GLOBE-AL Connections - AIR KISS, Steven Carson

Written by Dr. Pamela Zeplin

The party’s over, only a soft afterglow lingers on. Still warm and pulsing ever so gently in the wee, small crepuscular hours. A sort of detumescence. You have to leave, but want to stay on – floating on this strange and wonderful night, a time and place now dissolved in a melancholic haze of blue and red party lights.

 What kind of festive occasion had been imagined? Surely not blue light disco or dance party - no evidence of gay abandon here. Nor did these coloured globes resemble the reassuring fairy lights of Christmas, with their diminutive and twinkling excess. Rather, this choice of illumination evoked traces of simple family parties - barbeques even. Like the 1960s, when party lights were so special that only ‘other’ families had them, nailed to their verandahs in straight lines or kept in storage boxes - in case a special occasion came along, like an engagement or a 50th. Beyond the domestic, they also signified sideshows, tawdriness and vulgar entertainment. Australia was innocent then, very anglo and not terribly good at glamour.

 There was something then about Steven Carson’s use of party lights in Air Kiss that evoked the popular culture of that period, at least in terms of mood and materiel. Firmly located in last century’s technology, the entire installation consisted of no-nonsense party lights, including one hundred A-shaped, “Regular” screw base globes (15 – 37 Watts).

As Carson’s accompanying poem notes:

“SEVENTY FIVE BLUE TWENTY FIVE RED” bulbs were screwed into one hundred insulated sockets and attached to 75 metres of black electrical cable - then turned on. That’s all. Or was it? 

 Carson’s text continued:

 “ONE HUNDRED PER CENT UNTIL THEY BLOW.

BLOWN. SPENT. DEAD …

PINS PRICK DEEP THROUGH INSULATION.

THE RUBBER THAT PROTECTS US …”

Journeying beyond mere nostalgia or retro gesture, the artist’s text invited the visitor to consider deeper levels of connection so that the subtle sexual metaphor implicit in the work became more apparent. Electrical incandescence and live current – contained and insulated - took on new energy and urgency within this context. My first fleeting impression of Air Kiss was intuitive - the installation registered strongly as somehow sexy and yet simultaneously poignant - and only later was I able to grope towards more charged and specific meanings. I had made two visits before reading the poster (with poem) and artist’s notes, which situated the work within a politically homoerotic context. After all, the exhibition was part of the 2002 FEAST Festival. Of course, those hot rounded globes  (6 15/16” in length) in their cheerfully upright holders suddenly bespoke a profoundly phallic presence, vulnerable and quietly throbbing - “UNTIL THEY BLOW”.

On reflection, it then seemed obvious, as well, why the electrical cable was dispersed as it was around and across the gallery. Far from being nailed up in straight lines – as is ‘normal’ for these type of lights – the cables snaked across the floor or looped and coiled across the walls like thick and insistent handwriting. But Carson’s ‘sentences’ were unravelled, suggesting another language - personal, mysterious, incommunicable, other. Perhaps this was a reference to the poem (or vice versa):

 “CHARGED

THEY HANG LIMP

AND THEY DRAPE AND THEY LEAN

AND STAND ERECT”

After almost two years in Adelaide, this work marked a significant departure for Carson in terms of concept and realisation. It continued his focus on popular culture and the decorative, but overtly explored dimensions of masculinity within this sphere;  to “STAND IN THE SHADOWS” or “STAND IN THE LIGHT”. More importantly, the exhibition achieved (literally) a certain visual charge that was highly evocative, poetic and, dare I say, electric. Hovering around the half-light of those mellow globes was an indefinable sense of risk, of dangerous sexuality.

 Notwithstanding, therefore, any didactic intent on the part of the artist, Air Kiss presented itself as a seductive yet moving experience within a particularly elegant economy of means. While caressing its space, it embraced beyond the politics of“Gay” identity, but whispered to a broader audience and murmured of a deeper time. Despite its title, Air Kiss did make connection.