Grace & Clark Fyfe Gallery – Glasgow
Continuity – Vienna Konzerthaus 1924, Internationale Ausstellung Neuer Theatertechnik
Dynamism – instrument in nineteen forms
Infinity – Endless House, unrealised
Correlation – linear relationships between random variables, nature, connections between humans, forms, space, time, the world
Leger Trager, takes it title from the early Leger und Trager (L + T) exhibition display units of Frederick Kiesler, architect and furniture designer, who in 1942 was commissioned to design Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, New York. Kiesler denoted the display mechanisms for Guggenheim’s collection throughout the iconic three-roomed gallery, his elegant wooden Correalist furniture forms acted as seating, plinth, table and support in each space.
Kiesler fabricated armatures for the Surrealist Gallery, on which the Ernst’s, Dali’s and de Chirico’s were to be hung, ‘liberating the painting from its traditional close relation to the wall allows ‘endless space’ to flow freely around the object and its viewer.’ Here, Kiesler’s flowing space has been revisited, isolated, it exists as a moat encircling Pollock’s raised platform and entrenching Miller’s objects and paintings.
Meticulously, repeatedly scoured, the multi-level ‘flooring’ co-exists as drawing and sculpture, prop and architecture, at once functioning as Kiesler’s ‘arms’ supporting other sculpture whilst denying its geometric constructs to become part of an organic whole. Upon Pollock’s crafted steel and wood structure rest Miller’s eroded totemic sculpture, of similar manmade materials, Jesmonite and Polystyrene. What appears a load-bearing column is in fact the shattered reconfigurations of the hollowed shells of a former work: in the act removing the core its exterior is reinforced as repetitive yet futile effort for solidity.
Untitled oscillates between playing a mundane and dutiful role as structural barrier to its awareness of itself as craft and art, its role as base and counterpart to others is coupled with the dominance it exerts upon the exhibition space. Of the various sculpture placed upon this deck it is the vessels cast in acrylic resin that carry the synthetic materials at use to the brim, they are not ‘object’ as much as they are ‘thing’.
‘the true thing has the character of having taken shape by itself (like the boulder).’
In his recent essay, entitled ‘Art as Object Attachment; Thoughts on Thingness’, Dieter Roelstraete discusses our apparent culture-wide shift back towards a more ‘embodied, physically immediate experience of the world.’ , a return to substance. The ‘thing’ is that which renews us our closeness to the world, a place shared with the bowl, the rock, the book, and our reawakening of a responsibility of care to these items.
In Leger Trager, Miller and Pollock present not the objects of; barren arrangements of flora, tentative dressings of domestic ‘ready-mades’, mere flotsam but the weighty gathering of ‘things’, materials with steel footprints, slabs of cast resins and residues, painted forms, of matter and mass.
J. Kenyon 2009
Images coming soon…