MISSING IN ACTION Missing in action Michael Lindeman lands us in a suspended and eerie world. This is a world teeming with both the panic and the ‘mute submission’(1) of an advanced capitalist culture – a world where useful objects are mangled and discarded while cartoon ‘baddies’ remain immaculately intact. Responding to recent experiences in the United States and Australia, Lindeman aggregates and extends the synthesisation of Pop in order to ‘see’ this contemporary world, in spite of its overwhelming and blinding wallpapering of images. His haunted vignettes and plasticised characters of a disposable culture suggest both an aftermath and a premonition. And here we hover, somewhere between hope and gutted inevitability. Like Lindeman, we too become ‘missing in action’, lured by and caught within the aphasic discontent of capitalism’s endless production line. Our consumptive viewing triggers the commencement of the work as we oscillate between being missing in action and being part of the action. The processes of repetition and appropriation are extended by Lindeman to become a kind of ‘glitch’ that consolidates the works in ‘Missing in action’. This glitch, the suspended section of dead space, is an intriguing metaphor for an immobilising cultural anxiety, and provides a clue to our location within this exile. We are missing but not lost. There has been a deliberate raking through the rubble of an unhinged Americanised culture. These are uneasy environs; they reflect broader political structures that threaten to topple at any moment. There are ambiguous boundaries between the goodies and baddies, jarring the innate childish need for an obvious dichotomy between the two. Lindeman points to consumerism’s blurred boundary between good and evil in The Hamburgerler. The ambiguous smile and partially masked face of this multinational fast-food villain suggest a sinister motive, enhanced by the precisely executed finish of the work. Co-conspirators with The Hamburgerler are Skeletor, the nightmarish Lord of Destruction from Masters of the Universe, and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s archenemy, Krang. The techno-scientific mutant Krang is beyond pop-ironic when he says, ‘I can’t wait to rule your world’,(2) a sentiment echoed in the disturbingly imperial aspirations of contemporary political powers. These characters are sourced by Lindeman through a readymade practice and contain imprints of both playful fantasy and growing up in an environment of plastic and visual inundation. Collected together in this way they threaten imminent peril. Bongo Vacation appears to disrupt this shadow, yet the fantastic, shimmying vibrations of the girl and bongo-playing boys are withheld in the flatness of the painting’s surface. The hot rhythm of this Shangri-la is not a frequency we can register in our silent glitch space, further exacerbating the gap between reality and the idyllic. We are onlookers of the fantasy space in Bongo Vacation, a space that is, to quote the artist: ‘beyond revolution – a refuge from the grinding and anxious environments we inhabit’. Warmth, time and memory surround the two readymade works, Stolen, the Night I Drank the Colt 45 and Those Were Wild Times My Friend. Rolling fun, enigmatic connections, seductive reminiscence – these are tender works. Implicitly linked through their titles, the works bounce kinetically from each other like an in-joke between mates. The machismo of the beer’s title, the theft of the sign and the defiant disregard for its instruction lace the work with youthful testosterone. In turn, this is rounded-up and tamed into the art unit, much like the process of growing up – containing, yet cherishing, the wild things we were. Kaboom points to the gross excesses of consumerism. After each storm that ripped through New York during Lindeman’s studio residency, broken and abandoned umbrellas littered the streets as if shed by the storm itself. He collected these umbrellas in huge numbers, describing them within the gallery space as a ‘graveyard of mass production’. Kaboom also subtly denigrates the consumerist pursuit by demonstrating that any membrane we attempt to erect between nature and ourselves is ultimately penetrable. The toon-plastic paintings and readymades are consolidated by Lindeman’s series of paintings titled New York Ghost. While in New York, Lindeman documented bicycle remains throughout the city, describing them as the ‘scavenged and skeletal remains of what was once a functional mode of transport’. The paintings represent the glitch – that dead space – through the isolation of the bike remnants within the pared-back canvas and scaffold surrounds. These decomposing, deconstructed forms, abandoned by ghost riders, are anchored to the city until, bit-by-bit, they are stripped free. Rather than a despondent shrug at the powerful anti-social greed of capitalism, this series suggests an intriguing tale of an underground currency and invention. The bicycle becomes an ephemeral, cyclical entity, propagating throughout the city – a gesture to the idyllic vision of Bongo Vacation. ‘Missing in action’ is Michael Lindeman’s synthesised, complex vision of the world. This world synergises the binding, shabby reality of a late-capitalist Americanisation with rich utopian imaginings. (1) Sigmund Freud, cited in D. Klass, P. R. Silverman & S. L. Nickman (eds), Continuing Bonds, New Understandings of Grief, Taylor & Francis, Washington DC, 1996, p. 23. (2) Krang, as quoted in www.ninjaturtles.com/html/profil l 1.htm Talulah Stephenson |
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