Beyond Function: Vital Matter and Danni O’Brien’s Toning Systems by Maura Callahan
Danni O’Brien is a scavenger. The work included in the exhibition Toning Systems was constructed from accumulations of consumer excess, especially exercise equipment O’Brien found, thrifted, or received as donations. Dumbbells, ab rollers, weight racks, pressure point massagers, yoga blocks, and deconstructed exercise machines—leftovers of the at-home self-improvement market that surged during the Covid-19 lockdown—appear throughout their sculptures. Now that once-avid wellness shoppers have reactivated their gym memberships or can no longer bear the shame of their neglected equipment, these items have found their way into yard sales and thrift stores, and ultimately into O’Brien’s sculptures. Placing these dejected objects together to form new, cyborgian creatures, O’Brien retains a sense of impotence in the individual parts while imbuing the whole with an uncanny vitality. Through monochromatic palettes and precarious assemblages, domestic refuse intermingles with wax-cast and dried gourds to form strange hybrids, collapsing anachronism into novelty and the synthetic into the organic.

Throughout O’Brien’s sculptures, wall-mounted reliefs, and drawings, objects that feel familiar in one moment register as foreign in the next. Sad Beige Pyramid Scheme nods to the nearly obsolete trends of O’Brien’s (and this writer’s) generation, which now faces the sting of subordination to the growing capital of Gen Z. Research shows that millennials are more invested in impulsive shopping and exercise than any other generation, and here, the products of those pursuits rematerialize as oddities. Dumbbells, scented candles, a peach-hued paper weight, purse lining, and a wooden back massager appear nestled among gourds in a pyramid-shaped rack, all balanced atop taupe candles stacked on wax casts of fake rocks. At the pinnacle, the empty rubber skin of a dumbbell sheaths a flesh-colored squash. The items’ peculiar presentation as artifacts of a recent past seems to parody the speed at which we become alienated from the objects of our own obsessive consumption. The pyramid structure suggests a totemic or memorializing function, yet O’Brien avoids nostalgia by allowing the objects to accumulate into a new and unstable entity, rather than fixing them in space and time in the manner of a conventional monument. The structure’s infiltration by twisting gourds, color-tuned to the oft-ridiculed “sad beige” palette of the wellness products (almost exclusively marketed to women), transforms the mass into a living web of detritus and overgrowth.

O’Brien seems to ask not simply what happens to these discarded objects when their appeal or use value fades, but more urgently: what happens to “our” things when we are gone? If abandoned wellness products have reemerged as relics of the pandemic (a sign of the vulnerability of our species if there ever was one), then the once-instrumentalized objects’ unruly entanglement with organic matter in O’Brien’s sculptures seems to speculate a post-human situation. They would seem at home in a post-apocalyptic landscape in which plants and fungi begin to consume the abandoned infrastructure of a vanished civilization. But in O’Brien’s work, these materials do not appear as passive vestiges of depleted functionality. Instead, they seem to take on new functions that we can sense but not make sense of. Off-kilter “dumbbell” pairs made from not-quite identical wax gourds and various handles invite bimanual interaction, but to what end? In Ready Set Go, partial evidence of mechanical engineering—looping webs of tubes, reconfigured parts from a recumbent exerciser—amounts to no clear purpose. Perhaps the bulbous gourds—both actual and wax-cast, ripe and rotted—are the organs which operate the mechanism, or maybe they’re parasitic growths. This may still be a machine, but it now serves or is acted upon by something other than ourselves.

In other words, we encounter the possibility of agencies and vitalities that exceed a human context. Jane Bennett theorized material vitality as “the capacity of things… not only to impede or block the will of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” O’Brien resists the human fantasies of mastery and consumption that tend to shape images of instrumentalized products and deinstrumentalized refuse by staging a world of things beyond ourselves. The discarded products O’Brien incorporates into their work are no longer irrelevant to us—we have become irrelevant to them.

But the human is not totally absent in these works. We bring ourselves into the picture by recalling our relationship to these once-domestic objects. Traces of use appear in worn or nicked surfaces and faded colors, which O’Brien deliberately retains as small, organic interventions in the materials’ intensely synthetic saturation. We also form associations between these sculptural bodies and our own anatomies: protuberances correspond to limbs or sexual organs, while linkages fusing disparate materials remind us of our own joints. But O’Brien’s provocations for anthropomorphization take unexpected turns. In their ink drawings, the contours of imaginary apparatuses are rendered with the dotted lines used for human figures in patent illustrations, recasting these strange machines as bodies. A wall-mounted sculpture made from the skeleton of a back rest resembles a female reproductive system, camouflaging the sexual as mechanical. Meanwhile, gourds frequently appear phallic, but also limp and breast-like, both natural and manufactured in their wax-cast doubles.

Maurice Berger observed that the absurd and erotic sculptures of Eva Hesse—a longstanding inspiration for O’Brien—“refuse to project sexuality as static or univalent.” Similarly, O’Brien extends a queer sensibility to disrupt not only sexual dichotomies, but also distinctions between animation and inanimation, function and disfunction. This irresolution unsettles prescriptive values once assigned to charged signifiers. Petrified in stonelike paper pulp, a relief diagram of a vintage, clamshell-like “bust developer” patented in 1970 appears to us like an ancient cave drawing shrouded in mystery. O’Brien retains the ubiquitous baby pink of the original plastic, but in its reappearance here as a curio returned from the distant past, the image resists gendered terms of representation. Cast onto the surrounding wall by a light behind the sculpture, the pink appears more alien than exactly feminine. In our misrecognition of this product, we are reminded that objects can outlast the (gendered) values once ascribed to them.

In conversation, the works oscillate between revealing and rebuking meaning. Pseudo-instructive cues from diagrammatic drawings and paper pulp reliefs tease and then disrupt any logic that might synthesize between the sculptures and their wall-bound counterparts. Several works literally open themselves up for inspection. In Innards, a splayed-out ankle weight embeds itself in another paper pulp relief, meticulously pinned into the surface like a framed insect. The chambers that would normally enclose individual weights have been emptied and opened, beckoning tactile exploration. In this and other works, a close look into the “insides” of an object only serves to abstract its function. O’Brien repeatedly incorporates the emptied silicone membranes of dumbbells, restuffing them with wax gourds. Once again, our hyperawareness of the structure and materiality of things fails to cohere into a stable logic.

The sculptures depend quite literally on structural incoherence. In piecing together their assemblages, O’Brien eschews adhesive for counterbalanced, suspended, or pressure-fit attachments. Some parts are nestled into others as if they could be picked up, knocked out of place, or rearranged altogether. The assemblage sculptures never appear in the same configuration twice. O’Brien’s commitment to modularity is, in part, practical: they have been a nomadic artist for nearly three years, moving from one studio or residency to another. The option for disassembly and reassembly offers a travel-ready solution for the migratory maker. In O’Brien’s case, it also contributes to the feeling of endless potential that invigorates their work.

The precarious and iterative nature of O’Brien’s work reflects a vision of an unstable world continuously reshaped through hybridization, glitched reproduction, and reconfiguration. In this sense, O’Brien’s intimation of a posthuman future is less concerned with our own ending than it is with the possibility of growth and renewal outside of human (and specifically capitalist) domination. Toning Systems offers a glimpse—however speculative and partial—into the lives of things beyond human-engineered obsolescence. As it turns out, the stuff that once appeared to occupy the background of our lives holds power we can only begin to imagine.