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Melbourne artist Marcel Cousins recently presented engaging new works in Ryan Renshaw’s project room. Cousins was associated with King’s Art Space in Melbourne before fleeing to Tokyo where he earned a doctorate at Tama University. Since his return he has pursued an interest in using art to examine the relationship between cultural generics and aesthetics. Indeed, this disciplined and exiguous installation demonstrated Cousins’s investment in the alluring and illusory power of art, especially its capacity to transform generic objects via aesthetic processes that operate in exhibition contexts.
Every Little Thing consisted of four works: a floor sculpture, assemblage sculpture, and two paintings. The lush floor sculpture Melting Second World War German Soldier (2010) introduced the viewer to an exploration of counteractive trajectories that can occur between form, content and medium. Although the title specified an historical period for this soldier, the monochromatic treatment of the figure—with its slick dark beige polyester resin sheen—initiated a period shift that aligned the piece more with classical antecedents. Famous sculptures such as the Dying Gaul came to mind and, in turn, alluded to idealised and sublimated depictions of war and destruction. Yet, the sculpture’s deliquescent quality—for the perfectly realised top half of the figure was undermined by a melting lower half and base—abandoned any adherence to flawless classical paragons. Other anomalies were generated by the strong contrasts between hard and soft media as well as concepts surrounding substantiality and dissolution. The original model for the piece was a toy soldier, so the intimate perspective in which one looked down on, rather than up to, the sculpture also reinforced the notion of play and childish imagination, with obvious implications for artistic practice.
The artist also