Questioning the contemporary
Why have a contemporary artist interpret historic collections? This is one of the questions at the heart of an article I've written for this month's Apollo Magazine on the vogue for 'Cabinet of Curiosities' style displays in both museums and galleries. From MOMA New York's 2008 show Wunderkammer, which show-cased contemporary artists who ‘have likewise felt the pull of unusual and extraordinary objects and phenomena' to the British Museum's Statuephilia show in 2008-9, which put Damien Hirst's work into the historic Enlightenment Gallery, contemporary artists are increasingly encouraged to respond to historic ideas and collections.
But what is it that we hope to gain from such pairings? A new perspective on historic collections? A different kind of contemporary art? Simply a new way of engaging audiences? Some of these questions returned to me recently on visiting the show On White curated by the ceramicist Edmund de Waal for the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. De Waal has staged an intervention in the Fitzwilliam's ceramic galleries, consisting of three different vitrines of his own work, and a series of cases down the centre of one gallery re-displaying and interpreting their existing ceramic collection. He has placed a few chosen pieces onto long white ceramic tiles commissioned for the show, and filled drawers beneath with archival photos, quotations and his own hand-written comments. On White is intended to get visitors to think about liquid porcelain as a powerful commodity, traded and lusted after in the past, with a danger lurking in its translucent sheen and fragility.
I have written before about de Waal's book The Hare with the Amber Eyes, which I find wonderfully inspiring and evocative of the life of a collection, and also about his beguiling talk at CRASSH in 2013. Now, as then, I am left in two minds about de Waal, and the space between his words and his work. He writes and conceptualises beautifully. I read the (incredibly white, fragile, haptic leaflet) to On White before entering the display, and was convinced by his narrative of powerful yet vulnerable materials. But the display itself, and crucially his work, didn't show me those arguments visually. I was left less impressed with the Fitz collections than usual, and certainly underwhelmed by his works in comparison to them. I felt distanced from the porcelain, not closer to appreciating it.
De Waal is of course, only one contemporary artist, who works in a specific way, and the Fitzwilliam is only one collection. His installation at the V&A, Signs and Wonders, for example, I find much more successful, perhaps because it responds to the building rather than the collections as such. Luckily, we have a conference coming up in Greenwich on 14 February, 'Culture Clash' considering precisely this question of what a contemporary artist brings to a museum. So maybe soon I'll have answers to some of my questions.