forthcoming.
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It’s October 2024. Genocide continues in Gaza and the conflict is extending into Lebanon and Iran. War persists in Ukraine, with no sign of letting up. And let’s not get started on Somalia. Trump and Harris are slugging it out in the lead-up to the US election, where the future of the free world turns on a swing voters in swing states and the weather on election day. The ice caps keep melting and sea levels keep rising—as does the cost of living—while we brace for the next strain of Covid. In the art sector, issues—identity politics, decolonisation, and representation—rule the roost. However, none of this seems even remotely relevant to Rebecca Baumann’s work, to how she makes it or how we consume it. Her art appears effortless, carefree, which—right now—seems unusual.

In being invited to write on Baumann’s work, I feel under pressure to find something smart, to say—to offer insight into her art-historical pedigree or her thought processes. But this puts me into a frame of mind entirely at odds with the one the work itself puts me in. Baumann creates eye-candy, brain-candy moments; bubbles of carefree pleasure, of lightness, of vacuousness even; abstracted experiences that we all enjoy, rather than ponder or analyse. Watching confetti erupt, pastel smoke billow and dissipate, and coloured cards flip over, there’s no moral, no message, just the pleasure of being there, in the moment. We stop thinking, stop worrying, and take pleasure in these too-brief interludes, these moments within time but outside of it. And why not? 

I remember American Beauty, with Ricky (Wes Bentley) showing Jane (Thora Birch) his video of a plastic bag miraculously dancing in the air, buffeted by air currents and electrostatic energies. Except Ricky drew a metaphysical conclusion: ‘And this bag was like dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and … this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid ever.’ Baumann makes addictive pleasure machines, but without Ricky’s misty-eyed metaphysics—they’re more like science exhibits. 

As if to underline her work’s pointlessness, to make a point of it, Baumann is drawn to redundant communications technologies: to flares that don’t demark anything, flip clocks that don’t tell time, signs without directions, printers that spew out colours rather than documents, billboards stripped of enticements, and confetti without an occasion. She prompts us to adopt a different relation to this machinery. We experience the absence of a message, where we expect to find one. She repurposes redundant information technologies, stripping away the message, making the medium the message.

Rather than being liberated by tech, we are enslaved to it, and busier than ever, sending and receiving work emails day and night on our devices. We don’t know how to take time out. And yet we gaze on Baumann’s flip-clock works with pleasure not pain. They’re more like autumn leaves falling or lulling lava lamps. They offer a break from the 24/7 hamster wheel of modern times. And people love them. I remember one of Baumann’s gallerists telling me that her flip-clock works would ‘sell themselves’ at art fairs. Impulse buyers were transfixed, stupefied, entranced. They wanted to buy them at first sight, whether they knew her work or not, and no matter how many there were in the edition. They could have sold them ten times over—I was told—to the point where she was afraid of not being able to move on, of being typecast as the flip-clock artist. 

Baumann’s work doesn’t make us think but invites us to experience and enjoy. A lot of calculation goes into achieving this, but, as viewers, in the moment, we hardly care that she spent a year developing her smoke machine—our minds simply don’t go there. The work is not really about the process or research (the artist’s end), it’s about the effect (on us). But the delivery needs to be perfect, apparently effortless, and anonymous, to achieve this. So she conceals the process, hiding her thinking, her calculations, so we can enjoy not thinking.

Baumann’s work is not about her, not about identity, as she constantly asserts. The work is phenomenological, not psychological. Her intention and inquiry are eclipsed by sheer affect. It doesn’t place us under any pressure to understand her or care for her, to track her work or thinking back to experiences she may have had, or to her cultural roots. Her research may have led her to India, to be doused with colour at the Holi festival, and to Finland, to witness the Northern Lights, and yet the works that sprung from these experiences don’t prompt us to consider these cultures, these natures. It’s just background information, and that’s where it stays. Writers may argue the connection, but the work doesn’t. 

Miraculously, Baumann’s works appear to arrive fully formed—no drawings. They seem to emerge directly from her materials and mechanisms, and sometimes from the movement of the sun and clouds, rather than from the movement of her thoughts. She seems to do little or nothing—no sweat. Much of her work’s effect seems intrinsic to her chosen materials and mechanisms, particularly the dichroic film she’s favoured of late. It’s like these materials and mechanisms do the heavy lifting, leaving her to be an observer alongside us.

Contemporary art has become causey and allergic to moments of beauty. Today, beauty is trivial and pleasures always guilty. Baumann’s work, however, offers us a kind of wide-eyed, infantile bliss, recalling nursery-room distractions: mobiles and rattles. It shunts us back to a time before politics, before we were aware of others, or of the issues that divide us. Increasingly, she invites us to enjoy share these lovely moments in public spaces, in social situations where we stand alongside others—neighbours we potentially have little affinity with or worse—enjoying uncommon common delights. She creates little apolitical utopias. 

But don’t worry. The experiences are fleeting. Normal transmission will be restored as soon as we step outside the work’s envelope and return to the world. Back to work.

[IMAGE: Rebecca Baumann Light Event 2024, Perth Festival, 2024.]