College 9th January: Art History

This morning we were looking at Order, and Collections, and in particular, some of the work of American  artist Mark Dion (b 1961) who organised a dig of the Thames river bank outside Tate Britain and Tate Modern in 1999 (the year Tate Modern opened), and exhibited a collection of the material he found in a purpose-made display cabinet in Tate Modern.

More information about the exhibition is on the Tate website here, from where this image was copied.  Dion did something smilier in Venice, and while he attracted the ire of the venetian authorities, he also uncovered valuable and previously unknown evidence about the earliest human settlement in Venice.

He has collaborated with various universities and museums on similar works, such as this one at the  Natural History Museum, which he saw as a tribute to Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who invented the way scientists still categorise plant and animal species.

There is more information about the exhibition here, from where this image is copied, and which includes the following extract about Dion's intention.

Dion appropriates the methods, tactics and traits of science, to explore serious questions in a playful and subjective manner that scientists cannot adopt. In his own words, he is able to act as a "lightning rod" for ideas about science. "I'm not conducting an experiment in strict scientific terms, but for some people it's enough to look the part," he comments in an interview published in the catalogue to a concurrent, touring exhibition, The Natural History of the Museum. 

Personally, I am not rally sure if this is 'art' or not - it is certainly a means to make previously hidden things more visible and possibly more accessible to the viewer.  If it helps people get interested in museums and archaeology, then it's fine by me.  But a similar approach, by a rained archaeologist or naturalist, but with the vision to present things in non-traditional ways, might do an even better job of this.    Of course, it's interesting that archaeologists hadn't thought about trawling through the thames mud themselves....

We then looked at work by Christian Boltanski, born in Paris in 1944.  He has done a lot of big installations around the themes of loss, many of them about war and the Holocaust in particular.  

This one is about the lost children of Dijon, made in 1986.

Image copied from here.

He did a huge and impressive installation t the Grand Palais in Paris in 2010

Image was copied from the Guardian article here, which also has a helpful discussion about the piece.

This installation, called Personne or "Nobody" is a massive statement about the Holocasut.  It is on a huge scale (the Grand Palais is vast, much bigger than Tate Modern's Turbine Hall) and as well as the mounds of clothes, and the mechanical grabber which constantly lifts an drops clothes on the heap, there was a constant and loud soundtrack of heartbeat, so the overall effect must have been almost overwhelming.  In terms of making an unforgettable impact on the viewer, this succeeded big time.  

Boltanski has made a lot of work on this theme of death and remembrance, and often of ordinary and unnamed people, like this installation at the Guggenheim Gallery in Bilbao.

Humans, 1994. Photographs and lights, overall dimensions variable. Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa  GBM1998.1. Photo: Erika Barahona-Ede

Image copied from the Guggenheim website here, which also has more information about the work.

Other artists we looked at briefly included Tracey Emin (Everyone I have ever slept with, and My Bed, among other works based on collections of her belongings or her past lives); Cornelia Parker's feathers, and German artist Kirsten Bott who has been collecting and cataloguing everyday objects for over 20 years. One is tempted to ask "why?" and "why should we want to look at his collections?" but they do have a strangely compelling attraction, perhaps because we all hoard 'stuff' and it is challenging to have to confront, visually, the scale and banality of a lifetimes' wroth of every-day 'stuff', most of it pretty worthless and useless.  So perhaps there is a point to it... jut about.  This is an image from one of his exhibited collections.

Karsten Bott,One of Each, 1993, detail,
Installation at the Offenes
Kulturhaus, Linz, 1993,
10 x 30 m.

The antithesis of collections, however, is Michael land, who famously destroyed every single one of his possessions

More images and information abut the breakdown project is here.

Overall, I am still not quite convinced about the relevance of some (or all) of these collections as 'art' although they can be witty and intriguing, and perhaps they are a statement on consumerism, or whatever.  

If they create order out of chaos, or make us look at ordinary objects in a new way, or pose questions about the consumption and waste of everyday life, then perhaps they have value.  I am not sure...