Interpretration (re)presentation: to theme or not to theme
This paper briefly describes the history of Biennials and their possible structures and makes a case for thematic selection over first past the post value judgements of "the most interesting". I will then give a few examples of a themed Biennial that I curated in Liverpool in 1999 to demonstrate how a theme helped make a productive context for the artist's work and build bridges to the audience.
Finally I will give some examples of curatorial presentation of artworks in museum collections that may distort the artists intentions and suggest ways to avoid such interventions.
Curatorial strategies in International Biennales.
There is no single model for an international biennale of contemporary art. Venice Biennale was the original and for most of its long history it has been centred on a system of national pavilions that are selected by the agency of the respective governments. Some countries have a procedure for appointing a jury or a curator while in others the relevant Ministry or its agency make the selection.
Sydney Biennale however gravitated towards a curated exhibition more along the lines of Documenta. Until 1990 the Sydney curators were selected on the basis of their proposed theme and they played a central role in the selection however the national commissioners often had the power to compromise this process. Renee Block finally overcame this intervention in 1990 and since then the Curator has had total discretion even though funding agencies often make useful and interesting suggestions. The exception was 2000 when the board decided to work with a jury of senior international curators.
Istanbul followed a similar model to Sydney and in recent years Sao Paolo and Venice have also introduced thematic and curated sections. The advantages of this process for the public and for the artists are that a more coherent visual experience can be created. Common artistic goals bring additional energy to the exhibition as a product of collaboration between artist curator and the public. Further more by clearly stating the theme and presenting it in public the curator provides a context for transparency and accountability.
The counter argument to this is that curatorial themes represent unjustifiable influence on the artist's practice and impose meanings that may distort the viewer's appreciation of the work. I think we have all experienced curatorial themes that do just this and I am surprised that some artists allow themselves to be manipulated in this way.
The Curator may on the other hand evolve a theme as a response to the work of the artists as an act of interpretation that I believe to be the proper responsibility of a curator in their capacity as art historian and presenter. It is important to make a clear distinction between legitimate interpretation in collaboration with the artist and (re)presentation in which works are used to illustrate a theory that may not arise directly from the work.
The curator's responsibility to the artists and to themselves is to ensure that the context for presentation and the thematic discussion of the work is accurately representing the intentions of the artist. It is worth noting here that interesting artists are invariably very strong minded and very aware of these issues.
Liverpool Biennial, Britain's first attempt at an International Biennale
invited me to curate their international exhibition in 1999. I chose the theme TRACE for two reasons. One was that it arose directly from my current art historical research into the function of objects and materials as triggers for memory, and the other was to do with my desire to trace the exhibition over the physical space of the city which is particularly rich in architecture even though much of it is unoccupied and conspicuously run down.
Slides 1-6 L&R cityscapes of Liverpool
The foundation of Liverpool's wealth in the nineteenth century was based on the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Manufactured goods were sent from Liverpool to Africa and traded for slaves who were shipped to The Americas where in turn they were traded for sugar, tobacco and rum; each leg of this triangle rendering the Liverpool ship owners substantial profits. The history of the port was also implicated in the exportation of orphans and children of unsuitable parents up to the 1950s. So in addition to tracing the city I also wanted to trace the resulting Diasporas.
It is often a mistake to try and conflate two or more concepts under one theme particularly if it is based upon a coincidence of language, however I hoped that in this case the linguistic ploy of remaining ambiguous about noun a trace and verb to trace actually made logical sense. In other words to trace a path or to search for clues corresponds well with the function of discovery that occurs when implicit or bodily memory is unleashed through the sensation of objects and places. This was to be an exhibition that was primarily about affect and the viewer's memory. I invited the artists to take the physical city and its history as material for their work. The choice of artists was therefore geared towards people who already like to work with sites. It is clear from current practice and discourse around the world that this tendency has returned with renewed energy.
The difficulty that this kind of practice raises is of course the apparent divergence between the objectivity associated with realism and the subjectivity of implicit memory. It is necessarily a contentious area in current theoretical debate. I would simply like to propose here that while an objective view of the world is an essential condition for a progressive society no view of the real could be complete without engaging the reality of affect.
Some examples from TRACE
Individual Artists texts
Doris Salcedo traces political and psychological events through the altered materials and circumstances of everyday life. In her work things that should be comfortable and familiar become strange and even terrible. This process parallels the distortion of reality that occurs when power and violence are used as means of social control. What comfort can be left in the bed one�s lover has been murdered in? What pleasure can one take in the intimate possessions of one�s spouse or child when they have been dragged away with no explanation? Objects retain traces of those who have used them. It is difficult to throw away such traces of an absent loved one, and yet it is equally difficult to continue using them as though nothing had happened.
Slides 7-9 L&R Salcedo installation
Here at the Cathedral wardrobes and beds are doubled so that one structure seems to slide seamlessly into another. Time and space have been strangely loosened to allow this slippage. All the holes, gaps and cracks in the wood have been meticulously sealed with white cement. It is as if they have been rendered blind and mute, just like those whose silence is ensured by the threat of further violence. This careful sealing of the cracks is also read as an attempt to keep something out or in. But in this case the �something� is elusive, like the nebulous fear of some unforeseen tragedy. There is something terribly beautiful and yet repulsive about these hybrid objects. Like the memory of a loved one forever contaminated by the image of their death, Salcedo�s fusion of inanimate matter and human remains provokes a sense of abomination.
Miroslaw Balka�s installations transpose the memory of one space into another. Because their origins are personal and autobiographical � the proportions of the artist�s body, the spaces of his childhood � the installations are seldom site-specific. As a child Balka spent many hours in his grandmother's house outside Warsaw. He recalls playing under the furniture and has a vivid memory of the textures and topography of the various rooms. The house is now his studio, and in many of his sculptures the artist re-works the dimensions and spaces between objects that are so deeply ingrained in his psyche. His use of materials extends these metaphors of the body and memory. Salt appears as a residue in channels and on slabs. Warmth � generated by heating elements contained in fabric and other materials � suggests the presence of living bodies. Suggestive of hanging figures, these modules create a dialogue between human presences, architectural space, and the time and space of memory.
Slides 10-11 L&R Balka installation
In TRACE Balka installed a soap platform 770 cm square and a few inches high. Over the window of the exhibition space in the Tate Gallery he placed a metal grid with lumps of soap wedged into it that have been reduced in size by being used by staff at the museum. The intimate contact of body and soap and the residues of hair bear a striking trace of bodies.
Burnt drawings hang on the walls surrounding the platform. This work is both visual and olfactory. From a distance the soap platform looks like a slab of marble, but on closer inspection its softness and soapy aroma reveal its true origins. The bodily associations of soap link this piece to Balka's preoccupation with the body and memory.
The burnt drawings also have figurative and autobiographical connotations. Their charred edges draw our attention to the paper itself, while hinting at some past tragedy. The fragments of soap in the window could be the remains of some dramatic or explosive event. In fact the drawings were accidentally burnt in a fire that nearly gutted the artist�s studio. In this way they make a direct link back to the actual history of his house of memories.
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons has made the journey from Cuba to America, continuing the displacement begun when her Yoruba ancestors were shipped from Nigeria as slaves. Her work traces the histories of people for whom the past is not as distant as we might like to think. Campos-Pons�s grandfather was transported to Cuba to work on the Vega sugar plantation and her family was still living and working on the plantation when she was growing up. With an oral tradition that kept their connection to Africa very much alive, the artist�s friends and family were a living testament to this history of displacement.
Slides 12 L&R Campos Pons Seven Powers and Unfolding desires
The Seven Powers Came by the Sea (1992) deals with this history. The Seven Powers are based on templates for the stowing of slaves on the transport ships that once sailed from West Africa to the Caribbean after trading manufactured goods brought from Liverpool. The layout of the bodies on the slave boards is a powerful image of the conjunction of mathematical efficiency and brutality. Campos-Pons also uses photography, film and video in her work. At Bluecoat Art Centre the seven slave boards are leant against the wall, evoking the Yoruba deities transposed to the new world. On the floor in front of them texts and small framed photographs of African Cubans are arranged in groups like family photographs. There is a further suggestion of headstones or silent memorials to the generations uprooted and separated by the slave trade.
Reinhard M�cha uses objects and furnishings to evoke specific memories, and to reflect on the nature of memory itself. Sometimes he places these objects in boxes lined with dark felt, which are reminiscent of jewellery cases, or cabinets for cutlery or valuable scientific instruments. Seen through glass against the dark interior, the objects become difficult to decipher. A clear view is prevented by our own reflection, and the fact that M�cha defines the surface of the glass by adding metallic strips that suggest an elaborate security device. The works are therefore layered with different views. We look at the surface of the glass. We look through the glass. We look at what lies behind the glass. And while trying to overlook the glass and its effects, we also look at ourselves and others reflected in the glass. This Duchampian strategy complicates � if not frustrates � the physical experience of looking. It can also be seen as a commentary on the processes and structure of memory.
Slide 13-14 L&R Mucha Eller Bahnhof
Reinhard M�cha�s work often concerns (and is literally gathered from) sites of passage or transit. For TRACE he relocated the installation Eller Bahnhof to the Tate Gallery. Originally constructed in D�sseldorf, the work was subsequently installed in Stockholm, where it was set into the newly built walls of the renovated museum. Mucha was so surprised by the hasty carpentry of the walls that he decided to work with this exposed structure in subsequent manifestations. He did this by cutting around the segments of wall, removing them from the gallery, and then displaying them in glass cases on the wall of the new space: first at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York, and now (in their fourth manifestation) in Liverpool. In this way, each successive installation contains physical traces and memories of the others.
Allan Sekula
Slide 15 L&R Freeway to China (Version Two: for Liverpool) 1998-99
Here's the idea this time. Trace a line of dockers' solidarity across the Pacific, from Fremantle and Sydney to Los Angeles. Set that line against the heavier line of transnational corporate intrigue, the line that seeks to strangle and divide and endlessly cheapen the cost of labor, the line that respects only the degradation of the "bottom line." Reverse the direction of the poet Charles Olson's reading of Melville's modernism: Melville's line tracing the American frontier's outward extension across the Pacific; his foreknowledge, in 1850, of the "Pacific as sweatshop." Trace the thin line of resistance further in reverse, crossing America and the Atlantic to Liverpool, great city of working-class toil, departure and refusal.
The Liverpool dockers and their wives and families insist that theirs has been a "very modern" struggle, refuting the smug neoliberal dismissal of dock labor as an atavistic throwback to an earlier mercantile age. Postmodernists, who fantasize a world of purely electronic and instantaneous contacts, blind to the slow movement of heavy and necessary things, may indeed find this insistence on mere modernity quaint. But against the pernicious idealist abstraction termed "globalism," dockers enact an international solidarity based on intricate physical, intellectual, and above all social relationships to the flow of material goods. The dockers' line of contact extends outward from what is immediately at hand, to be lifted or stowed, and crosses the horizon, to another space with similar immediacies. To sustain this solidarity, based on work, when work has been cravenly stolen away, is all the more admirable, sustaining hope for a future distinct from that imagined by the engineers of a new world of wealth without workers.
Dorothy Cross has made the work for TRACE as an extension of a recent installation, Ghost Ship, realised near Dublin in 1999.
Slide 16 L&R Ghost Ship Liverpool
For the original work Cross painted a retired light ship with many layers of phosphorescent paint and moored it out at sea within sight of the esplanade of Dublin Bay. Every evening just before dusk the boat�s sides were flooded with strong ultraviolet light. As the sun faded the lights were turned off. The boat remained visible as a luminous, ghostly presence between the shore and the horizon. The original purpose of the light ship as a marker of reefs and dangerous waters brings to mind the many ships that foundered in spite of every precaution. Each evening crowds of sightseers would come to the cold waterside to watch this mystery unfold and speculate about the history of the sea and of this boat in particular.
Cross braved the windswept channel in a dinghy one night to make a video of the glowing boat from the sea. A projection of this video will be screened at dusk each night along the edge of the Mersey in Liverpool, where boats from Dublin used to moor. In years past these Irish boats depended on the light ship for their safe passage to England. At the Exchange Flags the artist has also installed a phosphorescent model of the ship, made in preparation for the original project.
Nicola Costantino has made her installation in a prominent Liverpool shop window. The window display includes an array of stylish garments presented on mannequins.
Slide 17-18 L&R Costantino installation at littlewoods
Seen from a distance, the costumes could be made from suede, with a fur trim and a subtle pattern of flowers or some other simple motif. One assumes they are selected from a designer�s seasonal range. The garments are sufficiently intriguing to attract closer inspection and, as one approaches, the whole ensemble is radically transformed. The suede turns out to be latex and now seems more like human skin than leather. Worse still, the motifs that relieve the surface turn out to be directly moulded from the human body. Far from being florets they are revealed as direct body casts of navels, nipples and arseholes. The chalk-coated silicone simulates flesh, with a suede-like feel.
The history of bodily imprints in modern art can be traced from Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein, through the work of arte povera artists, to contemporary practitioners such as Janine Antoni and Abigail Lane. Transferring the imprint of the most intimate and hidden parts of the body to the very garments that ordinarily conceal those parts produces a paradoxical inversion that would have greatly appealed to Duchamp. Contemporary viewers are likely to bring a range of associations to this work. Some may see it as a statement in support of animal rights, in the sense that Constantino substitutes traces of a woman�s body for the hide of an animal. Others will see the work as a feminist statement about the rag trade and the commodification of women�s bodies. It is equally possible to accept both these readings and relish the humour and the sensuality of the objects themselves.
Slide 19-20 L&R Neto installation Tate
Ernesto Neto has created a world between body and architecture. His sculptures articulate the spaces of buildings while simulating bodily membranes. His basic forms are constructed from poliamid: a stretch material like stockingette that he distends into various configurations. These empty structures are articulated by being pulled across architectural spaces or gorged with substances like powdered turmeric or lead shot. The process is always intrinsic to the form. For example, one sculpture � entitled Paff � is constructed by filling the �toe� of a long tube of material with 60 kg of turmeric. The empty end is attached to the ceiling while the bulky �toe� is hurled onto the floor, stretching the tube taught while creating a globule of rich yellow surrounded by a powdery halo on the floor.
In other installations Neto has created entire rooms out of poliamid material suspended from existing ceiling structures. The corners are weighted and looped over beams or rings to create a semi-transparent cube with concave walls. These walls are disturbingly skin-like, an association that the artist sometimes highlights by embroidering small orifices into the membrane. Other poliamid objects are arranged in clusters, taking the form of soft standing tubes like fungi or crowds of amorphous figures. In every case the works are highly sensual, an experience heightened by the aroma of turmeric or cloves, which strikes visitors long before they see the installation.
Domenico De Clario is an Australian artist of Italian ancestry. He has made use of painting, assemblage, text and performance, as well as site-specific and installation art to trace his memories and family migrations. Childhood, adolescence and adulthood are explored through everyday objects and personal effects. As an Italian migrant the experiences of dispossession and migration have been constant themes in his art. De Clario�s recent performances have often entailed blindfolded journeys to sites of personal significance. In many of the performances he plays meditative harmonies on a grand piano, occasionally speaking to himself or to an unseen listener.
Slide 21 L&R Domnenico de Clario performance
De Clario performed on 14 nights centred on the opening of the Biennial. (By chance, the opening night coincided with the equinox and was also, unusually, a night of the full moon.) The artist will travel across seven sites, back and forth over two weeks, following the moon through its entire phase. Each night he will play the piano accompanied by a saxophonist, and tell stories of the journey and of his response to the site. The performances will last for the nine hours between sunset and dawn, and the sites will be illuminated with a different colour for each of the first seven nights. These colours � which are associated with the seven energy centres of the body (chakras) � will then be repeated as he retraces his steps on the subsequent seven nights. As a lasting trace within the exhibition, each site will be marked with a written text of the stories recounted by the artist during his journey.
Slides 22-23 L&R Fischer & el Sani Berlin sites
Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani have been photographing the entrances to temporary nightclubs in Berlin. Because they are illegal, these venues are often only occupied for one night, and the signs of the event are ephemeral graffiti and posters. The artists were invited to seek out and document similar events in Liverpool, a city famous for its club life. As it turned out, Liverpool did have such clubs 10 or 15 years ago, but these have now become established venues. The artists decided not to show the entrances of these more established spaces, but instead to find obscure sites where a club could have been (or might one day be held). They brought with them posters made from their Berlin photographs, which they put up near the entrances of these phantom sites. They then re-photographed the posters in situ. The resulting photographs will be run off as a poster series and pasted around Liverpool, suggesting potential or fictitious club sites.
Back in the gallery space the Berlin club photographs and the phantom images will be hung together. Fischer and El Sani have made interesting comparisons between Berlin and Liverpool. Whereas Berlin has been attracting thousands of young people since the �90s, Liverpool has been partially emptied since the decline of its shipping industry. Like the Mitte of Berlin when the wall first came down, there are whole areas of empty buildings that lend themselves to informal occupation. In Berlin this happened spontaneously. First came the squatters, many of whom were artists. The authorities accepted and even encouraged their activities just to get life back into the streets. It was in this climate that the clubs and bars flourished. Bit by bit this impromptu occupation has given way to planned urban development. �Liverpool is hoping for new inhabitants,� they point out. �There are already a lot of young people, students for example, coming into town. Maybe the time will come soon when they need the space. Then the houses in the abandoned streets can be used again. We have already had a look around the streets, and there are places we would like to turn into bars or clubs.�
Julie Gough is an Aboriginal Australian artist who works with ancient and new technologies to negotiate the historical construction of indigenous identities. Although she has previously focused on eighteenth and nineteenth-century explorations of the Australian/Pacific region, Gough is interested in all histories of migration and displacement. Using found objects, photographs and assorted icons of popular culture, she raises questions about the mass production of cultural and personal identity, about history, memory and mythology. She has recently made works that trace her own family history, bringing together the indigenous people of Tasmania with her Celtic ancestors from Scotland.
Slides 24 L&R Gough at Bluecoat
For TRACE Gogh has turned her attention to the social history of Liverpool. Her work was displayed at Bluecoat Art Centre that had been an orphanage in the eighteenth century and this was connected to the continuing deportation of children from Britain to work in the colonies throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Julie has taken particular interest in the life of orphans in nineteenth-century Britain. On a preliminary research trip she found objects and materials connected with the history of the orphanage. These have provided the starting point for her final installation. The children were employed making pins and sewing. At the cathedral cemetery she discovered a whole wall of memorials to children who had died at the orphanage and this installation distils this rich material.
25-27 L&R Klophaus documentation of Beuys Celtic, Mainstream and Explaining pictures to a dead hare
Ute Klophaus is best known for her extraordinary photographic documentation of Joseph Beuys's performances in the late 1960s and early �70s. She is also a compelling artist in her own right. No doubt Beuys chose her to record his events because of the unusually expressive and material quality of her images. When we recall performances like Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare or Manressa it is invariably Klophaus�s images that come to mind. The particular printing quality she has evolved emphasises the alchemical aspect of the photographic print. This emphasis on the photographic trace has been adapted by other German artists, including Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke.
In Liverpool Klophaus will exhibit 20 early photographs documenting Beuys�s performance of Celtic in Edinburgh in 1970. Her own artistic practice has often been more concerned with the architectural spaces of cities than with people and action, yet the photographic details of streets and buildings have the same atmospheric quality as the performance images. They capture the sense of time passed and of ghostly presences. Her recently commissioned documentary images of the celebrations at Weimar are haunting examples of this.
Slides 28 L&R MacLennan performance at Liverpool
Alasdair MacLennan installed trestle tables running the entire length of his space and set them for absent guests. Their uneaten feast includes pigs� heads, fish and other items symbolic in the Catholic tradition and strewn with ticker tape listing the names of the dead. MacLennan�s performance took place, on alternate days, and consisted of his sitting next to the table dressed in black holding a branch and reciting the names of the many who have died in the Irish struggles.
Vik Muniz has a longstanding fascination with photographic documentation. He has a personal collection of works by photographers who specialised in recording images of images, such as museological records and archives.
Slides 29-30 L&R Vic Muniz installation at Tate including Sugar children
His own work involves a similar layering of representations. Aftermath and Sugar Children � the two series represented in TRACE � take the form of photographs of drawings done by the artist. The drawings are, in turn, derived from his photographs of the original subject. The images in Aftermath contain a further layer of reference. The subjects are street children in Brazil: extremely vulnerable children with whom the artist established a relationship of trust and collaboration. In this instance he invited them to find images they identified with in books on art history, then asked them to pose in the position of the principal figure in the selected painting. This was the starting point for a lengthy series of displacements.
The reproduced drawings appear from a distance to be almost photographic in their realism, but on close inspection it becomes clear that the materials are far from conventional. For the Aftermath series Muniz collected street sweepings left over from the Carnivale in Rio and scattered them onto a light box. He has then skilfully dusted and vacuumed the material away to produce a convincing replica of his original photograph. In Sugar Children, as the title suggests, he has used sugar as his medium. In each case there is a resonance between the material and the subject matter. The process itself is also highly suggestive, particularly in Aftermath where the dust and scattered sequins lend the images a forensic quality.
Rivane Neuenschwander creates intricate and ephemeral installations out of organic substances and domestic objects, manipulating the symbolic qualities of materials as ordinary as garlic husks, soap or dust. In a recent installation at Friedman Gallery in London she traced the outline of the parquet tiles on the floor in fine lines of white powder. This exquisite and fragile drawing could have been blown away or scuffed out of existence by any inadvertent passer by. Walking around the edge of the installation made one very aware of one�s own presence as a threat. By outlining the cracks she also initiated a sense of unease that can come when the gaps in our world are drawn to our attention. Not walking on the cracks in case the bears get you is a childhood enactment of this basic fear: the fear that our reality may be porous to unknown forces. The �crack man� is a particularly vivid illustration of this seemingly universal fear. The Aboriginal people of Australia have a spirit creature called the crack man who is shown as a menacing spidery presence drawn along the crack lines in cave wall paintings.
Slides 31 L&R Rivane Neuenschwander installation Liverpool
Neuenschwander�s coconut soap drawings are elegant geometric sculptures that contain linear designs. Each rectangular block of white soap has been pressed into dust along its narrow edges. The blocks are then welded together to make a larger rectangle so that the edges show up as a linear grid. At a distance these objects appear to be elegant modernist designs in marble or some other valuable material. At close range, however, it is apparent that the sculpture is made of soap and the lines are dust: the intimate residue of a bathroom or some other domestic space. The rich smell of coconut also belies the initial sense of pristine materiality.
Slides 32-33 L&R Anne Noel in the shopping centre
Ann No�l set up a stall in the shopping centre and engaged passers by in conversation. She asked them to give her some token from their bag or pocket that held some significance for them. For example you may find that you have kept a bus ticket for years without considering why. It may have been a very significant trip for some reason. Noel would then sew these fragments into her quilt of memories while writing down your story in her book. The book was indexed to the quilt.
In my case I found that I had kept a fragment of ribbon that came from one of 1000 blue balloons released at a celebration for Yves Klein, a card someone gave me on the street of St Rita, Klein's patron saint of lost causes and a four leafed clover picked for me by the artist Orlan outside her studio. These objects had become burdensome fetishes and Anne Noel gave me the perfect opportunity to have them transformed into art so that they would no longer be my responsibility.
Slides 34L&R Willats project installed at Exchange Flags
Stephen Willats: Artist�s Statement
Democratic Journey is an expression of the basic consensus between people in the process of creating a society and in its externalisation as culture. The work is an evolving process that, as a simulation, is enabled and enacted by people�s direct participation. The transience, fluidity and randomness of people�s encounters with the infrastructure of society � the �reality� that governs their daily lives � is manifest in this work as a sequence of interpersonal procedures evolving in time. These interpersonal procedures take a group of 32 individuals on a journey, both imaginary and actual, in which they build a �society� between themselves.
The formal structure of the work enables 32 individuals, who have not previously met, to become one group of 32 members. There are six stages to the group�s evolution, each of which is built around a participant�s response to a question concerning the �ideal journey�. The questions are open: there are no right or wrong replies, no good or bad responses. They are simply a way of externalising and articulating people�s highly personal, implicit visions of their destiny to themselves and to others. A dice is thrown before the presentation of the second question to generate random pairings of participants and this procedure is repeated before each subsequent question, leading to larger and larger groupings.
The outcome of the work cannot be known in advance and participants� interpretation of what constitutes the �ideal journey� is completely relative to the models held and expressed by the 32 participants. However the structure of the work, from the individual towards progressively larger groups, ensures that participants will interact with each other and at some undetermined level influence each other�s perceptual models in the drive towards consensus. The work is neither analysed nor edited: after the completion of Journey Question six the group disbands.
Fred Wilson remade the labels for all the model ships and paintings of vessels in the Liverpool Maritime Museum. These labels subtly played with the gendering the ships.
Slides 35 L&R Fred Wilson intervention at The Maritime museum Liverpool
Erwin Wurm�s performance sculptures arise from simple daily actions: trying on new clothing, driving by a billboard, or opening a box. Superficially minimalist in style, these works are actually more closely related to performance art in their impermanence and emphasis on action. In earlier pieces, Wurm folded jumpers and shirts in different ways to create different volumes. The logic of the process was rigorously followed through. The performances began with clothing worn in dysfunctional ways to produce abstractions and new geometries. A jumper drawn over the entire form of a crouched figure, for example, produced a symmetrical cube.
Slides 36-37 L&R Erwin Wurm performance and billboards Liverpool
At the Exchange Flags in Liverpool, Wurm has displayed copies of drawings he made as instructions for one-minute performances. Each performance entailed everyday objects being used to complete an action, based solely on the criterion that the action was possible. For example, a minimum number of tennis balls were used to form a bed upon which participants could lie, supported only at the necessary points. The process was recorded on video, and is shown in the present installation beside the objects and drawings. The audience is encouraged to participate by following the instructions in the drawings and employing the materials that have been provided in the installation. A billboard has been created in Liverpool displaying an example of these performances.
Slides 38 L&R Yamashita shadow images at Exchange Flags
Kumi Yamashita traces figures with the most obscure materials. Her subjects include shadows on the wall or dirty prints from a pair of old boots. Her graphic skills are amazingly well honed and the delightful images she produces are even more pleasing because we doubt our eyes when we see how they are produced. In one installation lifelike forms of the human body in motion are produced by the most unlikely source. On the wall, illuminated by a single strong lamp, we can see an arrangement of ordinary children�s building blocks. Some are shaped like block letters or toy animals, but they are random forms in different sizes and shapes. Yamashita has arranged these so that each throws a particular shadow which, when taken with all the other precisely placed objects, astonishingly adds up to the illusion of reality.
Interpretation or (re) presentation
documenting artist�s intentions in museum collections.
There are some fine lines to be drawn between legitimate interpretation of art works and (re)presenting them in such a way that the artist�s intentions are subverted. This is particularly troublesome when the installation of a work has to be realised by the curator according to an ethos statement rather than by a strict template or certificate. I will examine some striking examples of this including particular installations by Giulio Paolini, Tony Cragg and Richard Long. The issues raised also apply to more traditional works such as sets of images that are intended to be shown as a complete installation in a particular order and configuration. Clear documentation and procedures for consultation of the records are the best means of ensuring that these intentions are understood and adhered to.
These issues can be carried over into exhibition strategies and reproduction of objects that seek to bring out a particular view of the work. In this case the question of legitimate interpretation and critical analysis may at some point come into conflict with the moral right of the artist to determine the physical presentation and reproduction of the work that could otherwise be significantly distorted. While academic and critical interpretations of the work must be completely independent from the artist�s sensitivity it could be argued that the museum can be expected to have a rather different duty of care in (re)presenting the work on behalf of the artist. The Museum�s argument for copyright license from the artist is presumably predicated on such an assumption.
Interpreting installations in practice
Slides 39 L&R Giulio Paolini�s L�Altra Figura 1984 consists of two identical plaster casts of a classical head facing eachother as if in a mirror but with their glance cast down towards the shattered remains of a third identical figure. There is no template for installation only an overall diameter of 3 meters and an earlier photograph of the installation by the artist. While it is possible to get a fair idea of the distribution of the fragments from the photo there is still room for subtle variation which can have a critical effect on the interpretation of the work.
It is possible to consider this work as a post-modern critique of originality and of the authenticity of representations. Because of the classical references in the heads it is tempting to think of classical myths that lend themselves to a poetic interpretation of these critical themes. Icarus is invoked by the shattered image as if the figure had fallen from a great hight. Icarus attempted to fly too close to the sun god Apollo the source of pure forms. This could be a metaphor for the neoplatonic aspirations that haunt Modernism. Narcissus also comes to mind because of the mirroring effect of the two figures and because every time the unhappy youth reached out to touch the object of his desire (his own reflection in the stream) he rippled the water disrupting the image.
It is perfectly possible to inflect the placement of the fragments on the ground so that they suggest an image disturbed by concentric ripples or alternatively to emphasise the shatter effect of the fall. It is the latter which seems to be closest to the effect shown by the artist�s photograph of the work but a small inflection can make a significant difference. However the ideal installation is more random and could be taken either way. The Icarus version has intriguing correspondences with other works in the collection that also invoke Icarus. Anselm Kiefer�s constant play with frustrated transcendence eg. Glaube Hoffnung Liebe, or Yves Klein�s Leap into the void 1961 in which he enacts the transformation from material to immaterial.
Slides 40L&R Kiefer Glaube Hoffnung Liebe and Kleins Leap into the void
Slides 41 L&R Long's Slate cairn and Mud drawing
Richard Long�s Slate Cairn 1977 is another very critical example. The certificates for the works are normally supplied with the stones. The instruction provides the dimensions of the piece, 10� high and 20� across. It is a flat platform of slate shards. On one occasion I left the installation crew arranging the stones and when I returned there was something horribly wrong. The instructions had been meticulously adhered to; it was 10� by 20� and it was a flat platform but it looked like a piece of landscape architecture. They had lined up the edges of the stones to create a nice clean edge. The exactness of the geometry is in fact an essential part of the work. In all Long�s work the shape gives the impression of absolute mathematical precision and yet the elements always appear to be randomly scattered. The splattered Mud drawings are a fine example of this geometry in total equilibrium with chance application of random gestures. In this case lining up the edges of the stone made it into a dry stone wall and completely lost the tension between natural distribution of elements and the geometric. The meaning inherent in this tension revolves around the coexistence of culture with nature. It would be possible for a creative installation officer to arrange the stones in order of their size or colour thereby making the work distinctly decorative or even figurative. Such nightmares are not total fantasy. I once had art students volunteering who raised the platform into a shallow dome. This immediately made it into an Andy Goldsworthy who makes images of natural forms by arranging natural pieces of stone, wood, snow etc. Longs work never had a mimetic reference. His piles only reveal process and the idea of geometry.
Slides 42 L&R Tony Cragg�s New Stones Newton�s Tones 1978 is a similar but more complex example. The work consists of several hundred fragments of coloured plastic. These include bits of broken toys, plates, pens and other indecipherable pieces of junk. They are roughly graded and packed according to their place on the spectrum. In many of Cragg�s works there is a template which is a hard and fast guide to placement but in this case that would be unrealistic because of the many tiny pieces. The installation plan gives the size of the rectangle that the objects must create when laid out and the instruction that the colour follow the order of the spectrum. There are other subtleties indicated such as; The edge of the rectangle must be crisply geometrical but the objects must not align self consciously with the edges. This is just like Long where the nature/culture balance is critical. There are ethos suggestions such as; the bands of colour must not make harsh lines, instead they should suggest the colour separation in a pool of oil. The space between the objects should be sufficient to suggest that they are attracting and repelling eachother in a uniform field but the effect must be of a random distribution.
Most of these instructions are clear enough but they require sensibility and real aesthetic choices. The work looks different depending on each installer�s sensibility. Our interpretation of random is always subjective. The human mind seems unable to achieve it without the aid of some system. I recall a case where Allan Kaprow asked ten volunteers to cover a wall with random daubs of black paint. After two hours they had produced ten quite individualistic abstract expressionist paintings. It took me several hours to �randomise� and unify the effects they had created.
(Re)presenting by context
Exhibiting works in a particular context may also change the received meaning of the work. This may be a legitimate interpretive strategy in some cases if it is properly acknowledged but where is the line to be drawn? The Curator has a formal duty of care towards the work and the artist�s intention but at what point does the right of every reader to interpret a work, once it is in the public domain, cross that line of duty. There is a difference between discursive interpretation in text and material (re)presentation of a work in a deliberately manipulated context. There may be a case made for the latter but justification for this rests upon the transparency of the argument being made. If a work is given a new interpretation by being (re)presented in a given context the argument must be overtly and clearly articulated by the curator. In such a case the work becomes an element in the creative activity of the curator and many people would argue against their right to use an artist�s work in this way.
Reproduction
Slide 43 L Ian Burn No object implies the existence of any other 1967
Reproduction of complex works is also difficult. Even simple framed objects can present a problem. There is a recent case of an Ian Burn mirror work, No object implies the existence of any other, being reproduced without its frame. In this case the work becomes completely unreadable. It appears as a text inscribed over an image of an architectural space and could be read as a version of one of the artist�s late overwritten paintings. The material properties of the mirror are lost and along with that much of the work�s meaning which depends on the obvious contradiction between the text and the object. There are many cases of art works where the frame is a significant part of the work itself. What would happen if we cropped the rope off Picasso�s Still life with chair caning? The rope frame is acting as the boundary between art and life in the conventional way that frames do while treacherously retaining its own identity and associations in the real world. at the same time it forms a component in the pictorial composition as the rim of the table that supports the represented still life.
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