KATHY TEMIN

Since the early 1990s, Melbourne-based artist Kathy Temin has populated the gallery space with wonky, hand-made creatures and objects; irreverent and anti-authoritarian sculptural works that explore connections between the art historical investigations of movements such as minimalism and arte povera and the more intimate concerns of domesticity and craft. Temin’s signature use of fake fur playfully combines associations of childhood and toys, safety and comfort, with the overt materiality of post-1960s practice; firmly placing the emotional and the personal within the hallowed halls of art. The artist’s ongoing interest in suburbia and pop culture icons similarly explores the intersection and competition between high and low culture, good and bad taste, resulting in works that relish their deliberately uncomfortable roles. Unlike the process-driven, problem-solving concerns of the modernist artists whose work she riffs off, Temin’s practice works against a Gestalt experience of the sculptural object and instead demands an acceptance of open-endedness and joyful embrace of the enigmatic.

On the eve of a major survey exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art and the launch of a new project at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, Temin discusses the relationship of her work to modernism and her particular marking of memory.[1]

Kelly Gellatly: Many of the titles of your sculptures from the early to mid-1990s declare the works as ‘problems’ (Duck-rabbit problem, 1991, for instance), defiantly living up to this claim through their ability to complicate and confound issues surrounding perception, cognition and seeing. Fluffy and deflated, they occupy an uncomfortable, indeterminate space; posing questions to which there are seemingly no answers.

Kathy Temin: The problems are some of the earliest works in the Heide exhibition and they were a result of asking questions about the resolution of making art – modernist ideas about picture making and abstract sculpture from the 1960s and 1970s. I was trying to leave the work in an unresolved state and referred to this through the titles. When I see them today they look finished, but I was referencing industrial fabrication and perfect lines. They were soft, sewn and stuffed and also formally fell between being paintings and sculptures. The in-betweenness was a place I wanted to explore, as was making work from craft materials and craft-related activities.

KG: Many of these works signal colour as part of the ‘problem’, and your use of colour in these sculptures is both garish and celebratory, deliberately challenging cultural hierarchies and corresponding conventions of taste.

KT: The colour was not intended to be part of the problem, but the material was. An example is Problem, 1991, which is made from two different shades of pink felt with a pompom at the base of it in the same colours. The Duck-rabbit problem used colour (yellow and pink) as a narrative to represent the images of the duck and the rabbit, where the profile of the duck’s beak is the profile of the rabbit’s ear, but you can’t see both at the same time. Black and yellow corner problem, 1992, represented the colours of the bee. I was thinking about pathos and abjection here. Sometimes the colour was determined by the material used. White problem, 1992, was deliberately devoid of any colour so the forms were the focus.

What I learned from the earlier brighter works is that when you are working with cute images and when they in turn are combined with bright colours, they reference what you expect of the images and that is not so interesting to me. My later felt pictures have the associations with the childhood game Fuzzy Felt and I wanted to combine adult, serious themes with a material that has associations with sentimentality and play. I am interested in the process of the transformation of images and memory, where there is a disjunction between the source and the end result. The focus on the restrained palette of black, white and grey felt in Troubled times, 1997–98, was due to these images being based on (colour) photographs that were mainly taken during a holiday in Ireland in 1996. When I translated parts of them into this work I wanted it to read like a film still or be a reference to a memory.

KG: Can you explain the relationship to modernism in your work? Does it remain a source of inspiration and/or contention?

KT: It is partly the transformation of what happens when you engage with another artwork and rework that into another material, scale and context. I have chosen to do this for particular reasons. With Frank Stella’s painting Arbeit macht frei, 1958, it was about wanting to understand the gaps between the title and the abstract line image of the painting and the disconnection between the two. This disconnection is something I did not understand in 1995[2] and I felt that the painting and the title held something significant for me, so I made the work to explore it. It wasn’t just a formal translation from painting to sculpture.

The formal aspects of modernism have provided a context that I identify with and I also wanted to challenge its conventions of artmaking and notions of taste. Having combined many of these works with materials they are not associated with also helped me as a young artist to learn something about my practice. With David Smith’s works, I translated his large outdoor aluminium Cubi sculptures and made them into small soft sculptures from larmé to simulate metal.[3] I have been influenced by Joseph Beuys’s, Claes Oldenburg’s and Meret Oppenheim’s use of unconventional materials and their engagement with sensory perception. However, I did not start working with synthetic fur to engage with their works; their practices gave me the freedom to explore my own ideas. Initially I was interested in translating the feelings associated with emotional content in soft toy imagery and combining that with art history. These feelings range from pathos, cuteness, idealised love, abjection, sentimentality, sadness and affection. 

KG: You once said: ‘I have been interested in reworking minimalism so it takes on the appearance of what it represses – the body, sentiment and memory.’ This kind of program of reinstatement is of course a hallmark of feminist art, and your own sense of materiality and exploration of craft practices and domesticity can similarly be seen to relate to such an enterprise. While you quite consciously create a feminised and often infantilised space within the gallery, do you consider yourself a feminist artist? Indeed, some forty or so years after second-wave feminism, does this position still matter?

KT: When I was at art school[4] I was very interested in understanding and knowing about the history of feminist art in both Australia and the United States. I was one of the co-ordinators of SWIM [Support Women Image Makers] where we invited practitioners to give talks to students, and this continued to a public lecture series at Linden that I organised with [fellow artist] Kate Daw. We wanted to address the conspicuous absence of female staff and the ideas surrounding feminist art practices. Some of the speakers that spoke at SWIM included Juliana Engberg, Anne Marsh, Jenny Watson and Vivienne Shark LeWitt.

I have been greatly influenced by Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman and Yayoi Kusama’s work so your question is significant in relation to my interests. I certainly identify with the feminist focus of the exploration of their identity during the 1970s and this has created a context for other female artists to do the same. It has been very important for me to know about this history because I felt excluded by the work that was being made during the late 1980s (large gestural paintings, for example), and it empowered me to know that there were other approaches to making art. This position does still matter because there is always a group of artists that are marginalised at different times due to the shifting of cultural climates. Feminist art provided me with an understanding that I did not have to accept a mainstream position of what was fashionable when I was at art school.

KG: Your interest in and play with notions of ‘perfect’ domesticity extend to sculptures that resemble designer modernist houses, but of a scale only suitable for birds or small animals – beautiful, desirable structures that are strangely uninhabitable.

KT: These are different series of works and there is a crossover of motifs and images within them. I posed the question, ‘How do you design a habitat for an animal when you are a human?’, and that generated the ‘Model Homes’ series, from 1996 and 1999, which are a cross between bird boxes and idealised modernist houses. The ‘Dis-play’ series are Perspex cabinets with constructed objects displayed inside. I have spent a lot of time in natural history museums and have been engaged by the way that objects are displayed, which is sometimes as interesting as what is being shown. In some regional museums handmade texts are used, and these seemed to be works in themselves.

I have been influenced by fashion magazines and pop culture and I am also a collector of art. In fashion magazines there is always a Top 10 list of things that you are suggested to buy and I wanted to reference this consumption. Interior design magazines often show portraits of peoples’ collections – everything seems so ordered and idealised. For me, life isn’t like that, but I do enter into the idea that it could be. There are felt pictures where I have included my own wish lists of things that I own or want to own (the ‘Arrange Your Own Room’ series, 1998-99) and in the 1999 black-and-white ‘Felt Habitat’ pictures). These were sometimes shown with a polystyrene screen that was a three-dimensional image of what was represented in the pictures.

KG: Your work reveals an ongoing interest in cultural (primarily pop) icons – the figure of Kylie Minogue, for example, has enabled you to investigate the relationship between the fan and the object of his/her admiration, fascination and desire, from the perspective of both participant and observer. Your own position as a ‘fan’ is particularly important here, as much of the success of these works is dependent upon a sense of pathos and understanding, rather than any criticism or judgement.

KT: Part of my initial interest in Kylie was how she constantly transformed images of women from the past into the present, recycling styles to make them her own. When I did the series of felt pictures what became apparent through the silhouettes was the references to iconic images of women from the past, and pin-ups – not just the ones she has obviously reworked – such as the Athena tennis poster from the 1970s.

I am interested in the crossovers between images from different sources and in the reception of images. As a fan and as an artist wanting to explore the notions of consumption around fandom, I made some of these images into a series of fused-glass pictures. These works are made in a very similar way to the felt cut-outs, but in glass. They are glossy, seductive and reflective and originally they were in candy and ice-cream colours of pinks, creams and browns (as part of the 2001-02 ‘Frozen Moments’ series). They later combined references to reliefs and to paintings identified as triptychs and diptychs, and the colours were white, brown and blue to engage with Wedgwood designs.

The initial scale of the first Kylie pictures was 30 by 30 centimetres, a reference to the size of an album cover. I also wanted to make throw-away images from the media into something that was precious and solid and to translate the seduction of consumption that is an integral part of being a fan.

KG: The garden has been an important feature of your work, often married to interior architectural elements such as mantles and sideboards. In your ‘Indoor Gardens’ series at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in 2007, for example, a sense of cultivation and containment is paramount, almost in spite of the works’ disorderly materiality. Your installation My monument: white forest, 2008–09 blows up the landscape, creating an environment that is both negotiated and experienced on a bodily scale. This work relates to your recent travels to Europe to visit Holocaust sites and memorials, and builds upon your investigation of the monument in previous work through the guise and experience of family. This aspect of your practice isn’t immediately apparent.

KT: There are recent white works Sideboard garden and Mantle garden, both 2006-07, that combine interior furniture with garden references and anthropomorphic shapes of trees. My monument: white forest was conceived for the ‘Optimism’ exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, and responded to a particular space within that museum. I had been talking with them for some time about making a new work and the timing coincided with my participation in the ‘Adult March of the Living’ journey to Eastern Europe. This was organised by the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne for children of survivors, and anyone with an interest, to visit memorials and sites where the events of their family history took place and to mark their memory. As a child of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor I have been influenced by this history.

As an artist I have consistently engaged with private and collective memory through popular culture, suburbia, fan cultures and art history. In the 1995 exhibition ‘Three Indoor Monuments’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, the focus was where art history, Jewish history and my own personal identity coincided. It was in this context that the reworking of Stella’s Arbeit macht frei was made. The title of Stella’s painting is the text that is embedded into iron gates above many concentration camps, which translates as ‘work sets you free’.

During my recent visit to three of the concentration camps in Europe, I felt physically very small and saw that these vast spaces were surrounded by beautiful tree-lined countryside. For ‘Optimism’, I wanted to create a space that translated the feeling of smallness, without being empty and vast, with the comfort and protection of the softness. In the work the trees are anthropomorphic, as is the physicality of making and moving them. I have recently been to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park where there is a similar feeling when walking between two long walls of enormous stylised green trees.

I am working with landscape as an immersive experience that engages with private and collective memory (and associations of grief and loss), but one that is combined with hope and faith, like memorial gardens; hence the optimism of the Wedgwood-blue sky background. I was thinking about the work as a contemplative space where the presence of absence was evoked. The scale is monumental. I can’t determine what audiences will do when they are within these works, but I can generate a path. If people want to stand, sit, hug trees, get out of it quickly, or not enter at all, these are all interesting responses.

KG: How does your new work My monument: black cube, 2009, relate to its precursor?

KT: They are different ways of conceiving of a monument, memorial and the marking of memory. My monument: white forest is immersive and My monument: black cube is very different, despite using the same material – synthetic fur. Black cube engages with modernism through the way in which the trees create the cube-like form. It is an object to be walked around, whereas the White forest was to be walked through. There is a feeling of openness in the White forest, whereas the Black cube is affronting, dense, evocative, remote, and seductive in its materiality.

I have been interested in American artist Sol LeWitt’s project, Black form – dedicated to the missing Jews, 1987–89, which commemorated the missing Jewish community of Münster. The work has an interesting history of being graffitied on and destroyed, and then remade and permanently installed as a 5.5-metre-long black cuboid. Similarly, I am interested in the dual function of mourning jewellery – the way in which it marks loss but is also seductive. For this exhibition, the aim is to generate a collective dialogue beyond my own personal history from which the project has been influenced, to a collective referencing of loss, and the marking of histories and commemorative practices that evoke a wide range of emotions.

Kathy Temin, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 1 August – 8 November 2009; My Monument: Black Cube, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, 3 September – 3 October 2009.

Text © 2009, Art & Australia Pty Ltd. Image © Kathy Temin. Reproduced with thanks.

Kathy Temin is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney: and Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington.

Notes

1 This conversation took place in June 2009.

2 When Temin made the installation Indoor monument: hard dis-play, a black and white striped knee-high maze based on Stella’s painting.

3 Corner larme cubi, 1993, was shown at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, during that year.

4 Temin studied painting at Victoria College, Prahran.