Portfolio - grosses treffen

1
Stabled: Floyd (2001)
38cm x 110cm x 78cm
living horse
Dark bay coloured
Miniature British Horse
gelding. Full name ‘Asils
Pretty Boy Floyd’, progeny
of stallion ‘Asils Calisto’
and mare ‘Gaterley
Mistlethrush’
Stabled: Vitrine (2013)
2m x 1m x 1m
teak, brass, water, hay,
horse excreta
Modified teak vitrine, after
original by Kaare Klint
CASTRATED at an early age, and
estranged from his surroundings by
his scale, the 12 year-old miniature
horse Floyd was kept as as a house pet
in England before being moved to
his current stables in Ostprignitz, in
Germany’s Brandenburg region.
Not to be confused with ponies,
miniature horses differ from their
relatives in both size and characteristics.
The line between ponies and horses
is strictly guarded by communities of
miniature horse owners. The American
Miniature Horse Association sets an
upper height limit of 34 inches (86cm) as
one of its registration criteria and states
that a miniature horse, seen devoid of
a scale reference, should be identical
in characteristics, conformation and
proportion to a full-sized horse. The
association declares its objective as
producing ‘the smallest possible perfect
horse’.
“I’ve been more fearful than fond of horses
most of my life. They were never sweet
playthings. More like scary masculine
brutes. Horses used to strike the tarmac
outside my childhood home at 7am every
day. Up to the gallops. Like clockwork.
Mechanical beasts cocked and coked up for
the racetrack, or for attacking with flying
iron feet that would suddenly flail out in all
directions [...].”
“The first thing I got, of course, was the
‘Grooming Parlour.’ This included a comb,
various harnesses and other equestrian
accoutrements, plus two hats and a plastic
cat. I remember I was quite excited by the
male shire horses with long hair on their feet.
[...] My parents never challenged the fact that
I was playing with pink plastic ponies. But
when I got a little older, I started to hide the
ponies under the mattress in my bed.”
2
Stored: Self (1980/1981)
32cmx58cmx199cm /
30cmx60cmx187cm
2 living human beings
1 white male with blue
eyes and blond hair / 1
white male with brown
eyes and brown hair
no distinguishing features
registration numbers:
0402813563/1405801457
Stored: Storage (2013)
80cm x 80cm x 191cm
Teak, leather, linen,
paper yarn, brass, human
secretions
Mutated teak vitrine, after
original by Kaare Klint
EDIFIED by institutions in Denmark and
the United Kingdom respectively, these
two male, white, living humans have been
reared within educational establishments
and cultivated with support from cultural
agencies in ways that have enabled them
to create objects for display in museums
and similar spaces, or to teach in similar
institutions as they were schooled in
themselves.
Typically, value is assigned to
their production, whether classified
as artistic, intellectual or social, either
through exhibitions held in institutions
of display, or according to criteria
established by committees of bureaucrats
and representatives affiliated with the
selfsame institutions. These individuals
are largely dependent on the approval
of such committees to make their living
and for their continued production to be
commissioned, financed, displayed and
housed.
“We are writing to attain permission to
live, during both waking and sleeping
hours, in Designmuseum Danmark during
the exhibition ‘Storage’. Our piece for that
exhibition is called ‘stored’. The work is an
attempt to make a home for ourselves within
what could be seen as the frame of your
institution: the vitrines that were designed by
Kaare Klint in 1927 for the museum when it
was first established and the building was
converted from its former use as a hospital.
[Our remakes of these vitrines] have now
become integrated part of our artworks,
carrying vestiges of the institution’s formal
confidence and authority. Through our work
we want to ask what it means to be at home
within an institution, and how institutions
make our homes.”
3
2078 Fifth Avenue
(2009)
55cm x 40cm x 35 cm;
Newspaper, 22-carat gold
leaf, rope
Modelled reconstruction,
at scale 1:12, of interiors
of Collyer home
constructed within
newspaper stack that
includes original print of
New Haven Post, dated
March 22nd 1947. Model
interiors lined with gold
leaf.
HORROR VACUI, in other words a fear
of empty spaces, could be seen to have
shaped the tightly stuffed home of New
Yorker brothers Homer and Langley
Collyer, whose reclusive existence has
been the subject of fascination since
their deaths over sixty years ago. After
living alone together for almost three
decades, Homer and Langley died
within ten feet and one week of each
other. Entombed in 103 tons of hoarded
possessions in their Harlem home,
Langley was killed by his own booby trap
and Homer died later, helpless without
his brother to care for him.
With the help of police photos and
newspaper articles from the time of their
death, 2078 Fifth Avenue reconstructs the
Collyers’ home from the main material
of the Collyers’ hoard – newspaper
– and from gold leaf. The Collyers’
Harlem brownstone house was literally
inseparable from its hoarded collection;
following the brothers’ deaths, the
clearance of the Collyers’ hoard from the
house led to the building’s collapse.
“We became fascinated by the way that the
Collyer brothers literally built themselves
into their own personal world with its own
distinct value system. Their hoard had been
rumoured to be full of valuable treasures,
a myth that was debunked following their
deaths. Most of the hoard consisted of old
newspapers that Langley had collected for
the day when his blind brother regained
his sight and would need to catch up with
decades of news. What interests us is the
alchemy that occurs when an object loses its
value in one system (like an artefact found
to be a fake), but then suddenly becomes
a rich mine for something else. The sheer
mass and density of the Collyers’ collection
has been a source of fascination since their
deaths and has been plundered ever since
as a source of stories for books, plays, films
and artworks.”
4
Mountain of
Depression
(2008/2011)
90cmx120cmx180cm
Beech plywood, MDF,
plastic, steel, cardboard,
rubberised paint finish
Mechanical adjustable
height table with office
spaces under tabletop;
modelled at scale 1:50.
REPRESSION is revealed as lying under
the façade of a neutral and anonymous
workspace in Mountain of Depression.
The mountain literally grows out of
depression; as the adjustable height
office table is lowered, contour lines
spring up from the surface and its various
strata are revealed. The ‘mountain’
consists of layer upon layer of office
spaces, from lofty boardroom to cavelike
telesales cabin. The director’s concealed
control centre hangs ominously at the
mountain’s core, holding the structure in
check with its eyeless gaze.
Mountain of Depression delves into
a repressed emotional landscape whose
hidden heights and unplumbed depths
often exist within so-called ‘flat’ office
structures, but which nonetheless go
undiscussed in company board rooms
and unrecorded in corporate workflow
charts and management diagrams.
“We made this work for an exhibition
in a showroom which doubled as the
headquarters for the company that
manufactured the original adjustable height
table. The employees were on permanent
display in their office, both to the public
and to the company’s boss, who sat behind
pot plants in a glass walled office above
the showroom floor. The set-up reminded us
both of this traveller’s case, in which there
is ‘a place for everything and everything
is in its place’, and of Jeremy Bentham’s
panopticon, a prison design in which the
inmates’ cells are organised around the
periphery of a cylindrical building, all
overlooked by a screened guard’s viewing
point. Whether the guard was there or not,
the prisoners were to be controlled by the
notion that they might, at any time, be on
view.”
5
Burial of the Last
Queen of Denmark
(2009)
120cmx235cmx218cm
Bog oak, plaster
Rectangular sarcophagus
constructed from bog oak
with two funnel-formed
water inlets. Within,
1:50 architecture model
of Roskilde cathedral
square and water-powered
mechanism.
FIGUREHEADS continue to hold
symbolic power even after death in The
Burial of the Last Queen of Denmark.
A ritualised national event is retold
as a future endpoint. The work is a
water-driven mechanical theatre and
architectural model housed in a bog
oak sarcophagus. In it is staged the
funeral procession for the last queen
of Denmark. At their death Denmark’s
monarchs have for centuries passed
through Roskilde’s cathedral square
before being laid to rest in the city’s
cathedral. Here, the future event is
projected as an assemblage of longestablished urban rituals, in which
the queen’s body is dismembered and
enshrined in building-sized reliquaries.
The work thereby mechanises the
ceremonies that have traditionally
transformed Roskilde’s cathedral square
into a grand departure gate and set
piece in the construction of Denmark’s
national identity.
“We see a connection between the funeral
processions of Denmark’s kings and queens
through Roskilde before being buried
in the city’s cathedral and earlier ritual
performances associated with holy relics.
The skull of Saint Lucius I was trafficked up
from Rome to repel the demons of Isefjord,
which it reportedly did with some success,
before reaching Roskilde to triumphal
acclaim. On arrival, it was built into the
facade of the newly built cathedral. Both
relics and royal remains have to arrive in
just the right way. We’re interested in how
the careful staging of these arrivals shapes
identities and gives meanings that extend
far beyond the bodies of saints, kings and
queens.”
6
Phantom Limbs (2011)
80cmx80cmx180cm
Teak, oak, steel, leather
Child’s 19th century
prosthetic leg built into
complex construction
consisting of 5 interlocking
teak vitrines.
PROSTHETICS tell the story of the
bodies they once fitted in terms of their
absences. They cannot help but remind
us of the absent limbs that they come to
stand in for. Seen alone as bespoke pieces
of craftsmanship, they recreate the absent
contours of the individual’s body they
were tailored to match, and of which they
once formed part.
Phantom Limbs make space for
absence within the tightly-packed rooms
of the museum. The teak vitrines that
Kaare Klint designed for the museum’s
artefacts have turned in on each other,
knotted and interlocked in such a way
as to repeatedly frame themselves, their
content and their context. Enshrined and
integral to the piece is a child’s prosthetic
leg, which is a reminder of a whole
series of absences. A leg lost. A child that
outgrew his or her artificial limb. A child
that grew old and has long since passed
away.
“What intrigued us here was how
presenting a prosthetic leg, a bit of a misfit
in this design museum context, might
make us see its surroundings differently.
We reflect on the qualities of the leg not
only as a historical and technological
artefact, but also as an agent capable of
bringing particular absences more clearly
into focus. For example, just above the
work is a wooden ceiling which has once
formed part of a fifteenth century building
in Valencia. It is one of many artefacts in
the collection which have abruptly severed
from the contexts in which it was created
and understood. Museums might give the
impression of forming complete and selfexplanatory collections, but we discover
to our surprise that they’re actually full of
loose ends.”
7
City of the
(Re)Orientated
(2007/2011)
70cm x 90cm x110 cm
Assorted woods, plaster,
cardboard
Scale model of city
constructed from
framework of wooden
rods of various dimensions
with larger inset modelled
architectural elements.
DETACHMENT from the city’s
multitude of distractions is only possible
in small oases of isolation in City of
the (Re)Orientated. In this city the
‘map’ has long been useless, its streets
continually reshaped by their walkers,
vendors, sponsors, hobby street-artists
and salvation-sellers. In this anthill
of possibilities only the most elastic
orientation software can direct the city’s
inhabitants through its myriad of shifting,
tangled streets. As private dwellings of
the city connect to this mobile space,
more parks, institutions and cinemas
detach themselves from mobile invasion.
Two interdependent territories
grow back to back: the first is a mobile,
shifting space that is continually intent
on becoming ever more stimulating,
responsive and distracting. In the
shadows of the mobile territory grow
the immobile spaces. They become ever
more out-of-reception and are intent on
appealing to the focussed eye.
“These days, the old ivory towers are
networked. The internet’s lost its earthbound
nettiness and flies wirelessly higher and
higher. But that prosthetic nervous system
of instant connections has its own blind
spots and phantom limbs. We want to ask
what kind of pleasures and pains might be
generated in the dead-end spaces that are
severed from the throb of GPS guidance
& internet connection. We’re inspired by
Spengler’s exuberant creations because we
see them as bringing two worlds together.
One in which a master craftsman carves
ivory painstakingly in concentrated
isolation; another in which the same
craftsman materialises wild visions that
wouldn’t look out of place in the sci-fi
universe of online gaming.”
8
Made in Ruins & Seat
on the Edge (2009/2011
& 2009)
90cmx100cmx180cm
50x50x120cm
Various woods, plaster
Staircase fragment
constructed from various
woods using marquetry
work, in ruined or
incomplete state
Marquetry-work chair with
turned plaster casts, in
ruined or incomplete state
FRAGMENTS of ruined architecture
and construction sites simultaneously,
the delicately collapsing and elaborately
erected Made in Ruins & Seat on the
Edge stand as if caught in time. As both
staircase and superstructure, chair and
classical portico, ruin and construction
site, the works exist in a state of spatial
and temporal suspension.
The misfits will not be pinned down.
The oversized dimensions and shifting
scales of the staircase fragment refuse an
easy and predictable relationship with
your legs. The chair defends itself against
your weight. Beneath the works’ surfaces
lie architectural worlds, suggesting an
ambiguity of scale and a vulnerable
relationship between the work’s bold
outer surfaces and the fragile inner
constructions that support them.
“The Koepping glasses are fragile to the
point that they threaten to shatter at the
slightest contact with human fingers. This
means that they are to all intents and
purposes dysfunctional, but for us this
dysfunctional character seems more than
accidental. On the one hand it’s a kitsch and
showy way of pursuing crafting finesse to
the point of absurdity. On the other, it’s as
an extreme development of an archetypical
quality of any glass - its fragility. Made in
Ruins and Seat on the Edge both call on our
capacities to project ruin and incompletion
onto our own bodies. These qualities are
easy to associate with fraility, and our
bodies’ innevitable decay and disintegration.
But, unlike the glasses, our bodies are busy
construction sites that keep picking up the
pieces and rebuilding themselves.”
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