Throwing Stars

Seven hundred ninja stars thrown into the gallery wall form an unlikely constellation – they trace the form of a charging elephant. This is not a newfound astronomical pattern but rather a contemporary art installation by Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy, which offers a critique of both capitalism and the museum. Titled White Elephant Stall 2008 their architectural intervention appropriates the popular expression and meaning of a “white elephant” to fundamentally question how we live and what we value. A white elephant is an expensive possession, one that is a financial burden to maintain and hence has questionable value to its owner. The capitalist constellation according to Cordeiro and Healy is the white elephant of our time; its costs on a social, environmental and political level exceed its use value. Unwieldy in size and rampaging by nature, its increasingly global momentum and influence is relentless. In the artists’ own words “White Elephant Stall is a physical manifestation of our anxiety in regard to the speed and vastness of the global world we find ourselves part of.”

The use of ninja stars suggests that Cordeiro and Healy still have some fight left in them. Commonly known as traditional Japanese martial arts weapons, ninja stars have a little known architectural provenance – they were used originally in building to brace the junction of timber beams. The original simple cross style metal plates, Zen versions of gang-nails, were adapted by ninja warriors to become throwing stars. These objects, initially designed to provide architectural stability, become part of a destabilising architectural intervention – one that literally involves driving seven hundred weapons into pristine art museum walls. Cordeiro and Healy cleverly coax the museum into committing an anarchic act against itself.

Since 2002 Cordeiro and Healy have been collaborating to make work that questions not only our inane patterns of consumption but also the rarefied status of the art museum. Regularly transforming the museum into their own Kunstverein or laboratory space they blur the distinction between private and public, abandoned and reclaimed and worthless and valuable. The Cordial home project 2003 saw the entire contents of a suburban weatherboard home reassembled into a material stratum at Sydney’s Artspace. They are well aware of the transformative and performative dimension of the art museum in their selection of unlikely objects however, they actively seek to re-write the practices of classification and display. In their 2004 Deceased estate an abandoned studio became the site of display when its entire contents were compressed, documented and monumentalised. Originally driven out of Sydney as part of a generation who could only dream of home ownership, Cordeiro and Healy have become nomadic and intrepid artists. Just as the art museum has become their studio, it appears and somewhat ironically, that the art museum has also very much become their home.

Lisa Slade
September 2008