Artist: Joe Scanlan
Exhibition title: Indoor Outposts
Venue: Micheline Szwajcer, Brussels, Belgium
Date: June 8 – July 23, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Micheline Szwajcer
The term Outpost can mean a remote military station, a commerce site, or a settlement. It always implies forward motion in terms of territory (space), but backward motion in terms of that space lacking civilization in the form of agriculture, plumbing, a legal system, etc. However primitive, like a campsite, or sophisticated, like a motorcycle, an outpost is always pulled in two spatial directions at once. This tension creates the drama that gives the outpost its romantic appeal.
In the context of this exhibition, the Outposts are temporary stations made by hacking standard camping equipment with a wide range of materials—brass, leather, aluminum, plastic, wood, stainless steel, fabric.
The Outposts come directly out of Scanlan’s research with the Broodthaers Society of America, and how Marcel Broodthaers‘s notions of conquest and technology have influenced his thinking. Not only in relation to these new works, but in retrospective as well. A bathroom floor is a kind of outpost—even when it’s in an apartment centered in a major city. So is a Nesting Bookcase, or a fictional character created to wander the earth and stake out various positions.
The fantasies of the American West, from the Grand Canyon to Silicon Valley, are implied by the Outposts, as are the mythic characters of the camper, the squatter, the Hell’s Angel, the entrepreneur.
Each Outpost includes some form of outmoded technology — a slide projector, a typewriter, a magic lantern, a carnivorous plant — that speak to the idea of “roughing it” in technological terms, suggesting that each outpost is located in a distant time as well as space. There is a faint aspect of science fiction to them.
Several large paintings made from stretchers without canvas and with paint applied to the crossbars instead are displayed in the space.
As outposts positioned on the wall they behave like monitoring devices, transparent screens supported by an underlying grid that intercept the viewer’s eye and control it.
The transparency of the paintings is an illusion that makes us thinking we are “getting to the bottom of things.” In fact, we are only being controlled by the paintings in different, but equally deceptive, ways.
The Outposts positioned on the floor and on the wall have an integral relation to each other in the exhibition. The Outposts on the floor represent the idea of escape (autonomy) and the Intercepts Outposts on the wall represent the idea of capture (surveillance, discipline). Depending on who we are, we negotiate these positions —and position ourselves, our subjectivity—along a carefully calibrated spectrum between the binaries of private and public, freedom and control.
Joe Scanlan, Expo, 2016
Coleman camping tables(aluminum, printed melamine, steel, platsic), wood inlay, embroidery thread, ceramic, potting soil, carnivorous plant, arrangement variable
Joe Scanlan, Expo, 2016 (detail)
Joe Scanlan, Outpost (small), 2016
Oil and gesso on wood, 112 x 112 x 6 cm
Joe Scanlan, Outpost (small), 2016
Oil and gesso on wood, 112 x 112 x 6 cm
Joe Scanlan, Outpost (medium), 2016
Oil and gesso on wood, 132 x 132 x 6 cm
Joe Scanlan, Outpost (medium), 2016
Oil and gesso on wood, 132 x 132 x 6 cm
Joe Scanlan, Memory Aid, 2016
Coleman camping tables (aluminum, printed melamine, steel, plastic), wood inlay, leather, powder-coated steel, stainless steel, brass, wood, polyester, cotton, digital projection screen (polyester, cotton, metal grommets), slide projector, 35mm color slides, Dimensions variables
Joe Scanlan, Memory Aid, 2016 (detail)
Joe Scanlan, Memory Aid, 2016 (detail)
Joe Scanlan, Memory Aid, 2016 (detail)
Joe Scanlan, Off Road (for Truman), 2016
Coleman camping table (aluminum, printed melamine, steel, plastic), leather, powder-coated steel, stainless steel, brass, wood, polyester, Olivetti typewriter (metal, plastic, rubber), typewriter ink on paper, Dries Van Noten shirt (cotton, silkscreen ink), embroider patches, arrangement variable
Joe Scanlan, Off Road (for Truman), 2016 (detail)
Joe Scanlan, Off Road (for Truman), 2016 (detail)
Joe Scanlan, Off Road (for Truman), 2016 (detail)
Joe Scanlan, Cold Turkey (no. 2), 2016
Coleman camping tables (aluminum, printed melamine, steel, plastic), wood inlay, leather, 160 x 40 x 50 cm
Joe Scanlan, Cold Turkey (no. 2), 2016
Coleman camping tables (aluminum, printed melamine, steel, plastic), wood inlay, leather, 160 x 40 x 50 cm
Joe Scanlan, L’oeil Vigilant, 2016
Archival aqueous inkjet on paper, 76 x 36 cm each
Joe Scanlan, L’oeil Vigilant, 2016 (detail)
Joe Scanlan, The Hero Pythias, 2016
part 1: the projection booth. Coleman camping tables (aluminum, printed melamine, steel, plastic), wood inlay, leather, powder-coated steel, stainless steel, brass, wood, magic lantern (brass, chrome, tin, paper, steel, polished glass, plastic), magic lantern slides (mahogany, copper, glass, paint, photo emulsion), indoor clothesline (steel, cotton cord) cotton, clothespins, arrangement variable
part 2: the screen. Powder-coated steel, polyester, wood, nylon, clothespins, Dries Van Noten linen trouser scraps, arrangement variable
Joe Scanlan, The Hero Pythias, 2016
part 1: the projection booth. Coleman camping tables (aluminum, printed melamine, steel, plastic), wood inlay, leather, powder-coated steel, stainless steel, brass, wood, magic lantern (brass, chrome, tin, paper, steel, polished glass, plastic), magic lantern slides (mahogany, copper, glass, paint, photo emulsion), indoor clothesline (steel, cotton cord) cotton, clothespins, arrangement variable
part 2: the screen. Powder-coated steel, polyester, wood, nylon, clothespins, Dries Van Noten linen trouser scraps, arrangement variable
Joe Scanlan, The Hero Pythias, 2016 (detail)
Joe Scanlan, The Hero Pythias, 2016 (detail)
Joe Scanlan, The Hero Pythias, 2016 (detail)
