Steven Gontarski & Martin Maloney - New Neurotic Realism (1999)

Art Design Publicity 3(2) - Totally Walker | Published 14 August 2011
Page 6 of 9

Steven Gontarski is an American sculptor (b. Philadelphia, 1972) who studied for an MA at Goldsmiths’ in 1997. His work continued the tradition of Western erotic art: standing and reclining figures that intertwined and even merged. According to Dick Price, his rubbery figures fetishised “nightclub posing and distorted copulation”. Gontarski himself considered them both humorous and grotesque. In terms of composition, there were tributes to famous marbles of the Italian Renaissance, but the bodies were highly generalised and abstracted, as in the case of Henry Moore’s work. What was unusual about Gontarski’s was the fact that they were made, not from wood or stone, but from fabrics, PVC, polyester wadding, synthetic hair, transfer tattoos and real, mundane clothes such as socks. They were the result of sewing rather than carving skills. For this reason lines on the sculptures— that is, the seams— were as important to the artist as lines in his drawings. Gontarski combined opaque and transparent materials that were often shiny— giving them a space-age look. “Mutant” and “humanoid” were two adjectives critics used. At a distance certain sculptures were attractive and complex, but close-up some viewers found their plastic skins repulsive and their pretty pink and blue colours cloying.

Martin Maloney showed a new (1998) series whose extravagant size, we suspect, was due in part to the fact that the Saatchi Gallery walls were huge and required filling. In our view, their monumental, public scale was inappropriate given the intimacy of their subject matter— gay sex in clubs— but perhaps that was Maloney’s intention. Besides their sexual explicitness, what was distinctive about his figurative paintings was their style; it has been described as “amateurish, artless and artful, bad, botched, cack-handed, cartoon-like, child-like, faux naif, ham-fisted, informal, sloppy and ugly”. The hands of Maloney’s figures reminded one critic of bunches of bananas and the artist himself freely admitted that he found hands difficult to paint. He told one journalist: ’I do the best I can. Nobody’s perfect. Maybe that’s one of the things we’re trying to say.’’[8] Those interested in new art, it appeared, had now to adjust to low horizons and expectations.

Martin Maloney’s neo-naive mannerisms seemed designed to foil critical condemnation in advance: it was hard to dismiss his paintings as ’bad’ knowing that they were self-consciously clumsy. Similarly, it was futile to attack Tomoko Takahashi’s installation on the grounds that it was “a load of rubbish!” because that is literally what it was.

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