2009 DARREN SYLVESTER

EXHIBITION IMAGES

In Darren Sylvester’s video artwork I Was The Last In The Carpenters’ Garden (2008), the artist himself —all stove-pipe jeans and plastic bracelets— wanders through an eerie unreality: a garden constructed on a naked, black-backed soundstage. As piped-in running-water sounds seem to mock ‘calming’ new-age tropes, Sylvester walks tentatively, almost reverently through the unnatural, unconvincing set. As its title alludes, this ersatz Garden of Eden is Sylvester’s own temple of worship: a tacky replica of the backyard of cheesy ’70s pop siblings The Carpenters.

When the Downey, California house that Karen and Richard Carpenter grew up in was undergoing radical renovations in 2007, the Japanese-styled garden was to be razed. So, in a Melbourne studio, Sylvester built himself a mock-up, rolling out reams of coloured fabric and hysterically-green fake grass, hand-carving the same Romaji (which, in the garden, read: ‘Karen’, ‘Richard’, and ‘Superstar’) on wooden plaques, and building his own bridge over troubled waters; all to painstakingly exact proportions. But why?

As a critique of cultural appropriation, whereby The Carpenters’ transplantation of a traditional Japanese garden was steeped in inauthenticity? As a commentary on the emptiness of hero-worship, and the comic inability of genuinely connecting with those pop-cultural icons you adore from afar? As a representation of the Second Life-ing of modern existence, where the not-real can be equal to —or, indeed, be more significant than— the physically genuine? Or, like those unending ranks of musicians that set out to recreate the exact sound of their favourite 1968 LP, was this Sylvester’s naked attempt at try to summon an imaginary, mythical time from pop-culture’s past that never actually really existed? I Was The Last In The Carpenters’ Garden is a little of all of these things: Sylvester calling it a “fan-based” work, steeped in the earnest geekery of pop-cultural devotion, yet also taking inspiration from the spartan sound-stages and sharpened mass-cultural criticism of Lars von Trier’s sermonic cinematic studies in ironic Americana (Dogville (2003), Manderlay (2005)).

But, in truth, in building his own shrine to The Carpenters’ shrine, Sylvester has outed himself as a pure perp, an artist embodying one of the new millennium’s most popular modes of social miscreancy: the stalker.

In this era of increasingly psychotic fan-dom, Sylvester is out to prove his stripes. Meticulously researching this beloved backyard —trading the minutiae of trivia with the devotees on Carpenters mailing lists, calling up fans who’d visited the Newville Avenue house, using Google Maps’ imagery to measure his set-piece blueprints against such pixelated ‘reality’— Sylvester seems almost like some artistic John Hinckley; his rebuilt garden a grand gesture made to stake a claim of obsessive love that goes beyond that of any other follower. This isn’t an act of devotion, but an act of ego.

Karen Carpenter died in 1983. The jostling isn’t to get close to her, so to speak, but to be the last to walk on her grave. Taken in this context, the title of Sylvester’s video seems like sheer message-board boast: I Was The Last In The Carpenters Garden. As artist, Sylvester could’ve made the work as an installation, inviting others to wander through his physical facsimile, to share in the shrine that he’d built. Instead, the video is, itself, designed as a remnant, a piece of pointed pop-cultural memorabilia showing a moment forever receding, further and further, into the past. Torn down after the camera stopped rolling, this faux garden has gone the way of the true one; these video images dealing in memories of memories, in ghosts of ghosts.

With The Carpenters, Karen Carpenter, and the Carpenters’ garden all long gone, there’s a definite sense of finality, here; I Was The Last In The Carpenters Garden not merely a shrine to Karen, but to Sylvester himself. There the artist is, wandering through this garden for one last time. He’s the last man standing: the omega Carpenters fan. This isn’t the first time Sylvester has used video to make a curious study of hero worship; You Should Let Go Of A Dying Relationship (2006) finding a similar duality of homage to both hero and self. In that work, Sylvester fastidiously recreated the video-clips for David Bowie’s Heroes (1977) and Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights (1978), casting himself, both times, as each respective star.

Finding the artist frocked up in near-authentic pantomime, the videos seek to summon the spirit of their star subjects, but inadvertently dredge up the spectre of disposable pop-cultural dross; reminiscent of MTV’s short-lived, early-’00s reality show Becoming, where the irony-free bastion of global teen monoculture took ‘lucky fans’ of MTV-approved acts and gussied them up to look just like the figures of their obsession.

That already-forgotten program followed a familiar reality-television model, where the unsuspecting subject is whisked away from their humdrum daily life, thrown into a whirlwind of tacky makeover and gormless product-placement, and transformed into a new, improved human. Robbed of that hackneyed narrative, and torn away from the hyper-capitalist obsession with the new, You Should Let Go Of A Dying Relationship resounds with a certain sense of sadness; it existing not in the perpetual ‘now’ of syndicated television, but in a past whose in-hindsight naïveté grows more wholesome with each passing season.

Unlike Carpenter, neither Bush nor Bowie is dead, but who they were in those iconic, three-decades-ago moments is long gone; their smoke-machine-swamped figures like spectral wraiths, dancing in the opaque haze of memory.

Sylvester flips this notion with a pair of new still images: Take Me To You (2009) and Take Me To You Again (2009). The twin works are headshots of crooners captured mid-note; frozen in front of lurid backdrops whose eyesore colours highlight how this performance is, in essence, an ‘unnatural act’. Inspired by a pair of circa-late-’70s photos of Bryan Ferry and Grace Jones on the set of English chart-show Top Of The Pops, Sylvester, drawing on his experience in restaging Bush/Bowie videos, focused on the notion of the television performance —a mimed pantomime— as the ultimate in empty theatricality.

Yet, rather than recreating each image, Sylvester used them as a starting-off point. Recruiting models that looked like older, less stylish versions of Ferry and Jones, Sylvester summons the passage of time in an aloof way. Running counter to his preservationist works, Take Me To You and Take Me To You Again are not about precious moments captured and treasured, but about sheer repetition. The figures in these images look time-worn, veterans who’ve trod the boards for years, summoning the same sentiment from the same songs until it’s all reflex; original emotion replaced by the ingrained habits of their stageshow.

Interestingly, these images have come about a year into Sylvester’s own experiences as live musical act; he, apparently, learning swiftly the crushing repetition of gigging. Having previously played in the short-lived, Shonen-Knife-ish comic-garage combo The Plurals, 2008 found Sylvester working as a solo artist. Largely, he focused on recording his own debut album, an “MOR background record” to accompany I Was The Last In The Carpenters’ Garden.

As neophyte to audio recording, Sylvester took a magpie’s approach: using the same microphone that Fleetwood Mac did in the ’70s, copying Karen Carpenter’s panned-from-left-to-right drum fills, sampling the same drum-machines New Order used in the ’80s. Playing —sometimes rudimentarily— all the instruments himself, Sylvester slowly built recorded layers on his computer; these warped, half-ironic, new-millennial evocations of decades-old pop licks playing like a more hi-fi variation on the ridiculous outsider-art pastiches of LA’s audio-tape alchemist, Ariel Pink.

When not accompanying I Was The Last In The Carpenters Garden, Sylvester’s self-titled album was, initially, going to be an art object unto itself; pressed up as a limited run of 500 slabs of cherry-red wax. But, with the album receiving a regular CD release on Australian independent imprint Unstable Ape, its status has changed: undertaking an artistic evolution from vinyl fetish-object to abundantly-manufactured consumer good.

The artist explores this distinction —between aesthetic beauty and functionality, between uniqueness and mass-production— with Drum Machine (2009). As its title implies, the work involves the literal rebuilding of the Simmons Suitcase Kit; a now-extinct drum-machine whose archaic technology was actually housed within a suitcase. Sylvester’s ‘sculptural’ recreation isn’t an exact job —there’s many extraneous wires that the Simmons lacked— but it is functional, and it fits in with his current artistic kick.

Famously used by New Order in the video-clip for Perfect Kiss (1985), the Simmons soon faded from sight. The fact that it was hand-made, prone to electrical problems, and not the easiest machine in the world to work consigned it to a musical graveyard. Its death only ended up cementing its status as an object steeped in both kitsch and cool: the Simmons Suitcase Kit died young and left a beautiful corpse. Sylvester, in building it anew, is out to rescue the object from the reaper, to drag it from the eternal darkness of the pop-cultural abyss and into his romantic artistic light.

These increasingly sentimental displays of romanticism constitute a new ‘movement’ for Sylvester’s work; one that has a distinctly different tenor to the photographic work with which he made his name. Sylvester’s early career was a catalogue of glossy images matched with ironic, narrative titles; works simultaneously summoning advertising’s high-gloss sheen and blatant aspirationalism, and the obvious, cavernous ennui that so apparently lurks beneath this erected façade of shilled fantasy.

Throughout, Sylvester has used branded images and corporate iconography as a kind of recurring touchstone; his strangely sad pictures finding tender moments of alienation sprinkled with fast-food wrappers or soft drink bottles. The presence of such products is always a counterpoint to his human figures, often in a mocking, subversive way: whilst Sylvester’s camera enshrines throwaway day-to-day moments in the lurid, high-colour beam usually used to render heightened fantasy, these disposable props have the opposite effect, turning melodramatic moments mundane.

Two new still images, Help Others and Help Yourself (2009), have a curious relationship to the corporate logo. In 2008, Madonna staged a fundraising benefit for orphaned Malawi children at the UN Headquarters in New York. The gala event turned out to have been underwritten by Gucci, and was used as a platform by the fashion empire to pimp their new New York store. Recreating red-carpet snaps of Rihanna and Jessica Alba, Sylvester’s twin images posit the central figure as bland and interchangeable; the real interest, for him, is the backdrop, where UNICEF and Gucci icons sit side-by-side.

The omnipresence of the logo has turned it into urban wallpaper; it’s nigh on impossible to take a snapshot in any metropolis and not have your own personal memories tainted with the scourge of space-branding run amok. But, beyond that, whilst these two logos seeming stand for diametrically-opposed values, they’re, really as interchangeable as those out-front fame whores riding the mercurial merry-go-round of increasingly-meaningless celebrity. Both are, at essence, selling you something, whether that’s huminatarianism or handbags. Whilst Help Others and Help Yourself have strong ties to Sylvester’s photographic past, Doomed (2008) has much more in common with his recent works in other media. The diptych image finds Sylvester recreating a single frame from the movie Doom (2005), whose to-screen translation of a popular shoot-’em-up video-game is the epitome of lazy, cross-promotional Hollywood fodder.

Though set in 2046, therein a character is glimpsed, fleetingly, playing Galaxian II, a hand-held video game from the late 1970s. It’s a gamer in-joke, but one gone wrong: the actor therein holds the game sideways, rendering it essentially unplayable. This inspired Sylvester, via equal parts nostalgia and absurdity, to make the moment into a photographic portrait; to go to great lengths of exacting recreation just to point out that this inconsequential character is playing this obscure game wrong.

In seizing on this meaningless moment in a meaningless movie, Sylvester’s romanticism comes to most florid blossom. Here, the personal connection is obvious: this game, for the artist, is loaded with meaningful childhood memories; and, thereby, the literal/figurative mishandling of it, in Doom, makes it a sad remnant of a past time, misunderstood and/or ignored by the disinterested kids of subsequent generations.

By shining a light on this singular moment, Sylvester is not just pointing out some Hollywood gaffe, but exploring the supposed linearity of the passage of time: his 2008 work recreating an imagined 2046 from 2005, whilst mostly being concerned with the 1983 of his memory. As in his ambitious video-art recreationism, Sylvester hopes to save these archaic technological remnants of the past, to instil them with a personal significance that can arrest their inevitable slide into oblivion.

In this way, and in all its manifest effort, Doomed shares a sentimental sensibility with I Was The Last In The Carpenters’ Garden: one forced to immediately question why Sylvester would go to such lengths to preserve something so seemingly worthless. Watching him wander, lonely as a cloud, across his soundstage set of fake-grass and rickety bridges, the answer is obvious: Sylvester hopes, via the sentimentality of his memories and the toil of his physical labour, to let his heroes live on just a few frames longer.


Anthony Carew. March, 2009.