SALON JETPACKCHRIS FOX

285 Young St Waterloo Sydney gallery@gbk.com.au

www.gbk.com.au+61 2 8399 1240

www.chrisfox.com.au

Front: Quiff, Salon Jetpack, 2009, stainless steel, mild steel, stainless steel braided hose, polyurethane tubing, pneumatic fittings, shoulder and waist harness, fiberglass, automotive paints, 154 x 82 x 131 cm

Above, top: Salon Jetpack, installation view, Mohawk, Afro, Bob, 2009

Above: 2010-2020 Salon Density Map, 2009, print on photographic paper, 71.5 x 54 cm each, edition of 20

Flap: Ponytail, Salon Jetpack, 2009, galvanised and mild steel, stainless steel, brass, copper, rubber and stainless steel braided hose, shoulder harness, fiberglass, automotive paints, 113 x 60 x 123 cm

Inside left: Bob, Salon Jetpack, 2009, moulded

plastic, stainless steel, mild steel, aluminium, stainless steel braided hose, shoulder harness, fiberglass, automotive paints, 81 x 70 x 143 cm

Inside middle left: 2010 Salon Density Map, 2009, (detail), print on photographic paper

Inside middle right: Afro, Salon Jetpack, 2009, copper, stainless steel, mild steel, stainless steel braided hose, polyurethane tubing, pneumatic fittings, shoulder and waist harness, fiberglass, automotive paints, 147 x 63 x 128 cm

Inside right: Mohawk, Salon Jetpack, 2009, (detail), mild steel, stainless steel, aluminium, stainless steel braided hose, polyurethane tubing, pneumatic fittings, shoulder harness, fiberglass, automotive paints, 118 x 67 x 123 cm

Photography: Jamie North

2010 2015 2020

30 SECONDS OF FLIGHT

Anatomy is not destiny, nor is politics: seduction is destiny. It is what remains of a magical, fateful world, a risky, vertiginous and predestined world; it is what is quietly effective in a visibly efficient and stolid world.1

Jetpacks have long since been a childhood dream of a future that has yet to unfold. The promise of soaring solo through the air, stopping off at floating worlds and living on landscapes in the sky, is no doubt linked to the idea of utopia—a place that could never exist on earth.

In the realm of the physical world and corporeal desires, Chris Fox has refashioned the soft organs of machines into five

propositions of flight. His urban Salon Jetpacks (2009) hang from the wall like exoskeletons of the future remade from the flesh of an industrial past. They appear showroom ready, but have a slightly used quality about them when seen from up-close, like near-new prosthetics. Attached to each jetpack is a helmet moulded in the shape of either a Mohawk, Afro, Bob, Ponytail or Quiff, offering us the potential of airborne freedom anchored to the retro coiffure of our choice. The implication is one of codependence where aeronautics is driven by cosmetic aspiration and current definitions of consumer cool. The style is the ride, so function follows form in an inverse take on the modern architecture of flight.

A nuclear family comes in to the gallery to

look at Fox’s industrial prototypes while their dog waits patiently outside. The little girl stands in front of the models and plays a game of “What if?”. She announces she has chosen the creamy yellow ponytail from the menu of gelato-coloured helmets on offer, and prompts the family to designate their preferences too. Her slightly older brother says he wants “Elvis!”. His built-in nostalgia is a second-hand memory, yet to him it still feels like a reflex response. His dad attempts to correct him by saying, “You mean the Quiff?”. The son is not interested in listening. For him the semiotics of hair is linked to an order of fame that exceeds the idea of a mere style. The look is a trademarked brand, like the Beckham “faux-hawk” that began at the 2002 World Cup and ended up in suburban shopping malls across the globe.

Thirty seconds of flight is the physical limit of the current dream; the jetpack’s fuel-to-weight ratio is unsustainable beyond this mileage of time. The technology, therefore, offers a moment of flight just long enough to let go of gravity without the commitment of a journey. It is the difference between a stunt and an event, blink and you will miss it. With built-in inefficiency, this is a luxury design wedded to a cycle of terminal endurance and pit stops. Under these circumstances, reality is lived as a truncated devotion to ‘the dream’.

The world of television advertising is premised on this timeframe. Thirty-second cycles of seduction run parenthetically on either side of programmed ‘content’ and consumer impulses are built on a product’s unspoken promise of failure. Former U.S. president

George W. Bush’s strategy for withdrawing American troops from Iraq worked on a similar assumption. His commitment to a withdrawal was based on a “general time horizon” and the immediate act of doing nothing was posited as a causal guarantee of future action. In essence it was a buy now, pay later dream with resolution conceived of as a perpetual state of imminence. In this sense, action was understood as a measure of delay with progress aligned to negative productivity.

A comparable fate belies the urban integration plans for the Salon Jetpack’s future. In another part of the gallery, a triptych of blueprints forecasts a geographically condensed world marked by an exponential rate of growth in jetpack usage. These commercial projections suggest a destiny of entropic

gridlock. The useless extravagance of flight, modelled on the stylings of contemporary nostalgia, seems geared towards both driving and immobilising the industry’s future.

Fox’s Salon Jetpack suggests that if we continue to pursue the market logic of our impulses then our destiny appears inextricably bound to a past which will take us back to a future ultimately running on empty. For now, however, we can continue to play in the reflections of time, captivated by appearances and wondering “What if?”

Tanya Peterson 2009

1 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (trans. Jean Singer), London: MacMillan, 1990, p. 180.

2010