The visible and invisible dimensions of an artwork rarely occur or conclude synchronically. As one introduces the other, the other draws from first into deeper resonances, darker ironies and sharper delineations of its still static depictions.
In these works a wooden girl enacts a series of vacation activities. She is nearly always alone and nearly always depicted quite self sufficient and confident in her solitude. Whether this is flying over the island or just waiting in the airport, the boundaries appear resolved with a sense of assurance, but do we find ourselves to be complicit in witnessing her across a membrane of economy? Are we witnesses to a Pinocchio-like journey of becoming or a technological ingestion into performative class & capitalist exchange; true self or a truth spoken?
While Foucault’s lectures from 1982 mostly address philosophy and the conditions and contexts wherein Greek and Roman thinkers believed the attainment of philosophy possible, his analysis, in its address of the self in pursuit of its self bare many resonantly adjacent insights to how the depiction of a wooden young woman windsurfing might be fathomed artistically.
There is a buffet of achievements produced in Cole Denyer’s Slaves in Paradise and in each one a secondary sphere of recognitions and prosthetic features testify to an embedded socio-economic frame. While frequently circling back to the procedures of tutelage invoked by & about philosophy, we see her a world of inaccessible interiority. The short-term transactional formatting of vacation commodity rentals function almost entirely within a system of unseen but omnipresent surveillance & content creation; vacation model of depictive capture & representational accumulation posits something of a trial by fire format where doing is immediately adjacent to proving. Garnished with the wages of elsewhere, incubated introductory encounters to whale watching, swimming with dolphins or any other such activity are always accompanied by an onboard staff of documentary workers producing a secondary membrane of evidence available for purchase upon completion.
This invisible strata of service labour dictates the frame of the events to produce talismanic evidence of individuation. The experience leases identity, which circularly confirms attitude & access to expenditure; even in consumer culture, what Foucault states about culture remains true, it must both claim universality & be accessible only to an accepted few. It is through the proscenium of this needle that I want to conclude my point. Has Denyer presented Eric Gill’s Petra to finally achieve the respite & autonomy denied her human model? Has she arrived at La Gomera only to find that her chance at becoming truly human in the Aktionanalytische Organization already imploded before her arrival?
What is Art & what Arts do we service? For which investment brokerage magistrates do we serve or swerve? Under what conditions does the interiorised world building which Denyer has subtended these images meaningfully or forcefully challenge the banality of consumer culture? Or is this capital sanctioned transactional culture of access where we are all at? We don’t have time for real attractions or interactions or to Point Break our way into the underbelly of the ocean.
Is the will to fashioning incubator spaces really still a gateway to communities of dis-regulated intimacy; or is it enough to enter replication, fill the frame & receive affirmation for the expenses taken. Is this our care of self? Petra can do all things but nowhere does she permeate beneath the water’s surface. Perhaps, this is the limit of my conclusion or simply the length of time I had to hold my breath & write this.
By Willie Brisco
