MAN.NE.QUIN

A PLACE CALLED HOME: INTERVIEW





Samantha Sweeting interviews Luke Rodilosso.

This Thursday evening (26 April 2012), artist collective Rented By The Hour, will be staging a one night only exhibition in a short-term let apartment in Kensington. The exhibition - A Place Called Home – is the latest in a series of site-specific events produced by the group of Royal College of Arts graduates and will include work by Olivia Hicks, Beatrice Haines, Laura Clarke, Luke Rodilosso and James Winter.

In the run up to the show, I have been discussing sex, violence, television and tailoring with artist Luke Rodilosso.

SKS: To begin, could you please give me a brief introduction to the works you will be presenting in Apartment 20?


LR: There will be three pieces of work: a sculpture, a video and a performance.

The sculpture is a platonic copper form emerging from a button hole hand-stitched by Savile Row tailors. It’s title is The Lament Configuration, the name of the puzzle box in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, a fictional artefact that transforms the everyday world into a nightmare of sex and death drives.

The video piece, Monsters Through The Balustrades, is a kaleidoscope of images that chronicle a child’s experiences of potent violence and sexuality in the home, glimpsed through a magnifying lens.

The performance is a companion to Monsters and functions like a detail of a painting. It focuses on the Japanese finger weaving exercises Kuji Kiri that I learnt as a child from late night ninja movies. I would perform these exercises to calm my nerves, often whilst hiding in a wardrobe.

SKS: Transformation and a desire for otherness seem to be recurrent elements in your work. Can you tell me more about this?


LR: In otherness I find an alien allure, the solace of something clean and cold. Many times, I have looked at the sky at night and thought that our model for luxury products and jewellery must come from its jet black, glittering vastness. In this, the other is linked to luxury and sex, and the freedom of being absorbed into it, a kind of cold orgiastic luxury beyond time.

I consider transformation the vehicle by which otherness emerges. It appeals to me to have elements in transition; cuts and tears become curtain calls, heralding the arrival of the other. In The Lament Configuration, the button hole is presented as a banal orifice suddenly transformed by the birthing of an alien artefact.  


In Monsters Through The Balustrades, the domestic environment is transformed into a realm of gods and monsters, where a child must achieve spiritual perfection to survive.

SKS: Across the body of your work, there’s a pronounced obsession with gaps and orifices that both conceal and reveal. On the one hand, they are the site for penetration and birth, a doorway to the mysteries beyond. But on the other, they are there to obscure vision, as though an intermediary device is necessary to diffuse the starkness of reality. As far as I’m aware, Monsters is made up almost entirely of video imagery filmed through a magnifying peep hole lens - a motif that repeats itself in your cupboard performance. The hiding child watching through the cupboard door or the gaps between the balustrades, draws reference with that scene in Taxi Driver where Robert DeNiro’s character sits alone in a porn cinema watching the film through his fingers.


LR: In Taxi Driver, Travis attempts to create intimacy by placing flesh between himself and the screen. It is as if glimpsing the hardcore sex through the mesh of his hands could create tenderness.  

Reducing the visual aperture to a button hole or an opening between the fingers, is for me to place the viewer on the inside looking out. It is a baroque gesture, that suggests to the viewer that they are within a monad. Deleuze, in The Fold, explains that
”The monad is a cell. It resembles a sacristy more than an atom: a room with neither doors nor windows, where all activity takes place on the inside.”

In this, there is a desire for safety, an urge to pay witness to the world from a secure and timeless vantage.

SKS: I want to pick up on this use of the hands to make the hardcore tender. You grew up in a household overwhelmed by domestic violence. Hands represented brutality. In response, you developed an interest in martial arts and Japanese finger weaving, and in so doing, found an alternative way of touching, replacing the boxer’s punch with discipline and philosophy.


LR: As a child raised in a home intolerant of effete sentiments, martial arts enabled my femininity to exist by stealth within a violent structure.

This tactic is repeated in my practice; tenderness is smuggled into the work encased within harsh lines, whilst brutal sentiments are redeemed through a certain play of light or delightful contrast of colours.

SKS: You spent much of your childhood watching television and looking to films for role models. Fiction became reality and vice versa. In Monsters, you have spliced together original and appropriated video footage. Your parents are represented by cinema actors and your autobiography is played back on a hotel television. Can you tell me more about your relationship with cinema – what it is you are looking for?


LR: Cinema took the place of the family and its actors my parents; it seems pertinent to have them represented by pixilated glimpses of people I have never met.
Formally speaking I am in love with the lens and the way its shadowy orifice frames the world and protects the voyeur. I am exploring both static photography and appropriated footage with my lens, focusing on the point at which the image disintegrates into the material it is constructed of. In Monsters the trauma of the sex and violence explodes upon inspection into the glistening pixels of the screen.

SKS: In the accompanying text to Monsters Through the Balustrades you write:
“There was no solace in home. That was where the monsters lived. Only the hotel’s shrink wrapped palimpsest of a thousand brief lives could provide me safety.”



The hotel is symbolic of repression, where ugly or potentially shameful aspects of life are cleaned away and hidden from view. In much of your work to date, you have privileged aesthetic over story. You are now choosing to make explicit your narrative, reinserting the personal into the shrink-wrapped safe space. It is a brave decision.



LR: I have always favoured the self-evident language of strong aesthetics over the unravelling that takes place through narrative. I would still say that I am preoccupied by strong images that convey the total atmosphere of the idea at a glance. I find myself now able to invest vulnerability into a practice that was once aspirationally stark. The yuppie noir of my previous works is now tempered by a confession of melancholy and hope.



A Place Called Home will take place on Thursday 26th April,

from 6.30pm until late,

at:


Apt no. 20
 

Clearlake Hotel Ltd
 18-20 Prince of Wales Terrace
 Kensington
 London W8 5PQ

Monsters through the balustrades

My parents were monsters I glimpsed through the balustrades.

I spent my childhood in the gods, watching horrors from the cheap seats.

I met the police officer when I was 7.

His eyes were glacial and absorbed every detail.

He was not like the marine who used to come here before, he had given me his hat and affixed a map of the world to my bedroom wall.

The police man was terrifying

Once when mother was kissing him, he stared over her shoulder at me, precisely, indifferently.

From my darkened perch on the mezzanine I watched him destroy all manner of things.

I remember watching him smash every light bulb in the house with the stiletto heel of my mothers shoe. She lay on the ground, one foot bare, her face strewn with hair and tears and blood.

The last light went out, and then he left. I sat bathed in darkness on the staircase, my mothers gargled sobs swelling in a space that felt endless and timeless.

When the house became void of hope, I would be ushered noiselessly into the dimly lit uterine interior of a luxury car. My mothers bloody but beautifully manicured hands, would grasp the steering wheel and with the purring of the engine, I would sleep.

I spent every night measuring screams from the next room, caught like specimens in the echo chamber of a beaker I pressed against the wall. I would strain to listen, to read in the babel of the cup the exact point at which I would need to run next door and throw my body between them.

The only sleep I ever had was in the car.

When the engine stopped, I would awaken from a sleep rendered hallucinatory by the sudden and brief absence of fear.

We were at a hotel.

We spent many weekends in hotels.

The hallways seemed to shimmer with piano music. The endless repetition of its simple melodies. Musical standards, ‘Strangers in the night’, ‘Tea for two’ or ‘When I fall in love’.

There was no solace in home. That was where the monsters lived. Only the hotel’s shrink wrapped palimpsest of a thousand brief lives could provide me safety.

a place called home

Rented by the hour - Clearlake Hotel

Apartment 20  - A place called home

Following on from Apartment 21 in 2010 the artists Olivia Hicks, Laura Clarke, Beatrice Haines, James Winter and Luke Rodilosso return to Apartment 20 at Clearlake hotel in April 2012 to the floor above for the next Rented by the hour experience. The artists are gradually working their way up the building.

A place called home will be an exploration into how ideas of suspended time can be interpreted in a transient space such as a rented apartment where people regularly pass through. The apartments are not hotel rooms, but a home from home, usually only occupied for a short period by an endless stream of different people, but in this private space at a particular moment in time a multitude of stories can be told, both real and imagined.

Rene Magritte wrote an essay entitled Theatre in the Midst of Life, which portrayed his art as a stage on which the natural laws of time and space ceased to exist. In the spirit of this the artists will produce psychosocial responses to the rooms, but only as a starting point for individual fictional journeys inspired by the architecture, its space and its aura.

The stories and poems written by each artist will include varied themes ranging from visceral obsession, the body becoming the home and the home as a space for ritual practice.

A publication entitled A place called home will accompany this exhibition.

18 – 19 Prince of Wales Terrace,

Kensington, London W8 5PQ Tube; High St Kensington

Thursday 26^th April 2012

Check in time 6.30pm, check out late.

A one night event

Parade Gloss

Cleaning is the futile gesture, an act of application and erasure which mirrors the meditative rhythms of sculpting, drawing or painting. A haptic mantra of to and fro movements which can never be satisfied.

In order to achieve a Parade gloss, one must engage an antiquated technique know as Bulling.

An act of painting, bull polishing one’s shoes is akin to glazing with oils, it too involves a quiet and methodical application of numerous thin layers to create brilliance and richness

In the exotic gleam of the bulled shoe, there a sense of a pride fueled by obsession, a pride rehearsed in the home and mobilized in the world.

The initial phase is to polish the shoes to a standard finish.

This is achieved in full by taking a medium bristled brush and applying polish generously.

The polish is brushed across the entire surface of the shoe and once coverage is achieved in full, including the tongue, one brushes in circular motions to massage the polish into the leather.

It is best to leave the polish to dry for 15 minutes before removing it with another softer brush. The soft brush is used in sweeping motions to buff the surface of the shoe.

With this the standard polish is complete and the shoe is ready to be bulled.

One begins by setting alight the surface of the polish, a flame will lick the air and dance for a moment or two before you are to blow it out or use the lid to extinguish it.

A gorgeous pool of warm polish will sit on the surface like black gold.

I salivate into the lid of the polish tin and dip into it a soft cloth which is wrapped tightly around my index finger.

The tip of this finger is dipped into the polish and used in small circular motions on the toe of the shoe.

At this point, I am no longer polishing the leather which is saturated, the thin layer of polish which sits astride the leather is refined into a lacquered finish.

10hrs of small swirling circular motions have compressed the individual layers of polish into an obsidian mirror.

Jet black and glassy the toe of each shoe glints in a moment I consider magnificently erotic, it’s lustre is far superior to the crude shininess of patent leather.

I work in privacy at home and have always spent long hours alone.

As a flâneur my excursions out of the house are often without direct purpose and are celebrations of the simple act of encounter.

Fetishized rituals of appearance such as the laborious bulling, reveal a strict order which underpins an ambiguous relationship between self and world. It is like the inflexible rules of play established in trust between promiscuous lovers.

There is a joy inherent in setting out without purpose in parade best.

That the world deserves ones very best even in the pursuit of nothing.

Chapter and Verse.

I have set myself the task of memorizing the book of the Revelation of St John the Divine, from the King James version Bible.

Memory is the jewel in the crown of creative thought, its most strange and marvelous creation, identity. 

Memory engages imagination, association and order. Committing facts to memory involves repetition, and in turn engages the will.

As one develops a greater capacity to form vivid associations between fragments of information, the importance of repetition lessens.

Recall becomes effortless, long lasting and instant whereupon information can be seen in the minds eye as clear concise images.

My practice of memorization engages both discipline and the visionary capacity of the imagination. It is as follows;

I have chapter and verse written in a loose scrawl upon flash cards, these are stuck to my kitchen wall above the sink, one at a time and in chronological order.

As I clean the dishes I chant the same few lines over and over in a florid mantra of thine’s and thou’s.

 

When the kitchen is clean and the last bubbles draining in the sink shimmer and burst I have recited the passages countless times, with this I go to my desk and purposefully drift to sleep in a upright posture.

This ensures that I will wake and return to sleep many times, affording me much time in the hypnagogic and hypnapompic state, those treasured hallucinatory forerunners to sleep and wakefulness.

During the onset of sleep and the return to wakefulness the words on the flash cards once mindlessly chanted, now mesh into the rich visual tapestries that comprise long term memory. 

It is late, I am swaying at my desk, my body become weak.

‘And in his right hand he held seven stars

And out from his mouth went a sharp two edged sword’.

My head jerks in submission to sleep and the eyes roll back to reveal their white glistening belly.

With lids still open in hypnagogic glee, the seven stars now gleam with the inner life of the celestial and the two edged sword going out from his mouth is harshly back lit by the weight of passing Millenia.  

These visions represent learning in it’s most narcotic and compulsive guise. With meditation one must be sober and measured, but with hypnagogia one can swoop in and out of profound visionary experience with the jerking of ones neck.

It is as joyous as a rocking horse, a breathless moment of hallucination at the top and at the tail. 

Fearful symmetry

Mannequin

(Oct.2011)

Fearful Symmetry -

Alex Virji - Digital transcription.

Alex Virji, The three graces (2011).

Alex Virji, The three graces ii (2011).

The code of gestures

Mannequin on Ashwath Bandi

Ashwath Bandi is a medical graduate of Imperial College London. His field of specialization is pediatric surgery and here expounds upon the nature of a life dictated by ritual.

(Oct. 2011)

‘Two firemen cut the door from its hinges. Dropping it into the road, they peered down at me like the assistants of a gored bullfighter. Even their smallest movements seemed to be formalized, hands reaching towards me in a series of coded gestures.’

J.G Ballard, Crash (1973)

(Mqn)

I was fascinated to learn that you tie surgical knots in grocery bags. Is this idiosyncratic to you, or is it common practice amongst your contemporaries.

(Ab)

It is something that is practiced amongst my friends. Once you start to get interested in surgery, then much of what surgeons are able to achieve is quite magical and incredibly glamorous. Whilst this allure still exists in your early years of training you tend to latch on to any tit-bits of knowledge you manage to come across.

So when you first see surgeons tying knots, it’s extraordinary – you haven’t any idea what is going on and then as soon as you learn how simple it can be to execute, you just want to tie surgical knots in everything, and as you need to improve quickly any opportunity to do so serves a function.

Now it has become something of a habit, but I should suppose that as you become more adept with surgery that magic is replaced by mathematics.

(Mqn)

The medical profession has a very specific codified aesthetic, the architectures of many of London’s hospitals are magnetically austere and chapel like.

(Ab)

I have spent a significant period of my time in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital which was designed as a shopping center in the 90’s, it has a very striking design and large atrium in the center with floors layered around it.

(Mqn)

You went through a spell of working many consecutive night shifts, about which you used to recount the experience of moving through those empty hallways at night and the solemnity of those hours.

(Ab)

Very much so, the particular qualities of the space become deeply embedded in your consciousness, after seeing these spaces alive with the chaos and throng of the day, their emptiness at night is haunting.

The hospital that I’m working in at the moment in Norwich is a purpose built building, unlike many in London which were constructed for one reason or another and have then been appropriated for hospital use.

The building only consists of about 4 floors, but every so often the floors converge in enormous atrium’s which punctuate the space, and between these floors are corridors with relevant wards and services along the way.

This is a bustling hospital during the day, the atrium’s are where the restaurants are and seem to condense and echo the clamour and noise. Then at night when you are there, there is nothing.

There have been times when I have wandered into the atrium and sat down awhile. It’s something that I’ve always enjoyed and have frequently sought out in my private life, and that is to seek out a large architectural space which is for one reason or another empty, and to be alone within that space. It’s something beautiful about the night shifts.

(Mqn)

The aesthetics of the medical environment aside from pieces of artwork that often punctuate the corridors, are essentially bare of design, things appear the way they are in service of function and so the visual properties are utilitarian in their nature. This utility creates a strong visual experience, setting a mood whereupon every object resonates with it’s purpose at a glance. Do you find yourself hypnotized by the severity of this setting.

(Ab)

I certainly find that there are moments rushing down the bright white hallways which are entrancing and in a heightened state of awareness the glint and gleam of metal can be beautiful.

(Mqn)

Thinking of the particular qualities of the medical aesthetic I find it difficult to compare the environment to any other, but for one and that is the luxury boutique. Marble clad arcades redolent with austerity and coldness. I think it is fascinating that this arena where life and death is being decided does bare resemblance to a slick featureless Bond street boutique. Do you find that the amount of time you spend in the operating theater predisposes you towards an appreciation of these stark environments.

(Ab)

Function is very rewarding, and in as far as it perpetuates and serves your ambitions, the stark corridors and wipe clean surfaces become delightful.

With the environment being purpose built, the architecture yielding to the needs of every kind of ritual that may be performed, it is very easy to be swept away with it all, because the work is urgent and precise and everything must coalesce to serve it. If an element hinders the clockwork motion of surgery it is simply extracted.

In this respect I certainly do appreciate the precision and elegance that should comprise a fine restaurant meal, the sweeping motion of the Sommelier as he passes noiselessly behind you without disturbing your meditations.

This of course all becomes quite pointed in some, and you will encounter surgeons who are totally intolerant of any errant detail, even be it something which does not alter the end result but simply disturbs the sanctum of ritual.

(Mqn)

Luxury at its zenith is extremely stark, it is marble clad halls and single towering heels presented on granite plinths.

The antithetical foil to luxury is the austerity of religion and the asceticism of it’s rituals. Yet luxury consistently references religious ceremony and turns to it at every juncture to lend potency to it’s rituals and ideologies.

Somewhere between these two points a line could also be drawn through the institutions of war and medicine, who’s practitioners dress like priests, construct sanctuaries and immerse themselves in pedantic ritual which often stray into object fetish and obsessiveness.

(Ab)

It is fascinating, if you are at a religious ceremony where water is being poured from one vessel to another, there will always be beginners who are handling the cup in some erroneous or awkward fashion and will be corrected until even the very mood with which they clasp the cup is eventually correct.

I remember my grandmother taking me to temple, when receiving an offering I used to extend my left hand to receive and I would be sternly corrected, you receive offerings with your right hand.

It is the same in theater, if you pick up a scalpel and hold it wrong, you’ll be corrected quickly and sternly. You might be performing the function correctly but that is not the point, some will accept that you have found a way to handle the tool which is perfectly effective, but generally the ritual and culture of the theater is closely guarded.

(Mqn)

What particularly fascinates me about you is that you in the course of each and almost every day you partake in the complicated physical rituals of your morning yogic practice. From this point you work a long and precise day in theater and may some days find yourself eating dinner in a fine restaurant. This is a life of clockwork and ritual, it is fascinating.

(Ab)

I think the more you do yoga, the more you will take pleasure in any movements you make and with that you become aware of your movements having a purpose.

This expands to connect you to anything which is in motion, and allows you to find the gesture that completes the moment.

The attraction is the enjoyment of taking what limited progress I’ve made and placing myself in a situation where the environment around me works like clockwork. Enjoying all about you the harmonious click clack of objects in their right place.

At the moment I can’t just walk into a cacophonous place like Gaza and simply attain this joy of the clockwork, I’m specifically seeking out conducive environments which allow me to experience more than how good I am.

It is a meditation through collaboration. The collective might of an institutions ritualized practices create a seamless experience of fluidity, in which regardless of one’s own elegance a sense of all of this can be felt. 

Meditation is the practice of death.

Two years ago, one of my closest friends drowned himself in an unfathomable gesture.

He cast himself into the Severn Estuary from Clevedon Pier in the early hours of the morning. He died with the rising sun throbbing and fading through the deepening murk of an English Estuary. 

He had been seen a week earlier rehearsing what I know he would’ve considered his finest hour. He had been preparing, he had been enduring, a regime of total abstinence and fitness.

One of the last people to see him alive reported him to be in peak physical condition, he was potent and overwhelming.

And then he ended his life.

Two years later I am still unraveling the last moments of his life. Redolent with pain and mystery, his suicide remains a defiant enigma.

Clevedon Pier.

Meditation is the practice of death.

For the last 4 days I have had a cold shower each morning.

To start with the shower is warm, gloriously so - I kneel in the bath with the shower head low down. The room fills with steam and I bow my head in earnest.

I wash with an industrial coal and tar soap which evokes a mood of institution and function. I lather a sponge and scrub myself scrupulously.

I lather my face with a badger brush and sandalwood shaving cream, shave leaving my moustache intact, and cut high on the side burns in a military fashion. 

My hair is a grade 1 on the backs and sides, it is a legionares cut. 

I trim my nails every morning and brush my teeth enthusiastically in the shower.

When I have groomed myself completely and in the spirit of someone preparing for a certain death, I sit down cross legged.

I stare at the taps in front of me.

I become absent minded and my left and right hands clasp each tap with an economy of touch.

Hot tap swings shut, cold swings open.

My muscles tense and my first 5 breathes are gasping reflex.

I take stock of myself and relax my spine to sit gently erect. I stare ahead and breathe purposefully and slowly.

Alex Virji, Meditation is the practice of death (2011).

In that instant I am face to face with him in his final moment. I see him drowning, I take his last breaths with him and see his body slacken into the abyss of dying.

I exhale a final breath and my body relaxes in fascinated submission to the end.

The ice cold water beats my yielding frame and I see with penetrating clarity into my life.

In that instant I am the giant Alice peering through the windows of a diminutive wonderland home.

My life is at once a dolls house, and I the observing colossus freely peer into any room to watch its story.

My hand snatches the cold tap shut, and I stand slowly and carefully. My muscles have seized and my flesh radiates warmth though my skin is cold.

My eyes are peeled open in a gesture of total bodily shock, the amount of visual information I am receiving is suddenly massive.

I start to breathe heavy and after an inane moment of glassy eyed gawking, I erupt into a cacophony of whoops and howls.

I am delirious, and my body exudes a dreadful potency. My loins radiate immense heat and all I can do is stride around my apartment feeling my body and it’s sinews twisting in glorious locomotion.

I change into a freshly ironed shirt and pressed trousers, with this I sit down at my desk and set to work.

Luke Rodilosso, Grotta Azura (2008).

About Mannequin.

Mannequin acts as an umbrella housing the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of Royal College of Art graduate Luke Rodilosso.

There is a desire here to uncover what is happening in artistic practice.

Via articles and interviews between myself and my closest peers, I am hoping to peel back the surface detail of practice, to reveal the nuanced mechanics that construct images.

Image making is an act of alchemy whereupon ones entire body of influence is pulped into the gesture of a single mark, dissecting the mulch of this gesture is a fascinating task.  

http://l-rodilosso.tumblr.com/