Indepth Arts News:
"Heads and Hands: A Fluid Exhibition with Loans from the nvisible Museum"
2001-01-26 until 2001-03-01
Decatur House, WPA/C
Washington, DC,
USA United States of America
Works from Matthew Barney, David Hammons, Gary Hume, Callum Innes, Emma Kay,
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, Cady Noland, Marc Quinn, Mark Wallinger. The nvisible Museum is a nomadic and evolving collection
of contemporary art. Adapting according to context, space,
city, it occupies its place in Washington, DC, as a
subliminal tenant of a historic home across from the White
House with loans subtly installed in an alternative reading
as to collection and representation. Cady Noland's 'Pipes
in a Basket' [1989] stand functionally and symbolically in
the far corner of the sparse kitchen as within any other
domestic's place, Callum Innes' Untitled [1995] shellac and
oil on canvas painting hangs as an incongruous extension
of the exposed stripped plaster wall, and Marc Quinn's
home-made bread hands conspicuously occupy a place
above the mantel.
These and other transient or physical
works throughout the house, such as Paul D. Miller aka DJ
Spooky's composition resounding throughout the Second
Floor, convey the nvisible Museum's intent to create a
spatial dialectic revealing a substratum of economic,
political, and social interrelationships. Glancing out the
window across the courtyard and into the Carriage House,
Mark Wallinger's 'Prometheus' [1999] image of himself is
conveyed as one apparently constrained, his voice
projecting in a slow drone from Ariel's song in 'The
Tempest': Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are
coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing
of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into
something rich and strange. In leaving the drawing room,
one indiscriminately finds reflection in the Drawing Room
mirror only to read Emma Kay's 'The Bible from Memory'
[1997], initiated as a direct citation on a single sheet of
paper and subsequently evolving into an abstraction from
her memory.
Heads and Hands provides the notion of an exhibition as a
tour rather than a citing of individual objects extending
beyond revealing the identities of private individuals or the
importance of the house as an isolated architectural
structure and container of static aesthetic objects. Decatur
House is as a social institution with an implicit designation
of a broader framework for the system of relations. The
illusions of the interior marked by furniture and decorative
objects without function characterize the home not as a
shelter but as a citadel upholding the ideology of
autonomy and privacy and the defense of private
property. In interjecting the notion of from hand to
mouth as in sustenance, or in hand to head as in
Matthew Barney's 'Field Dressing Manual C' [1989-92], a
form of exchange as in David Hammon's mutated dollar, or
the isolated head denoting a more representational
image relating to patronage and order as in Gary Hume's
'The Cleric' [2000], the nvisible Museum approaches the
internalized system endemic to a domestic home in
reconditioning the notion of how art functions in the
present day world and how contemporary art lends to the
rightful reinterpretation of history.
Benjamin Henry Latrobe is regarded as the father of
American architecture, a somewhat nominal historic figure
noted for his artist's temperament and reputation as an
insubordinate inspired by a school of architectural thought
characterized by simplicity, geometric power, and
rationalism, deemed both politically and aesthetically
radical for its time. Latrobe's notion of a domestic home
incorporated a unified place of coexistence - hierarchically
compartmentalized but nevertheless cohesive in providing
for a new tenant order comprised of owners and servants
located within one building. The recent discovery of a
kitchen located off the main vestibule of one of his only
remaining buildings, The Decatur House [1818], and
formerly understood to be Stephen Decatur's office, has
unveiled a transformed room, one neutral and unresolved,
subject to further disclosure as to how an enslaved labor
force contributed and endowed domestic life in historic
houses. It has also attributed Latrobe with having been
the first architect to incorporate the kitchen into the main
living quarters, placing slaves as tenants into a space
formerly entrusted and privileged for the seclusion of
private individuals endowed with guaranteed protection
and freedom to pursue self-interest.
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