Danny Frommer
Winter 2024
35°19’06.5”S 149°00’35.3”E
Yale-Columbia Refractor Ruin,
Mount Stromlo, Kamberri/Canberra
︎ View exhibition catalogue
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‘The observer’ refers to a person engaged in an act of perceiving some event or phenomenon. It situates a human witness, a spectator in relation to a particular process or system, a body engaged in looking – employing the senses to attain, measure, and interpret information about the world around us.
Bizarrely, the presence of an observer tends to commonly affect the process being observed. Wherein just looking, ‘the observer’ causes a paradoxical distortion, generating a different outcome than if the process was unobserved. This is due to the fact that human perception occurs by a complex, unconscious process of abstraction.
Humans are so prone to error, not merely perceptual or psychological forms of disorder - like misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or mistranslation - but also physical kinds of disorder like illness, injury or malady.
In focusing on technology and its embodiments, Danny Frommer seeks to transpose the fallibilities and inbuilt intensities of the human body onto the technical infrastructure of mechanical systems. Each of the works in this exhibition has been encoded with an internal glitch, whereby each assemblage performs a ‘system error’ – a malfunction of meaning, a loss of resolution.
When a mechanical process or system breaks down, it no longer works properly; it stops the logical flow and demands maintenance through human intervention. A breakdown affords the opportunity to pause a task and allows the system to show its technical infrastructure – to expose its inner workings and flaws. Like a glitch, a breakdown becomes a wonderful experience of an interruption that focuses our attention onto an object, onto a singular part of a larger system, and isolates it away from its ordinary form, function, or discourse.
In our increasingly decentered and dematerialised world, we tend to ignore our complicity and essential function in maintaining the technical systems that facilitate production. As new technologies become progressively automated and disembodied, their inner-workings become abstracted and concealed from view – assigned to an intelligence that is ‘artificial’, or invisibly offloaded into The Cloud.
Such technologies are usually only considered as serving a utilitarian function, and are therefore normalised in such a way that they slip out of any real-human moral framework. However, as Danny’s work reminds us, such technologies remain robustly material and prone to error, disposed to catastrophic malfunctions and breakdowns, revealing the gap between the stories we are sold about technology and our visceral reality – our moral complicity and corporeal proximity to such systems of error.
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Danny Frommer (b. Canberra, 1979) creates installations of painting, sculpture and mechanical assemblage which together form interrelational systems of both physical and figurative, kinetic and symbolic exchange.
Drawing on his experience as a metal-fitter and machinist, he seeks to reveal the “abject body of technology” – the working parts and processes of mechanical reproduction and maintenance that go unseen in the Technosphere.
Danny often forces disparate objects and images into absurd or illogical propositions. Mechanical assemblages are often tasked to perform competing demands and exhaustive actions, pushing the mechanics to their material and metaphorical extremes. As such, these systems require routine maintenance, human care and supervision – highlighting the fallibility of machines, and our corporeal resemblance to such systems of error.
Danny’s work seeks to question the value we ascribe to utility, to craftsmanship, automatisation, interpretation, simulation and repetition – blurring the distinction between utilitarian-production and obsolete-performance.
Danny Frommer is currently based in Narrm/Melbourne, where he maintains a studio and metal-fitter and machinist’s workshop. In 2018, he completed a Masters in Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, receiving the National Gallery of Victoria Women’s Association Award. From 2009-2012, Danny undertook Engineering Studies at the Northern Melbourne Institute of Tafe (NMIT), after completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Painting) at the ANU School of Art & Design, Canberra, in 2002.
Recent solo-exhibitions in Melbourne include Dog’s Breakfast at Second Space Projects (2016), Stranding Reserve at Mars Gallery (2015), and Clogged Pipes at Bus Projects (2014). Recent group-exhibitions include The Sundowner at Fires (2019) by Nicholas Kleindienst, From Where I Stand at George Patton (2018) by Kim Donaldson, and On Being at The Honeymoon Suite (2017) by Charlotte Cornish.
︎ Artist’s website