Nick Mangan: Apocalypse Culture

Watching the evolution of Nick Mangan’s work over recent years has been not unlike watching a mutant virus growing and evolving everyday. It began as a small mold in the corner of the lounge room and has spread to encompass the entire house. To date we have watched it grow out of an arctic thaw (due, one wonders, to global warming?). We have watched it move through its prehistoric era and mutate into an almost recognisable moment of cultural invention. Last year it reached its’ ‘post-colonial’ era. What will happen when it reaches the present day? And worse – the future?

If Mangan’s most recent work, produced in the Australia Council’s New York studio, is anything to go by, things are bleak indeed. It is as though Mangan was in synch with the atomic scientists at the University of Chicago who recently updated the symbolic Doomsday Clock that tracks the likelihood of nuclear annihilation. The clock is currently set to five minutes to midnight – Armageddon – having been advanced by two minutes on January 17, 2007. One can imagine the clock on Magnan’s studio wall set at one minute after midnight.

There has always been something unsettling about this artists’ work. Compositionally they are elegant, well-planned and meticulously executed sculptural assemblages. But there is also arguably an intricate and epic narrative evolving, chapter by chapter, work by work, show by show. Already, at the ripe age of 29, a survey exhibition of Magnan’s work to date would reveal a truly obsessive individual. He is known for his sculptures, but his works on paper – inks and montages – are equally intense and bizarre. It is tempting to think of Magnan as some kind of inter-dimensional cartographer/naturalist, plucking images from alternate realities to bring back to this world. Indeed, when English naturalists in Australia sent back a platypus to the Royal Academy it was presumed the creature was a prank, sewn together from other species. Mangan’s work has a similarly jarring effect.

Nick Mangan’s work has almost always explored the clash of cultures between the ‘exotic’ and the ‘western.’ But even by his standards 2006 must have been something of a culture shock. In less than a year he traveled from camping with a group of indigenous artists in Australia’s top-end to traversing the streets of Manhattan for the first time.

Remarkably, although it is not overt in his work, Mangan has discovered a link between these disparate regions. It is waste.

It has always been tempting to discuss Mangan’s work in terms of environmental Armageddon; the strange growths in his work hint at hyper-mutated genetic derangement. In that context Mangan becomes a weird survivalist, preparing for the worst. Using waste products is just natural in the context of the end of the world. But in Mangan’s world this is already happening – he’s seen it.

That we live in a time of ultra-consumerism is a given. But, as author William Gibson has famously said; “The street finds its own use for things.” For Mangan this is abundantly apparent; the Aboriginal people of Gunbalanya in Arnhem Land recycle plastic Coca Cola bottles as fishing apparatus, the homeless of Manhattan recycle anything they can as functional tools. Mangan takes this a step further; the tragic detritus of the western lifestyle are the building blocks for his sculpture.

“I’ve been going through the trash a lot,” Mangan wrote in a recent e-mail from Manhattan. “There is much to be found in the piles on the street – it starts as a response to what appears to be an over-indulgence of material and disregard. I established rules for myself that I would only use rubbish and items that had entered the secondary market (i.e.; flea markets) directing my focus on questioning the notion of sculptural production in an age of waste and over-consumption, inspired by the homeless people’s resourceful approach to objects and how they are able to give things a utilitarian function. i.e. plastic bags.

“The level of waste here in this city is horrifying. Piles of momentary ecologies piled high by night and vanished by the morning (this cycle is a constant). Everyone knows this waste is not buried on this island, but no one seems to care where it goes. The excessive consumption – chewing up and shitting out of commodities packaged in plastic bags, double plastic bags and so on.”

Mangan’s latest installation/sculpture embraces a collection of found objects collected from Manhattan’s Chinatown and the Afro-American flea-markets found on the street. His delirious detritus is presented on the shipping and packing cases of Western world trade scavenged from the banks of the Hudson River. Titled Raft it clearly indicates the impact that Manhattan has already had on Mangan. He has eschewed his usual suggestions of organic – albeit malformed – growth and instead, with its strange mélange of abject objects, created a theoretically functional craft. There is a globe for navigation, but it is stygian black, as though the planet is immersed in never-ending darkness. There is a funnel for steam and other debris obviously plundered for this hazardous journey.

Mangan describes his experience of New York City as; “the fusing of street cultures smashed against museum fetish and imperialistic cringe.”

“One thing I can say is that I’ve been really inspired by the different levels of economical exchange/display of cultures, from the museum plunderings to the flea markets and rip-off Rolex watches and Nike Jordans on Canal Street.”

Strangely, in an environment that is barely comparable to the bustling metropolis of Gotham, one of the works Mangan executed at Gunbalanya in 2006 held a number of common traits with Raft. It was a strange concoction of found objects strung up in the trees that was concocted in the context of the Bindinj (Aboriginal) use of such objects as soft drink cans and plastic bottles in everything from mixing paints to fishing. Mangan dubbed the work The Mimibindu Trap and given the mutated nature of his trap one wondered what he imagined being caught.

“I was completely inspired by the Bindinj use of everyday materials and how they appropriated and reinvented the purpose of objects,” Mangan said soon after making the work. “They have an understanding of their material world, and the environment that those materials need to function in, that for me reinforced the idea of city life complacency. I was interested in how they assimulated certain objects and materials into their culture, having objects work in favour for them.

“One of the objects I made while I was there was inspired by this use of materials, it was a trap-like object made from a juice bottle, some rope and bees wax that I suspended between some trees. I was playing with the idea of spirit traps, or in this case a dreaming catcher.”

Arguably Magnan’s work is devolving rather than evolving. His earlier sculptural installations incorporated materials and objects that were far more technologically complex that those of his later works. Two pieces from 2003 in particular highlight this – elemental exposure, which featured as its base a dilapidated photocopier laying prone under harsh light with crystalline shards growing from its interior and In the crux of the matter which used as its base a motorcycle. Such technological apparatus was soon discarded, as though the future was breaking down to more elemental components.

The lighting of Mangan’s early installations – deliberately harsh fluorescent – was intentionally staged. “I was playing with the idea of (or playing on the word) photosynthetics or evolving/devolving from photosynthesis to photosynthetics. Inorganic things growing under fake light. The photocopier work, elemental exposure, was the catalyst for this notion,” he said.

Similar issues arose with the 2003 work In the crux of the matter exhibited as part of the 2004 exhibition at Federation Square, Melbourne, where the chassis of a motorbike took on new life with strange crystalline growths protruding sharply at dangerous angles: “The crystal shards, hand tooled from acrylic, speak of re-growth and regeneration,” he said in an accompanying artists’ statement. “Not in the sense of being connected with nature, but rather within the language of fictional science. The material and processes reference an interest in geology, organic formations, mutations and transformations.”

A major shift could be seen in the installation, exoecoaxis – shown at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art as part of the 2004 group show The Molecular History of Everything. A worn Persian rug lay on the floor, its’ meticulous Mandela’s faded; large ceramic jars were scarred from misuse and decidedly bizarre talismans lay scattered throughout, strange morphings of petrified wood and bone. Cast in resin from real, found objects, cow teeth were grafted onto wood, remnants of long-ago, albeit fictional, cultures.

Materiality is paramount in Magnan’s work. Doomdrum (2005) consisted of a found floor drum, speaker, wood veneers, found dowel, found teak and sound. The Colony (2005) morphed axe, shovel and hammer handles, found dowel, found teak forks and spoons, western red cedar, elk hair, nylon hair, jute, teak stainer and wooden chopsticks.

In such works as The Colony, the use of faux New Guinea artifacts seemed instilled with a degree of nostalgia, based in part on the fact that his parents had those kinds of decorations in the family home. “My work often enters an alternate paradigm,” he says. “This paradigm is a reflection of the real world but its logic is deliberately distorted, it becomes a space where things can be teased out and inverted.”

An interest in the often-turbulent relationship of contemporary consumptive culture with history led Mangan to ongoing investigations of exotic objects and souvenirs to construct hybrid forms that explore notions of identity and cultural representation. This was launched with experimentation with Philippine and Fijian monkey pod-wood faux-artifacts-come-souvenirs found in thrift shops. In The Colony, Mangan investigated the struggle between the constructed western notion of tourism culture, caught between the representation of true cultural identity and the tourism economy’s interpretation of the exotic.

One of the works completed upon his return from Gunbalanya was Barricade, exhibited at Sutton Galleries in 2006, a bizarre structure that hints at the self-protective barbs of the echidna. It was both a fortress and a campsite, a clear reference to his time spent in the bush in Arnhem Land, but also a defensive structure, perhaps indicative of his uncertainty about what he would face in the canyons of Manhattan.

The shifts between his last body of work executed in Melbourne and the first finished work in New York reveal an artist who is finely tuned with his immediate environment. But if anything, while Barricade may have been defensive, Raft is bordering on the tragic; a craft of pure desperation, A Raft of the Medusa for the new age.

Mangan has grasped Manhattan and filtered his findings through his own dark and dystopian aesthetic. Another work in the studio features a discarded shopping trolley. A number of elements make this a distinctly bleak assemblage. Firstly it is empty. Secondly there is a vacant and strangely poignant baby pouch. Thirdly the trolley is balanced upon a plastic bin, its wheels aloft – this trolley has ended its traveling days. The entire assemblage is matt black as though coated in a carbonized dust. Then there was the working title: .({><}). – an unexplained series of punctuations that could hint at the genetic code of the plague that has ravaged Mangan’s Manhattan or the mathematical symbol for extermination.

In Cormac McCarthy’s blistering and bleak recent novel, The Road, a father and his son traverse a blasted landscape in search of the coast. What they will find there they do not know – the world as we know it has been obliterated, reduced to ashen dust. They push along a shopping trolley, gathering all they can for survival in ways that Magnan has witnessed the homeless in New York do. When they reach the coast it would not be hard to imagine them preparing a vessel similar to Magnan’s Raft, loading on board all they can. This doesn’t happen in the novel, but with Magnan’s blackened globe aft of his craft one wonders whether Magnan has witnessed a similar apocalypse in his time in Manhattan.