Sculpture in the Close 2017

Home , Alison Wilding, Barry Flanagan, Shirazeh Houshiary, Stephen Cox (sculptor)

Jesus College, Cambridge

26 june – 17 september

1 Sculpture in the Close 2017

Photographs copyright © Phyllida Barlow and Louise Bourgeois, Hauser & Wirth; Mona Hatoum, White Cube; Shirazeh Houshiary, The Lisson Gallery; Kim Lim, Alex Turnbull Studios; Cornelia Parker, Frith Street Gallery; Agnes Thurnauer, Valerie Bach Gallery; Rachael Whiteread, Gagosian; Alison Wilding, Karsten Schubert

Jesus College Cambridge Works of Art Committee: Colin Renfrew (Chairman), Rod Mengham (Curator), Jean Bacon, Anthony Bowen, Andrea Brand, James Clackson, Donal Cooper, Juliet Mitchell, Sian Stinchcombe, Bill Stronge, Preti Taneja, Claudia Tobin

Catalogue notes by Rod Mengham

Editing and design by The Running Head Limited, Cambridge www.therunninghead.com

Printed in Great Britain by Swan Print Ltd, Bedford www.swanprint.org.uk

Proceeds from the sale of this catalogue go to the Friends of Art at Jesus College fund

Cover photograph from Phyllida Barlow, Untitled: stacked chairs (2014) Foreword

The Master and Fellows of Jesus College are delighted Valuable assistance was provided by the Manciple, once again to host Sculpture in the Close. In so doing Simon Hawkey, the Development Office under Richard we acknowledge our gratitude to Lord Renfrew, who Dennis, the communications officer, Helen Harris, the so imaginatively launched this concept during his head gardener, Paul Stearn, our maintenance manager, mastership, and we celebrate the fact that this year’s Richard Secker, maintenance supervisor, Chris Brown, exhibition is the fifteenth in the series. Jesus College and our Head Porter, Grahame Appleby. We are also is known throughout Cambridge, and indeed beyond, grateful for assistance from Deborah Mansfield in the for these marvellous exhibitions of contemporary Bursary and the Ecclesiastical Insurance Company. sculpture. The generosity of the sculptors in The vibrancy and success of modern art exhibitions lending their work for this exhibition is gratefully is increasingly dependent on donations, notably the acknowledged. We have also received absolutely support of the Friends of Art of Jesus College. In invaluable assistance from their galleries, who have particular, the continuation of the Sculpture in the been exceptionally committed and supportive in the Close exhibition programme has been made possible preparations for this exhibition. this year through the success of the College’s new print The works of art committee of the College, led portfolio – one quarter of the edition of 100 has been in such an excellent manner by the curator, Dr Rod sold so far. We are indebted to Mrs Mary Mochary and Mengham, has been responsible for mounting this the Kasser Mochary Foundation for the seed-funding exhibition, working closely with its advisor, Tim that enabled us to launch this project; and we are very Marlow, Director of Artistic Programmes at The grateful to those who have already purchased copies, Royal Academy. Tim has been the essential link in for helping us to continue the vision of bringing the chain connecting the College with the wider art exciting and edifying contemporary art to Cambridge in community. The committee has also liaised with a College setting. the gardens committee, chaired by Dr David Hanke. ian white, Master

Phyllida Barlow

Letters in ochre indicate the work’s position on the map One is tempted to see this highly suggestive on page 24. sculpture as an allegory of contemporary art, riskily asserting its value and importance regardless of A Untitled: megaphone audience reaction. Like the myth of Echo and Narcissus, B Untitled: stacked chairs it is a cautionary tale, with moral implications. Even when not needed, the chairs combine into an assertive Phyllida Barlow intends her two Untitled works of presence; perhaps especially when they are not needed, 2014 to be shown together. One includes a large they form a large and intractable mass; and yet each one cone-like funnel resembling a megaphone, while the is capable of implying an individual human presence, other consists of a large number of stacked chairs. a reminder that people are not mere echoes of one The viewer of the sculptures is bound to imagine the another, but are unrepeatable mixtures of thoughts, emission of sounds that have long since ceased, and feelings and perceptions with unique histories of the rapt attentiveness of an audience that has long experience. The megaphone, on the other hand, is not since departed. There seems to be more than an echo a guarantee of human presence, but is just as likely to here of the myth of Echo and Narcissus that has often represent human absence; if not disconnection, then been used as the subject of artworks. The imposing remote connection to a source of dubious authority. megaphone that is angle-poised on its tall mast recalls The implied attitude of audience to speaker is one the figure of Narcissus leaning over his pool, while of passive reception rather than interaction. And the the pile of redundant seating implies his neglect of his somewhat oversized dimensions of the megaphone lover, Echo. In the myth, Narcissus’ rejection of the are a strong hint to the imagination that the balance nymph Echo causes her to fade away until she dwindles of power in the relationship is unequal. Barlow’s to the function of a sounding board, echoing whatever combination of elements in this installation is very he says. She is nothing more than an aural mirror – the emphatic – its silence is intended to be deafening. It equivalent of a reflecting pool. The duplicate chairs of challenges the artist never to take for granted the terms Barlow’s assemblage are visual echoes of one another; of transmission in contemporary art, and challenges moreover, they are folded flat and have lost both the viewers, the imaginary audience, to act up whenever volume and function. the signal threatens to fade out.

5 6 Louise Bourgeois

C Eyebenches granite accentuate beds and mirrors while leaving out other items of furniture. They resemble distorted memories The eyes, and their role in the development of the self, which the passage of time has calibrated to focus on are right at the centre of Louise Bourgeois’s art. Her the sources of trauma and obsession. Access to the entire oeuvre revolves around certain acts of witnessing interior of these spaces is generally barred, imposing and the complex feelings aroused in the witness unable on the inquisitive viewer the status of voyeur and either to avow or deny the nature of what they have would-be intruder. And there is often an area that seen. While still a child, Bourgeois became aware of remains invisible unless by means of reflection in a her father’s acts of infidelity with her own governess, in mirror. The viewer is placed in a position evoking that a relationship that persisted with the connivance of her of the child who has stumbled across the secret of adult mother. Navigating her way through the contradictory sexuality without being able to see it for what it is. nature of this experience turned Bourgeois into an The two enormous eyes of stone that stare out from artist for whom acts of sight are always caught up the end of Library Court in the current exhibition are in an unstable and troubling negotiation between completely unseeing, but their place in the oeuvre of permission and prohibition. Louise Bourgeois makes their blindness psychological. Many of her installations, especially the Cells In Greek mythology, Medusa turned to stone all those series, complicate the act of viewing. The name Cells who gazed upon her, but was turned to stone herself by itself suggests how the building blocks of life can the reflection of her own eyes in the polished shield of be used to construct limitations on our freedom of Perseus. The subjectivity encoded in the work of Louise manoeuvre. The artworks assembled under that name Bourgeois is paralysed by the contemplation of a secret are makeshift constructions that combine elements of on the verge of being revealed; a truth that the eyes of an early twentieth-century domestic setting that might the mind may not acknowledge, short of destruction.

Mona Hatoum

D Bunker mild steel tubing and spatial distance; exilic in the pull they exert on the artist’s sense of self as relics of a familiar world made The work of Mona Hatoum is marked by the condition strange – as reference points and means of orientation of exile from the Beirut where she was born and that seem the more essential the more they grow brought up as a member of a Palestinian family obscure. itself already in exile from its country of origin. But although these works have specific origins, She was in London in 1975 during the outbreak of they are presented as part of an art exhibition in the Lebanese civil war and has been based largely which their reception ties them to the category of in the UK for the subsequent forty years. Her work sculpture. Viewers are unlikely to grasp immediately Bunker (2011) consists of a series of architectural the historical experience intrinsic to their production forms that reproduce the proportions of buildings and will recognize instead their similarity to the classic in Beirut damaged over the period of long drawn- works of high modernism. They echo the forms and out conflict during her absence from the city. They materials used in a tradition that emphasized pure are stylized substitutes for the original buildings, all abstraction from the burden of representation. Hatoum constructed in sheet steel pierced in the same grid seems to occupy this position strategically in order to pattern in a formalized representation of the effects restore the link between art and history, aesthetics and of shellfire. This formalism generalizes the condition politics. Her Bunker is among other things a rebuke to of these individual structures, although their varying the modernist desire to isolate the artwork within its outlines draw them back to their original aspects and own protected environment, forcing recognition of the locations in an actual urban environment. They are family resemblance between sculpture and dwelling, like memories that have been distorted by temporal precinct and battleground.

Shirazeh Houshiary

E String Quintet cast stainless steel in visual terms it is tenuous and airy, and relatively insubstantial. Shirazeh Houshiary’s String Quintet weaves together Another source for its sinuous refinement of five separate ribbons of steel that climb upwards form might be the translation into visual terms of alongside and around one another in emulation of the emission of sound waves with their varying flow plant stems whose separate patterns of growth are patterns. This is to conceive of a large and heavy all dictated by the same movements of the sun. They sculpture that consists of steel in an apparently very seem coordinated, brought into visual harmony, by steady state in terms of evanescent pulses of energy. an invisible common goal. Houshiary’s title asks One of the achievements of Houshiary’s work is that us to translate this invisibility into musical terms, this illusion is completely convincing. The material of as if the parameters of this monumentally delicate the work would be resistant to touch, while its structure work, with its slender verticality, were equivalent to is protean and elusive. The title of String Quintet is the visual patterns traced by a group of notes drawn drawn from the world of human invention, while its along horizontally within the linear grid of bar formal presence in that world seems to have its origins lines on a printed page of sheet music. We hear the in the most fundamental principles of organic growth notes but not the bar lines; we see the freedom of and even the underlying laws of energy and matter. expression in the surging movement of the ribbons There is a resemblance between the approximately of steel, but not the vertical corridor that puts natural spiralling impulse at the heart of many of her two- and limits on their growth. This is in fact a large sculpture three-dimensional works that is clearly reminiscent of in terms of the volume of space that it occupies, yet the conventional representation of a strand of DNA.

Kim Lim

F Spiral II Portland stone and varying each other’s forms, articulating space by G Untitled II granite implying an extension of their own ordering principles H Kudah rose aurora marble into the intervals of absence between and among the I Column V Portland stone work’s component parts. Their setting in The Orchard at Jesus College, an area where cultivation has an informal Kim Lim was a Singaporean-British sculptor educated style, brings out their aesthetic resolution of the tension at St Martin’s School of Art and the Slade School of Art between static order and organic growth. The spiral who died in 1997. The process of assembling works for is very open-ended, as much projected as described, her exhibition at the Roundhouse in spring 1979 ‘made insisting on the potential for unlimited development me’, she said, ‘very aware of the pull within myself rather than containment and completion. between the ordered, static experience and the dynamic Lim’s works seem both contemporary and ancient, rhythms of organic structured forms . . . How to evoking the reticent forms of the earliest sculptural incorporate and synthesise these two seemingly opposed traditions, in which humanity’s later obsession with elements within one work became . . . the starting rendering the true likeness of the appearance of things point for the . . . stone sculptures.’ Martin Holman has is avoided. These sculptures impress us rather with argued that her work ‘unfolded in a cyclical way that their desire for implication – of the true relations thrived on invention and review.’ Lim’s Spiral II is almost between states of being, both seen and unseen, a visual diagram of this trajectory, a series of sculptural between the narrow preoccupations of the human and forms detached from one another but recapitulating what might extend beyond them.

13 Cornelia Parker

J Puddle black patinated bronze like a museum label informing us that the object we K Cloudburst rusting paintwork on a bomb disposal seek has been removed. And the irony is doubled vessel when we appreciate the generic similarity between this plaque and others we have encountered in the Cornelia Parker’s Moon Landing in the Fellows’ English landscape. Shape, design and lettering recall Garden of Jesus College tells us that ‘Here in the inscriptions of English Heritage or the National this garden on the night of the full moon a lunar Trust, provoking questions about the extent to which meteorite fell and was lost.’ The plaque we read is these deploy a house style of interpretation that

14 displaces the object of scrutiny instead of retrieving in Jerusalem, used to contain a very different kind it. Ultimately, it is the reported disappearance of the of outburst that has its own grim cycle. Parker’s meteor that disturbs our equanimity in any attempt work plays with the inexhaustible variation that to fix the meaning and control the approaches to this determines the relationship between images and work of art. their referents; between so-called solid objects Parker’s two works in the current exhibition, and their actual fluid states; between art and Puddle and Cloudburst, are solid objects that the material conditions in which art is always displace their referents, both phenomena that absorbed. appear then disappear according to changes in the earth’s atmosphere. Clouds and rainpuddles take on form – transitory form – as stages in a process that is endlessly renewed, never in the same way twice. Both phenomena appear and disappear at different rates only to reappear as art objects in Parker’s practice, although not in identical fashion. Parker’s metal floor sculpture gives the puddle a seemingly durable form; nevertheless, its patinated condition makes it clear that the object is caught up in a process of constant change. The wall-work Cloudburst seems to capture the image of a cloud at the instant of precipitation – the relationship between image and referent depends on a visual similarity, although the patch of rust that forms the image is produced by the same alterations in the atmosphere that give rise to clouds in the first place. The cloud-shape that emerges from the patch of rust is purely arbitrary – it could easily have been different. But the very presence of rust on the surface of the exposed metal panel is completely inevitable. The metal has been sourced from the debris of a bomb disposal vessel

Agnes Thurnauer

L Matrices brushed aluminium language conventions. Her work can be thought of as having been always situated on the borders between Agnes Thurnauer’s Matrices is an extensible series of different states of being, of gender, of mentality, works consisting of individual sculptures based on the of sensibility, and of expressive medium; and her moulds used to create sets of alphabetical letters in own work issues from the necessity to translate and three-dimensional form. The number of component re-translate the idioms of one state into another. But works being exhibited varies from one installation to as the recent paintings make clear, it is the very ground another, but like the difference between language and of being that is taken from under the feet of those speech (langue and parole), each selection of letterforms who migrate from one state to another. Language makes a comment on the workings of the system as acquisition is formative of every aspect of the self, a whole. In Thurnauer’s practice as a painter, written which means that second-language acquisition is a language is often incorporated into the picture plane, means of building a new and somewhat different self; but even when it is not, the frequent allusiveness of this has positive consequences as well as elements of subject matter and style and the foregrounding of melancholy. generic conventions make it clear that the work is The Matrices remind us of a child’s set of wooden situated within the language of art history and that it or plastic letters, different shapes that can be engages with the methods of reading a painting that this arranged in ways that are aesthetically pleasing as entails. Thurnauer is fascinated by the ways art reads the well as semantically correct. They are both literal and social and cultural reality in which it is produced, and symbolic building blocks of a way of interpreting and her constant insistence is on making the viewer aware of representing the world that involves creative play and the complicated mixture of liberties and restrictions that pleasure at the same time as they teach us the rules the available languages of art allow us to use. and limitations of social being. They remind us that art Her most recent series of paintings focuses on the and language are positive resources during a historical migration crisis whose most graphic scenes of tension crisis in our willingness to imagine ourselves in the are set on the borders between states, cultures and place of the other.

Rachel Whiteread

M Untitled Portland stone our everyday reality, and she traces the borderlines N Untitled Ancaster stone between neglect and fascination in the most subtle O Some are abject objects II glass, steel, plaster, brass, fashion, here through the use of linear cutouts bone, platinum, white gold leaf enabling the movement of light and shadow to make us attend to sculpture as a transitional object, moving Rachel Whiteread’s work has been referred to as into the world of art straight from a world we take for ‘sculpture that seems to have withdrawn in on itself’ granted. (Bryony Fer). This is a description that could apply In the accompanying vitrine Some are abject objects II, to the two works in stone in the current exhibition. Whiteread examines a selection of functional objects Each is a cast of an interior, a blind space, and yet the and their relationship to and simultaneous detachment disclosing of this normally unseen and closed-off from the human obsession with meaning-production. space allows it to see, or, if not to see exactly, then to What does it mean to isolate and frame a manufactured be present in the visible world, a world from which it object unless it is to challenge Walter Benjamin’s would otherwise be completely absent. Whiteread’s contention that ‘aura’ surrounds only the unique sculptural practice over decades has refined the creation and is absent once the single artefact has methods of translating imperceptible space into been reproduced? The reproduced objects that are perceptible form. It is as if she is transporting sculpture rendered singular here include skeletal bones and from one dimension to another. mechanical components – they have been isolated Whiteread’s choice of Portland and Ancaster stone from the working systems of which they are a part in for the two works deploys materials most often found a way that emphasizes their individual value. Without in prestigious buildings and monuments, especially them, the systems would not work. But isolation and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century institutional and juxtaposition also force recognition of their individual corporate building projects in London. If she is not forms. Each form is the product of its function in exactly claiming monumentality for the spaces she connection with others yet offers a beauty all its own, has coaxed out of the shadows, then she is claiming an aesthetic satisfaction that Whiteread underlines with our attention and diverting it away from a visual the addition of precious materials such as platinum and culture where ostentation forces certain objects on white gold leaf. The most commonplace technologies our attention and distracts us from others. Whiteread harbour the potential for reflection on the aesthetic has always insisted on opening up the mind of the richness of our material culture and our hierarchies of viewer to the overlooked and unconsidered spaces of value.

Alison Wilding

P Tooth and Claw oriental plane, acrylic sphere the branches of an enormous oriental plane tree, the Q R S T Aftermath I, II, III, IV Crystacal with wood ash, sculpture’s circular shape echoing the penumbral cast fibreglass balloons shade of its foliage, a large branch detached itself from the tree and came crashing to earth. Alison Alison Wilding’s sculpture Melancholia in the Fellows’ took some of the wood away to serve as the basis of Garden of Jesus College is emblematic of her artistic another sculpture, Tooth and Claw, which retains the practice and its mode of precisely determined form of a section of tree branch. The title’s allusion elusiveness and mystery. In the medieval and to Tennyson’s epitome of Darwin’s evolutionary renaissance theory of bodily humours, melancholy imperative (translating the survival of the fittest into is the humour associated with scholarship, an ‘nature red in tooth and claw’) is reinforced by the appropriate choice of subject matter for a sculpture apposition of a red acrylic sphere to the interior of located in a college garden. But the primary the branch, making it reminiscent of flesh. The tree’s association in this instance is more likely to be with own story of survival began with the transplanting Freud’s concept of melancholia as a critical stage in of a seed from the site of the Battle of Thermopylae the process of mourning. Melancholia is akin to a in Greece, during which the 300 Spartans lost their state of suspense in which the subject is unable to lives but outlasted their opponents in history and relinquish their hold on the object of loss, so that legend. Wilding’s choice of materials (wood, acrylic, mourning remains incomplete. Wilding’s choice of language) underlines the cultural rather than the imagery, form and colour supports such a hypothesis. natural basis for evolutionary struggle, played out in She has affixed a series of ceramic blooms on a a theatrum mundi in which art intervenes in the conflict cement base – the blooms are naturalistic in form but of meanings. The collective title of the group of works ashen or funereal in colour. The cement base is given Aftermaths seems to propose that art is what outlasts the form of a geometrically precise section of a perfect the experience of life precisely in order to summarize sphere. The sculpture as a whole thus hesitates its meanings. The sculptures are the residue of the between naturalistic representation and formal breath of life, to which they owe their very form. In abstraction; in art-historical terms it hovers in an some respects, all these works are all like melancholy unresolved state between realism and conceptualism. relics of a form of being from which the life has not A dozen years after Melancholia was installed under fully departed.

21 Sculpture in the Close

1988 2003 Denise de Cordova, Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, Edward Allington, Steven Gregory, Peter Hide, Phillip David Nash, Veronica Ryan, Keir Smith King, Eilis O’Connell, Keir Smith, Rachel Whiteread, Alison Wilding 1990 William Turnbull 2005 Mark Firth, John Gibbons, Sand Laurenson, Diane 1992 Maclean, Eilis O’Connell, Cornelia Parker, Sam Taylor- Michael Dan Archer, Richard Bray, Antony Gormley, Wood, Kate Whiteford Richard Long, David Mach, Diane Maclean, Nina Saunders 2007 Claire Barclay, Christine Borland, John Gibbons, 1994 Roger Hiorns, Marc Quinn, Bill Woodrow, Cerith Wyn Eduardo Paolozzi, Lucy Swan, Jim Unsworth Evans 1996 (Quincentenary Exhibition) 2009 Michael Dan Archer, Richard Bray, Denise de Cordova, Anthony Caro, Antony Gormley, Anselm Kiefer Barry Flanagan, Antony Gormley, Richard Long, David Mach, Diane Maclean, David Nash, Eduardo Paolozzi, 2011 Peter Randall-Page, Veronica Ryan, Nina Saunders, Keir Barry Flanagan, Anthony Caro, Phillip King, Bruce Smith, Lucy Swan, William Turnbull, Jim Unsworth McLean, Tim Scott, Wendy Taylor, Bill Tucker 1999 2013 Geoffrey Clarke, Stephen Cox, Andrew James, Sonia Mirosław Bałka, Theaster Gates, Harland Miller, Wyndham-West Damian Ortega, Doris Salcedo 2001 2015 Mark Dion and Robert Williams, Anish Kapoor, Danny James Capper, Roger Hiorns, Thomas Houseago, Eva Lane, Julian Opie, Carl Von Weiler, Richard Wentworth Rothschild, Lucy Skaer

22 Friends of Art at Jesus College

As well as paying for the sculpture exhibitions in 2005 and 2007 and helping to pay for the exhibitions in 2009 and 2011, funds raised for the Friends have been used for the purchase of Call it Hadrian’s Wall by Geoffrey Clarke in 2007 and for exhibitions of paintings and drawings by Stephen Chambers in 2008, John Gibbons in 2009, John Mclean in 2010, Humphrey Ocean in 2011, of collages by David Mach in 2012 and of sculptures and drawings by Michael Dan Archer in 2012. The Friends’ grateful thanks go to all who have made contributions. Over the past twenty-nine years Jesus College has come to occupy an important position in the field of contemporary visual arts. The Sculpture in the Close exhibitions have been the principal focus of its activities and have established its reputation as a place where interesting and challenging contemporary art is valued and discussed. However, putting on exhibitions is very expensive and new funds are always needed to ensure that this tradition continues. Anyone wishing to make their own contribution to the Friends should send a cheque (payable to Jesus College Cambridge) to Rod Mengham at the college, or contact him by e-mail at [email protected]

23 SQUASH COURTS AND GYM

All in West Court Gallery (private)