CHILD’S PLAY

2016 - 2017

MICHAEL KEMPSON’S CHILD’S PLAY: A MASTER OF EXACTITUDE

Dr. Scott East
Lecturer in Art Theory 
University of New South Wales Art & Design, Sydney

Catalogue essay for Michael Kempson: Work and Play
Song Ya Feng Arts Centre, Beijing, China, 2017, pages 20 - 21

In 2011 Michael Kempson undertook an artist’s residency program at Sydney’s popular tourist attraction Taronga Zoo. The residency program by that stage was in its third year, and attracted luminaries such as John Olsen, Elisabeth Cummings, and Euan Macleod to the harbour-side sanctuary to support the Zoo’s ongoing conservation work, collectively raising over $300,000. Despite the proximity the residency provided to the wild and exotic, Kempson was not taken with living creatures, rather it was the far more prosaic souvenirs of stuffed wallabies, frogs and pandas in the gift shop that sparked his attention, for example, Flora and Fauna, Past and Present & Slow and Fast all feature toys (all 2011). Initially, these subjects were combined with other elements such as in Flora and Fauna, a menagerie of stuffed animals, including a koala, a frog, and giraffe are arranged in a neat three-by-three grid alongside four banksia specimens arranged in a single column. The playfulness of the toys conjures the domestic whereas the Banksia pods appear laid out as if on the botanist’s table. 

While designed objects, Coke bottles and beer cans, had been a regular motif against the equally ubiquitous native banksias, stones and shells, the plush toys are of a different order. Firstly, the previous synthetic appearances were primarily waste, detritus discarded by consumption or careless intoxication, whereas the toys are always pristine, never taken off the shelf, not battle worn as lives lived must be. Secondly, the waste products were of consumption items, whereas the toys are already representations of nature, making Kempson’s prints representations of representations. This second-order hall-of-mirrors game emulates the seriality of printmaking, where the image is worked up on a plate to then almost like magic be transferred to the final surface. This is not at all surprising from such a masterful and dedicated printmaker, who has spent decades reflecting on and perfecting his craft. Since then, Kempson has undertaken a major cycle of work inspired by this experience which features soft children’s toys as its subject matter, and Child’s Play is the latest and most majestic contribution. 

Kempson recounts that it was the birth of his first grandchild, Jason Keni Junior (JJ), around this time that may have directed his vision. In this reading the works in the cycle can be read alongside William Yeats’ famous poem A Prayer for My Daughter, 1919, yet unlike the overbearing father whose own insecurities wish to constrain his progeny to a “vegetable: immobile, unthinking, and placid”[1] nineteenth-century feminine-ideal, whose greatest mission in life is to find a rich husband, this visual meditation is far-more oblique and open-ended. Yet, similar anxieties as to the fate the next generation will face prevail in both. Having seen their own children grow-up, leave home and have their own families, grand-parents have the distance to know there will be fights but they will be resolved, there will be difficulties but they will be overcome; rather than twee platitudes, their experience reminds them of what to hold dear, like the moments of small delights such as a child beholden with their teddy. These moments are the fabric of life which hold together the less frequent events, like a day’s trip to the zoo.

It is useful to note that alongside the development of this motif in Kempson’s work, his method has increasingly relied on cultural exchange with colleagues and printmakers, especially domestically and in the Asia-Pacific, exemplified in the work of Cicada Press. For many artists, the demands required to build such a space of knowledge and cultural exchange would take its toll, but spending time in Cicada Press it is clear that the dedication and commitment to another’s practice only drives and produces more work. 

In viewing Kempson’s work I am reminded of the poet Susan Stewart’s meditations on the souvenir and collection in her cult classic On Longing (1984). Here, Stewart outlines a distinction of two sorts of souvenirs, those that can be readily purchased as a substitute of a particular experience (a model Eiffel Tower for example – in the case of Kempson’s work we must leave aside the question of whether a toy koala can ever replace a live one) or those which commemorate life’s events (births, deaths and marriages), noting that perhaps it is because of a lack of progress along life’s course that makes children so enamored with the first sort. Read as a souvenir, these works can be understood as a desire for a fullness of experience for the grandchild, that they may too experience all that the world can offer. Against the substitution of the souvenir Stewart outlines the collection’s inherent aestheticisation, the collection is always chosen and therefore is tied to ideas of taste, whereas taste does not figure for either sort of souvenir. It is the artfulness of the collection which makes it “a form of art as play, a form involving the reframing of objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context” (1993: 151). Written well-before our current world of Trump, the dismantling of the EU and the large-scale spread of fake news and populist coercion, these words stand as a stark warning. As a collection, Child’s Play updates this warning in a visual form.

The flat alignment of Child’s Play is made even more evident by comparison to the works which emerged directly from the residency, including Past and Present 2011 in which a solitary koala looks out diagonally from the picture plane while on the left-hand-side stones are arranged in neat lines as if the bars of a prison cell. In the latest work the nations of the world are laid flat as souvenirs. Currently the series stands at thirty-eight crisp prints, with plans to extend it to fifty, but it is easy to imagine, the 51st or the 146th (a Maltese Pharaoh hound) in the series, until all 246 ISO country codes are accounted for. The absences remind us of the uneven development erased in most discourses of globalisation. Likewise, we can imagine the individual figurines joining their neighbours in blocks of power or those placed opposite in grips of confrontation or war. This is made explicit in earlier works such as Body Politic 2012, Presents with Presence 2013 and East and West, 2014. In this vein the deliberate placement becomes highly symbolically charged. 

Stewart reminds us that the collection works via metaphor while the souvenir relies on metonym. Metaphorically, these figures map our contemporary geopolitical conjunction. It is worth remembering as Stewart does that perhaps the archetypal collection is Noah’s Ark. This fable of redemption is concerned with ensuring the replication of a pre-existing world post-flood. Kempson’s ark has no potential for reproduction of the same, two from each species are not saved. In this series, the uniqueness of each toy is what grants the characterhood. In this way, these inanimate objects gain agency in some unfolding drama that we can’t quite access but which leaves its mark in those thus assembled. Despite their differences, the consistent shadows of the subjects behind their left-sides, reveal they are all lit dramatically from their top right, the shadows they cast are their only context, otherwise they are completely extracted from any surroundings, here, the future must be faced without recourse to any of the old supports whether customary, technological or natural. The future must be faced together in all of our multiple differences. The refusal to place these figures within their environment, whether national, or to create some quaint diorama nor even the commercial shelves that would sell the animals as plush toys produces a sense of groundlessness which is possibly the most menacing aspect of this work.

In the larger cycle of works, Kempson has played around with backgrounds, for example, in PRK – KOR (2017) a Siberian Tiger and the mythic Cholima are united against a wood-grain background (the Koreas re-united in the nursery). Unsurprisingly, such conceptual trickery is of less interest to Kempson than the technical addition to his repertoire of using a laser cutter and off-set press in order to render this verisimilitude of the wood-grain. Such directness obscures the conceptual sophistication of the work, but also reminds us of the incredible accessibility of the work. The simple raw delight of these cute objects never fails to win an audience. The combination of the official national symbols with the vernacular is further evidence of this, for example, the gushingly cute koala appears instead of the kangaroo or emu, and rather than the regal lion representing Britishness the bulldog replaces it at this table. Likewise, each species is referred to not with its scientific name – this is a popular assembly. There is no denying the fun, playful tone these figures have added to Kempson’s work. 

However, as the cultural critic Sianne Ngai suggests our relations with cuteness is far from straightforward “disclosing the surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensively subordinate and unthreatening commodities.”[2] Considering the traits associated with cuteness “smallness, compactness, formal simplicity, softness or pliancy”[3] we might even consider stuffed-toys as cuteness’ perfect form. Soft toys are nature turned into commodity, to be consumed but ultimately valued by somebody. Inert, motionless, their eyes-wide begging for our protection. They are charged symbols of our affections, but presently they remain sitting unloved on the shelf. This is far from a celebration of tacky kitsch, this collection of souvenirs remains marked by their producer, the hand-made is not erased in mass-manufacture. Ultimately, Kempson turns the souvenir into the collection, and in doing so, against a geo-political order of anonymity and inaccessibility he holds out the possibility for intimacy and exchange within the grid of already existing circuits of power. It is this precise mapping that is the genius in the work. 

Dr. Scott East
Lecturer in Art Theory 
University of New South Wales Art & Design, Sydney

NOTES

[1] Oates, Joyce Carol. “At Least I have Made a Woman of Her: Images of women in Twentieth-Century Literature”, The Georgia Review, Vol. 37, No. 1, 1983, pp. 7–30, p 17.  nineteenth-century feminine-ideal, whose greatest mission in life is to find a rich husband, this visual meditation is far-more oblique and open-ended. Yet, similar anxieties as to the fate the next generation will face prevail in both. Having seen their own children grow-up, leave home and have their own families, grand-parents have the distance to know there will be fights but they will be resolved, there will be difficulties but they will be overcome; rather than twee platitudes, their experience reminds them of what to hold dear, like the moments of small delights such as a child beholden with their teddy. These moments are the fabric of life which hold together the less frequent events, like a day’s trip to the zoo.  

[2] Ngai, Sianne. "Our Aesthetic Categories." PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010): 948-58, p 949. 

[3] Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories : Zany, Cute, Interesting, 2012: 64.