Marian Tubbs
In the hands of Sydney artist Marian Tubbs, everyday materials close the gap between the real and the virtual and flip age-old power structures on their head.
Image credit: MARIAN TUBBS, transmission detox, 2015. Courtesy the artist, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Minerva, Sydney
Marian Tubbs [artist’s own website]
Marian Tubbs, transmission detox, 2015 [information about recent
Museum of Contemporary Art digital commission listed on the MCA website]
Artist Mix : Marian Tubbs :: News [MCA website news section,
about same commission]
MCA Awards First Digital Commission to Marian Tubbs [Blouin Art Info news item]
Residency Unlimited | Marian Tubbs [artist profile for a New York residency that Tubbs undertook in 2013]
Marian Tubbs – Waverley Council [profile of former artist-in-residence,
date not stated]
Marian Tubbs | 24th Oct – 21st Nov 2015 | STATION GALLERY [listing of recent solo commercial exhibition in Melbourne]
UTS PSM >> Public Lecture #8: Marian Tubbs [speaker profile for a talk given at University of Technology Sydney in 2015]
Minerva [homepage of Sydney gallery where Tubbs is represented, and where “Witness”, a show she has curated, is showing at the time of writing and is listed on the homepage]
This is what appeared on the first page of search results when I Googled “Marian Tubbs” on 15 December 2015. At the bottom of the page, you'll find a screen shot of what the results looked like on 17 December 2015. Things shift and move quickly, invisible algorithms pushing different stories to the surface.
When we meet, Tubbs talks about taking responsibility for one’s online presence. As two women in our early thirties, we were deliberating over young people today, mainly in the context of Tubbs teaching first-year art students and the ways
in which we can capitalise on our virtual personas.
These days, it’s hard to excuse the lack of an online presence, an awful website or an inability to be contacted, unless that’s part of a broader anti-establishment plan.
As an artist who has had significant international exposure at an early stage of her career – with works screened in Vienna, Venice (the Maldives Pavilion for the 55th Biennale) and New York, as well as major Australian institutions – Tubbs understands the power of an online presence. Her neat website is an interesting foil for an artist who works with everyday and domestic materials. It is functional, it allows her to be easily found, traced and contextualised by international curators, and it seems designed to more or less disappear behind install shots, links to press and snatches of poetic text.
The peripheral activity around the actual making of art and the art objects – the profile-building, interpersonal interactions, institutional box-ticking, diplomacy and the tension when collectors just can’t get into your new work – are of academic interest to Tubbs. More than ever, they are an inextricable part of being an artist. To varying extents, these factors influence the making and showing
of work. Through her installations and web-based projects, Tubbs challenges and engages in an ongoing dialogue with many of art’s entrenched structures.
As a smart, independent young female artist, she deliberately does things you wouldn’t expect from someone with that profile, and observes the reactions and consequences with an objective curiosity. From having (male) collectors and art fair attendees complain about the crudeness of her animations, to major museums inviting her to show but requesting edits, Tubbs embraces challenging and uncomfortable encounters.
In the prologue to her recently completed PhD paper, Tubbs highlights a formative encounter as an eleven-year-old Canberran on a solo mission to the National Gallery of Australia. It is a pretty neat summation of what and why she makes what she makes, to the extent that Tubbs’ work can be neatly summed up. Speaking of the 1996 exhibition Islands: Contemporary Installations from Australia, Asia, Europe and America, which included installations by the likes of Richard Wilson and Bill Viola, Tubbs explains:
The feeling that they were getting away with something was to me simultaneously intriguing and disconcerting… My project is a gesture toward the reconciliation between a pragmatic upbringing that would not know what to make of all this ‘stuff pulled into the gallery’, and the artist who wants to actively drag in all these pieces of reality.
The realisation that art could encompass a walk through a corridor bounded by oil, or a darkened room featuring a projection of a man showering, or a pile of photographic slides, marked the beginning of Tubbs’ desire to investigate and undo its very terms and boundaries.
If the artists in Islands were getting away with something, Tubbs seems to be seeking a present-day equivalent: how far can I push boundaries of cultural acceptability, intellectual snobbery, conventional methods of presentation and preconceptions about the value of certain types of materials? What is the effect, in the current political, social and ecological climate, of bringing materials associated with industrial contexts or poverty into the hallowed halls of major institutions or the commodified space of a commercial gallery? Her installations act as a series of provocations that require thought and engagement in order for the audience to extract meaning.
A passive audience would find Tubbs’ work difficult, perhaps inexplicable and frustrating. What she seems to request is that we become aware of our own responses to her materials, their configuration and their demand to be considered for both what they are and what they believe themselves to be. Tubbs’ materials are at once a collection of junk and artwork and it is the tension between these two positions that make them interesting.
For Tubbs, materiality is a primary concern – much of her research is to do with the agency of objects – but the medium is always in the service of an idea. Tubbs contends that neither the actual nor virtual realm is more or less real. In fact,
she proposes that the very term 'virtual' is almost antiquated and denotes a lack of acknowledgement of the ways in which technology is deeply embedded and integrated into everyday life. In much of Tubbs’ work, the lines between tangible and digital are so blurred, it’s hard to gauge the point at which objects and images begin. She creates hybrid spaces and objects that are tangible / scrollable / viewable / touchable.
In transmission detox (2015), the Museum of Contemporary Art’s first digital commission, one of a series of linked pages
is a feed of analytics, as if we are conducting live surveillance on our own data. Tubbs turns the mechanisms of the medium into the object for contemplation.
In physical installations, Tubbs places materials – plaster bandage, string, foam, found plastic, chicken wire – up against digital screens and fine printed silk and micro-georgette.
A metal triangle, which resembles an oversized bus handle suspended with spaghetti-like rubber, is draped with diaphanous printed fabric that hangs vertically and splays out at right angles on the floor. It reads like scrolling data, a haze of colours and semi-legible forms interrupted by text message. The materials encourage us to imagine what they might be like to touch, understand their vulnerabilities and reflect on the lives they may have had before an artist scooped them up and positioned them on this parquetry or polished concrete floor.
Tubbs’ materials invite consideration. That bed of foam, complete with rubbery cast objects arranged on top like a dirty jelly cushion is not what you may think of as art. But it wants you to think about why and this is where it gets interesting. Cultural value is arbitrary, yet deeply ingrained, so that a man working with paint is automatically and inexplicably taken more seriously than a woman working with fabric.
There is nothing to lose by conducting a small thought experiment: I have a certain picture of what I think art should
be, so to declare this installation 'art', I must either shift my definitions or deem it unworthy. The latter works, too. The materials are resilient, they can take it – after all, they have previously been deemed waste. The artist can also take it,
her provocations purposefully vulnerable, constantly risking rejection. Tubbs is always playing on that edge of failure, shaping and reflecting her own identity as a woman and an artist. It’s okay if people don’t get it. But the moment that they do, art expands its limits to accept a woman, a champion
of the discarded, into its orbit. The boundaries of this discipline called art, this system of signs and signifiers, are prodded, investigated and momentarily loosened to let another outsider in, hauling a sack of ordinary materials with them.
Marian Tubbs’ online commission for the Museum of
Contemporary Art can be viewed at transmissiondetox.com
Marian Tubbs is represented by Minerva, Sydney.
minervasydney.com
mariantubbs.com
