Past Modern Madonna
Paul Hopmeier
Shown at Defiance Gallery, Newtown
7 June - 1 July 2006

Paul Hopmeier 'Past Modern Madonna' 2006 Metals, rubber and wood 250 x 350 x 200 cm

Museums are places of nostalgia and curiosity where objects are preserved to convey how individuals and societies operated and survived in the past. Contrast this with junk heaps, which are museums of another kind. They are deposits of everything that is discarded by the community in its rush to replace the old with the new. Artists who recuperate ‘junk’ give it a new value, an artistic value, but in the process it loses its original identity. Paul Hopmeier with his sculpture/installation, has retained the identity of the vehicle, he has saved it from the junk heap, recreated it in another form, and turned it into an exhibition piece (museum piece), while retaining the machine in its primary state.

As well as the aesthetics of machinery, what Hopmeier is interested in is a certain parallel between artistic invention and technological invention. Both can be seen as a way of interpreting and managing the world around us. Picasso and Braque invented cubism and essentially changed the way art was produced. In 1896 Gottlieb Daimler built the first internal combustion engine to power a four wheel vehicle and we have had a love affair with it and the car ever since. There are thousands of words written about each new vehicle release these days just as there seems to be a plethora of writing about the latest artistic manifestation, and in a way both the car and art seem to incorporate the same desire, the desire to escape the everyday.

Hopmeier has not reinvented the wheel or even a new art form and yet he has given us the wheel as aesthetic object….and the differential, and the chassis, and the steering wheel, and the motor, etc. These are all the individual parts, which go together to make up the vehicle. Like Michelangelo, dissecting cadavers to learn about the anatomy of the body, Hopmeier has dissected the vehicle to understand the parts and how they relate to the whole. For him there is a metaphor here for the way individuals create a society and relate as a whole by way of their abilities, wants and desires.

Chariot 5th-4th century BC, nomadic peoples of the Altai region, the Hermitage Museum
St Petersburg, Russia

His vehicle is a conundrum, as if the old Cambodian farm truck has just been driven in to the gallery from the field to become an instant museum piece. Part of this conundrum is the significance and meaning he has given it by combining it with another relic, something he has borrowed from another vehicle he recalls seeing in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, a 5th century BC funerary vehicle, constructed from birch wood. It is the cage like construction from this museum piece that he has adopted for his own vehicle and it is the connotation of the two cultures, which gives Hopmeier’s truck its mysterious presence. The cart used by nomadic tribal people from the Steppes of Russia, and the truck used in Cambodia with a Chinese made engine, represent both cultures managing to survive with available technology.

The Madonna in the title is the transcendent woman, the holy mother, the symbol of the Roman Catholic Church and a universal symbol throughout the history of art. In our ‘Past Modern’ secular society the Madonna does not belong to our reality accept in ironic form. Hopmeier is interested in representation as a construct for a different reality. With his construct he has given us the functional beauty of the truck combined with a massive empty cage conveying a museum type testament to the past and lost rituals. His vehicle, as machine and transporter, points us towards the past as well as the future. It has fulfilled its function supporting the agricultural enterprise and is now ready to carry us to our graves.

Harvey Shields