Martin Kersels

There’s something pathetically comedic about Martin Kersels’ de-stabilized works of art. Gravity and humor on a grand scale activate “Heavyweight Champion,” the largest exhibition of the artist’s production to date, a collection of over 30 works featuring sculpture, photography and video documentation of performances by Kersels.

The multimedia artist makes no attempt to conceal the electric motor that causes his mesmerizing mechanized sculpture of a blinking lifebuoy, “Buoy,” to rock back and forth like a metronome. Making a point of using mundane materials, Kersels exposes all the working parts of his sculptures to public view, pulling the curtain back to reveal the ordinariness behind his wizardry. His own voice is detectable on the CD connected to the nearly six foot tall buoy marooned on the gallery floor. He generates increasingly loud whooshing sounds that build into a ridiculous imitation of a storm capable of tossing ocean waves. The sculpture’s bulbous bottom simulates that of a child’s roly-poly toy or clown shaped punching bag, weighted inside to enable it to remain upright no matter how hard it is hit: the thing is built to teeter on the edge, but dancing in perpetuity, refusing to stay down.

Blogger and recent Cal Arts grad Michael Buitron recognizes the incredible approachability of Kersels’ work, suggesting that “there is a strong relationship with the body, either in the anthropomorphized forms or how the body relates to the sculptures that conceivably may be operated.” That relationship is supported by Kersels’ early collaboration with other heavyweights in the performance group called the Shrimps, which Kersels acknowledges set the stage for his later work in sculpture. That’s where he began creating the most of his 300 plus pounds of flesh, moving that mass through space, performing what he characterizes as sculpture-making in time.

Among the earliest works in the show are photographs of Kersels falling, taken in the mid 1990’s while he was working on his MFA degree at UCLA with faculty mentors like Charles Ray, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelly. Those pictures and others in which Kersels trips, tosses friends into the air or gets smacked by them, are the result of hours of practice in collaboration and improvisation with the photographer (usually Kersels’ wife, Mary Collins). Their goal was to allow the camera to capture points of view and trajectories that responded to the artist’s quest for melancholic, pathetic actions. Credit Kersels’ astute study of the “wink-wink humor mixed with a tragic element” of his Hollywood hero, Buster Keaton. The obvious art world precedent for this series is Yves Klein’s 1960 “Leap into the Void,” retouched before Photoshop further eroded our belief in “truth” in photography. The oddity in the series is the diptych “Kouros and Me,” understandable as a study in contrasts between the formal posture of the Greek sculpture’s idealized body and the bulges under Kersels’ tee shirt, but a rare exception to Kersels’ “what you see is what you get” work ethic. His flying kouros is a painted foam impersonation, linking it to later accusations of fakery and illegal procurements that plagued the Getty’s Department of Antiquities.

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MARTIN KERSELS