Clive Murphy: Making Space

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of the shutter release buttons, the rustling of crank of levers that advanced the film.
“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now”
He seemed immensely pleased by this.


In Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel White Noise two professors consider the spectacle of THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. It is the index of a world in which meanings proliferate and take on a life of their own but yet nonetheless implicate the invisible community of people required for such a world to be possible. So too does it point to the irreducibly social dimension of the Event, its creation and activation through the interaction of people ‘here’ and ‘now’. But DeLillo’s words may also serve as an index to the work of Irish sculptor and visual artist Clive Murphy. For Murphy’s work has consistently engaged with questions concerning the individual’s position within the sheer mass of information facing us, the gravitational pull of these signifiers and sites of meaning, and the way in which the relationship between individual and environment is colored, if not wholly determined by the social and cultural forces with which we may negotiate but rarely control. And yet despite these sources of alienation Murphy, like DeLillo’s character who is “immensely pleased by this”, displays no resignation. His work precisely embodies a negotiation with these cultural forces, a negotiation that, despite the seriousness of Murphy’s intent, is shot through with a playfulness that creates a space for reconfigured modes of interaction and new possibilities of artistic experience.


Ferdinand de Saussure has argued that language consists of both a signifier and a signified, whose relationship is arbitrary and ultimately conditioned by location within a system or a cultural context. As such there is no essential connection between words or images and their meanings. Murphy’s early work in the Inflatable Cardboard Box series displays an acute awareness of this and investigates the role and position of the viewer, the point where signifier and signified coalesce. His alteration of printed information on a number of these inflated boxes is a sly subversion of the forces of marketing and consumer demands, opening up a space where the viewer/consumer is freed from the binding relationship with the object promised to be held within, while also bringing the viewer face to face with the nature of these forces. The inflated space within the box holds promise, the object of our desires, while also promising literally nothing. To open is to deflate.


While such an attention to surface and the conscious embrace of low culture displays a debt to Pop Art, Murphy eschews quick productivity and mass productive techniques in favor of what he himself calls draughtsmanship . Like Tom Friedman, much of Murphy’s work is painstakingly constructed from the most unlikely materials, cardboard boxes, cassette tapes patiently rewound, black bin liners joined into sculptures. Furthermore his apparent concern with surface and superficiality is underpinned by an acute sense of spatiality. His series of street signs, utilizing American mid-west sermon titles extend the manipulation of physical space in Inflatable Cardboard Box to the manipulation of social and cultural space. The appropriation of space for ideological ends by religious billboards is defused by Murphy’s acts of de-contextualization. Language itself is rescued from ideology, or at the very least is offered as fair game to all competing ideologies. The significance of these actions becomes more pronounced in the context of Belfast where Murphy lived and worked for many years. The sectarian murals, banners and slogans there are a testament of how language and space is politicized - where one’s geographic and symbolic location can only be accurately gauged by ‘the writing on the wall’.

The symbolic life of landscape and the environment is further investigated in Murphy’s Untitled piece, from 2005, constructed from found audiocassette tapes, amplified and spooled along the gallery walls to delineate a primitive landscape. The personal history of the cassette tape, the legacy of mix-tapes, sharing, and their evocation of a specific period in the history of sound at once indicates the life of the individual and a shared past. The public and the private are brought together in the strands of tape collected and reworked, implicating collective memory and, like Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks of the West, pointing to the evocation of real and imagined social milieu through sound.


While Murphy has understood his more recent work on bouncy sculptures and castles as “a revisit to the world of the inflatable”, there is a very real sense in which it a natural development from and a deepening of his earlier work. All his work has a subversive edge, and both his bouncy sculptures, such as 2005’s I want to be you, and his bouncy castle unveiled this year at Mercer Union Gallery in Toronto, with their defined lines and austere black appearance, mimic the pretensions of modernist architecture and the self-conscious severity of artists like Malevich. Yet this mimicry is extended and transformed into critique by Murphy’s development of his work toward an aesthetics of the Event. The invitational aspect of I want to be you – not only its title, but its rising and falling armature, beckoning and luring the viewer into its midst – becomes central in his 2006 bouncy castle. The bouncy castle is there to be literally bounced on and as such becomes an interactive social event and an opportunity for new configurations of human relations. As such it distances itself from the aloofness of modernist and late modernist/minimalist aesthetics by reconsidering the art gallery as a site for unselfconscious social interaction and by questioning accepted distinctions between high and low culture.

Furthermore, the black plastic and rubber surfaces of these works have an unmistakably fetishistic feel, a theme that can even be extended back to Murphy’s untitled piece, in which the shiny black strands of cassette tape are stretched along the walls of the gallery, in a manner not too dissimilar to the walls of a dungeon. Both Marx and Freud have emphasized fetishism’s capacity to create distance, in that the object of the fetish comes to insinuate itself between two terms of a relationship by symbolically replacing one of those terms. In this light, it is apparent that much of Murphy’s work can be understood as an effort to engage with this distancing. From his early inflatable boxes, in their concern with mass production right through to the bouncy castle and its emphasis on human relations in the ‘here’ and ‘now’, a strength of Murphy’s work is its power to indicate sites and strategies whereby this distance can be indicated, subverted or altered.

Yet it is for this very reason that, despite such serious considerations, Murphy’s work is not overbearingly earnest or ideologically driven. Through the subversion and parody of social and aesthetic ideologies, he himself refuses to accept any ideology. Like his street signs that were appropriated in Brussels in 2003 “as the battle cry for a group of immigrant residents living in an area allowed to sink into dereliction by property developers” his work refuses single meaning by being open to all. His work is characterized by this openness and an immediacy that gives the work its particularly inclusive nature. We, like DeLillo’s speaker, should be immensely pleased by this.