David Simpkin is a Melbourne installation and performance artist, who since the 1980s has been making provocative work out of simple means. This is his second show at Conical, since returning from a residency at Cite Internationale in Paris. In Testudo, Simpkin has created an arrangement of performance and the readymade that physically incorporates the artist himself, and potentially the viewer. To experience the work is to enter an intriguing puzzle, composed of enigmatic clues and maybe a few red herrings.

As you enter the main room of the gallery the first thing you notice in front of you is an independent structural wall about six metres long, built from a few beams of wood. This supports a portable projection screen fixed sideways above the floor. On the screen a video shows David Simpkin methodically submitting his body to a number of actions in different parts of the gallery. You see him, for example, slowing fitting himself into constricted spaces, underneath a bathroom sink and behind display partitions. Placed along the makeshift wall, and gathered on the floor next to it, are dozens of identically shaped vases. These are made from regular segments of plastic, in alternating colours, and have a late-modernist decorator look. Wedged between this wall and the outer wall of the gallery is a large white kiln-shaped shell with an opening at floor level, its concave side pasted over with horse racing betting slips.

This unusual tableau is likely to divert your attention from something even stranger. Immediately on your left, is a man's head protruding from a hole in the floor. This head belongs to the artist, whose body is wedged underneath the polished boards, possibly at risk of falling through to the level below. From the ceiling, a light globe in an orange shade hangs down a few inches above his head, shining on his closely cropped pate as if he were an item on display, or undergoing an interrogation of some kind. At a distance on the adjacent brick wall, two cardboard pizza boxes hang like pop art parodies, with a small speaker set in each one. One speaker provides sound for the video, while the other is mute with a cut wire dangling below.

Further along is the Conical fireplace, part of the original building that exhibiting artists deal with in various ways. Pushed against it in a reclining position is a large electric massage chair. Sitting in the chair your head disappears into the fireplace, and looking up you see a small video monitor placed inside the flu. Pressing one of the buttons on the arm of the chair, you receive a massage while you watch. The video is similar to that on the main screen. In one humorous sequence, oranges are rolled along the gallery floor at David Simpkin's head, a bizarre bowling game with the artist wincing when a hit or near miss is made.

There are no easy associations to be found in this installation, a point emphasized by its minimal layout. The use of vases and pizza boxes is deliberately obscure, yet also presented in a matter of fact way. In conversation, the artist referred to the colourful vases as 'decoys', as though intended to both entertain and distract. There is certainly a underlying irony in this display of mass produced objects, as though intended for uncritical cultural consumption. The other elements of the installation subvert such an aesthetic, leading the viewer, as voyeur and participant, to question this static model of cultural production.

Sitting in the massage chair, the initial pleasure of having a full or lower back massage is undercut by the claustrophobic dimensions of the fireplace, and the repetitive motions of the chair. You join the artist in an absurd posture of entrapment, both willing victims in the name of art. Seen from the gallery floor, your supine torso complements the artist's head, together forming a composite body. The physical positioning of artist and viewer somehow relates to the title Testudo, which is the tortoise formation used by Roman troops to protect themselves from attack. This arrangement of shields protected and hid the soldiers' bodies, but provided little protection for the faces and legs of those in the front row. In a similar way, David Simpkin's head is exposed to anyone wishing to attack the artistic avant-garde. The massage chair is perhaps an inverted testudo, in which the audience is lulled into exposing its soft underbelly, and dropping its critical and criticizing faculties.

Whenever the artist is not present you will encounter an empty hole in the floor, a negative form that recalls Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect of 1975. In Testudo, David Simpkin takes Matta-Clark's reshaping of urban architecture back inside the gallery, persuading the viewer to reflect on the structures and relationships that we take for granted. At the same time, the basic appearance of the installation has a straight-faced absurdity that is enjoyable for its own sake. Although this may risk undermining the conceptual aspects of the work, such ambiguity makes it appealing in an 'Alice in Wonderland' way, which is really what it's all about. The hole in the floor may be an escape route, a trap for the unwary, or perhaps nothing at all. It all depends on how you choose to see it.

Jason Beale 2006

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