Barbara Hepworth, Construction I, 1965
Published by The Ingram Art Foundation, 2017
Online catalogue: Artist biographies and artwork interpretation
Review for Espace Magazine: "Michael Joo: Radiohalo"
Espace Magazine: Fetiches/Fetishes, No. 113, Spring/Summer 2016
Published in Espace Magazine #113, Spring/Summer 2016
Blain Southern Gallery, London
10 February 2016 – 9 April 2016
A white slab of marble towers over visitors as they enter the gallery. Flanked within a three-meter-high steel frame, the mammoth stone vacillates between taciturn menace and security, as it incites viewers to consider their own corporeal awareness. A meandering vein slices through the boulder, symbolising Cameron’s Line, a tectonic boundary defined by a subterranean belt of marble that runs from Connecticut to the Bronx. Oozing art historical references, Michael Joo’s work speaks of the geometric impulses and minimalist ideologies of the 1960s, of Joseph Beuys’ articulation of primal and elemental forces, of Gary Kuehn’s emphasis on the physicality of raw mediums, of Richard Serra’s sculptures that teeter on the brink of danger, and of Barry Le Va’s conceptual installations. Yet, Joo’s engagement with independent themes and the transformative qualities of matter lend his practice a unique position within the context of contemporary art. This sculpture, fittingly entitled Prologue (Montclair Danby Vein Cut) (2014-2015), acts as a preamble to the exhibition. Echoing the nucleus of the artist’s iconography, it sets the stage for Joo’sRadiohalo show at Blain Southern in London.
Review for ArtNow Magazine: "Ai Weiwei"
Ai Weiwei, 2015
Published in ArtNow Magazine, 01 October 2015
Royal Academy of Art, London
19 September - 13 December 2015
A thicket of reconstructed trees greats visitors as they enter the Royal Academy’s courtyard. The work, entitled Tree (2009-10, 2015), is made up of discarded pieces of bough collected from the mountains of southern China. Its medium reverbs within the open space, subtly echoing the artist’s manifesto. The disparate parts interlock and fuse, as the eight simulacral structures create a cohesive whole. Together they boom a visual commentary on the way in which geographically and culturally diverse people unite to form ‘One China’. Simultaneously playful and searingly political, Tree sets the stage for Ai Weiwei’s retrospective exhibition at the R.A.
Review for Espace Magazine: "Robert Therrien: Reinventing the Readymade"
Espace Magazine: Migrations Frontieres/Migrations Borders, No. 111, Autumn 2015
Published in Espace Magazine #111, Autumn 2015
Gagosian Gallery, London
14 April – 30 May 2015
Presenting visitors with a portal into a fantastical world where the uncanny rubs shoulders with the familiar, Robert Therrien’s oversized objects displayed at the Gagosian Gallery in London from 14 April to 30 May 2015 speak of childhood curiosity. The colossal sculptures are a bid, if you will, to preserve the fleeting days of innocence through the ribbons of whimsical narrative that run through the exhibition. The exaggerated dimensions of the everyday housewares depicted punctuate the rigid white cube, as the space transforms and transcends into the absurd. Hence, it is difficult to walk through the gallery and not feel transported back to a simpler time. Akin to the artist’s earlier works, the oeuvres exhibited dissolve the boundaries that exist between dreams and childhood memories; Therrien depicts humdrum objects that each viewer is sure to have encountered in their past, objects that we can only revisit through a hypnagogic exploration. Thus, his installations simultaneously evoke the wide-eyed idealism and trepidation of youth. It is this guileless awe that beckons within us the sensation of being little again. I find myself unwittingly reminiscing about Lewis Carroll and his Alice, who when faced with the little door she was too big to fit through drank the shrinking potion. Much like Alice in Wonderland, visitors fall down the rabbit hole when confronted with the inevitable perception shift that occurs upon encountering Therrien’s rounded artworks.
Review for Photomonitor: "Guy Bourdin: Image-Maker"
Guy Bourdin, Charles Jourdan, 1979
Published in Photomonitor, 06 March 2015
Somerset House, London
27 November 2014 - 15 March 2015
Disembodied mannequin legs donning Charles Jourdan stilettos walk across the grainy surface of a vintage polaroid. Suspended in animation, the plastic legs strut along a deserted English boardwalk. Simultaneously eerily present and absent, they quietly echo the eroticism that saturated fashion spreads in the late 1970s while systematically disengaging from the normalization of the sexualization of the female form. This photograph, along with many others from the same series, sets the tone for the Guy Bourdin: Image-Maker exhibition at Somerset House. Both hauntingly distant and familiar, the images speak of the surrealist tendencies of the 1920s, of Alfred Hitchcock’s aesthetic cues, of the fabricated truths that surround consumerism and of fashion photography’s ultimate pursuit of perfection.
Exhibiting over 200 works and previously unseen material from Bourdin’s estate from 1955 to 1987, the aesthetic of the show quickly evolves into a distilled avant-garde form of fashion photography, as the plain plastic legs give way to 80s big hair, bright red lipstick, lacquered nails and sensual silhouettes. Needless to say, there is a marked contrast between the two sets of images. Yet, the simplicity and purity of the iconography used throughout the beginning of his practice remains intact. Much like his earlier body of work, the images are classic in their composition but possess an unexpected contortion that somehow reverberates a sense of uncanny horror. It is this infusion of eerie terror that toys with the audience’s definition of beauty and desirability, subtly morphing the realm of fashion photography.
Fashion photography – at its base, an art medium used to sell products – moves away from tradition in Bourdin’s oeuvre, as the image’s point of focus is transferred from the consumerist good to the composition as a whole. Advertising more than a pair of shoes, a piece of clothing, jewelry or lipstick, they draw the beholder into a world of intrigue and subversion; hence the product becomes secondary and almost incidental, a mere aesthetic cue used to move the twisted plot forward. From his professional debut for Vogue Paris in the fifties, Bourdin influenced the course of commercial photography through these ribbons of narrative that continue to inspire some of the most eminent contemporary photographers from Tim Walker to Nick Knight. Each constructed image is a portal into his world, a world real or imagined that you cannot help but wish you had been a part of. Above all else, it is Bourdin’s unyielding style of visual storytelling that never ceases to surprise, shock and provoke the audience. The narratives that run through his frames map his progression from Man Ray’s protégé to one of the leading figure in fashion photography, and firmly anchor his work within the art canon.
Review for Espace Magazine: "Rachel Kneebone: 399 Days"
Espace Magazine: Diorama, No. 109, Winter 2015
Published in Espace Magazine, #109, Winter 2015
White Cube, Bermondsey, London
18 July - 28 September 2014
Hybrid body parts, severed limbs and phallic figures populate Rachel Kneebone’s 399 Days (2012-2013). Towering over visitors as they enter the White Cube’s 9x9x9 gallery space in Bermondsey (London, UK), the artist’s psychosexual hinterland takes the form of an erect column that soars towards the cubic room’s bright skylight. Unfolding an infinite spiral narrative that purposefully lacks a cohesive beginning, middle and end, the ivory sculpture refutes both history and the passage of time. Instead, it chooses to focus on the now, or rather the viewer’s immediate visceral reaction to the anagrams of vehemence and violence that inhabit Kneebone’s porcelain chrysalis. Hence, recognizable shapes rub shoulders with the quintessentially bizarre, as 399 Days simultaneously conveys familiarity and strangeness, beauty and horror, purity and adulteration, ecstasy and mortality, fragility and monumentality, playfulness and menace, and completeness and provisionality. It is through these acts of negation that the artist’s uncanny plot unfolds.
Review for This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine: "Julia Crabtree & William Evans: Antonio Bay"
Antonio Bay, South London Gallery, 2014
Published in This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine, 23 June 2014
South London Gallery
7 June - 14 September 2014
Following their successful solo exhibition, ‘Hyper Bole’, at Legion TV (February – March 2014) and their six-month stint as the Nina Stewart Artists in Residence, collaborators Julia Crabtree and William Evans further explore the codependent relationship that exists between the body and the screen in their current SLG show, ‘Antonio Bay’. Exhibited on the first floor, the installation unfolds within the space to reveal the duplicity of visual representation, as well as the malleability of form.
Subjected to various layers of virtual and material alterations, the finished pieces carry marks of their individual histories as they merge to create a cohesive whole that points to the influence of digital technology on visual culture. Hence, atmospheric mist is flattened onto the thick carpet that paves our way around the exhibition, whilst horizon lines morph into abstract sculptures in the middle of the space. Engaging with filmic and cinematic discourses, the installation speaks of the digital revolution, of the deceptiveness of B-movies, of the spatial logic of cartoon physics, of Jacques Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, and of the trajectories that carry images from real to virtual spaces and the consequential shift that occurs in the viewer’s perception.
Referencing John Carpenter’s 1980 film, ‘The Fog’, the installation’s floor was created by engulfing a virtual model of the gallery space with multicolored smoke. An aerial photograph was then taken of the scene and printed onto dense pile carpet. Epitomizing the tension that exists between the use of digital technology and the consequential deterioration of the image through its replication, the floor’s manipulation of spatial depth further conjures the notion of the theatrical backdrop. The creation process is also integral to the sculptures that undulate through the gallery. Constructed using prop-making and industrial materials (expanding foam and car body filler), the pieces are sanded to expose their facture.
Much like Crabtree and Evans’ ‘Death Valley’ (2013), ‘Antonio Bay’ submerges us into a pool of our collective virtual memories. While the former drapes intentionally-pixelated photographs around a gallery space intermittently punctured with surreal cactus-like constructions, the latter furthers the submersive qualities of the artists’ oeuvre as it forces visitors to step onto the simulacral images. Moving away from the figurative, ‘Death Valley’s recognisable moon-like landscape evolves into an abstract imprint of smoke in ‘Antonio Bay’. Likewise, the columnar cacti morph into horizon lines in Crabtree and Evans’ 2014 installation.
The artists’ exploration of the pool of images that make up the virtual world we interface with on a daily basis deeply anchors the installation within the now. Blurring the line between a simulacral hyperreality and the three-dimensional world around us, ‘Antonio Bay’ booms the interconnectivity that exists between these two spheres.
Review for FAD Magazine: "World Music"
World Music, Carlos/Ishikawa Gallery, 2014
Published in FAD Magazine, 16 June 2014
Carlos/Ishikawa Gallery, London
02 May - 14 June 2014
A wall of cheap mass-produced posters advertising a distant moon greets visitors as they enter the Carlos/Ishikawa Gallery. Paving the way to their current show, World Music, the posters serve as a visual reminder for all that is at once distant and hauntingly familiar. Ostensibly accurate renderings of reality (namely, Shasha Litvintseva’s artful documentary film, Alluvion) rub shoulders with the quintessentially bizarre (Renaud Jerez’s two anthropomorphic sculptures, No Title), as the show operates on a wide spectrum.
Much like its title World Music, the exhibition embraces an all-compassing genre. Seemingly relinquishing their role as curators, artists Steve Bishop and Richard Sides juxtapose works to create an overarching theme that is both nebulous and subjectively experienced. Privileging an immediate response to each artwork’s material presence within the gallery, the beholder’s reaction is not mediated through various lenses namely, press releases, catalogues and audio guides. Instead, these modes of communication make way for the viewer’s physical encounter with the art, as well as the ribbons of dialogue it creates within the space.
Here, the work takes center stage.
Interview for This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine: "Bas van den Hurk: Once Upon A Time You Dressed So Fine"
Once Upon A Time You Dressed So Fine, Rod Barton, 2014
Published in This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine, 21 March 2014
Rod Barton, London
21 March - 26 April 2014
Oscillating between painting, sculpture, installation, architecture, fashion and performance, Bas van den Hurk’s upcoming show ‘Once Upon A Time You Dressed So Fine’ (21 March – 26 April 2014) at Rod Barton explores art-making in its many forms. Revealing traces of their modes of production, the works are simultaneously presented as autonomous agents and active participants on the exhibition’s stage. Entwined in their respective networks of histories, temporalities, locations and materials, they speak of Arthur Koestler’s Holon philosophy, of the auratic dimension of art and of the subjectiveness of representation.
The artist talks to Ariane Belisle about his artistic practice, in light of his upcoming solo exhibition at the Rod Barton gallery in London. This interview was conducted via a telephone conversation on Friday 14 March 2014.
Text for Hermie Island: "Diane Arbus"
Diane Arbus, Child with Toy Hand Grenade, 1962
Published in Hermie Island, 07 March 2014
Central Park, summer of 62. The subject, a boy, stands in the center of the frame. His left strap hangs awkwardly off his shoulder. Long, thin arms extend at his side. His right hand clenches a toy hand grenade, while his left hand is contorted in a claw-like gesture. His face conveys a maniacal expression, perhaps borrowed from the super villain, the mad scientist or simply an antagonist on the silver screen. You have seen this photograph before. As one of the most celebrated images within the canon of fine art photography, it has been embedded in your mind’s eye. Immortalized in grainy celluloid through popular culture, it is anchored in our collective memory.
Diane Arbus’ iconic image – Child With Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park – has come to symbolize the deep-rooted tension that exists between primal violence and the tomfoolery of youth. It speaks of America’s historic evolution from the obsequious isolationism of the 1950s to the sociopolitical chaos that would materialize in the late 1960s and 1970s. While these themes appear to simmer beneath the surface of the gelatin silver print, the image does not actively search for metaphors but rather investigates the physical world in a solidly corporeal manner. Far from being orchestrated, the still merely captures a candid and fleeting moment.
Much like all of Arbus’ photographs, Child With Toy Hand Grenade inadvertently hints at Alan Kaprow’s radical assertion from his 1966 manifesto: ‘The line between [art] and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.’ Thus, Arbus’ practice breaks out of the controlled studio environment, as it creates uninhibited spaces of possibility and incites subject-participation to bring the artwork to life. In the wake of flawless fashion shoots and faultless photography, Arbus’ raw images present us with a visual argument for the dismantling of conventional standards of beauty, the undoing of aesthetic traditions, the blurring of art and life, and a re-imagining of the photographer’s encounter with the subject.
Artworld Insight for ARTUNER Magazine: "Martin Barré & The Provisional Painting"
Martin Barre, 63-H, 1963
Published in ARTUNER, 03 February 2014
Transcending the period when modernist ideals gave way to a new set of aesthetic cues in contemporary art, Martin Barré’s (1924-1993) creative exploration of line, color, form and the two-dimensional surface is widely recognized as a milestone within the realm of art history. Presenting the viewer with a visual argument against the polite-passive intellectualism of traditional pictorial order, Barré’s oeuvre is mendaciously simple and minimalist. Communicating boundless variations of shapes and pigments within the self-imposed confines of the rectangular stretcher, his work investigates the delicate equilibrium that exists between notions of inner and outer space, figure and ground, completeness and provisionality.
"Apoptosis/Lettre ouverte à une jeune fille morte"
Ariane Belisle, Lettre ouverte a une jeune fille morte, 2013
You, a., have always used your body as a vessel of sorts. It appears concepts, fabricated narratives if you will, are endlessly more enthralling than the reality on which they are based. In fact, or rather in fiction, still ingrained on my retina is the mosaic of color that made up your face and body. The two-dimensional pixelated surface that momentarily became you. A fragmented version of you, of course. The facet you consciously chose to present to the world. Slightly parted bee stung lips, makeup meticulously applied, eyes that wore an expression lionized by Hitchcock’s leading ladies the moment they were caught like deer in headlights, left eyebrow provocatively raised (perhaps anticipating a reaction, #dareyoutothinkofthisassexy), legs extended and at times spread, fishnets, knee socks, petticoats, skin and the meaning it carried – the ongoing significance of steel and flesh, you thought to yourself. Click. Post. Likes. Self-expression in the noughties. Prohibition is destruction. Welcome to the exhibitionist club.
You thought of your body as a vehicle for social change and with that belief came an empty Cindy Shermanesque promise of meaning. Hiding behind this veil of dubious significance, you must have felt comfortably detached from the girl you featured time and time again in your photographs – the urban sophisticate, the damsel in distress, the waif, the heroine, the nymph, the seductress, the floozy, the Miss over Mrs. Your I was malleable. You assumed stringing your persona through these disconnected signifiers would reveal gender biases within the realm of art history and media culture. And you hoped that the images would, in turn, be injected with substance and anchored within a greater theoretical framework. A noble motive to be sure, but what framework, may I ask, did you have in mind? Had you read anything by Craig Owens or Rosalind Krauss? Much like you, they contended that representation is pre-coded and championed the notion that play-acting can be used as a tool to critique the idea of femininity as a masquerade. Questioning master narratives, their viewpoint challenged first generation feminists to redefine the mythical femme. The truth, as one of your photographs’ titles suggested, is rarely pure and never simple.
Riding this new tide of feminism, a wave carved by countless before you, you shied away from imagery rooted in what we conceive to be an intrinsically female experience – childbearing and the iconography of corporeal differences. Instead, you chose to hone in on the construction of meaning within a culture that had proliferated the artificial commonality of batting eyelashes and pouts. Lost in a vortex of endless repetition, empty signifiers morphed into regurgitated stereotypes as you painted your face with a sensuous look learnt. Pubescent folly in imitation of some simulacral feminine essence. A copy with no original. Click & Repeat. Your captures, captured at 1/500 s, froze the apparent reality as a sign. The medium’s two-dimensionality was reflected in the stills you created, as none could mirror any form of human complexity. Destabilizing and fragmenting the female subject, yours is an accurate depiction of the female object.
Much like the degenerate beauty queens and selfie-inflicted camwhores of your era, you pranced before a pervasive analog eye. Did you concur, as Jacques Lacan had decades before you, that voyeurism does, in fact, deny women human agency? You rehearsed this structure with ease, framing the girl – it – in a series of endless reiterations of her subservience and his control. Vacillating between reification and critique of the established order of femininity, and between celebration and decelebration of male subjectivity, you partook in the very activity you wished to condemn in an attempt to condemn it. Then tell me, a., did you succeed in exposing femininity as a construct rather than something inherent? Did your masquerade overthrow the tyranny of the male gaze?
Does Cindy Sherman come to mind, here? Her Untitled Film Stills, I agree, successfully subvert the male gaze. Their effectiveness lies within the palpable tension that exists between the character Sherman is depicting and her own identity. Overturning the notion of the self-portrait, her performance is central to our understanding of the images. Unlike you, a., the self she pictures is an imaginary construct. Lights. Camera. Act(ion). To redouble and rephrase, it is only through Sherman’s interrogation of her own identity that we are led to explore female identity as a figment.
Your subject, on the other hand, is subjected. Did you notice these self-portraits quietly cropping up in concurrence with your sporadic bouts of crashing insecurity? Each new photo was produced as a resounding affirmation of your place within a world where you equated your self-worth to your desirability vis-à-vis the opposite sex. You fed into the pervasive myths about femininity, perpetuating the status quo. Yours was not a face that launched a thousand ships, but rather one that publicly exhibited your private struggle with dysmorphophobia, anxiety and insecurity. A portrait of the young girl in all her candor. Click. Did self-portraiture present you with a release from who you were? Were you comforted by this simple act of drowning in a simulacral version of who you aspired to be? Could it be that your photographs were met with success simply because they did not menace phallocracy but rather confirmed it? Does the truth cut deep? My questions linger like thought bubbles.
They say a photograph has the ability to guide us back into ourselves. You, a., always liked this notion. Vague and all encompassing, it attributed meaning without discerning it. It allowed a picture to transcend its primordial function as a record of real life and morph into a portal through which substance could be derived. Salvation. Mute, your images craved this completion. But always remember, a., that perception is never passive – it fills in the blanks, injects and cements. Through this new lens, it is difficult to dismiss your stills as vacuous constructs; they were, and continue to be, the reflection of a young girl’s vulnerabilities and insecurities. Perhaps this is a social comment within itself. A picture of the now, in all its gory.
Today, we are post-mystery, choosing to visually document our existence. Images made up of liquid crystals momentarily flash up on a computer screen, only to disappear again. It is on this stage that the female form is incessantly replicated as an object on display. The boundaries of her body begin to erode. Yet, each click is an act of self-realization. While you presented your body as something inherently vulnerable and private, it was also public. Preceding the self – yourself – it physically projected your image to the world and came to constitute a facet of your identity, as well as female identity. Frozen in celluloid within the plastic frame of a computer monitor, you existed.
And now the hand that created you wavers as the conclusion of this task draws near. One swift motion of my index finger and you will be gone. Are you sure you want to delete this photo? [Pause for dramatic effect] And then finally: Click.
Text for Create to Inspire: "Influential Artist: Diane Arbus"
Diane Arbus, A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, NYC, 1966
Published in Create To Inspire, 08 January 2014
Rejecting conventional aesthetics in a raw and unsentimental manner, “straight” photography emerged in the 1930s as a counter movement to pictorialism. Vacillating between fine art and photojournalism, these new images sought to provide an analytical and descriptive look at social landscapes. The movement came to its full maturation in the 1950s when it was met with commercial success. It is within this framework that Diane Arbus (1923-1971) and her eerie portraits of the real rose to prominence. Discarding the niceties of fine art and fashion photography, her images championed fact over fiction, as her subjects took center stage.
Instantly recognizable through their consciously un-artistic modality, Arbus’ pictures echo a defined set of aesthetic cues. Often set in New York City, the depicted scene embodies the look of a film noir – a stylistic earmark of the New York School of Photography. While her photographs borrow elements of romanticism, they reject the sublimity commonly associated with the movement. Hence, her subjects, habitually placed in the center of the frame, are stripped of embellishments and treated objectively. Transcending their role as model, they inform Arbus’ perception and vision. The relationship that develops between the photographer, subject and viewer becomes an intrinsic part of her work.
Depicting those who, either by birth or by choice, lived within the seams of polite society, Arbus allowed ugliness, deviation and flaw to enter the realm of fine art photography. While each model’s visual distinctiveness permeates the image’s square frame, the most compelling aspect of her pictures is not the subjects themselves but rather their undeviating gaze that hints at a relaxed acceptance of one’s own individuality. Delicately revealing what society had been taught to turn its back on, Arbus’ body of work encouraged more than vicarious tourism into these people’s lives. Presenting viewers with a portal into another world, her photographs provoked a visual experience, as they ultimately acted as an assault on the polite, habitual blindness that was/is so prevalent in society.
Arbus’ contribution as a photographer did not solely rest in her choice of subjects. Rejecting the anecdotal descriptiveness of sensationalistic photojournalism, she challenged the presumed objectivity of the documentary by photographing the rituals of everyday life. Hence, while the reality represented is far removed from our own, it is at the same time hauntingly familiar and in no end stranger than ours. To redouble and rephrase, the subjects appear as characters of alienation. Yet, they hold up a mirror, prompting the beholder to investigate his own humanity. Destabilizing our concept of reality, Arbus documented a marginalized world rarely depicted – a world distinct from our own, it comes to almost represent the dreamlike for the common viewer.
Greatly contributing to the history of photography, Arbus’ work is widely viewed as a phenomenon that changed the medium. She militated against the formal concepts of beauty, breaching the boundaries of what was acceptable, mostly through her choice of subject matter. Her main preoccupation was to expose a truth: “Photographs are the proof that something was there and no longer is. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you.” (Geoff Dyers). For her, a photograph was a medium which could communicate and render a candid and fleeting reality.
Artworld Insight for ARTUNER Magazine: "A Brief History of Collecting"
Musei Wormiani Historia depicting Ole Worm's (1588-1655) cabinet of curiosities
Published in ARTUNER, 11 November 2013
Over the past decade, the art market has undeniably evolved. Remarkably resilient in the wake of the financial crisis, artworks have become tangible assets for international investors. Riding the tide of globalization, a new influx of collectors has emerged within South America, Asia and the Middle East, while the acquisition of art online has provided buyers with an unparalleled level of access to masterpieces worldwide. Needless to say, there is a stark contrast between collecting in the Digital Age and the sixteenth-century practice from which it stems. Yet, investigating the historical genesis of this pastime highlights the emotional, aesthetic and intellectual qualities that continue to inspire collectors today.
Epitomizing the magnitude and diversity of a sixteenth-century cabinet of curiosities, Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor’s (1552-1612) kunstkammer (or art-room) held 470 paintings, 69 bronze figures, 179 ivory objects, several thousand medals and coins, 403 Indian curiosa, 600 vessels of agate and crystal, 50 amber and coral pieces, 185 uncut diamonds and precious stones, 174 works of faience, 300 mathematical instruments, numerous taxidermies, and countless other items. Arguably the most important collector of his time, the Emperor’s kunstkammer speaks of the breath and depth of collecting during the Renaissance period. While categorical boundaries were yet to be defined, these cabinets of curiosities acted as a precursor to the art of museology and collecting.
A characteristic product of its age, Rudolf II’s encyclopedic collection sought to paint an image of the universe, as it reflected the connoisseur’s pansophical view of the world. Exhibiting works of art and antiquities, as well as the physical world of phenomena, the intent was to amass objects that formed an intrinsic part of the universal system. Thus, elements of natural history, geology, ethnography and archaeology rubbed shoulders with religious relics, paintings and sculptures. These cabinets of wonder morphed into a microcosmic theatre of our macrocosm where collective memory and one’s own personal history were displayed.
Privileging empirical knowledge, a well-rounded experience of the objects through an active involvement of all five senses was fundamental. Olfaction in particular was valued (herbariums, for example, oozed exotic aromas). The devaluation of smell in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries inscribed an important break in the history of collecting, as a palpable shift from the ephemeral to the aesthetic occurred. Philosophers and scientists of that era eulogized sight as the ‘pre-eminent sense of reason and civilization, [while] smell was the sense of madness and savagery.’ [1] A ‘coarse sense’ according to Immanuel Kant, smell saw its demise and visual culture quickly flourished.
Flowing from this fundamental insight, the attractive presentation of these opthalmoceptive pieces, as opposed to their secretive storage, became integral to the art of collecting. This novel form of exhibitionism expressed collectors’ conviction that displaying their artistic treasures in such a manner was sure to enhance their beauty by the astute juxtaposition of the objects with their setting. The Wallace Collection in London and the Frick Collection in New York, both still on view today in their original dwellings, illustrate this ruptured continuity with their sixteenth-century antecedents.
While similarities between the Age of Discovery’s haphazard kunstkammers and the Romantic era’s lavish displays of art may be few and far between, one in particular can be observed. Cabinets of curiosities frequently featured items amassed from the connoisseur’s travels. Morphing into relics of his life journey, they also bore their own past. Likewise, eighteenth and nineteenth-century collections were inevitably punctured with one’s own story, whilst also communicating each artwork’s provenance, literature and exhibition history. Further illustrating this point is the bequeathment ritual that is common to most, if not all, historical collections, be it of rarities or of art. This simple act of handing down to future generations spoke of the value placed on both the past and the future.
Today we live in an era characterized by technological abstraction. Yet our culture’s priorities, its notion of value, are still intrinsically linked to our relationship with the physical object, the artwork. Collecting has undeniably blossomed since the Renaissance period. With the advent of the Internet, the mediums through which we acquire art have moved into the virtual sphere. However, the factors that determine the collectibility of an artwork have remained unchanged. To quote Iwona Blazwick in last week’s Insight: “Above all you have to be moved by it, be curious about, love, admire, even be confused by the work of art.” Acquiring art grounds us to something tangible; and in this sense, the practice has endured as a physical exploration of both our collective and personal histories.
[1] Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge, 1994, p. 4
Recommended reading
Altshuler, Bruce, ed., Collecting the New, 2006
Arnold, Ken, Cabinets of the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums, 2006
Cummings, Neil, and Lewandowska, Marysia, The Value of Things, 2000
Elsner, John, and Cardinal, Roger, ed., The Cultures of Collecting, 1994
Haskell, Francis, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collection in England and France, 1976
Hermann, Frank, ed., The English as Collectors: A Documentary Chrestomathy, 1972
Hook, Philip, The Ultimate Trophy: How the Impressionist Painting Conquered the World, 2009
Impey, Oliver, and MacGregor, Arthur, The Origin of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe, 1985
MacGregor, Arthur, ‘Collectors and Collections of Rarities in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Tradescant’s Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, 1983
Pearce, Susan, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, 1999
Taylor, Francis Henry, The Taste of Angels: A History of Art Collecting from Rameses to Napoleon, 1948
Review for Hermie Island: "Welcome to the Arts Club: Frieze Art Fair 2013"
Frieze Art Fair, London, 2013
Published in Hermie Island, 28 October 2013
Regent’s Park, London
18 - 20 October 2013
Daisy lies on the temporary gallery floor seemingly unaware of her surroundings. Her right wrist wears a label bearing her name – a name that conjures ingenuousness and youth in its purest form. Her body is contorted; her actions, suspended in animation. Transfixed, visitors gather. Disheveled lackluster hair is juxtaposed against a vivid pink dress and fluorescent yellow leotards. Her face conveys a tragic look learnt, as her eyes wear an expression similar to those favored by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro in La Cité des enfants perdus (The City of Lost Children, 1995). Her angst is palpable. An archetype of childhood and innocence lost, she communicates the bitter existential emptiness of contemporary life, and forces us to examine our own materiality within the art space. Unprompted by the gallery staff, Daisy stands. Visitors look on, eagerly awaiting the conclusion of her performance. She runs to a woman with a pushchair as a gallerist impatiently snatches the label – the conduit for this social experience – from her and places it next to its respective art piece. Stripped of her contextual framework, ‘Daisy’s’ actions are rendered meaningless. Inadvertently engaging with Nicolas Bourriaud’s esthétique relationnelle or relational aesthetics, ‘Daisy’: The Rise and Fall (more accurately renamed) literally boasts the prevailing “anything is art” cliché summary of contemporary art. Mother and child disappear behind a row of glistening Jeff Koons sculptures at Gagosian, as a wave of nervous laughter erupts within the space and red Louboutin soles scatter. This is Frieze 2013. Welcome to the arts club.
This year marks the eleventh incarnation of Frieze Art Fair, and with it comes a new wave of international collectors, dealers, curators, critics and visitors who mistake children for artworks. 151 galleries unite to create a dizzying FoMO fairground where tortoise framed glasses, slicked back power hair, statement jewelry and Chanel handbags (“Chanel Bags the Biggest Fans at the London Frieze,” the Guardian reports) parade along the aisles to see and be seen. Constellations of star-studded bomber jackets and Cuban heels form around works that encourage viewer participation – a tangible side effect of our current obsession with surface-level interactivity, no doubt. Find it in the Twitter feeds, Facebook likes and incessant hashtagging. This is what our generation craves.
Frieze Projects, a program of artist’s commissions realized annually, amplifies this circus funfair vibe, exhibiting experimental audience-participatory artworks. Ken Okiishi’s carnival-style installation is no exception, as visitors are invited to fire paint guns with the help of remote controlled robots. The colors red and green explode on random targets, whilst they are violently bombed behind a protective Perspex sheet. Next door, Lili Reynaud-Dewar transforms an intimate bedroom setting into a public arena (Untitled, 2011). Comfortably nestled on the bed’s plumped-up pillows, the performance artist reads Guillaume Dustan’s autobiography Dans ma chambre (In My Room, 1996) as an ink fountain freely flows out of the mattress’ center, saturating everything in its proximity. Acting as a sounding board, the spectator becomes an integral part of the work.
Emerging from Frieze Projects, an unruly queue begins to form at the Stephen Friedman Gallery to enter Jennifer Rubell’s Portrait of the Artist (2013), a white fiberglass sculpture of a colossal pregnant woman lounging on her side. In place of her belly, there is a void within which viewers can climb and morph into living fetuses for the ultimate rebirthing experience. A few rows down at PSM in Frame, one is invited to face impending doom by standing beneath Eduardo Basualdo’s mammoth beehive-like formation (Teoria (Theory), 2013). Vacillating between the repressive and liberating strains of calamity, its cataclysmic quality incites the beholder to fathom the installation’s eerie impenetrable depths. From protected womb to looming mortality, the visitor’s journey echoes John Barth’s mythotherapeutic notion that everyone is the hero of his own life story.
A star in her own cinema, a woman stands before Olafur Eliasson’s Fade Door Up (Working Title) (2013, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery), her camera phone at the ready (#selfie). The mirrored piece reflects her body while concealing her face. Spectator and artwork amalgamate to become one. At first glance we dismiss it as a vacuous encounter, yet it speaks of popular culture, circularity and feedback. Further along, a spiraled Plexiglas pavilion by Dan Graham (Groovy Spiral, 2013, Lisson Gallery) warps the booth it occupies, enticing visitors to enter. Cocooned in the spherical structure, participants escape the surrounding cacophony. On display to onlookers, bodies navigating the glass maze articulate the social implications of architectural systems. Restructuring our perception of time and space, the installation demands a reflection of our selves within the art gallery. More importantly, it encourages viewer participation, engagement, interactivity and play – something too easily forgotten at a fair where pretension and posing often prevail. Much like ‘Daisy’, it is through these humble encounters with the artwork that meaning is construed.
Text for the Artist's Website: "Michael Vickers"
Michael Vickers, Neon, 2016
Published on MichaelVickers.org, 27 August 2013
Vacillating between painting, sculpture and installation, Michael Vickers’ modulating forms develop an autonomous and distinctive visual language. Insistently remodeled industrial sheets of metal, folded fabric and molded plexiglas morph into artworks, as gradients of brightly-hued paint camouflage their unyielding surfaces. By relying on acts of negation, and investigating notions of inner and outer space, the compositions simultaneously convey familiarity and strangeness, weightlessness and mass, fragility and monumentality, playfulness and menace, completeness and provisionality.
Seeping art historical references, the works speak of the 1960s minimalist ideology, of Donald Judd’s finish fetishism and geometric impulses, of Richard Serra pouring and folding metal, and of John Chamberlain contorting automobile parts. Yet, Vickers’ engagement with independent themes and the obliterative qualities of matter lend his practice a unique position within the context of contemporary art. The calculated creases and folds – a palpable reference to Gilles Deleuze – are remnants of an interaction between the artist and his material, a depiction of the transitional moment of struggle before the medium yields. They eloquently recall the physical actions by which they were brought into being; and in this sense, never cease to exist in liminal space. Colliding with this facture element, a destructive impulse can also be perceived, as the act of creating oscillates between transformation and defacement. Arguably, this places the artworks within a realm of transgression, of George Bataille’s informe or formless, of sculpting and painting understood as a primal urge to mutate, disfigure, embellish and transform.
While their physicality arrests motion, anchoring the art in a specific temporal continuum, their chance placement within divers contextual frameworks points to the ephemerality of these captured moments. Needless to say, there is a claustrophobically tight circularity between the spectrums of time and space. Reacting to – and at times reflecting – the light and characteristics of their milieu, they transcends their function as mere objects. Hence, it is through presentation that the potential of matter is explored and meaning, attributed. Moreover, the insistent materiality of the installations firmly places the viewer alongside them in the gallery space. Seemingly dancing with the beholder, the pieces become the protagonists of a concealed narrative, as one’s perception and spatial relationship to the works develop the creative process.
Capturing a sense of urgency and immediacy, Vickers’ practice favors negation, provisionality and occluded beauty. More than a testament to artistic intuition, the works are, in the artist’s own words, a celebration of the seductive and poetic qualities of form.
Review for This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine: "Jockum Nordstrom: All I Have Learned and Forgotten Again"
All I Have Learned and Forgotten Again, Camden Arts Centre, 2013
Published in This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine, 06 August 2013
Camden Arts Centre, London
26 July - 29 September 2013
Presenting viewers with a portal into the artist’s subconscious mind, Jockum Nordström’s major survey of work at Camden Arts Centre brings together graphite drawings, watercolours, collages and architectural sculptures. Exhibiting the breadth of his creative output from the 1990s, as well as contemporary pieces commissioned for the show, ‘All I Have Learned and Forgotten Again’ oozes ingenuous charm and childlike wonder. Cutout Victorian figures clad in stiff clothes and crinolines, hymenoptera, game, crustacean, harpsichords, schooners, rock formations, and modernist architecture are suspended in animation on the gallery walls, as a form of visual fantasia unfolds within the space.
Continue reading at This Is Tomorrow
Review for This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine: "Jerwood Encounters: After Hours"
After Hours, Jerwood Space, 2013
Published in This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine, 28 May 2013
JVA at Jerwood Space, London
15 May - 23 June 2013
Presenting visitors with a portal into the creative minds of graphic designers, Jerwood Encounters: After Hours… An exhibition of personal work by graphic designers exhibits work created free from the constraints of a client, brief or fee. Concepts and projects traversing myriad media and themes unite under this overarching premise, whilst personal artistic impulses and passions are explored, and that flash of brilliance that is inspiration, exposed.
Review for This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine: "Pae White: Too Much Night, Again"
Too Much Night Again, South London Gallery, 2013
Published in This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine, 22 April 2013
South London Gallery
13 March – 12 May 2013
Dissolving the boundaries between fine and applied art, Pae White’s immersive site-specific installation ‘Too Much Night, Again’ at South London Gallery effortlessly merges art, design, craft and architecture. Vectorial lines of colored acrylic yarn spanning 48 kilometers concurrently coalesce and disperse, forming an intricate web that hovers hauntingly over the exhibition space. This vociferous three-dimensional crosshatching invites visitors to enter the work. Only when enveloped in its cocooned environment do words seep into our consciousness, as letters spelling “TIGER TIME” and “UNMASTERING” take form. While the colossal graphics gradually ebb and flow depending on one’s positioning, the fragile illusion they create burns itself onto the retina. The space is imbued with new meaning.
Review for This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine: "Drawing : Sculpture"
Drawing : Sculpture, The Drawing Room, 2013
Published in This Is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine, 20 March 2013
The Drawing Room, London
14 February - 06 April 2013
Inciting viewers to revisit their preconceived definitions of both drawing and sculpture, the Drawing : Sculpture exhibition at the Drawing Room brings together twenty-one works by seven international contemporary artists who explore interconnections between the media. Vacillating between linearity and three-dimensionality, the pieces investigate whether the languages of drawing and sculpture are now intertwined or simply exist in parallel.
