Alex Millar: The Shiny Flivver

“It’s difficult to say precisely what my practice is as an artist now, but I think that’s quite a natural thing, a healthy thing quite early on in my career.” So says Alex Millar, wisely, under close questioning on what will be revealed in his exhibition this month. The winner of last year’s The Skinny & CCA Award at RSA New Contemporaries has his prize of a solo show opening in CCA’s Intermedia gallery on 7 February. Offered the opportunity to present work a further year on from the 2013 graduate show, Alex has been beavering away developing his visual language at high velocity.

“I’m still open to using anything, really, in my work. It’s changing very quickly,” he says. The installation displayed in 2013 in Edinburgh's RSA galleries offered an intriguing arrangement of elements, including film, photography, neon light, and materials ranging from metal to wood to the humble aubergine. The lightness with which he presents his theme is one of the true beauties of Millar’s work – he doesn’t overload with a determined meaning; the elusive space – both physical and intellectual – between the elements of the installation offer a tantalising challenge to define meaning, and render the viewing and exploration of the piece a creative process.

It’s difficult to avoid the question, though – why the aubergine? “I use it because in terms of its material – on one level it’s sort of alien, it’s kind of an amorphous object in a way; it’s stupid, it’s kind of simple, but it’s similar [formally] in a lot of ways to Modernist sculpture, to something like Brancusi. The tall piece of aubergines I had in the RSA is not dissimilar to something like that. A lot of Brancusi’s work dealt with nature in the forms of his age.” The ‘tall piece,’ the vegetables impaled on a metal spike and left to rot over the course of the show, degrading from their pristine formal beauty and withering in a riot of colour, introduced the memento mori to the work, the conventions of the still life explored in physical form reminding the viewer of the fragile beauty of mortality.

Alex elaborates: “Another reference would be Fischli + Weiss, where it’s very precariously balanced objects that they photograph just before they collapse." Their work, Equilibres, is subtitled 'Balance is most beautiful just before it collapses.’ That seemingly silly aubergine betrays a deep engagement with the fine art canon lying at the core of Millar's practice. 

The new exhibition, entitled Novella, expands on the multimedia elements of his work, presenting film, sound and kinetic sculpture. Subtitled What Happened To The Shiny Flivver, the installation is based around a mysterious metal object. “I found this piece of metal from a Ford car, but it’s not particularly certain what its function is. Basically, [the work is] referencing Henry Ford, and A Brave New World. There’s a poem in there, a ritual of obedience the characters all recite about Ford, and the shiny flivver. The flivver is a slang term used in America for a type of car, and it was also a project that Ford had for a plane that never actually took off – it was called the flivver plane.” That elusive piece of metal becomes a totem of industrialisation, perhaps, and an allusion to the hubristic dreams of our wealthy overlords. 

A recent residency in Marseille saw Millar learning new technical skills, working with computer programming and electronics to expand into the kinetic realm, while also examining that narrative space in his work. “I was reading up quite a lot of theory to do with narrative – narrative deficiency with regard to the objects and the way they allude to a kind of absent narrative in the space. They’re always trying to aspire to a history and also a more complex relationship between elements within the space; but also the way I use them is often humorous so that undercuts its sense of purpose in that regard.” As evidenced by the aubergines, now fallen by the wayside as part of his visual language. “I doubt that I'll be using them again; I don't want to be known as that aubergine artist!” he explains, later.

It would be entirely wrong to define Alex Millar by a single material. The rate of evolution of his practice makes it difficult to say exactly what will be in Intermedia ahead of time; a meditation on industrialism and its dystopian consequences awaits – all we know for certain is it will contain movement, rhythm and a shiny flivver.