metropolis m

Vidya Gastaldon: Irony or Esoterics

There is renewed interest in the spiritual amongst young artists. Weary of Homo Psychologicus’s never-ending interest in the inner self and personal development, artists seem to be seeking something that once again focuses on a collective consciousness. The work of the French artist Vidya Gastaldon, born in 1974 and now living in Geneva, can be seen at the Walsall Museum, a private museum about a half-hour drive from Liverpool, housing the famous Garman Ryan Collection. Gastaldon’s video, Nucléorama (2006), is shown in a theme gallery, entitled Illustration & Symbolism, together with two of her watercolours. They hang companionably alongside a beautiful, early romantic, mystical watercolour by William Blake: Christ in the Carpenters Shop or the Humility of the Saviour (1803-1805). Gastaldon’s Etre Assis (2006) shows a kind of archetypal form, a spherical, super-worldly body, connected to the earth by a red, organic structure. Ulephant (2006) also shows an abstract world of air bubbles and currents, binding the super-terrestrial with the unearthly. Nucléorama is a video in which abstract images of a colourful primal soup, an endless white emptiness and an immeasurable black hole are interspersed with drawings of a factory in a landscape and finally, found footage of important historic religious symbols from around the world.The work evokes a world of New Age and esoteric spirituality. ‘Religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell, and spirituality is for people who have already been there,’ as Gastaldon put it in an interview. ‘Spirituality is inherent to my work.’ She sees her work as a search for an interpretation and expression of a universal consciousness. This laden theme finds a counterweight in her use of ‘light’ stylistic motifs borrowed from popular culture, such as her use of the cartoon character, Spongebob Squarepants. In her drawings, Spongebob’s brain has assumed enormous proportions, serving as an allegory for the expansion of our consciousness. Gastaldon’s video Bright Vador was inspired by the Star Wars character, Darth Vador, and she was even more exuberant in the work Appart-Dolly-Rocker (2004), a Porsche in royal attire. The Porsche is intentionally decked out as a medieval horse, in order to divest it of its status as a luxury lifestyle icon. Gastaldon playfully connects symbols taken from religion, mysticism and everyday culture with one another. Along with drawings, videos and collages, Gastaldon makes sculptures of wool, using recycled textiles. Among other things, this has resulted in installations of ‘landscapes’ of knitted mushroom-like forms, geometric wire sculptures wrapped with colourful wool and godlike, primal creatures constructed of fibres and knitted fragments, including Godmother (Baba), from 2006. ‘My sculptures are sponges that send out a certain vibration – or quantum wave – through their colours, shapes or materials. I hope it is a positive vibration.’Gastaldon is not alone in her spiritual quest. In May, as part of the Amsterdam Tijdelijk Museum, artists Melanie Bonajo and Kinga Kielczynska organized an extensive programme of workshops and performances – ranging from photographing ghosts, ritual trance journey performances and Tibetan scale performances – all in the context of the ‘medium’, in the spiritual sense. This approach was not utterly devoid of the requisite irony, but for the artists, it was also serious. ‘Today, everybody is focused on themselves. Only the fears and the desires of the individual are important. But there is no such thing as an individual; everything is connected to everything else. We want to reach back to the spiritual in art. We think that art has moved too far away from that’, they said in an interview, which was published on the website of Mediamatic.Other artists take an intentionally ironic approach in their search for a new form of spirituality. In her video series Whispering Pines, the American artist Shana Moulton plays the character of Cynthia, an alter-ego plagued by all nature of imaginary diseases. Cynthia wears Jomanda-like dresses with strange prostheses worked into them, to help them function as portals to other worlds. She is perpetually in search of cures for ailments in new-age products and cosmetics that promise to work wonders. Her videos show a young woman in search of something higher, but ultimately entangled in a never-ending desire for self-realization.Vidya Gastaldon’s spiritual works are far removed from Moulton’s ironic exaggerations of New Age trends, yet she is also wrestling with her own position. On her website, vidyarama.com, alongside examples of her work, there are photographs of herself, under the heading Cave of Ego. In one photograph, she stands on the grass, wearing a blue hippie dress, in front of the enigmatic Le Corbusier church in Roncham: Notre Dame du Haut. In another photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans, she sits blissfully, topless, at the edge of a bright blue swimming pool. The photographs present an image of a young woman filled with herself, who is apparently as at ease in our hedonistic, individualistic culture as she is in a spiritual universe. Perhaps this is an illustration of the schism in today’s artists’ search for new spirituality in art. The century of the self is deeply engrained in our pores. In search of something else, artists are trying to navigate between irony and esoterics.Vidya Gastaldon – Call It What You Like New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK19 September–23 November

Ingrid Commandeur

Recente artikelen