Spellbound

Playing for the high one, dancing with the devil, Going with the flow, it’s all the same to me.

- Motörhead, ‘Ace of Spades’, 1980

A failure is a man who has blundered but is not capable of cashing in on the experience.

- Elbert Hubbard

I think in Spellbound Terry Urbahn is becoming hippy. Actually this persona was starting to emerge like an involuntary belch in ‘Trunk Rock’ (2003), taking a swipe at what Robert Leonard characterises as ‘twig art’ of the ‘70s and ‘80s that ‘celebrated some authentic Pakeha past’ . We see Terry the Hippy fully formed in 2006, participating in Smoke Signals, a group show at the Hirschfeld Gallery in Wellington. Urbahn’s installation had the bewigged and sunglassed artist sitting amongst plaster tree-mountains adopting a hippy-guru pose. All this is strange because Urbahn is definitely from the punk side of the tracks and this informs most of his past work. His best-known work, The Karaokes (1998) starred the artist reliving his punk band youth, performing a cover version of ‘Peaches’ by English punk band The Stranglers. His work personifies punk’s DIY amateurism, a position that provides an antidote to hippy utopianism.
November 2 - 18 2005

In Spellbound Urbahn couples art and performance with ritualistic spell casting, presenting both as strategies to deal with failure and fascination. But there is a paradox prowling around this exhibition as it slips from one allegiance to the other, in danger of tipping the whole show off its axis.

On the one hand there is Urbahn, the traveller from down-under who, no matter how well-worn the path, how many times the story has been told and retold (in a uniquely down-under repetition compulsion), is still knocked sideways by the uncanny displacement of seeing in the flesh often cited but never seen places. That person is awestruck, impressed, humbled - perhaps aware of having reached ‘an authentic Pakeha past’. On the other, there is the canny artist, one who makes things in response to life’s bringings, and who is used to doing it with tongue in cheek, hand over the mic, stumbling over his failures with flair. These two characters battle it out, and their struggle is played out in the tenuously matched mind-map of installations that make up Spellbound.

The first thing that strikes you upon entering Urbahn’s makeshift world is the noise. Heavy metal chords clash with sonorous spell incantations, emerging from adjacent monitors. The hub of the show is a tenuous web of connections emerging from the video mosh-pit of plastic bottles tossed by the bifurcating Tiber River where the parted waters meet in the slipstream of the Tiber Island. Moving maniacally to a tumbling riff provided by metal band Motörhead, the band’s occult leanings link the head-banging bottles to the conversation going on between the paintings in the adjacent wall-mounted video. The tumbling together mirrors the jumbled gathering of parts of which this show is constructed.

Urbahn animated paintings he videoed in the Louvre with spells fished from the Internet, the contemporary artist’s recycling bin. The spells evoked for Urbahn ‘Europe’s oldness’, a kind of medieval mindset, which, in a casual collapse of time, he put in the mouths of Renaissance narrators. As an example of things that people resort to in order to cover up failure, the spells succeed beautifully. But they activate more than a laugh. The distorted computer-generated voices recite love potions for the impotent, money-making for the broke, spells ‘to make you less noticeable’ which ‘may not work’. The effect see-saws between an irreverent teenage giggle and a disconcerting alienation at the disembodied voice of technology reciting New Age wish lists. The feel is that of a teenage séance conducted in a deserted house, part fascination, part skepticism.

In Spellbound Urbahn couples art and performance with ritualistic spell casting, presenting both as strategies to deal with failure and fascination. But there is a paradox prowling around this exhibition as it slips from one allegiance to the other, in danger of tipping the whole show off its axis.

On the one hand there is Urbahn, the traveller from down-under who, no matter how well-worn the path, how many times the story has been told and retold (in a uniquely down-under repetition compulsion), is still knocked sideways by the uncanny displacement of seeing in the flesh often cited but never seen places. That person is awestruck, impressed, humbled - perhaps aware of having reached ‘an authentic Pakeha past’. On the other, there is the canny artist, one who makes things in response to life’s bringings, and who is used to doing it with tongue in cheek, hand over the mic, stumbling over his failures with flair. These two characters battle it out, and their struggle is played out in the tenuously matched mind-map of installations that make up Spellbound.

The first thing that strikes you upon entering Urbahn’s makeshift world is the noise. Heavy metal chords clash with sonorous spell incantations, emerging from adjacent monitors. The hub of the show is a tenuous web of connections emerging from the video mosh-pit of plastic bottles tossed by the bifurcating Tiber River where the parted waters meet in the slipstream of the Tiber Island. Moving maniacally to a tumbling riff provided by metal band Motörhead, the band’s occult leanings link the head-banging bottles to the conversation going on between the paintings in the adjacent wall-mounted video. The tumbling together mirrors the jumbled gathering of parts of which this show is constructed.

Urbahn animated paintings he videoed in the Louvre with spells fished from the Internet, the contemporary artist’s recycling bin. The spells evoked for Urbahn ‘Europe’s oldness’, a kind of medieval mindset, which, in a casual collapse of time, he put in the mouths of Renaissance narrators. As an example of things that people resort to in order to cover up failure, the spells succeed beautifully. But they activate more than a laugh. The distorted computer-generated voices recite love potions for the impotent, money-making for the broke, spells ‘to make you less noticeable’ which ‘may not work’. The effect see-saws between an irreverent teenage giggle and a disconcerting alienation at the disembodied voice of technology reciting New Age wish lists. The feel is that of a teenage séance conducted in a deserted house, part fascination, part skepticism.

As the camera pans across a painting showing cavities of Christ’s body being probed by a doubting Thomas, those cavities are echoed in the cardboard and plaster castle which dominates the centre of the gallery, its interior lit by pulsing Christmas lights like a department store fairy grotto. Looking like a teenage ritualistic object, the sculpture has Urbahn’s familiar ‘punk’ DIY aesthetic, hastily but artfully constructed. Are we invited to doubt the authenticity of Urbahn’s experience, his reproduction of it, or his sarcastic/mocking position?

For instance, he creates a mockery of the celebration of consumerism on which tourism rests, the proof of conquest: ‘I was there’, ‘I owned that site/sight’. His sources are purloined, ready made, or cheap. He is interested in the detritus, the out-of-frame or hastily framed (a Polaroid of the artist as Mona Lisa peeks out between the two video monitors - a Duchampian cover version which took precisely 6 minutes 6 seconds according to the wall-drawn time- scale punctuating the show).

When Urbahn does wade into the mainstream, he flounders, and lets us know it. His attempt to faithfully draw famous sites from memory is an unintended example of failure in process. Finding his memory unreliable, Urbahn had to resort to family snapshots in which the buildings took second place to render his awkwardly earnest pencil sketches. They look like bad high school drawings, but time consuming, a testament to effort and good intentions. Displayed like a slap-on wall fresco the drawings take up a whole wall with unframed, barefaced cheek.

The paradox running through the show occurs as the awestruck response becomes a failed cover version. Spellbound teased the viewer with the possibility of a transformative experience, and gave us a makeshift facsimile of the artist’s trip. Rather than presenting a tourist’s trophy room, Urbahn staged an amateurish cover version of Europe. It was endearingly and unexpectedly authentic.