reviews diann baUer
Diann Bauer:
necrotroph-optopolis
Par adise row, London
10 october – 17 novem ber
Echoing the sounds of ancient Greece, Necrotroph-optopolis offers us the language of the dead and the parasitical, the civilised and the city
state, man’s destruction, his violation and decay. Depicting humanity and its socio-political situation through a violent, hungry and macabre
lens, Bauer erects her large-scale installation as a personal proposition or diagnosis of the human condition, and the inevitable fate towards
which it is headed.
Consisting of two curved walls embellished with figurative and abstract drawings and mark-making, and a selection of sculptural
forms suspended in the air between them, Bauer’s installation creates a physical space for the viewer to enter into, a metaphorical visualisation
of a world undone in which we become active, engaged participants.
Intricate linear drawings of flesh, limbs and bodies in bestial, brute conflict lie interwoven among fantastical layers of cloud, building
blocks and smoke. Across the space the second wall stretches out, and in the darkness of its reflective Perspex, it seems to awaken the
characters of the first. An aerial cityscape hangs in the midst of this optical exchange, with the mirrored narrative bouncing from one wall
and reverberating in the other. Cohesion, confusion… a melding of opposites into a unified background: a landscape of the futuristic, the
action hero, the Renaissance and the baroque, all intermingling in their own undifferentiated and convulsing realm.
Rooted in an architectural and fine-art background, Bauer’s work doesn’t sit firmly in any one medium, employing everything from
drawing and painting to sculpture and installation. Just as loose and disconnected is the choice of influences: associations with the plastic
pop of Japanese manga cartoons, the earthy, religious tones of Michelangelo paintings and the hi-tech, clean-cut structures of the architects
Zaha Hadid or Lebbeus Woods.
Bauer’s commentary is multifaceted. The view of the world she presents us with bears both positive and negative connotations.
Using references from different cultural backgrounds, historical eras and geographical locations, Bauer questions the appropriation of
signs and signifiers within a globalised mass-media and corporate world. Portraying violence in both the narrative of her drawings, with its
fracturing of its subjects, and in the composition of her installation, Bauer depicts humanity as disorientated, unrooted and overloaded,
failed by a system which destroys its very specificity and meaning. Simultaneously, however, this same violence is openly celebrated.
An image orgy of disembodied limbs and twisted torsos, it nevertheless entrances and seduces the viewer into the excitement of the such
a spectacle. Action, humour and popular entertainment are here just as important as notions of war, death and disease.
Necrotroph-optopolis, an explosion of genres, references and multiple viewpoints, sets out to denounce, as well as revel in, our cross-
cultural postmodernism. The optimism towards harmony and cohabitation is felt in Bauer’s work, yet ultimately remains overshadowed by
an inevitable and inherent sense of futility. As Necrotroph-optopolis suggests, civilisation is but its own terminator – the parasite eating away
at its decaying cells. Petra Polic
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artreview 110
JAN_REVIEWS.indd 110 4/12/07 15:24:16
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