If
there is one thing that we have learned from postmodernism it's that
anything goes. However that
anything, is always dependant on context to secure its meaning.
Objects are slippery things; open to aesthetic relations through
which contingent meanings are drawn. Context is all. It completely
defines such relations. And by this logic, the canonisation of art
and 'the history of art' the paradigm shifts within it,
is innately
postmodern, as this
discourse
appropriates and re-contextualises objects from other times, places
and contexts.
In
the latest body of work by material conceptualist Theresa Bruno, the
artist undermines our faith in representations of historical forms by
exploring the context in which they are represented. Bruno reproduces
knowledge, gleaned from her personal research practice, as
de-contextualised information; in the same way as an a-level art
student might assemble coursework by copying and pasting artist
biographies from Wikipedia. Her knowledge becomes submerged. Lost at
the bottom of a depthless abyss of surface; its location marked only
by lurid fluorescent buoys of allegory.
A
wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities was a collection of artefacts yet to be assimilated into the growing scientific
taxonomies of Renaissance Europe. These often became fake museums or
representations of made-up natural histories. Bruno's WUNDERKAMMER,
is a site-specific response to her artist residency at SIX Project
Space. The exhibition is also the culmination of years of collecting.
Bruno is an obsessive collector of ideas and information. The kind of
person who locks herself away in her study like a Victorian eccentric
and reads history books, cover to cover. The purpose of this practice
is curious in itself. Her motivation is not simply in accumulating
cultural capital or assimilating information but rather in
appropriating it like a group of extras in a theatrical play. Information
becomes the crowd to her lead players in a retelling or rather
remixing, of historical narratives. On one wall of the gallery,
collaged images from children's history books jostle like atomic
particles or a belt of space debris, severed from their original
narrative context. This gives them a Dadaist absurdity, reminiscent
of the illustrations in Luigi Serafini's experimental encyclopedia
Codex
Seraphinianus
(1981). However, their meaning remains partially in tact, badly
reproduced via poorly remembered historical discourse. This is then
narrated by a disjointed audio commentary, which sounds more like a
shopping list that something that would emerge from a museum headset.
Adding to the sense of absurdity is the fact that the disembodied and
disguised voice, resembles that of an abuse victim or criminal, whose
identity has been protected for a TV appearance.
In
another piece, the history of sculpture is recalled via the retrieval
of 3D printed information, rendering the end product as useful as a
collection of unwanted tourist souvenirs waiting to be packed away
after an unsuccessful car boot sale expedition. The objects, devoid
of status and context, are both mute and comedic. They enunciate the
colour blue as an impotent signifier for the masculine domination of
art history. Their fragile forms glisten like spun silk, punctuated
with defects from the 3D printing process. A green-screen video
rendering of the central character of the Venus of Willendorf – a
female lead – presides over these objects as their carnivalesque
ruler, whilst announcing “I am a diva”, as if to remind us of the
parodic nature of feminine power structures. She is of course, bright
pink: a colour which connotes both amplified femininity as social
conditioning and punk's irreverent subversion of this. Our 'icon'
also provides false histories for the objects that surround her,
enabling the suspension of disbelief as she draws herself into her
surroundings and in doing this also exposes the tension between the
virtual nature of 3D printing information and physical space. She
epitomises the sensibility of camp or that which revels in artifice
and illusion. Moreover, the Pop Art psychedelics which surround Venus
hasted our immersion in the banal. Susan Sontag makes the point that
camp is apolitical and anti-ideological. It is a sensibility that
operates outside the system. It is fragile, illusive, mundane and
contingent in its meanings. For a 'sensibility which can be crammed
into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof,
is no longer a sensibility at all' (Sontag, 1964). In this sense,
camp is what Michel de Certeau (1991) terms a 'tactic': a mundane
practice by which we can fly under the radar of ideological
oppression. Camp is a Foucauldian semiotic 'event' (Badiou, 1988): an
emergent form which has the power to subvert the established symbolic
order and to generate a transfigured and luminescent 'Being'
(Heidegger, 1964). Yet, unlike Dada and its cousin surrealism, camp
also undermines the dominance of the subconscious. In camp images,
meaning is at play at surface level. We don't need our subconscious
to tell us that the Eiffel Tower looks like a penis! Conversely, camp
is contrary, and could equally settle upon Freud's analogy that
“sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.
In
refusing to fix representational meaning, WUNDERKAMMER elicits a
post-structuralist game in which the audience is very much included
in an immersive and mundane practice. This involves an engagement
with the work, in which we restore its being through dwelling in it.
In the case of WUNDERKAMMER, this involves being in on the joke;
engaging the sensibility of camp to participate in the emergence of
the work. This involves an ontological understanding of the world as
emerging - of the appearance and dissolution, the revealing and
concealing of things in themselves - from a (their) base ground that
Heidegger terms ‘earth’: the objective nature of things, which
are un-knowable. In turn, ‘earth’ conceals or shelters ‘world’,
or that which we think we know, and paradoxically, is ‘on which and
in which man bases his dwelling’ (Heidegger, 1978). In this sense,
WUNDERKAMMER is an exposition of 'world'. By taking that which we
think we know as something upon which to feel at home, we are then
able to play with these representations and to re-appropriate them in
the dwelling context of the gallery space. Moreover, the gallery
context, the slightly shabby DIY nature of the exhibition content and
the interactive nature of the exhibits, all draw the audience into a
relational aesthetics: an un-purified space (that opposes the white
cube ethos), in which we very much become part of Bruno's world.
Bevis
Fenner, 2014
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