Jonathan Owen

Issue 32, May 2009

Doggerfisher, Edinburgh
6 February – 28 March

By Neil Mulholland

How-to has been the staple of the West since the 1950s: interminable schedules of makeover TV trade the consumer dream, online sites like VideoJug, eHow and Lifehacker proffer open-source advice on how to live better. Jonathan Owen’s practice is born of homecraft, the ‘domestica’ once pioneered by early feminist artists. Today such craft is no less engendered or ideological; we might say it’s the key focus of an experience-driven economy led by concepts of mass customisation and transformation design.

Rather than acquiesce to or condemn the inexorable drive to improve everything, Owen steps sideways from nouvelle consumerisms. His artisanship is craftily antediluvian, practised on quintessential relics of a mass-production era. Habitat furniture features prominently, playing out domestic dramas with quasireligious connotations that are, given the focus on craft, appropriately Pre-Raphaelite. A bentwood standard lamp is judiciously hacked into a monster nunchaku; snakelike, it squirms flaccidly on the floor. A winerack bears no fruit; its wooden supporting struts transfigured into chains, it crumples in on itself. Once-commanding shopper-selves are in a critical condition as the postindustrial economy nosedives faster than the Fall of Man.

Owen’s aesthetic rebirthing correlates with how ‘prosumerists’ – Japanese pencil carvers, circuit benders and IKEA hackers – refashion mass-produced objects by throwing away the instructions and adapting them to their desires. There’s an element of appropriation – taking the product and detourning it – but equally an element of making, an attention to skilled manual labour that has, for too long, been outsourced, out of sight, out of mind. Postindustrialism’s emphasis on taking is balanced with a timely craftiness and voluntary simplicity, an awareness that we now need to do more things for ourselves again, that we have to contribute to consume.

The domestic and public were once understood dialectically, a (depoliticised) private sphere enabling a (politicised) civic realm – a division increasingly difficult to sustain. Owen’s private/public nexus takes the shape of a security fence placed in the centre of the gallery. Enclosing the skylight, it is a forbidden portal to the brighter world outside, a prison that ensures any burglars breaking in through the roof will become part of the spectacle. The ironwork pattern apes RFID microchips found on credit cards. Purposely made visible, the chips render security and steadiness incarnate in a world wherein information is increasingly invisible and in flux. Owen’s sanctuary is trompe l’oeil, built of flimsy foamboard. The eternal desire to stabilize space in forms of material culture is imaginatively transmogrified in this scarecrow.

The phantoms of public life haunt a series of dematerialized photographic works featuring old equestrian monuments. Gently erasing the statues, Owen leaves empty pedestals where the great and the good once lorded over us. Eschewing Photoshop, Owen does it by hand, leaving margins for error and a sense of the unpredictable sensual qualities of the process. All too often it’s wrongly assumed that today’s hacking culture is practised primarily as a form of political radicalism. Owen’s work helps us to pay more attention to the aesthetic facility of hacking and the nuances of its rules, to the flair, skill and ingenuity of process, than we might to its more instrumental connotations.

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