Self-assembly not your thing?

IRISH ABROAD:The subversive wit of his flatpack-inspired sculpture is a hallmark of Clive Murphy's work, and it's one of the reasons he is becoming a presence on the New York arts scene, writes BELINDA MCKEON

IF YOU’VE EVER had to put together a piece of flatpack furniture, you’ll recognise this monster. Something like it, with its protruding limbs in brushed metal, its lacquered jaw and its screwhole eyes, has probably even played a part in your post-flatpack nightmares.

The offending creature is Demonic Interventions With Ikea Furniture, a new sculptural work by young Irish artist Clive Murphy, which is currently on display at Magnan Metz gallery in New York’s Chelsea district. The piece is a bizarre, hulking crossbreed of dismembered Ikea parts, assembled in line with an equally bizarre set of instructions pasted on the gallery wall beside the sculpture.

The instruction sheet is, needless to say, also Murphy’s creation. Although it mimics perfectly the cheery blandness of Ikea assembly manuals – those line-drawings of miniature people happily getting on with miniature Ikea parts – Murphy’s version channels something much closer to the actual atmosphere of the self-assembly experience, whereby glass-eyed obedience changes to murderous rage in 10 minutes flat. Let’s just say a goat wanders into the picture. And that an assembly tool becomes a lethal weapon. And that, at the opening of the exhibition that first featured the sculpture, gallery-goers were treated to the sight of a billy-goat roasting on a spit in the gallery’s back yard, and invited to taste for themselves. Well, it beats wrestling with the zillion parts of a Billy bookcase. Doesn’t it?

The subversive wit of his Ikea-inspired sculpture (DIWIF is just one of the pieces in the series) is a hallmark of Clive Murphy’s practice, and it’s one of the reasons the Wexford-born artist is becoming a much talked-about presence on the New York scene.

Since moving there from Ireland in 2005, he has created bouncy castles out of black rubber, canvases out of scorch marks, audio-kinetic pieces out of discarded cassette tape, and sculptures out of toasters, neon tubes and cardboard boxes found in the street, among other materials.

He has made a series of drawings of the hair of Irish artists (Louis le Brocquy’s locks have the look of a whale), a series of public works that render the titles of evangelical sermons in pieces of cut-up beer cans, and a series of T-shirts adorned with the titles of spam e-mails promising manifold categories of porn.

“I’m less interested in high culture/low culture distinctions than in an idea of a low/low thing,” Murphy says. “I’ve seen plenty of art that turns mundane or kitsch things into something high culture, the way Jeff Koons did with his chrome bunny, or Jasper Johns did by casting his brushes in bronze. And by doing that, you make the thing into a bona fide art object; you edify it. But what interested me much more than edifying a thing was to bring it only to the next rung of the ladder. To turn a cardboard box into an inflatable [as Murphy did for a series of pieces], for example, is not a quantum leap up the hierarchy. It interests me to democratise in that way – to make each rung as valuable as the next.”

Murphy, who studied in Galway and Belfast, lives with his American wife, a high-school teacher, in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Crown Heights. His studio is in the basement of their building. “I don’t see myself as an Irish artist in New York,” he says. “I’m just an artist who lives here. And there is no expectation, from my gallery or anywhere else, that my work will be somehow Irish.” Nor, even, that it will be somehow of, or about, New York. “The work I do refers to a pan-global experience of contemporary life, the things we all negotiate,” he says. “And those things are fairly generic and ubiquitous between America and Ireland and many other places.” While living in Belfast, Murphy became obsessed with the idea of blowing things up. But not in the sense you might think. As an artist, he felt huge pressure, he says, to represent the Troubles in some way, but that was not an expectation with which he felt comfortable. “I grew up in a village near Enniscorthy,” he says. “I wasn’t qualified to start sermonising in Belfast. I’d be a fake.”

Maybe it made sense, then, that he began instead to think about fakes, and about inflatable fakes. “I wanted to create blow-up versions of Monet and Rothko paintings,” he says, “because I was interested in the idea of art as a lifestyle commodity.

“There was a Habitat store in Belfast at the time, and this was where young, middle-class people went to buy stuff through which to identify themselves. They had all these framed reproductions of Rothko, especially, and that aesthetic was becoming this signifier of young, contemporary, educated people. I had this image of Rothko spinning like a top in his grave.”

What came out of the notion of inflatable Rothkos, however, was a series of inflated cardboard boxes; ordinary packing boxes, inflated like beach balls and, eventually, displayed on gallery walls like paintings. “It was the ridiculousness of the idea that drew me to it,” says Murphy. “I mean, first of all, cardboard doesn’t lend itself to being inflated. And secondly, why would you do it?”

So Murphy did it. It took months, countless failed attempts, a lot of paint-on latex, a supply of hairdryers, and the patience of Murphy’s future wife, who was in Belfast doing an MA and found herself roped into the hairdrying-of-latex business as part of their first few dates. And that’s not even a euphemism.

Eventually, Murphy got the trick of it, with the help of a rubber-welding machine sourced in China. “I shipped it back to Ireland, and then over to New York, and when I got it here, someone told me I could buy one a few miles away in New Jersey.”

His next obsession was already developing, and on a trip to the American midwest it took full flight. On billboards outside Bible-belt churches, Murphy kept seeing sermon titles so terrifically cringe-inducing that he couldn’t get them out of his head, and he knew he wanted to do something with them. Some of them strove towards youth appeal – Dude, Where’s My Freedom? and Surfing With Jesus – while others reached right for self-absorbed heart-strings: What About Me? and Why Oh Why Oh Why?

Murphy appropriated these titles for his own purposes. Part of that appropriation involved another act of fakery: pretending, in one church, to be an evangelical preacher from Ireland so he could “borrow” a list of titles and the tapes of the past year’s sermons. “And the gulf between the attempt at fun that was in a title like Dude, Where’s My Freedom? and the actual sermon in all its neocon piety was incredible,” he says.

Murphy used the sermon titles in public artworks; large-scale signs, the wording of which he created out of thousands of tiny, glittering discs cut out of old beer cans. “At the time, I was living in a flat over a sort of speakeasy drinking club in Belfast,” he says. “So you can imagine. There were lots of beer cans for me to use every Monday.”

The resultant works, What About Me? and Why Oh Why Oh Why?, were mounted in public spaces in Belfast, Brussels and Lisbon. In each case they got people talking, wondering about the meaning of the statements. That was the idea, says Murphy.

“In Brussels, the piece went up in an immigrant neighbourhood that was being allowed to become derelict by these mafioso-type developers. A group of urban interventionists helped me to find the site. And when we put the piece up, the developers arrived, and they started shouting in Flemish at the interventionist group, about what this sentence could mean, what was Why Oh Why Oh Why, and so on. Debating it out. And that, to me, was pure success for the project, right there – that it had provoked this analytical conversation between these odd bedfellows who had never spoken to each other before, about this abstract phrase and what it meant in any given context.”

Then again, Murphy seems to have a talent for attracting absurd conversations. While pulling some discarded cassette tape off a tree in Belfast for use in another project – it eventually became one of his audio-kinetic drawings, with the tape running on a loop around the gallery wall – he was approached by three earnest young men, members of a fundamentalist religion, who asked him if he was a Christian and warned him that cassette tape was booby-trapped by witches. “They said witches incant hexes onto cassette tape and wind it around trees, to trap us. My mind was spinning.”

More recently, for galleries in North America, Murphy has returned to the idea of inflatables – but on a much larger scale. Last year, he became the first artist to take over the Minneapolis gallery, Soap Factory, with a single installation – an inflatable sculpture made out of bin bags that filled the 12,000 sq ft space.

“It took 25 people 10 days to make – in an unheated warehouse in winter,” Murphy says. “It was minus 40 degrees in there. You need the hard-core work ethic of the Nordic Minneapolis people for that.”

In Toronto, he took the bin-bag aesthetic to new heights, creating a bouncy castle that looked just like the bouncy castles of childhood fantasies – except its rendering in black rubber added a more adult aspect. “Yeah,” admits Murphy. “It looked like a huge, oversized sex toy. But in my mind, it was beautiful as well as ridiculous.”

Clive Murphy’s Demonic Interventions With Ikea Furniture is on display at Magnan Metz, New York. See magnanmetz.com