vitae
Born
Smithton Tasmania, 1969
Exhibition
1997
Poets and Painters, Dick Betts Gallery, Hobart
1996
Survivability, Hobart GPO
Pulp,
Burnie, Regional Art Gallery
1995
Bubble Rap, M&B Motors, New Cross, London
1994
Selected Works from the 1993 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual
Arts Scholarships, Adelaide
1993
Group 16 Exhibition, Long Gallery, Hobart
1991
National Student Exhibition, Exhibition Building, Melbourne
1990
Insitu Fine Arts Gallery, University of Tasmania
Residencies
1998
Asialink Rimbun Dahan Malaysia
1994
McCulloch Studio, Cite International des Arts, Paris
Commmissions
1997
Art for Public Buildings Scheme, TAFE Training Facility Prince
of Wales Bay, Hobart
1991
Installation for Fletcher Construction at the ANZ Centre, Hobart
Scholarships
and Awards
1992
Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
Dean's
Role of Honour, University of Tasmania
Education
1995
MA Goldsmith's College, University of London
1993
Graduated with Honours (First Class)
1994
1992 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Tasmanian School of Art,
University of Tasmania
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