Thomas Houseago. Bastards

Hulking, mad and Luddite, the sculptures of Thomas Houseago shatter the silence with their assault on good manners, civility and tastefulness. They squat, stretch, thrust and cower, as if enacting a palette of dementedly exaggerated emotions, like players in a Greek tragedy or Japanese Kabuki theatre. As objets d’art, however, they seem unfinished, the techniques and substances of their manufacture still obvious on their grubby skins. It is as if they lack the decency even to dress themselves properly before launching into fervent and deranged tirades aimed at any passerby who’ll stop long enough to listen.

The irony is that much of the time they’re simply trying to stand up, to hold balance and to keep their poise. Their extraordinary positions are primarily the result of thoughts becoming forms, of images being born into three dimensions and of matter (wood, plaster, hemp or metal) being persuaded to raise itself up from the floor. Quite often Houseago’s sculptures are only a short evolutionary step away from being drawings, trimmed from outlines of figures that he makes on sheets of plaster. Nevertheless, they rage and pull against the two dimensional – even when, in the case of the masks that he makes, they are primarily flat and made to hang on the wall. These are emphatically objects, with all the vivid, dangerous, totemic power that things, rather than pictures, have in our world. For the last decade and a half, Houseago has been committed to an investigation into the potentials of figurative sculpture in an age in which the haptic and the handmade in art were overshadowed by other, more cerebral processes and activities. Even before he moved from Europe to Los Angeles, a city filled with glossy, hard and sharp-edged thoughts and objects, he keenly felt the radicality of his position. In the same way that, as a child, his obsession with drawing was seen as something of a defect by his friends and family, so his idiosyncratic involvement with figuration as a young artist was often seen with suspicion.

How can figuration be so alarming, so threatening, when to many it would seem to be the height of convention? Perhaps it is because it reveals the artist’s askance relation to time: his refusal to press unthinkingly onward towards the ever-receding horizon of the modern age, taking instead a determinedly non-linear view of history, in which, as he says, ‘one thing didn’t necessarily lead to the other’. Perhaps it is because of the potency, even pagan witchery, of creating objects that stand in for other human beings. I was reminded of this only this morning when I found myself sharing a department store elevator with a mannequin dressed in a suit and tie. The effect was beyond unnerving. Houseago reminds us that, when first revealed, Michelangelo’s David was seen as a horrific aberration by contemporary Florentines. Figurative sculpture, in his words, is a ‘fairly gross thing’. It is even more disturbing when its uncanny presence as an autonomous being is clearly underwritten by its status as a man-made product: think of the filmic chill of seeing the wires hanging out the back of a character’s head, or the unmistakeable bolts either side of the neck.

Houseago’s work’s roughness, its unpalatability, is bound up with a particular frankness about what it is. He is fascinated by the traces of process left on the skins of his sculptures – the ‘series of actions’ which the object carries with it out of the studio and into the world. Raw plaster is especially efficient in this regard; not only is it, even when hard, evocative of its own fast and wet contingency, but it absorbs traces of the world around it (dirt, dust, touch) like a dry white cloth.

His sculptures carry marks from the world in other ways too. It is impossible, in fact, for objects such as Houseago’s to resist picking up scuffs and bruises from the historical playground that they find themselves fighting in. This exhibition is titled ‘Bastards’. Houseago is not disowning his sculptures however, nor even implying that they are without parents. The dizzying truth is that it is impossible to trace the genealogy of these figures. Not only to they belong from the artist: they are as much connected to prehistoric image-making as they are part of the language of Hanna-Barbera cartoons. They are born from Cubism’s dialogue between two- and three-dimensional representation as well as the work of Paul McCarthy, Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore, Auguste Rodin, Donatello, pre-Columbian figurines… one could cycle back through generations of image- and object-makers forever, ending up exhausted and none the wiser. To do so would miss Houseago’s point: that these works exist in a flattened-out plane in which influences and legacies live side by side, stretching forever towards the horizon. A place, in fact, not unlike the city of Los Angeles.

Jonathan Griffin

Thomas Houseago
Bastards