Richard Goodwin�s exoskeletons 

by Anthony Bond

Richard Goodwin trained as an architect but began making art while still studying in London.   His artworks still reference this training and have often branched out into major engineering works in conjunction with architects and structural engineers.  His artworks range from fairly conventional exhibitions of works on paper or sculpture to performances and public art works.  There is an in-between quality about this that is not simply the space between gallery and the public domain or between Art and architecture but a more uncomfortable negotiation of interpersonal space and between art and life.

The theme of exoskeleton that has been present in his work from the beginning in one form or another may be seen as a metaphor for this interpersonal space and perhaps for a more difficult intrapersonal space.  None of us would want to exist without the infrastructure modern society provides for us.   It is a kind of exoskeleton with which we are so familiar that we probably find it difficult to realise that it is as much part of our bodies and minds as our most intimate bodily or psychological secrets.

Perversely it is only when we see the infrastructure reduced to a minimum or disfunctioning in some way that we get a glimpse of our normal dependency.  Richard has been fascinated by the memory of Joseph Cindric a homeless person whose connection to technology and the everyday infrastructure was manifested in a hand made cart that he pushed around Sydney complete with his entire minimal material requirements.   Maybe material is not the right way to see this assemblage, it was a sense of place that travelled with him, it was an extension of his body and of his personality that may have given him the comfort we normally receive from a room or a house of our own.

With hindsight I am tempted to look at Richard�s work as always entailing an investigation into the interdependency of structures beyond the body and the formal signs of this that often take the form of an exoskeleton.  This idea is supported by his persistent use of two contrasting materials.  These are soft materials - fabric associated with the body including clothing and bed sheets and its material opposite in hard metal and mechanical structures.  Both are undeniably extensions of the body, clothing as much as a car, a submarine or a bag lady�s trolley.  As such they both point inevitably to our interdependence on our built or constructed environment.

Architects have always known about this and in modern times Le Corbusier taught us to think of buildings as machines for living.  We naturally have a subjective revulsion towards this model that contradicts our internal view of self with its blatant juxtaposition of the mechanical and the personal.   We easily externalise the machine and condemn or ridicule the designer who tries to convince us of its logic but are we fooling ourselves?  Perhaps the most encouraging examples of coping with all this are precisely those who like Joseph Cindric occupy the fringes of our industrial society where they somehow convert its discarded fragments into a personal domain.  Their efforts strike us as somehow heroically autonomous but can we learn anything about ourselves from this example? 

Perhaps it is up to the artist to try and give this relationship between technology and the individual an acceptable face or more accurately reveal the truth of our condition without seeming to impose an ideological or theoretical model on our everyday life.  Can this be why Richard continues to build strangely defunct structures that defy modernist or structural logic? Are these support mechanisms metaphors for the invisible webs that hold us together and in our place?   This is a more subtle approach than the dramatic biomechanical performances of Stelarc whose presentations easily allow us to think of them as belonging in some distant future.  Today there are many artists using digital technology to give us science fiction images of androids and bio engineered life forms but Richard�s use of everyday materials and recognisable objects makes the present reality of man and his machines more easily assimilable and in reality all the more disturbing.