I’m going to visit Princelet Street again tomorrow to have another look at the room I’m beginning to make work for. This evening I’ve been sitting on the floor with one of my plants made of kitchen utensils rotating in the corner (the one made of a glued together roasting fork, egg poaching circle and pickle fork) and trying to make the things I’ve been collecting join together in good ways.
I have a good handful of things at the moment, including a wallpaper cutting machine, a plastic caster from a piece of light furniture, two magnifying glasses (I didn’t realise I had two) some metal things you use in sewing machines, some tweezers, a dentist’s tooth scraper and lots of different kinds of hooks you use on wood and in fabric.
What I want to do is make real things, rather than sculptures. Making sculptures feels fraudulent when I do it. I don’t really know about things. I’m not sure how they go together or how you’re supposed to look at them in order to make decisions or judgements about their appearance. I remember a few years ago sitting through a group critique at CSM and watching people discussing a pair of very rough, simple, man-sized objects made of rusty metal. I had no idea what on earth to say about them, but people around me were talking, and they were coming out with things that were helpful and illuminating. Perhaps it also has to do with the word ‘sculpture’. I’m certainly not sculpting anything at the moment.
It’s been good to see work by Louise Bourgeois and Hektor Mamet in the past few months, some of whose work I wouldn’t want to call sculpture but is certainly made of objects and three dimensional stuff. When artworks are visibly, awkwardly, beautifully made of three dimensional stuff they can stand up for themselves among the hats and coats and chairs in rooms. Here’s a chair Hektor Mamet showed in Nettie Horn last year.
I want to make objects that could have good fights with other objects you find in rooms, and there’s no chance of them doing that if they’re only pretend. As I was trying to make things this evening, the post I wrote the other week about pretending came to mind again. I want to find a way to create things that sit on the edge of being created and just being there.
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October 23, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Can you see me now? « Homologue
[…] I think two of the main changes sloped in while I was sitting with my work for hours on end during the Citations Lifted Loose exhibition, which we just took down on Sunday. Reflecting now, I think the overriding concern in the body of work I showed there was not only the tension between art objects and life objects, but more specifically the threat to authenticity (whatever I can mean by that) that surrounds things like the holders I make, which claim to serve a purpose in real life. I won’t go into it now because I’ve scraped some of the problems together here and here. […]
April 14, 2009 at 8:38 pm
That the beholder did not exist « Homologue
[…] eighteenth century. When I first read Fried’s 1980 essay Absorption and Theatricality I was trying to make objects to go in a room and was stirred by Diderot’s […]