Simon Zoric

When Simon Zoric exhibited a silicone copy of his dick and balls on the floor at West Space someone actually slipped over on it. It sounds like a modern take on a banana skin gag from a 1920s film that might have had tap dancing, or minstrelry in it—but it really happened and he says it wasn’t on purpose.
Despite his works’ potential for ironic, oftentimes chuckle-inducing readings he insists that they are never intended as ‘one-liners’: ‘I guess I get worried about people thinking that it’s a joke,’ he says.
‘I seesaw so much, because other times I get so angry if someone says it’s funny, and I try to say that I’m not trying to be humorous at all,’ he says, ‘It’s completely nuts though.’
Nuts, balls, dicks and all, on first look his works definitely amuse. Along with the sculpture Cock & Balls (2013) he wrote and exhibited From the Desk of (2013), a letter replete with references to urinal shyness that he had sent to the National Gallery of Victoria asking them to buy it (he still hasn’t heard back). In Moodometer (2010), he altered a barometer so that it oscillates between his three primary moods: horny, depressed, angry. He once exhibited a life-size wooden Decoy (2013) of himself, kind of like one of those folk art duck decoys, complete with a beer in hand (‘I used to drink a lot. I guess I was just making a joke about me being a boozer.’)
His works often border on self-parody. But that doesn’t mean he wants to lend others licence for the same. ‘Some people are jerks about it. If you’re self-deprecating then they think that means that they can make fun of you as well. It’s not the same thing.’

Simon’s constant self-effacement can make him seem a little unsure—his dark eyes dart, his voice quavers, and he has the tendency to ask too often if he’s making sense. But it becomes apparent as he hums and haws, explains and re-explains—that he really does knows what he means, exactly what he means. But that he’s just deliberating what words to use.
And when you look more closely at his work, past the humour and the persona, you can see similar layers of premeditation, forethought. That the materiality of the object is the result of a deep, conceptual labour.
And it is the concept that he is faithful to above all else. ‘The materials are dictated by the idea, and then you have to figure out how to make it or how to get somebody else to make it.’
He went through such a process when he made Decoy after undertaking a residency in the United States. ‘I came to the end of the residency and I had nothing, I was just at the San Francisco airport, and they had an exhibition on in the airport of antique duck decoys.’
‘From that I was just thinking what would a decoy of me look like? If I was to have a decoy carved, what would I be doing?’
He liked that the duck decoy can be instantly recognised as its signified subject and wondered how we could create a work with a similar immediacy.
He decided to dress the model in his then signature outfit; a bomber jacket, loose black pants, sneakers. ‘I had been travelling at the time, so I didn’t have all of my clothes with me, but I was wearing the same outfit all the time in that period.’
He also decided to give the Decoy a beer in hand, because he drinking a lot at the time, because of the stereotypically masculine connotations of the gesture, and because of drinking’s ubiquity in the art gallery opening context. Not being a carver, or a painter, he outsourced the construction of the piece.
Apart from his tendency to follow of his ideas, along the tangential lines and lateral jumps they take, he says ‘I don’t have any regular way of working ever.’ A lot of the time he’s just working things out, for the sake of working them out.
‘You’re trying things out sometimes and seeing what it means, or what it does.’

Simon started off studying photography, but eventually wanted to move away from it. ‘I feel like I had a bit of an insecurity—there’s a thing with being a photographer where you feel like you don’t have that skill with the hands…you just feel limited.’
He began to recognise that his strength wasn’t necessarily in his aesthetics or technical ability, but was somewhere within his capacity to conceptualise his life. ‘A lot of it comes from my experience… so something might happen that might make me think of something else and then I’ll put it through the art filter.’
Today his studio is filled with models of poached eggs, toast. He plans to make a Melbourne café breakfast still life, with two empty chairs, a table set. The work represents his fondness of the experience, and allows the viewer to project their ‘own experience or their own ideas about it—’they’ll say I never order bacon and eggs, or whatever.’
The work would also serve as a memorial for the experience, preserving elements of the real, where ‘it’s not real but you can have it forever.’
Rather than trying to perfectly mimic the experience, ‘it’s supposed to remind you of what the real thing is.’

While his works often represents the minutia of the generic experience of being human, he frames these in autobiographically specific terms. They operate as doubles of the artist—a multifarious series of competing versions of himself—often self-effacing, humorous, weird.
This is more out of an attempt to survive posthumously than due to an urge to create something uncanny: ‘it’s like leaving evidence that you were here.’
Different models relate to different facets of his identities. A work he made with a Nirvana poster removed from his teenage bedroom wall (titled Nirvana, 2013) for instance, memorialises his angstier years.
‘I feel like I want it to be a big picture type thing.’
He wants people to able to look back over his work holistically, take the ‘long view’ so ‘you could feel like you knew [him]’.
He is also interested in achieving a sense of intimacy with his viewer because he is fascinated with ‘getting to know’ other artists through their work—‘even if it’s not directly, it’s an expression about them.’
Despite not having to relate to other artists in a ‘literal’ sense, he is more interested in forming a straightforward connection between himself and his viewer. ‘I want it to be really direct, I want to feel as though the person looking at the work has a close relationship to me.’
‘Yeah, I like that idea.’

While he consistently speaks from his own experience, it’s not necessarily out of a conscious desire to, but because his conceptual process is so centred on working from what he knows.
‘I don’t want to necessarily use myself, I’m just trying to talk about my life.’
‘If I was going to make a woodcarving of a person, why would I use me instead of using another person? I could just have a stand-in, but then what would be the point?’
‘It’s about me.’
The works exploit elements of Simon’s self-image; most notably his sense of humour, his drinking, his moodiness and his masculinity.
‘Masculinity just comes into it because I’m a male artist. I got picked on at school—you know Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, I relate to those people a lot.’
He often exploits the stereotypical ideal of the male artist, as grand and heroic, but simultaneously undermines it. The self-deprecating sense of humour in his work aids this gesture. ‘I’m playing around with that idea of saying here I am I’m this heroic artist and then I’m not.’
Having both one viewpoint and its opposite coincide in equal measures in his work can make things complicated for him, ‘because at the end of the day I am a male artist, and I am still propping myself up, it’s like trying to have it both ways.’
‘That’s why I got to the point where I was not trying to put myself in the work all the time. And then I made a fucking statue of myself.’

One way that he gets away with it is that his works are not necessarily honest. He created an artwork called Headstone (2008) a headstone made of marble, inscribed with his birthdate and inscribed with an epitaph almost aphoristic in its simplicity: ‘My only regret is that I didn’t sleep with more people.’
About it, he says, ‘I don’t necessarily want to sleep with lots of people, it’s just something I was thinking about.’
While it’s not an honest representation of his thoughts, it’s important that the viewer thinks that it is, or questions that is—so it matters that the subject of the work is him. ‘I have to have ownership of it for anyone else to care.’
‘If they went and saw that and it was, oh, one person wants to sleep with lots of different people, I feel like that’s different if that’s me, the artist, or the author of it.’
Even if what is authored is not entirely revelatory of the artist.

His work often occupy this liminal terrain, between being intentionally funny, or not, sincere and insincere, monumental and un-monumental, self-exposing and ironic.
This kind of in-betweenness defined in his exhibition of Cock & Balls (2013) and From The Desk Of (2013).
‘I thought it would be really funny if the only work that I ever had purchased by the NGV was a sculpture of my penis, because it’s a ridiculous idea’ he said, but it was also his ‘worst nightmare.’
If he could have abdicated from the role as subject, used someone else, ‘gotten away with it not being me then I would have, but I didn’t see any way that I could get out of it…because that’s what the idea dictated.’
The simultaneous connotations of ego and ‘repulsion’ attached to depictions of the male genitals interested him.
‘The suggestion of that sculpture could be that I think that my penis is so great that I have to make a sculpture of it and put it on display.’
He took away any implicit egotism by exhibiting the flaccid object on the floor ‘in a cold harsh way’; alluding towards ideas of emboldened masculinity before stripping it away, where the work ‘kind of looks like something discarded.’
By making an object into an artwork and then denigrating it he says, ‘You’re elevating it, but you’re not making it special at the same time.’
This allows all of its competing inferences to operate, all at one, without one dominating.

In From the Desk Of (2013) the letter he wrote skirts the border between sincerity and insincerity. He says, when he wrote it, it was the letter he wanted to write, but it also wasn’t, because he knows that it’s not appropriate (‘it’s egotistical writing to the NGV and asking them to buy it, because you’re not supposed to request that.’)
He also sent it at what he knew was an entirely improper time. ‘I sent it in the middle of them getting ready for Melbourne Now. I wanted it to get me attention or something.’
Some elements he wrote about, including his embarrassment about his penis being uncircumcised, were patently ridiculous in the context of the letter’s formality. ‘I tried to write the letter really sincerely, but I know it’s a crazy letter to write.’
‘It’s not the letter that I would write if I really wanted them to buy them work. But I did sincerely want them to buy the work.’
‘It’s confusing. There’s my real feelings and what I want to happen, and I know that the letters not the right way to go about it but I decide to go and write the letter anyway.’
This ambivalence is instrumental in his enactment of a persona, one that is him and also isn’t, who’s funny, but not a punchline, who’s sincere and also not. ‘I feel like it has to be me, because I have to have this authorship of it.’
‘Even if it’s not really me it has to look it’s like me, because I want the viewer to believe that I’m being sincere, if they want to, or question if I’m being sincere.’
And by inviting both interpretations, maybe he can have both. Or make you giggle, either way.

You can view more of Simon Zoric’s works and hear about his future exhibitions at his website.