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"I-Wa-A-St-M" Perfectly pitched to abrade the “just passing through” ethos of a gallery space-cum-institutional thoroughfare, D. M. Satele’s B-A-C is learned in the arts of guerilla marketing: Pixar-quality color, Starbucks-esque scale, Vogue Italia-worthy good looks. Look closer at these radiant, statuesque figures, though, and immediacy slips out of sight behind a flurry of cultural reference: they’re Byzantine icons suspended in private gold-leaf skies; they’re space-helmet clad alien-warrior-prophets engraved in ancient Mayan temples; they’re tattooed New Guinean Avoko dolls designed to ward off evil spirits. What these diverse traditions have in common, of course, is their distance from the pop-realism or hyper-realism that dominates the depiction of the human figure in much contemporary art. Indeed, their comically solemn, quasi-ceremonial formation invite us to recall an art of devotion, of worship and of sublime transcendence: less a mug-shot of this world than a chair-lift elevating the viewer to another. The titular promise of a gallery called “Window” aside, transcendence is a tough proposition in an environment circumscribed by a wall of quasi-carceral glass: just what kind of “beyond” is at stake here? A clue lies in B-A-C’s compositional reliance on Masaccio’s The Tribute Money, the monumental work of the Quattrocento that depicts a little known parable in which Jesus, in an uncharacteristically profane moment, instructs his disciples on their duty to the taxman. Here, of course, is the rub: whereas the transactions enacted in the intertext are at least superficially economic, Satele’s figures, grasping cartoonishly oversized letters of the alphabet, appear to be involved in a transaction of a more pedagogical bent.[1] Indeed, the artist has labeled these figures with names: they are Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, and their representation functions, in part, as a kind of elaborately detailed study-aide, in which the sacralized body of the author is vested with the promise of enlightenment. This is as much a joke about nascent post-graduate theory-worship as devotional altar-piece. Translating an oddly profane religious text into an oddly religious reflection on education, it reshuffles perception like letters in a scrabble grab-bag: the pedagogical function of religious painting, the financial underpinnings of religion, and the religious aura that accrues to the academic “star” burst into view with the clarity of biblical revelation. Yet, despite its investment in the classic intertextual gesture of “re-reading,” B-A-C: The day I learnt to read nevertheless drips with the irony of the false epiphany – its sarcastic title collapsing the slow process of cultural education into the sudden revelation in a way that warns against this kind of exposé. For if reading is both subject, theme and aspiration in B-A-C, it is precisely reading that is suppressed in Masaccio’s Tribute Money, a work celebrated as the first fully realised deployment of one point perspective,thereby ushering in a tradition in which the cultural specificity inscribed by the term “reading” was suppressed in the ideology of vision. Satele’s cunningly dyslexic B-A-C: The day I learnt to read puts the reading into a text of which no reading is required, ironing out the columnar monumentalism of Quattrocento humanism into a flat-as-a-tack crayon tapestry whose complex referential network simply begs for further study. Yet it’s here that the picture’s ambivalent: it doesn’t take much reading to appreciate these fluorescent explosions of colour. Turning tribute money into money shot, and cash into cultural capital, B-A-C nevertheless begs the question: who’s reading when it looks this good?- Pansy Duncan is a writer and doctoral student in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland.
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[1] In the foreground, the tax man wheedles with Christ and his disciples; to the left, St Peter, as instructed by Christ, collects the money from the mouth of a fish; to the right, he grudgingly hands the money over to a smug tax man.
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