They are the work of Danny Treacy. They are figments of his imagination and desire. They are made from recovered clothes. They are from those lonely places, the woods, the wastelands, the car-parks. They are re-stitched and re-fashioned: re-modelled into junk monsters. They are nightmares of the catwalk, prowling around the outskirts of style's dumb extravagance.
They belonged to the unknown and the anonymous. They are the lost, the deranged, the sexually driven and, who knows, the dead. They are the sinister carnival playing in the street. They are the music we dread to hear. They confront us and they defy us. They take a chance on our presence. They take a chance on existence. They are Danny Treacy dressed-up.
They mask his identity. They become the confined space of his transgression. They are charged in this way. They are the places where he is close to Them.
They are awkward. They are contorted. They are the body harnessed, the body pinched, the body stitched-up. They have those Frankenstein, stiff-legged poses. They are B-movie cut-outs. They are Dada and they are Pop. They are the friends of Surrealism: shouting anarchy, whispering perversion. They are sampled pieces, cross-dressed collages, mix-gendered melodramas: part nasty, part nice.
They are the suits, the jeans, the rubber gloves. They are the workers and they are the dancers. They are the porno tea-break, the sexed-up secrets. They are rough trade. They are the soldiers. They have the armour and the equipment. They are medieval, the spice of old England. They are the danger-men, the shit-kickers. They are ready. They are tooled-up. They are tight and they are fit.
They are soiled and stained and perfectly formed. They are the shapes around which menace lingers. They are intimate and they are a violation. They are the victors and the victims. They are the kiss and the tell. They are true and they are false.
David Chandler, Director Photoworks. 2007.
There are supermarkets of free things. From our experience of places each one of us can easily remember to have seen lots of left objects in dismantled areas, car parks, but also in woods, beaches or in particular urban areas and in spaces where these objects detain a condition of boundary from human action. They are rejects that reveal signs of a passage through the landscape. They are like rubbish, but they are removed from the normal process of waste and recycling disposal. They are remains, excess, tales within reach. They are places into other places, waiting for a creative organization thanks to him who, moved by desire, puts the objects into a new action.
It is near the borderline between finding and leaving, that the English photographer Danny Treacy (Manchester, 1975) picks up all the clothes seen in some of his photos. In the collection called Them, begun in 2002 but still in progress, the artist recreates body shapes assembling these recycled clothes. In this way he obtains something that is both shown and hidden. Of these bodies it is possible to perceive the shapes revealed under the clothes, but it's impossible to recognize the details. The image is completed on its surface, made of coloured garments, offering to us the possibility of another reading level. It is on this surface both anonymous and peculiar like an imaginary presence that the bodies show themselves. These shapes declare an identity like masks that while hiding also reveal their real aspect. Therefore the art means are not used to communicate fiction, but to measure the fragile boundary between reality and imagination.
These human wrappings are psychological monsters, tragic figures of a theatre, puzzle of people, they are old professional uniforms; they are issuing of our soulful inner man that arises to rest on them. David Chandler writes "They are Danny Treacy dressed up". They are other people signs taking shape on the artist's body modelling the space that comes to life with the match between different worlds. In this way photography becomes the self-portrait of a visible and invisible being materially defined.
Danny Treacy creates a second skin, transforming the picked clothes condition of abandonment into a great opportunity of a parallel meaning. Looking at the shapes of these stains, rips, wrinkles and consumption people can experience a feeling of inner loss that changes them. Anyhow these formal real details change into a sort of daydream. This is one of Treacy's most interesting works: detecting the secret aspect that connects the real object being to a pure emotional presence. Here the sight is not enough, but there is the need of the touch, too. The possible fabric combination goes with the differences of the material used. In this way the chromatic effect can't be separated from the touchable suggestion given by the clothes. Smooth and rough, heavy and light, clean and dirty: everything is remarked from the frontal light, as if these bodies were on a surgery table. It's suggested the assembling work made by the artist and the final image is the visual sign of what his hands have done.
These figures identity is ambiguous and uncertain. They come out from the black background, archetype of the inside darkness, which shows itself outside. They are in front of the observer as if he is looking at himself in the mirror. They look at the spectator without eyes looking like himself. They are made with all those things people could have lost forever, but now, going over the sense of loss, they are full of a life that is mysterious, passing, sometimes attractive and worrying. They are upside figures just like everyone is. They could take shape even without a body underneath of which they will show anyhow the secret aptitude. They lift the wrapping of what is extraneous to them to observe the matching points between other possible identities, in a visual and corporal unity dressed up with pieces of the world that continually creates and wastes itself. They are the transparent edge between what we are and what is all around us.
These works don't want to be considered like a research of what is new. Contemporary art languages, with their amount of concepts, shapes and ways of work, are used to create a specific aesthetics of unusual and different. They do't suggest the distortion of reality, but the unseen side of things, where real shapes are handled more to reach crash than mimetic representation. Danny Treacy's language is absolutely contemporary and international, based on stylistic solutions that take possession of this culture of picking up objects from reality to assembly them according to a different way of work (practice that has historically meant the widening of art action; practice started in different ways by Avant-garde, carried on by Neo Avant-garde and still important in artistic research). It's also fundamental to mention Surrealism, in particular the 'double' and the 'perturbing', which are some of the concepts borrowed from Freud and used by surrealists to obtain their images. In these photos Danny Treacy shows a mysterious body that is alive, hidden and arcane at the same time just like Freud concepts suggested. To be revealed it's the double face, the carnival ghost felt like an overhanging threat.
Daniele Fiacco
Artkey n. 11 September/October 2009 (Translation by Simona Fiacco)
Danny Treacy's show, 'Them', is a cross section of various types of Others: the half man/half woman, the scapegoat, the faceless worker, and the biologically ambiguious. I meet Danny Treacy's work as a painter and as a fellow aficionado of all types of monsters: those that we construct to house our fears, to project that which is repugnant onto, and also those hybrid, unclassifiable life forms whose ambiguous edges threaten to disrupt the boundaries of our selves. How appropriate then that this show called 'Them' is more about 'us' than it is about 'them'.
A little background on the artist's process: Treacy, a London-based artist, collects discarded clothing and materials and constructs costumes from these clothes. He then photographs himself wearing the costumes. He considers these photos to be self-portraits wherein the self has been eradicated.
Focusing on the photos hanging in the main gallery space, I noticed a few commonalities. All of the works are printed so that the figures are life-size. They meet us in a fully frontal position; their bodies are facing us and so we stand almost face to face (if they have faces?). All of the faces are covered, though not headless. In every photo the feet almost touch the bottom of the composition. Each incarnation of the artist is pictured in a completely black space, a space that sometimes encroaches on the edges of the figure's silhouette, and at other times creates a crisp edge that defines the being's fuzzy hairs or contours. Almost every costume is dirty, some more than others. And every costume allows for a multitude of projected identities: no discrete skin is revealed.
Each photo in this show has a story to tell. Them #5, 2005, is the mouse-like one. I see in it the king of the mice, a scruffy ruffian mouse lord; the only one that almost could be adorable but escapes cuteness upon closer examination. In it we see Treacy wearing a mouse costume constructed from a few pieces of clothing. He looks to be wearing the arms of a coat as pants. The coat is a faux fur coat with a gnarly red velvet lining, sticky in parts. The fur mask covers his head and one eye type form is barely visible. Anyone who ever has visited what is lovingly referred to as "the bins" knows this kind of article the bins is where all the crap that Goodwill cannot sell in its stores goes: the dirty, the broken, the worn-out, and the misshapen. This is what Treacy is wearing. Up-close viewing is where a physical repugnance comes into play. You can almost smell the sweat, the moth-balls, and the grime. You can see the dark bits of what looks to be coal or gravel. The fur on the coat is matted, visibly soiled. The mouse's paws are mismatched: coming from the torso we see one orange hand that resembles a sock puppet with a red mouth. His stance is resistant, almost proud. He looks ready to take you on. He is abjection made proud, a whole made of cast-off parts.
Then there is Them #1, 2002. This is the one that is most obviously gendered, both male and female. The seat of an old pair of jeans engulfs the head, which is an elongated, flattened shape that looks too slender to enclose a real head. The man half is wearing a work boot; the woman half wearing a red pump. Across its chest is a patchwork of tough and soft fabrics, sewn with some edges frayed and others lovingly folded under and stitched 'clean seams' as my grandma would say. The most disturbing aspect of this portrait is the wrongness of the placement of the seams. One can only imagine the body for which this was made. Imagining it - it is a body that moves very differently from mine: perhaps the right leg hinges back at the hip instead of forward. It must move very haltingly. Think of every alien in every scary movie you have ever seen. They move differently than we, too slow, too fast, too different. Also important is the way that they edges of this form disappear into the background. It is an open form; one without hard edges. This technique makes one think that there could be more to this form, beyond what is in the light, beyond what we can observe from this vantage point. Perhaps something even more horrible?
Thinking in painterly terms, I am reminded of others who have treaded this territory. I think of two Spanish painters, Velazquez and Goya. Velazquez for his portraits with very dark backgrounds and Goya for his so-called 'Black Paintings', works picturing monstrous and fearful beings.
Looking at Velazquez's The Dwarf Sebastian de Morra, c. 1645, is an interesting counterpoint to Treacy's work. This portrait shows an elaborately dressed dwarf, sitting, legs outstretched, intelligent eyes meeting ours. We see a man who in his time was a court jester, a man who was marginalized and most likely ridiculed for his stature. That said, the portrait is complicated by the fact that the dwarf, Sebastian, is given an opportunity (via the painter's composition) to look back out at us, and through connecting with his gaze we somehow get closer to knowing him and what his life experience was like. He becomes specific, contextualized: a real man. This portrait works very differently than Treacy's portraits, in that his faceless beings never get to make eye contact. Treacy's 'Them' are physically incapable of looking back, denied the ability to stare back, mostly eyeless, and so we can only look harder, hoping to get a glimpse of some kind of articulation of self or expression of individuality. They are the Other, almost completely defenseless yet proud somehow. Even when completely bound up, Treacy's selves remain defiant. Eyeless, their bodies feel full of vigor. They, like Velazquez's Sebastian de Morra, will not shrink if you stare too hard. Resolutely not us, yet caught up somehow in our power structures and our systems of valuation, the violent systems that make just a few powerful and most others degraded.
Which brings us to the last I'll focus on, Them #20, 2007. It is the one that looks like a stingray from afar. The structure or body beneath the cloth has been completely redefined by the draped fabric covering it. It is a massive triangular life form. It is grey with dark marks that resemble a strange batik: Rorschach tests, x-rays, bat wings. This is the most ambiguous form. It could be microscopic or it could be massive. It almost has eyes, little dark smudges where his head could be. And it makes me think about the way that these re-configured materials have had a life prior to the costume. There are psychic traces from previous uses. In all of these works, the immaterial is made physical: the history of each item, its erotic life, has been revivified, re-embodied. I think of a coupling between 2 unlike species, a conjuring. Treacy's intimate engagement with these discarded skins is what I found most unsettling and most intriguing. I sense that the grimier the raw material, the better. If history can leave traces on objects, than Treacy is an archeologist of these traces. He is a shaman of slough.
Hayley Barker, September 2010
By definition the monster is incapable of reproduction: to do so would be to abandon deviation through the continuation of a genus, or genre. Invoking the law of the monster in his series Them, wherein a body is understood, but one which does not obey the rules, Treacy has nevertheless, managed to offer Them an equally deviant offspring. His most recent series, Those, is a series of what the artist calls protuberances, the parts of the body which stick out or intrude into space. Although they appear suspended in space, a ground is indicated by the way they recede slightly into blackness. They transgress genre, emerging as part human, part object, part animal.
In seventeenth-century Latin the first meaning of 'conceptus' is 'fetus'(2). Etymologically, the concept comes after the body. One of the most subtle images in the series, Those, is that of a belly. Gradually one becomes aware of the tiny black orifice of the naval, into which, for Treacy, one can stick things, ones eye, for example. The orifical as microcosmic counterpoint to the protrusion of the belly itself. As a metaphor for art practice, this gestatory bulge is the swelling which one can neither bear nor has any right to rear. It reminds me of the way Robert Gober talks of 'nursing an image' prior to producing a sculpture. A Caesarian is the only option. But as anyone who has been cut out this way knows, it is a procedure which leaves the subject with the hanging sense of not having been quite naturally intended for the world.
Consistent with the law of the monster's un-reproducibility, there is no recycling of the fabrics used in Them in Those. Despite visual similarities, it is only a continuity of materials which unites the two. Those are conceptually and materially not born of Them. Nevertheless, they remain psychically attached. As parts-objects they deviate from portraiture, being more a kind of stillborn as a mutation from the still-life genre, or anti-souvenirs(3) of expended energies lost.
The use of a large format camera produces photographic detail in all its promiscuity(4), giving the clothing an excessively evidential quality which is simultaneously forensic and anthropological. Evidently the materials used are not human skins, but through a process more akin to transubstantiation than transfiguration a human fabric invoked. For Treacy “there exists a de-construction of others by proxy (their clothing), then follows a processing of the garments so that in a way the clothing becomes my flesh.” Both series' offer a simultaneity of intimacy (acceptance) and violation (refusal). Treacy talks of a conflation of ideas of exo- and endo-cannibalism; the former being an act of aggression against the enemy, the latter being an act of love intended to keep the spirit of the loved one alive. He talks readily of his libidinal urge to produce these images, to show off his trophies, of how without this drive there would be no point in the expenditure involved.
To point to an object which one wants, but which one cannot, or refuses to name and to say, with one's eye as much as with one's finger, “Those”. In language, Those, when unhinged from a noun, is an empty sign awaiting an object. In Treacy's work it is also an act of refusal: to name. Them points a different, if not entirely dissimilar, kind of finger. Treacy's titling of each single work within the series' in the plural invokes mob. Like crowded cadavers they are mob-at-rest, yet embattled by the question of a common language, here played out in the field of naming. Through his patchworks of sloughed skins, a nameable and law-abiding thing, or body, or structure, falls into the realm of the unnameable, forcing us, behind him, to trespass and intrude into innumerable, ultimately individual boundaries. Each work speaks in an excessive, coded and unapologetically private way. As utterance, they are spoken in a profane language. If a translation were possible, it could not be reproduced here.
Essay written for Portfolio Catalogue No.43:
© Becky Beasley 2006
(1) Hollier, Denis, Against Architecture; The Writings of George Bataille, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995 (1992) p147
(2)ibid
(3)The concept of the anti-souvenir comes from Susan Stewart, On Longing; Narrative if the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke University Press, North Carolina, 2001 (1993), p140
(4)I am indebted to the use of the word promiscuity in the context of the photographic from Ian Jeffrey's, essay 'Fragment and Totality in Photography', History of Photography, Vol. 16, Winter 1992
These are all sites of prior or potential brutality, real or imagined. Anything that can be imagined may quite likely have occurred and continue to occur as these spaces continue to exist. Treacy renders these spaces visible in two ways; he paints them grey and then he photographs them. The grey looks cool, intelligent, almost chic, but I would argue that this appearance is part of the subversive nature of the project. The opposite of clinical becomes critical in grey, as though become a politicised form of a medical condition, a fucking with forensics. Treacy is driven to these places by the urge for the project. (It is the experience of any photographer to increasingly find himself able to overcome all kinds of trepidation for the photograph). He reveals these sites by painting over them, leaving in his wake, in the world, a secretive, yet ultimately absurd (theatrically, philosophically), series of grey painted areas. If one were to draw back from the frame of the image, one imagines an edge which is as roughly painted as the edge of the image is tight. They are lost, unfit places, abandoned even by Treacy himself, having been sought out, served their purpose, once again discarded. One might seek out these actual locations but success would be unlikely for most who might read this text. You'll know it when you get there though: it smells bad and is painted a shade of milked grey, already peeling away at the edges.
© 2005 Becky Beasley