Laurence Hegarty, installation view
These are the particulars of Laurence Hegarty’s recent installation at Miami: a white cow laps contentedly at a blue plywood puddle collecting under a blue plywood drip from the ceiling; a motley crew with migratory urges—a priest on wheels and three wheeled piggy banks—clusters nearby, overlooked by a bank of cardboard movie cameras; off by itself a windowless factory maintains a stony muteness. Charm galore here, but also all the terms of a Bakhtinian paradigm: the “hybrid utterance” of a monologue using more than one kind of speed (Hegarty’s critique phrased in processes that range from wrapping to carving to assembling to casting to printing in two and three dimensions); the heteroglossia of Marxism, psychoanalysis and cinema studies to convey his refracted authorial intentions; the intertextuality of contiguous elements (what does it mean to put a piggy bank, a camera and a priest next to one another?); the chronotope of interlocking time (pre- and post-industrial) and space (the group as “here”; the discrete object as “there”). Then there is the ultimate Bakhtinian trope—the carnival—in Hegarty’s project repeatedly and literally enacted through parades, crocodiles of rapscallion toy figures, battered and encrusted, often waving banners, often wheeled like floats.
Hegarty’s parades go beyond simple reversals of power and overturnings, however. Ever on the move, his sojourning characters seem also bent on a quest. They might be marching on the Bastille or they might be caught up in some bildungsroman pilgrimage. The stakes of the search are high; occasionally Hegarty sounds black notes in amongst the reveling license of temporary immunity. Earlier works included a suicide leaper and a row of undersized body bags. Though such extreme bass notes are missing from this particular installation, the memory of them informs that mute cell block of a factory. Grimly isolated, a block in shape and “built” of drawn block lines, it conveys the monolith of capitalist exploitation by rhyming the structure with that of a prison. The touch is light—this is a small and, again, toy-like model—as if to suggest the impossibility of revisiting such a thoroughly dissected nexus as that of labor and capital without using a set of quotation marks. Often and often Hegarty uses cartoon shorthand as a way of inserting that hyper punctuation. Consequently he is able to suggest toxic contamination in the sword-of-Damocles drip and its accumulating puddle while at the same time disarming us with their familiar comic-strip stylization.
Simultaneity not synthesis is the watchword. That cow is a sacred white but sports pronounced udders, a reference to the banning of teats on cow images in certain U.S. primary school textbooks. Likewise, the piggy bank is an endearing childhood artifact but a perverse one, training children to deny their natural spendthrift urges and equating the acquisition of ready cash with the violence of smashing open the bank to retrieve its contents. And although the “piggy” in piggy bank is actually a corruption of the middle English “pygg,” the word for a type of clay used for household jars in which money was sometimes hoarded, the alleged greediness of pigs is glorified. Poor kids! Poor pigs!
The pigs, as noted, are on wheels. So is the priest, bearing the Eucharist—the most sacred element in the Christian mass. On roller skates, so to speak, the cleric turns fool. Minor cathedral officials burlesquing the sacred ceremonies was of course a staple of the carnival. The sliding identity in that festival and the slippage implied in wheels endorses the mobility of a view that deliberately resists labeling, that embraces the unfinalizable self, contradiction and inconsistency. And these transporting devices are themselves dialectical. The mobilized characters project the sort of Katzenjammer zaniness of joyful escape and annoying disruption, but they cannot budge under their own power. They must be pushed or pulled. The kinetic has recently become of interest to Hegarty. In addition to the actually leaping suicide, there was once a high-wire-circus-act sculpture, both dependent on gravity for their prime mover, and both needing a helping human hand to overcome gravity afterwards, to be put back in place to do it all over again. A begging bear raised its tin cup when somebody pulled its strings. So too the priest and the piggy banks. Religion and money don’t budge until they are made to do so. In the end, Hegarty’s avoidance of mechanization, his reliance on human agency, is in keeping with his politics. We are on our own with neither “deus” nor “machina” to come to our rescue. This is just one of many modest refusals—the artist avoids large scale and expensive materials (cardboard is a favorite), but these modest refusals go hand in hand with an ambitious allusiveness and perseverance in a body of work that is piratically regenerative, shouldering aside conventions as it swarms across the viewer’s threshold into a place where genuine dialogue is possible.
Bridey Schufli