Jesus College, Cambridge Sculpture in the Close 2013 24 june – 22 september 1 Sculpture in the Close 2013 Text copyright © 2013 the Master and Fellows of Jesus College, Cambridge Photographs copyright © 2013 the individual artists and White Cube. Photographs on pages 4, 6, 14–15 by Todd-White Art Photography; 8–11, 20 by Ben Westoby; 12, 16, 18–19 by Stephen White Jesus College Cambridge Works of Art Committee: Colin Renfrew (Chairman), Rod Mengham (Curator), Jean Bacon, Anthony Bowen, Andrea Brand, Roberto Cipolla, James Clackson, Juliet Mitchell, Renaud Morieux, Bill Stronge 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 Cover: Doris Salcedo, Plegaria Muda (detail). Photograph by Ben Westoby Foreword The Master and Fellows of Jesus College are delighted the College and the artists. The committee has also once again to host Sculpture in the Close. In so doing liaised with the Gardens Committee, chaired by Dr we acknowledge our gratitude to Lord Renfrew, who David Hanke. Valuable assistance was provided by so imaginatively launched this concept during his the Manciple Simon Hawkey, the head gardener Paul mastership, and we celebrate the fact that this year’s Stearn, our maintenance supervisor Chris Brown, our exhibition is the thirteenth in the series. Jesus College lighting supervisor Peter Moore, and our Head Porter is known throughout Cambridge, and indeed beyond, Grahame Appleby. We are also grateful for assistance for these marvellous exhibitions of contemporary from 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, and in acknowledged. We have also received absolutely particular the support of the Friends of Art at Jesus invaluable assistance from Will Gates, Hannah Gruy, College. In particular, the continuation of the Sculpture Susannah Hyman, Kate Perutz and Simona Pizzi at in the Close exhibition programme has been made White Cube who have been exceptionally committed possible through the extraordinary generosity of and supportive in the preparations for this exhibition. Antony Gormley and Vicken Parsons. We are deeply The Works of Art Committee of the College, led grateful to them for their timely donations enabling us in such an excellent manner by the curator Dr Rod to continue the vision of bringing exciting and edifying Mengham, has been responsible for mounting this contemporary art to Cambridge in a College setting. exhibition, working closely with its advisor, Tim Marlow, who has been the essential link between ian white, Master 3 Mirosław Bałka 170 × 126 × 10 / T. Turn 4 Mirosław Bałka Letters in bold indicate the work’s position on the map cruelty during the Holocaust. By looping this moment on page 24 into infinity, Bałka forces us to ask whether this historical episode is truly over or not. A 690 × 190 × 102 (2006) steel, wood With T. Turn, the self-effacing neutrality of the B 170 × 126 × 10 / T. Turn (2004) steel, salt, projection screen is exchanged for a relay system DVD projection where the image is bounced off a small mirror and C Primitive (2008) video splayed onto a salt-filled metal tray that distorts and diffuses it, giving it a literal graininess. The image we Although two of Bałka’s works on show in Jesus see is unsteady, an impression of a sweeping gaze that College are video installations, it is important to is difficult to read; the movement of the hand-held stress that they are sculptures rather than films. We camera recording the image is subject to an implacable are used to viewing the immaterial image and taking rotation that threatens to spin out of control. What it for granted, but in these installations we cannot we are being asked to read is not so much what the escape the materiality either of the projection or of camera sees but the evidence of what the artist’s the conditions in which the images were gathered. body experienced in the act of recording the images; Primitive is perhaps the most extreme challenge to we can sense the effort of holding the camera up, of our expectations of film, in that the sound and image maintaining balance, of having to keep going without loop it repeats so exhaustively is only three seconds getting dizzy. long. The image quality is deliberately impoverished, Perhaps increasingly, Bałka’s sculpture has sought deriving from Bałka’s video recording of a television out the means of grounding his visual practice transmission. The three-second clip represents a tiny in the feel of things. His works seem to want to fragment of one of the longest films of the twentieth communicate the truth about bodily experience in century, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which details Nazi a continuum that runs from the contingencies of crimes against concentration camp victims during the time and place in which the work was conceived Second World War. The face and voice are of Franz and created to the physical conditions in which it Suchomel, SS-Unterscharführer at Treblinka. Unaware is encountered and engaged with by the viewer. of being recorded, Suchomel speaks of his enthusiasm The recent sculptures that have not been organized for the methods of extermination at Treblinka, which around video technology have focused on junction he describes as a primitive but effective production line points between the body and the built environment, of death: ‘primitiv, zwar, primitiv’. In this one man and asking us to think again, or to think for the first time, his matter-of-fact relish for atrocity, Bałka glimpses about the way we devise and control our pathways a metonym for the spatial and temporal structures of through the world. Like his Polish compatriot Stefan 5 Mirosław Bałka Primitive 6 Themerson, who describes walls, ceilings and and to consider both the proper and improper uses floors in his novel Bayamus (1949) as if encountering to which they have been – or may yet be – put. The them for the first time, Bałka offers us doorways, formal severity of these works is in proportion to the corridors, ramps, leading nowhere, so as to force fundamental challenge they offer to the viewer as us to reflect on the states of mind and feeling that inhabitant of a body with specific human capacities each of these architectural elements can create in us, for temporal and spatial orientation. Mirosław Bałka Primitive 7 8 Theaster Gates D My Labor is My Protest (2012) 1969 Hahn fire truck, tar century; the ‘tar baby’, originally a figure in the Uncle E My Labor is My Protest (2012) video Remus stories (reclaimed by Toni Morrison in her novel of the same name), was a pejorative term formerly Theaster Gates is a black American artist whose work used by whites to refer to black children; in practical is predicated on crossing the boundary between the art terms, tar is most commonly used in roofing and world and the living conditions of people in the black boat-building as a preservative and sealant. Strangely diaspora. My Labor is My Protest has become one of his enough, it is this latter use that Gates is foregrounding signature works that epitomizes the subject matter, the in his application of tar to a fire truck, as the nature of the materials, and the methods of identifying, accompanying video helps to make clear. framing, archiving and curating the kinds of objects that he places at the centre of his practice. The decommissioned Hahn fire truck now stand- ing in Second Court has not only been reclaimed for the purposes of art, it has also been reclaimed from a dev- astating secondary use as a weapon of war in the history of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, high-pressure hoses were first turned on black protestors in a peaceful dem- onstration against possibly the most discriminatory civil code in the American south. The famous photo- graph by Charles Moore showing three high school students taking the full force of a fire hose cannon- ade was published in Life magazine, under the equally famous caption ‘They fight a fire that won’t go out.’ In Gates’s presentation, the truck is daubed with tar, a substance that carries a range of associations: tarring and feathering, originally a form of vigilante punishment, was used for scapegoating purposes against black people in the first half of the twentieth Theaster Gates My Labor is My Protest 9 10 In the Chicago Riots of 1968, triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King (who had been the key figure in the 1963 Birmingham protests), the metaphorical ‘fire that won’t go out’ was literalized to an extent that devastated several city blocks. Gates’s father chose to be literally constructive in this moment, creating a measure of social agency for himself out of a prejudicial environment by tarring roofs for a living. This activity has had a long-term influence on Gates’s own work and attitudes. Choosing construction as a form of critical activity – ‘my labor is my protest’ – Gates has linked his art- making to a number of community projects, both conceptually and economically. The capital raised by his arthouse sales contributes to the revaluing of living and working conditions in Chicago’s South Side and elsewhere. And the link between the art-making and the community projects is cemented by an ethics of collaboration. In the video that accompanies his installation, Gates and his father can be seen and heard turning the process of daubing the truck with tar into a calm ritual that both evokes and brings into being the spirit of cooperation, in the company of musicians who refer back to the work songs of black music history in the very act of transforming them.