EMIL TOONEN
Clock, [2018]
WINDOWSPACE BEEAC
August 2019
Emil Toonen, Clock, [2018]
What is this? Do you need to
know. Is it enough to want to simply look, listen and wonder (surely the hope
of every artist for their viewer).
This writer definitely does not
need to know - there is great sufficiency, even joy, in simply gazing at and listening to Emil Toonen's
'construction', 'assemblage', 'machine' - whatever you will.
As a whole the object is a
vision of circuitry and various motions that together throb and patter. When first
met there was an almost instant entrancement - at once something primeval and
nostalgic in the entirety, a loving in its making, a grace in what at first
might have appeared hazardous. Toonen's work is something of a conundrum,
playful and serious in one, and for that haunting.
It is a fact that the artist
was soon to have his first child, to be a new father, when this work was
gestating - 'it just came to me' he said, and when I understood that, the
patterings were instantly tiny feet, a heartbeat, a coming to life of something
mysterious, that 'everyday miracle' we call birth. Toonen was trying on the
future in the way an artist does.
This is Toonen's second visit to Beeac's WINDOWSPACE, (see Controlled Fall, June 2016). A reprise of 'notes' from then remain pertinent:
Emil Toonen’s work could be a
slow process. First objects have to be sighted, (they are not on the shelf),
then pondered, possibly allied with others, and then ultimately coaxed into
being – this requires serendipity, an eye, contemplation, awareness of the
nature and capability of materials, a feel for weird combinations and finally
there is the making, or shaping, of a ‘work’. Many of Toonen’s objects do
‘work’ – they blink, whirl, spin, nod and make you laugh.
Emil Toonen, Consumer Pillar [2015]
Toonen’s thinking is wry and
his media exceptionally various. Since he grew up in the Strzelecki Ranges in
south east Victoria – mirror location to the volcanic grassy plains and salt
lake area of south west Victoria – could it be, that accustomed to the natural
environment, his eye responds with greater alacrity, analysis and wit to the
‘unnatural’. That rather than ‘bin it’ he pokes and prods ‘waste’ to see what
it’s worth, what it gives up, where it sits in his firmament of senses,
sentiment and response. Politics are not free of his estimation either.
Joseph Cornell, Untitled, [Soap Bubble Set]
Comparison of this work of Toonen's with that of American Joseph Cornell, is inevitable. When reviewing Cornell's work and legacy on the centennial of his birth, Adam Gopnik ('Sparkings', 2003*) wrote in the New Yorker:
What’s nostalgic in Cornell’s art is not that it’s made of old things…What’s nostalgic is that, behind glass, fixed in place, the new things become old even as we look at them: it is the fate of everything, each box proposes, to become part of a vivid and longed-for past…a bottomless melancholy in the simple desolation of life by time. The false kind of nostalgia promotes the superiority of life past; the true kind captures the sadness of life passing.
This writer feels all of that in front of Emil Toonen's Clock, [2018].
It is a privilege that WINDOWSPACE BEEAC is allowed to share the subtle hum of this work with the wider world.
AS
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