Sculpture in the Close 2013

Jesus College, Cambridge

24 june – 22 september

1 Sculpture in the Close 2013

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 standing 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 photograph 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.

11 12 Harland Miller

F The Bigger the Searchlight the Larger the order to make the whole scene cohere and yield up its Circumference of the Unknown (2008) aluminium, secrets. In the end, the point of the story is the same, no steel, polyurethane, paint, other materials matter what crime has been committed, who the victim G Wentworth Street (2010) copper on umbrella was, or who the perpetrator: the point of the story is H St Helen’s Road (2010) copper on umbrella the triumph of the method, the efficiency of the system, I Nickel Gate (2010) copper on umbrella a homeostatic mechanism that absorbs the energy of individuals into a common purpose, irrespective of their Although the detective has not been replaced by the individual strengths and flaws, fears and desires. forensic scientist in contemporary culture, the latter Miller’s remarkable copper umbrellas (illustrated now rivals the former’s ingenuity and authority. The overleaf) are the evidence standing for everything that rise of the popular television series exploring the gets left out of the efficiency story, everything that has dynamics of crime scene investigation simply occludes outlived its usefulness and presentability, everything the detective’s idiosyncratic methods, based as much that has been discarded. Umbrellas offer protection on intuition as on ratiocination and focused above all against the weather, but they are also accessories on the individual investigator. The cultural prominence that offer a limited means of self-expression. Miller’s of the crime scene scenario shifts attention instead umbrellas are damaged and abandoned, they seem in onto the group, onto the workings of a system, onto need of protection themselves; perhaps their impaired saturation methods of research: perspiration rather than condition reflects back on the vulnerable humans to inspiration. The white-suited human components of whom they were once attached. The lustrous copper this system seem at first glance to be interchangeably skin that protects and gives new value to what has been anonymous in stark contrast to the detective, with his neglected preserves the unique patterns of deformation or her defining eccentricities. Harland Miller’s eerily that make each of these works tell something of its frozen tableau of crime scene teamwork deploys the own story. Miller’s two installations in this show seem saturation aesthetic of naturalism to tell the truth about to fulfil in part Lautréamont’s famous desideratum for the surface of things, with a precision and vividness the work of art: ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter that makes every last detail seem equally important, or of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating equally unimportant. Our attention is distributed among table’. It is from the collision between human frailty these several figures absorbed in their separate tasks, and the forensic sensibility that his work derives its leaving us unsure what to focus on, where to look, in power to move us.

Harland Miller The Bigger the Searchlight the Larger the Circumference of the Unknown

13 Harland Miller Wentworth Street

14 Harland Miller St Helen’s Road

Harland Miller Nickel Gate

15 Damian Ortega Through / True Stone

16 Damian Ortega

J Through / True Stone (2012) mineralized acrylic The time we spend at an exhibition is one kind of polymer, mixed media time, more or less removed from the chronometrically K Estructura de Ensamble (2008) cast concrete regulated time in which we spend most of our lives. It is time slowed down, time which expands, time which ‘Through’ and ‘true’ are near-homophones but they seems to retreat from time itself. Ortega’s Estructura de contradict one another as qualifiers of ‘stone’. This Ensamble (overleaf) creates a space for this experience, recent assemblage by Damian Ortega is characteristic literally as well as metaphorically. The stacked of the Mexican artist’s playful exploration of the layers of his composition convert into sculpture the relationship between language and materials. From utilitarian components of an everyday mechanism: one angle the three sculptural elements look like the prime mechanism of the everyday, the mechanism naturally shaped rocks, while from another they are of the watch. These beautifully engineered objects revealed as artefacts enclosing perfectly cylindrical are greatly magnified versions of the cogs and wheels columns of air. What had seemed solid is now empty, that allow time to be measured. Clockwork has been heaviness becomes lightness, the real is illusory. The transformed into an artwork, its movement stilled, its rocks vanish from our consciousness, and sculpture presence in time translated as presence in space. The takes their place; in some sense, we are the agents of rearrangement of the relations in which these elements this change, as our expectations about the three objects usually find themselves is an invitation to a different are altered, as with the flick of a switch, determining experience of time, a different order of priorities, one how we frame them, how long we look at them, how which makes us linger before we return, perhaps with much or how little weight we attach to them, how reluctance, to the rhythms the sculpture must remind much or how little importance they hold for us. us of, even as it undoes them.

17 Damian Ortega Estructura de Ensamble

18 19 Doris Salcedo Plegaria Muda

20 Doris Salcedo

L Plegaria Muda (2008–10) wood, mineral compound, placed around a table is a primary instance of what draws cement, grass the individual into the social group. In the work from this period, strange versions of both chairs and tables were For the last twenty years the work of Doris Salcedo has forced into unnatural and disturbing combinations. combined and recombined many of the same motifs In Plegaria Muda we are faced with a mass of tables and materials, turning a succession of installations and a repetition of elements, and yet each unit of paired into a ritual sequence. The ritual concerned has been tables, both joined and separated by a layer of earth, that of commemoration, the testing of memory, whose is individuated by the unpredictable growth pattern of proportional relationship to the risk of forgetting is grass seedlings sown into the earth. The contradictory constantly challenged and refigured. The objects being structure of the installation echoes the tension between recalled are the victims of the protracted violence that commemoration and anonymity that has always has afflicted Colombian society for over five decades. problematized the social psychology of cenotaphs and The research that Salcedo always conducts for each of the graves of unknown soldiers. her projects traces the history of individuals, gauges the Salcedo has revealed that a decisive point was effects of those people’s loss on others, and makes use reached in her research for this project when she of extensive interviews with survivors. Yet despite this discovered that 1,500 young men recruited from concentration on specific identities, the artist’s work remote areas had been murdered by the Colombian rarely evokes the singular; it quite literally homes in army, dressed up in rebel uniforms, and passed off on the communal aspects of daily life, reminding the as dead guerrillas, so that officers could profit from viewer of what is lost when an individual is subtracted the government’s offer of financial rewards for an from the community. Social structure is undermined increased kill rate. Describing Colombia as the country and social bonds weakened; state force and guerrilla of ‘unburied death’, she conceives of her work as a and paramilitary violence all contribute to the demarcated space for symbolic burial: ‘Reyes Mate destruction of the social. writes that each murder generates an absence in our A significant number of the hybrid objects in lives and demands that we take responsibility for the Salcedo’s work of the last two decades have utilized sets absent, since the only way they can exist is within us, of chairs and tables. This powerful use of metonymy – in the process of living out our grief.’ Recognizing that employing motifs that do not merely symbolize social process of interiorization as inevitable and unspeakable, relationships but which are materially involved in them Plegaria Muda (‘mute prayer’) nonetheless hopes to – provides the most concise expression of the bond restore such deaths to the sphere of the human, to the between the individual and the social unit. Single chairs mute eloquence of the objects and relationships from evoke and stand in for single persons, while their being which they were so violently wrenched.

21 Sculpture in the Close

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

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 five 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 20

(private) 18