Vikky Alexander Nordic Rock Curator: Caroline Andrieux Main Hall NORDIC ROCK anthropomorphism—against the screen of Vincent Bonin nothing to see. When documented against neutral backgrounds without any references to the exhibition space, as was the case During a trip to Chamonix, France, in the in 1988, the sculptures lose some of their mid-1980s, Vikky Alexander found two veneer as art objects and in their literality, postcards depicting the ice grotto in the they come closer to the iconography of Mer de Glace glacier of Mont Blanc. The first furniture sale catalogues. Yet they also make depicts an utterly banal winter landscape. present—through its absence—the fetish The other shows an incongruous scene: of the commodity itself, as the surfaces of a room with sofas, coffee table, and the chairs, tables, and beds indicate the fireplace sculpted in ice. Every year, the “uninhabitable,” the impossibility of sitting village residents dig a tunnel allowing down or to find one’s place, rather than the tourists to penetrate within this body of functionality of design. water that has been frozen for several centuries, while at the same time carving The appearance of these three- again an architecture of comfort at the core dimensional forms in the late 1980s marked of the glacier’s indifferent matter. Alexander the end of Alexander’s investigation of has joked that after she discovered these media representation of the body, which she images, she wanted to make this furniture had been pursuing since the beginning of herself again, in ice. In the end, inspired by that decade. The transition towards quasi- the generic forms of the furniture inside the abstraction led the artist to delve into a grotto, she made axonometric drawings series of case studies in the 1990s—and keeping only the bare shapes of these still ongoing—that focused on heterotopic odd elements to conceive sculptures that places or entertainment enclosures she would later produce by assembling (the West Edmonton Mall, Disneyland, glass panels. When the objects were Las Vegas, Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, first exhibited in 1988, entitled Glass Bed and Versailles, among other sites). with Tables, they were installed on ad hoc Before this shift, Alexander mainly pedestals or against backgrounds that rephotographed pages from fashion were theatrically lit. As they were presented magazines with a 35-mm camera, fitted among works by other artists, these similar with a macro lens and set on an adjustable elements emphasized, through their limited copy stand. The process, which involved variation, the arbitrary co-existence of reframing the images by removing the objects in group exhibitions. Paradoxically, captions and brand logos, allowed her their near invisibility echoed the motif of to undo the essentialism of the models’ the empty gallery that so many conceptual poses, mostly female subjects absorbed artists of the 1960s and 1970s took up as in feigned pleasure offered solely to the a radical refusal of an expressivity whose male gaze.1 Furthermore, Alexander did articulation had become a motif over time not wish to impose an understanding of nonetheless, finding residual forms of her work through the hermeneutics of pathos and added value—a degree zero of the then current theoretical discourse (feminism influenced by psychoanalysis signifiers by covering one wall of the and semiotics). Therefore, she created an Cash/Newhouse Gallery in New York with open interpretative framework, expanding wallpaper bought in a hardware store, the possibility of ambivalent readings of depicting an exotic landscape similar to those the media fragments once removed from found in medical waiting rooms or banks. their original contexts, accentuating the On the opposite wall, she placed strips of fact that viewers should take responsibility imitation wood with small inlaid mirrors. over their unconscious. Although the 1988 This generated situation of making the sculptures dispense with the human figure, viewer aware of his own looking which the permutation of their components brakes the fascinating power of spectacle nonetheless metonymically give shape to through the use of adjacent reflective a “couple form” in absentia by sketching surfaces, had already appeared in certain the outline of a bourgeois interior. As such, works in the series of rephotographed the residual presence of the subject in magazine pages of the early 1980s. these sculptures brings us back to previous The repeated or reframed images often “appropriation” work, specifically the series included dark areas reiterating the titled Between Living and Dreaming (1985). institutional space as well as the bodies. Alexander superimposed 35 mm slides This time, in Lake in the Woods, viewers of stereotypical but nonetheless moving could single out a section of the landscape scenes of men and women embracing onto and eliminate all contextual cues, as though those of idyllic landscapes. To unify the transported elsewhere. Along with shifting surface of the representation, she mounted the logic of design to the field of art, the artist the prints under coloured panes of also contributed to a conversation of the Plexiglas. It could be argued that the 1988 period about space and the commodity by glass objects became a kind of holographic critically exploiting the stylistic characteristics extension of the screens placed over these of generic commercial architecture that photographs, emphasizing transparency Modernism had purged and replaced with a instead of opacity. fetishism for the building’s support structure.2 Alexander did not valorize and ennoble It should also be noted that Alexander these so-called vernacular attributes by manifested her interest in subverting the integrating them into already established category of the decorative well before this vocabularies after they became neutralized. shift to more spatial concerns. In the late Instead, she showed how the corporate 1970s, she began attempting to blur the language of managing spaces and bodies— divide between functionality in design, under the guise of providing access to integrated into the principle of supply and a fantasmatic realm—controls how we demand, and the supposed intellectual conceptualize the purpose of these transit autonomy of conceptualism. Between 1979 or entertainment sites and defines the social and 1980, she collaborated with Kim Gordon ties, especially transactional ones, that we in New York to create Design Office, a firm weave there.3 that offered services to peers, often without them having expressed an explicit need. Over the last decade, Alexander has The work undertaken by Alexander and been reviving past works. For example, she Gordon (mending clothes, illegally painting has produced new series of her photographs a facade, designing business cards) of magazine pages from the 1980s. Yet humorously referred to the phantom value of beyond this fairly common practice of the invisible labour of certain protagonists of reprinting, she is also interested in the the art field. In Lake in the Woods (1986), possibility of adding meaning to the afterlives Alexander pursued the strategy of making of earlier work. In some instances, she has hybrid objects and producing floating chosen to modify their appearance or scale. The sculptures presented at the Fonderie ceiling of the exhibition space that indicate Darling results from a slight shift of the first the site’s initial function have the same configuration created between 1988 and intensity despite their varied dimensions. 1990, which bears the fact that it is For example, the immense furnace merges still located in in the art discourse of into the rough surface of the bricks. that era.4 The act of rephotographing These details are ghosts of a past that has pages of magazines was contemporaneous been superficially recovered yet this history with the images’ availability in the media remains inaccessible in terms of class (in contrast to Barbara Kruger and other struggle. By making rudimentary collages, peer artists, Alexander never used dated enlarged on vinyl so as to completely cover iconography). By strategically waning the drywall sections of the Main Hall of affects, the sculptures also constituted a the Fonderie Darling, Alexander wishes to critical counterexample to the reactionary alter the phenomenology of a readymade reinvestment of masculinist subjectivity virtual reality, itself determined by a in Neo-Expressionist painting. When the simulation of the authentic. Generally, the works reappear today, we perceive the gap modulation of cybernetic grids behind the between their revival under the present helmet produces a continuous perspective, neoliberal regime and the postmodern without any interruption. Here, instead condition of yesterday. The recent of an immersion, we find composite non- instantiation of this cycle, at the Fonderie sites where nothing seems to be in the Darling, reiterates the first version’s entire right place. One oversized mural depicts sequence of permutated elements with an abstract strip, like a closed curtain or a the addition of dichroic glass, which dizzying lightning flash, while a seascape makes the ambient light filtering through deceptively carves an escape. A second the immense windows of the Main Hall intervention juxtaposes samples of artificial all the more visible. The amalgam of textures of rock and wood with a fragment multiple layers of coloured metal oxides of an ocean scene similar to the first one. also creates the illusion that the object’s