Spotlight: John Dickson: the fluidity of art and life
Sometimes the smallest things can be monumental. The movement of a ball-bearing, the warp of a piece of wood, or bubbles on the surface of water.
About 18 months ago, I found myself staring into a bathtub full of opaque, putrid-looking water. It was a white porcelain claw-foot in a dingy, carpeted room with no visible signs of plumbing. I cringed. As I turned to leave, the stagnant water started to move slightly, all on its own. Bubbles appeared on the surface, and (Im sure of it) formed the word "fuck."
The work, John Dicksons Dirty Water (2000), was shown as part of "Persona Volare," a group exhibition held in an empty suite of offices in downtown Toronto. The project had a lot in common with Dicksons practice over the last decade: the water, the kinetic element, the quiet, performative gesture and the presentation in an artist-initiated exhibition in a less-than-pristine space. Here, though, he seemed to push things further. Beyond abjection and beyond the haptic effect (the cringing), this work took a subtle but firm step to actively offend.
Settled in his obsessions, Dickson exhibits a startling range of complexity in his work with, or so it seems, the simplest of means. There is an uncanny, science-experiment feel to the self-sufficient systems he creates. Liquids are contained or manipulated using low-tech yet precise (and hidden) mechanismsstrange art-machines that perform minor actions; we are not quite sure why.
This spring I visited Dickson in his studio in a converted factory building in Torontos west end. In the hallway, a massive collection of different-sized sprinkler pipes, painted bright red, twist up through the ceiling and down through the floor. The bathtub now sits by his door, still kind of dirty. He pulled some boxes from it that had cables attached and plugged them in.
The boxes, meant to hang on the wall, started to whir. Small ball-bearings clinging to the smooth outer surfaces began to vibrate, quiver and move, as if on their own. They clumsily traced various forms; a circle, a figure eight, a curving or straight line; sometimes leaving faint marks in their wake. These compelling but ultimately pointless machines continuously repeated their task, performing, endlessly, the delicate drawing of a line in an awkward, mechanical way.
In the corner of the studio were some bulging, malformed wooden shipping crates.
For the exhibition "Container 96" in Denmark in 1996, artists exhibited works inside actual shipping containers in the port of Copenhagen. For his contribution, Dickson filled five empty crates of various dimensions with water from the harbour and resealed them. Viewers entered the container and walked amongst the crates, which bulged menacingly with the weight of the water.
Like the bathtub, the Five Crates provoked anxiety. Their status was uncertain. They were almost ready-mades, but were clearly contrived and constructed. And they didnt quite make it as elegant, minimalist cubes. Containing what they were designed to keep out, they became damaged over time. Again, there was a kind of staging and the uncomfortable feeling of having a bodily relation to an object that seemed about to burst, to fluids that threatened to not stay contained. The crates were also shown last summer, in a water-themed exhibition at York Quay Gallery in Toronto, but they lost something in the translation.
Back in the studio, there were air compressors, a sewing machine and, above our heads, assemblages of twisted sprinkler pipe. In one, I could make out the letters SOS. This piece was part of last summers "Museopathy," an exhibition in which artists were invited to exhibit into infiltratevarious heritage sites and non-art historical museums in and around Kingston. Dicksons venue was the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston, where he installed work both in the dry-dock and inside. Submerged in the dry-dock, a system of pipes with many small, intricate valves was pumped full of air to produce this sad, helpless "SOS" in bubbles on the waters surface. (Installing it, he told me, required several scuba dives, and numerous adjustments were needed to keep the system submerged and level.)
Inside the museum, a large blown-glass bottle filled with water, sand and a large floating model ship sat upright on an old-fashioned cabinet in a work called Cyclone. At the touch of a button, the bottle began to spin, creating a maelstrom, a storm in a bottle. Partway through the exhibition, museum staff called Dickson to inform him that there was a spider inside the bottle. In the studio, he showed me the delicate web it had woven, still clinging to the rigging of the ships mast.
In describing his works, reconstructing their original incarnations from the objects in the studio, Dickson described the sounds, smells and atmospheres of the places they were shown as much as their visual aspects.
Before the office space, the shipping container and the dry-dock, Dickson had exhibited, independent of gallery shows, in a myriad of unlikely locations. From the early to mid-1990s, it tended to be dark, cavernous spaces, in association with the collective "Nether Mind." He described the dank smell of a basement and the smell and feel of the black, rubberized, amorphous containers that he filled with water and hung from the ceiling. There was the courtyard of a 17th-century monastery in the Czech Republic, where subterranean canals made echoing sounds and his vortex and bottles in an outdoor pool made clinking noises under the sun (the exhibition "Hermit IV," in 1995). And a seedy hotel room at the Duke of Connaught Tavern on Torontos Queen St. West ("Duke-u-menta" in 1994), where a prosthetic eye, set into the wall, cried tears that spilled in a slow stream onto the floor. Sounds filtered in from the street and the bar below to make this Crying Eye all the more sad. Versions of his Eyes cried again in the washrooms of a downtown Toronto restaurant as part of the large site-specific summer exhibition "In Lieu" (1998). Such spaces, it seems, frame our experience of the work. Or perhaps these spaces are more effective precisely because they do not.
Dicksons systems both soothe and disturb. His liquids, moving or barely contained in a kind of non-fixed stillness, evoke a visceral bodily anxiety. His self-acting mechanisms are predictable and potentially calming in their limited, simple movement, but perform no necessary action. They exist, somehow, not for but despite us. Like the technological imaginings of a different time, like primitive automata, they move and sputter with an awkward elegance. These minimal, repetitive gestures, when they happen, announce nothing but themselves, maintaining a trembling perpetual motion or breaking an unstable stasis. Then the small can become monumental.
Leaving the studio, I had to pass again the twisted mass of red sprinkler pipes in the hall. This time, I expected them to do something.
Summer 2002
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