TENNIS.
SIBYL MONTAGUE
PALLAS PROJECTS
12.9.2018.
12.30pm.
SUNNY.
TENNIS.
There’s a painting by the late Norbert Schwonkowski titled Bosch that shows an ill-formed human being (as if there were any other sort) in boxer shorts opening and reaching into a fridge humming with light against a murky river of that famous Schwonkowski slop that painters drool and wonder over. Slurp. Caught between night and day, celestial and corporeal, cold and temperate, dream and reality, quotidian and fantasy, right and wrong—I'll stop there—the ill-formed human is also caught between reaching and grasping the milk, the meat, the butter, the cold pizza, the best-before-date, the whatever, the whenever…..We don't know: the night thief’s hand, in the act of reaching and retrieving the object of desire, of need, of gluttony, is cut off at the wrist as if a crime is being committed in the act of committing it. We are caught—dumbstruck with drumstick—between the perishable past and the preserved present, like the milk, the meat, the butter, the cold pizza, the best-before-date, the whatever, the whenever. “Eat or be eaten,” I say. Schwonkowski’s fridge hooked on to me years ago; only time will tell if Sibyl Montague's work at Pallas Projects Dublin will do the same. I think it will. Like Norbert’s ill-formed human, Sibyl seems to have also raided the fridge in the middle of the night, the day, the past, whenever, in her regurgitation of perishables, the perished. Floor— wall— table— sky-bound we trip over shapes and ingredients that seem out of place here, revealing our limiting tastes while challenging them in that coldest and cleanest of fridges: a jar of chillies, Frankfurters, peanuts, beer, fillets of gelatine, bones of a bird, fur ball of faux fur, piss, condoms, sweaty, mâché’d, calcifying waste (and Hello Magazine)... there's lots here to taste and consume with eyes and nose but daren't imagine ingest with mouth. Here the mouth is for telling stories—pieces of Sibyl, pieces of me, pieces of you, pieces of celebrities, pieces of Sean. Sean's Story involves a satellite dish on its back like a beetle, like a sieve, like the fire that warmed last night's knacker drinking, with strewn beer cans drowned and hardened in plaster, in cement, in forgetting; memory set so as not to forget. I won't. I Promise. REMEMBER, remember, r e m e m b e r….. A Too Tall table tells stories, too, of Prohibition, of sex, of something past its best-before-date waiting to be jilted. On my watch, when the exhibition wasn’t officially open, mould was growing on the meaty slabs of gelatine. If left longer?… well that’s a story for the future. Like metaphor, the hook to real life is temperamental, temporary, personal, and although some stuff hooks to life better than other stuff, rust, mould, crow’s feet come with time. We live. We die. We leave stuff behind. Headphones hook a branch of another branch stood standing in a plaster placeholder ready to take you for a limp around the gallery like a portable IV Stand feeding you sounds that wean you further from sense, from this space. I take them off, here is what I want to remember, to be, for now. Anyone for tennis. Sibyl's white, wraparound racket tape elevates us from the downward plumbing of dirt where piss, beer, condoms, memories sieve through the gutter of our consumption, to a cleaner place. But bet Federer stinks in the fifth set; arse cracks don’t lie. This is not art tied in a bow or stepping on the purple coattails of a revisionist canon of art history as Daniel Rios Rodriguez does, dances, slips on Forrest Bess at Kerlin Gallery currently. Gentlemen please! No. The coattail that Sibyl is stepping on is muddy. Of course artists have used perishables before: shit, sperm, beans, whatever, whenever. I'm not going to look them up now and pretend I remember; I forget. I won't this. Remember the day we played tennis?
so far…
