DATE: 14-11-24
TIME: 12:55
AUTHOR: OLIVIA WACHOWIAK
DESIGNER: PAULINE HILL
IMAGE COUNT: 05
TAGS: X
“I would like to know what spells you have for me, I can feel there’s something behind this masking of crud”
Charlie Osborne’s solo show [Finding Melody: Part 1] comprises a puzzle pending decomposition. The artist fills the quaint basement space of Dulwich’s Piccalilli Gallery with a miscellany of objects, woven together through a range of alterations and adornments: there is an edited monitor mount posing as a guitar; a piano fallboard embellished with hanging bells; a grotesque massage chair, positioned on a plywood stage, accompanied by diabolos, arrows, and a music stand. Atop it rests a booklet of script-style text, offering itself as an accompaniment to the peculiar site. Is it a circus stage? A rehearsal room? A torture chamber?
Whatever the answer, one appears certain: something happened here, and we are confronted only with the remaining footprints.
The tempting—and promisingly benign—pink hue of its cover invites the viewer to pick up the booklet, and perhaps seek conclusions there. I learn that the two figures watching over the room from the blurred photoprint on the wall are the titular Melody and her friend/love interest/co-star Marty, and that there is talk of a theatre play, until I am lost to the deeply fragmented structure of the script. Further interlaced with images and links to YouTube clips, and disorienting in its heavy figurativeness and frequent shifts in narrative, the text proves overwhelming in the solitude of the strange room. I shift my attention to the direct dialogue, highlighted in pink—such is visibly scarce, drowned out by the expansive “stage directions”.
Abounding in poetics, the jeu de théâtre eventually swallows me in too. The wind is “like a blanket of smog”, a melody “like a mermaid of a drunken sailor”, there are 27 characters “like in the Leonard Cohen ‘tower of song’”, and so on, and so forth. As the story unfolds, it relocates almost completely into stage directions, taking most of the dialogue with her. I trace the small typewriter font with my chipped nail. I identify parallels: between myself and the characters, the settings evoked and the room I’m in. Though ostensibly metatheatrical, the script—most prominent where it could be strictly technical—takes over my consciousness, and draws my focus away from the extravagant setup behind me.
Consequently, light is cast on the creative process which materialised the fantasy. The obscurity of the narrative itself matters little, for it is precisely the process that is the story. Melody is a person, not just a byproduct of work applied to instruments. These are also incarnated, from their explicit connections to human anatomy (the guitar’s headstock shaped like a hand, an illustration of a horn with eyes), to their pronounced presence in the room—and beyond it, with the release of a musical album of the same title alongside the presentation. The viewer is further invited to partake in the creative activity, be it through the choose-your-own-adventure format the script frequently leans into, or their mere role as an actor in the play, and investigator of the site. The artist does not shy away from demanding that her audience work for meaning—retype lengthy hyperlinks (no cringe QR codes in sight), decode her provisional structures (“+” is “and”, spaces are oft negligible), imagine characters and actions (“{INSERT NAME HERE}”,“[<REWIND>DREAM INSERT<]”).
The push-pull dynamic at play calls into question the viewer’s position relative to the works. In an epidemic of ‘immersive experiences’, is it unreasonable to expect permission to touch art? I am reminded of the slogan of one such user-friendly installation: “Beyond Monet: become one with his paintings”. With minimal effort— perhaps a short trip across town, and a quick bath in the great master’s work— you can enter a kind of holy trinity with the artist and his oeuvre. How convenient! One could list a number of snobbish arguments against such installations, yet, despite the art world’s collective push for democratisation, there is no denying they hold no real space within it. Ultimately, it is the lack of challenge that makes such “experiences” fleeting—they are too therapeutic, and that is the problem.
Aside from a chair which could well belong in a psychoanalyst’s study, Finding Melody takes no interest in offering therapy. Rather, it exposes the viewer as an intruder, a voyeur even, who seeks spectacle in the privacy of an underground basement, and the artist’s personal notes. Simultaneously, though unimposing, it invites a committed viewer to enter its multi-layered system, only to find a permanent place within it.
I catch the show fashionably late, after its official closing, hours before its final deconstruction. I spend a good while there—seizing my one chance to dismantle the elusive meaning, infiltrate the grotesque world. Later, I rush to a manicure appointment, tripping on the stairs to the salon’s basement, only to find a parallel setup there: one big cosmetic chair in the middle, random tools and furniture around it.
Images courtesey of the gallery and artist. Photography by Corey Bartle-Sanderson