Meg Cranston: The Pleasure of Obvious Problems
Walking upstairs into the Dunedin hanging of this show, all I can see is a huge flesh-coloured ball, suggesting that I must squeeze my way into the gallery. That is an optical illusion; there is plenty of space, but the claustrophobia remains. The ball’s contents are equivalent to the amount of air exhaled while reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Is this a reduction or is it a mad acknowledgement of the sheer mass of materiality that art in its path to abstraction ignores? Multiply this quantity by the number of people over the centuries who have read the book, all breathing as they did, and something weirdly Aristotelian starts to occur—shared atoms, shared dust, the interpenetration of bodies, the unavoidability of physics and matter in everything we do, not to mention reading’s contribution to greenhouse gases.
Meg Cranston’s raw material is the balance between pathos and bathos that is half situated in intention and half in the stickiness of things and their material reluctance to abandon claims to our attention. Her genealogy in conceptual art is clear from the contexts in which she exhibits in her home state of California, and conceptual art’s paradoxical relationship with the object is one of the undercurrents here. I am reminded of Bruno Latour’s table comparing what ‘what objects say they are’ with ‘what objects do’. The first comparison reads thus: ‘indifferent to human passions/make all the difference’. Objects, he argues, have their own agency; we need to understand our relationship with them better. Meg Cranston’s earlier works deal explicitly with matter and its archiving, evaluating cultural products not by the effects of their immediate presence but by secondary qualities.
So, for