If you happen to be wandering through London’s Mayfair dodging chihuahuas and preppy young interns juggling coffee, you may want to take a look at the latest installation at the Sprüth Magers gallery on Grafton Street. Running between the 12th October and 14th November, Sprüth Magers are proudly boasting their latest from one of conceptual art’s defining practitioners, John Baldessari.
Opening on the eve of his retrospective at the Tate Modern, Ear Sofa, Nose Sconces with Flowers (in stage setting) is Baldessari’s first ever Tableau Vivant and what an apt location for this living installation.
For those who aren’t acquainted with Mayfair, apart from it being the most expensive property on the Monopoly board, it also boasts some of London’s most lucrative real estate businesses and exclusive designer boutiques. However, on approach, one gets the feeling that the elegant, Art Deco, aesthetic of this installation isn’t as complimentary toward its location as it first seems. Baldessari is no stranger to using his wry wit and clever use of irony which he has employed many a time to critique the absurdity of modern day living.
The Window looking into the gallery is shrouded by a silk screen, building up the theatricality of this immaculate yet untouchable installation. As spectators, Baldessari has positioned us as if members of the paparazzi, stealing glimpses of this faux Hollywood star as she casually sits in a large sculpted ear, flanked by two inverted noses holding white lilies.
Working in collaboration with American film production designer Naomi Shohan who has put her name to such blockbuster hits as American Beauty and I am Legend, Baldessari has fused the boundaries between representation and reality as his living model, in the guise of a 1940s Hollywood starlet, brings this piece to life by literally being a part of the composition.
As she flicks through her copy of a 1943 Vogue, a small Poodle with painted nails and a silver bow atop its freshly permed head, scuttles about her feet; but this surreal microcosm delves far deeper than this impressive attention to detail. If you cast your eyes to the inverted nose-shaped sconces for a moment, the spray of white lilies protruding from the nostrils could just add to the overall aesthetic but this may prove too simple of an analysis of such a tactful social commentator as Baldessari. Could this in fact be alluding to the much darker side of celebrity culture and in fact be referencing cocaine, drug of the rich and famous and downfall of many?
Could this simulacrum of a sophisticated Art Deco interior actually be drawing attention to decadence and contemporary social decay rather than the glamour of celebrity society? The surrounding buildings clad with scaffolding and builders nearly outnumbering businessmen make me inclined to agree.
Baldessari’s preoccupation with facial features, particularly noses and ears, came about early on in his career. He attributes this to the discarded billboard segments he used to salvage from a friend in the advertising business, allowing him to concentrate on these specific features as totalities in themselves as opposed to simply being subordinate parts of a larger whole.
For Baldessari, the face poses important questions in terms of forging or erasing ideas of selfhood and how certain features can become fetishised, an interest that arose from his admiration of the surrealists. Here, one can’t but help associate this piece with for example Dali’s Mae West Lips Sofa as the model’s immaculate blond wig and seductive red lipstick coupled with this unique furniture design links Hollywood glamour with surrealist experiments.
This Tableau Vivant forces us, as the spectator, to consider the social significance of a face and the dichotomy of celebrity in that although we may idolize them for their wealth and freedom to buy countless commoditites, in fact it is they, in this media-saturated, celebrity obsessed society who are the commodity, available to buy, sell and dispose of at the drop of a director’s hat.
The installation proves that Baldessari, at the age of seventy eight, still has what it takes to innovatively challenge what is meant by art and this latest piece exemplifies his ongoing search to order and understand his perception of the world around him. Unlike his retrospective, currently showing at the Tate Modern, this visual one-liner outlines the continual progression in Baldessari’s work in one piece. It can be observed that here he has moved on from his experiments with sequential photography and scripted film performances to this highly unpredictable Tableau Vivant, completely leaving it to chance and human, or in this case also canine, error.
Baldessari has opened up the channels for multiple narratives to be explored through the unpredictable actions of the dog and the model, and to some extent the spectator as his career has lead him to believe that truth comes up in the unexpected, not the planned.
With works such as this and Sprüth Magers recent $400,000 sale of Baldessari’s Beethoven’s Trumpet (with ear) Opus 33 at this years Frieze art fair, it is clear that he has stood by his word when he promised “I will not make anymore boring art”.
Text: © Bethan Troakes
Until the 14 November 2009
Sprüth Magers London
7A Grafton Street
LONDON, W1S 4EJ
United Kingdom
T: +44 (0)20 / 74 08 16 13
Tagged: Beauty is in the Ear of the Beholder?, Bethan Troakes, Grafton Street, installation, John Baldessari, living installation, model, Sprüth Magers, street, Tableau Vivant, Tate Modern, Vogue, white, window
