Art gives you wings

Ed Lake

• Last Updated: December 12. 2008 8:30AM UAE / December 12. 2008 4:30AM GMT

Eyes on the prize: Michael Turda won top honours at the Art of Can exhibition, which asked artists to ponder one of the eternal themes – Red Bull. Courtesy Red Bull

The Art of Can fashions a cocktail of Red Bull and art. The mixture is neither energising nor drinkable. Ed Lakereports.

The more one stares, the more sharply cautionary the image becomes. Teeth are bared; the eyes, wide and feverish. The skin is International Klein Blue. The whole face must measure a couple of feet from chin to hairline; it commands the visual field like a hysteric seizing you by the lapels. The caption, a cloudy Plexiglas tablet which manages to look somehow holographic, says: Redbullized, by Hind Almari Maitha Demithan. And indeed, nothing could better evoke the throb of clammy panic produced by actually drinking Red Bull – that queasy overload of sugar, caffeine and synthesised bull-bile extract which powers perhaps a billion overdue university essay crises a year. To this extent, Redbullized is a triumph: the essence of the drink, captured on canvas.

I’m at Galleria in the Mall of the Emirates for Dubai’s second The Art of Can exhibition. This, for the uninitiated, is an art prize devoted to the glorification of an energy drink. As even Dalal Harb, Red Bull’s UAE communications manager, concedes, “the connection between the work of art and Red Bull, as an energy drink – maybe it’s not that obvious.” An odd event, to be sure (I am bathed in silver light and surrounded, to my surprised and sartorial disadvantage, by hired sylphs in evening-gowns), and no less so for being duplicated in dozens of cities around the globe. There’s an Art of Can in Miami, another in Salzberg: uncanny doppelgangers of more august, establishment art gatherings. One might suspect some satirical intent if The Art of Can weren’t everywhere else as well. From Austria to New Zealand, aspiring artists are cutting and crimping the signature blue cans, dreaming up variations on those heraldic butting steers and generally sending their imaginations aloft on hyper-stimulated pinions. And here’s the really clever part: to enter the contest, you need to produce a piece that chimes with the Red Bull brand. It would appear that the company has found a free and inexhaustible source of advertising concepts. Fiendish, no?

The supply of ideas showed no sign of drying up in Dubai, at any rate. There were 122 pieces on show this year, a remarkable haul that becomes still more striking when you consider the prizes up for grabs. Even the high-minded ADACH has offered a Range Rover and a TV appearance to the winner of its forthcoming Nabati poetry contest. Yet what did Red Bull have to stump up for its 122 original artworks? The first prize is a choice between a week’s worth of exhibition space in the UAE or a workshop with an international artist. No cash, no luxury goods. The offer touches the contestants in their most vulnerable spot: their creative aspirations. One feels instinctively protective towards them.

The artwork provokes similar sentiments. It ranges from the ingenious through the workmanlike to the possibly insane. There’s an inevitable crop of bulls, winged animals and macho critters – scorpions, legendary monsters and the like. One piece titled Passing Through Solids consists of a shop mannequin in a beige denim suit; Red Bull cans are, for no obvious reason beside the terms of the contest itself, poking through huge eyelets in its clothing. In Tribal Red Bull, a pygmy figurine fashioned from reclaimed aluminium sits on the ground in a grubby headband and loincloth, a drink can by its side; it looks utterly dejected. One doesn’t like to look too closely at Completing Time and Space, a wall-mounted figurative sculpture so concertedly horrific it could have sprung from a Clive Barker novel.

There’s little doubt about who belongs on the podium, at least. Myke Turda, who carries the contest, is both the judges’ and the popular favourite. His enigmatically titled gouache effort, I Am Legend, depicts a white-clad horde of men scrambling to catch a floating Red Bull can. Its intricacy and confident draughtsmanship announce Turda as a lifelong comics aficionado, though something about the stylised way his figures are struggling also gives the piece an odd air of socialist realism. Second prize goes to Rodel Noja, whose Meet the Myth is a can sculpture of a dragon climbing onto the back of an armoured centaur; its execution is undeniably deft, which doesn’t make it any less bewildering. And in third place is Jerry Maninang, whose cutaway relief image of lovers, stars, skyscrapers, cassettes and trees all bursting out of a Red Bull can recalls in its psychedelic exuberance one of Alan Aldridge’s 1960s record covers for The Who.

Grist for conspiracy theorists is supplied by the fact that all three winners are members of Guhit Pinoy, a UAE-based art collective headed by none other than Turda, a 37-year old graphic designer based in Abu Dhabi. Yet the explanation for their “sweep”, as Turda calls it with pride, is simple enough. He ran a three-line whip on the contest; Guhit Pinoy swamped the pool of submissions. When I spoke to him a couple of days after his victory, he hadn’t made his mind up about the prize but said he was leaning towards the exhibition. That’s the spirit, I thought, ride Red Bull for all the publicity they’re worth and do it on your own terms. Just one question: does Turda have enough suitable art to show? “I still need to fix some of my works,” he says. “I think since Red Bull is sponsoring this exhibit I need put some funky touches in my painting... make it more modern and, you know, trendy.”

Ah well. I’m sure he’ll do his sponsors proud.


elake@thenational.ae