Sean Duffy
Appearing as models built from the memory of a teenage past, Sean Duffy’s Third Motorcycle and First Helmet (all works 2006) sat like defunct artefacts in the middle of the gallery space. At first glance they could have passed for recast facsimiles of their namesakes, in the manner of Charles Ray. They were, however, calculatedly futile attempts at the reanimation of aged objects. Rather than being painstakingly assembled replicas, they were carefully painted originals, literally ‘oil on motorcycle’ and ‘oil on helmet’. Transforming these flawed relics, Duffy’s efforts point to a nostalgic impulse to resuscitate beloved objects from memory and discover the authentic through a process of duplication.
Duffy’s personal effects were in evidence elsewhere, yet the autobiographical was purely a point of departure. In various works self-replication served as a means of probing how cultural objects, whether high or low, create generic by-products. Group Show converted a section of the gallery into a record shop with wooden bins of LPs. The albums were sorted and catalogued according to the a chronology of Duffy’s artistic career to date, with the record covers depicting previous works, shows or references to his colleagues and acquaintances. Each record sleeve appropriated the graphics and design language of the recording industry; My Lifetime Studio Assistant aped the manner of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), and a newly released seven-inch single entitled First Helmet shared shelf space with the cryptic not-quite Andrew Lloyd Webber recording entitled Jesus Christ Sue. Like the culture he reflects, Duffy’s work bleeds into offshoots of memorabilia and annexed modified versions. His album covers are covers albums; familiar materials are recycled in an act eliciting popular culture’s process of consumption and regurgitation.
The elusive strategy Duffy performs is an act different from direct appropriation. He works not with duplication but with triplication, seeking a situation one or more steps removed from imitation’s mere copy. This notion is clearly manifest in the show’s centrepiece, his triple tonearm turntable entitled The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Those familiar with Duffy’s work would have recognized the object. Three record-players were sliced apart and fused together to create a triangular hybrid turntable with a single platter resting at the centre. Awaiting play at the sidelines were three albums – Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks to the trilogy of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood. When one of these records is placed on the turntable, the tonearms are set into simultaneous action and the sounds instantly swirl, chasing one another with phase-delayed repetition. Installed in a side-room, Morricone’s exotic tones became other-worldly in a harmony just short of becoming sheer noise.
Duffy’s turntables have been described as ‘wacky’, yet they are more intelligent than whimsical. The triple tonearm replicates a trilogy of films each removed three-fold from the place it depicts. Leone, an Italian, filmed his masterpieces in Spain, in a landscape dressed as the American West of the 1880s as mythologized by Hollywood. Duffy, rather than drawing on Leone with irony, employs the Western genre as a means of invoking the hybridizing behaviour of popular culture: the transmutation of the authentic West into generic entertainments, those generic forms into a Hollywood genre, and that genre into a trite and predictable by-product.
Jack Goldstein, with his seven-inch records 30 years earlier, mined the possibilities of dealing with the hackneyed nature of a re-recorded popular culture. In recording the very act of listening to sound effects, Goldstein removed any sense of the original in search of the affect of recorded effect. Sean Duffy has inherited this strategy. Yet Duffy, unlike Goldstein, seeks a full removal from the original. The sounds that emerged from his triple turntable were not reproduced products but altogether separate by-products; the principal is always absent. Duffy employs dated material to create always-new amplified sounds. The system is structured on cyclical reuse, yet in its incessant circulation there is a constant deferral of repeated performance. Goldstein referred to his sound effects records as ‘pictures’ and wrote, ‘the alluded-to picture is a picture of a picture of a picture that closes in on itself as abstract’. Duffy seeks the materiality of that allusion.
