Abstract
Solo exhibition
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |
| Event | exhibition; 2014-11-01; 2015-02-22 - Kunsthalle M├╝nster Duration: 1 Nov 2014 → 22 Feb 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Impact: Studio apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster is a serial work, the first of which was made in 1998 and again in 2010 at Camden Arts Centre London, its other incarnations to date have been produced for the MAMCO, Geneva in 2005 and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2014. Each 'apparatus' reflects the moment within which it is made, a studio self-aware of its status - as something which potentially acts as a mechanism to predict the future of the artist's own making. This absurd but equally plausible idea is helped by the borrowing of a structure, or narrative, that prescribes a scenario which in each case is the same; 'School for Crusoes'(1882) a book by Jules Verne, within which he parodies his own favourite genre of the mysterious island. Verne wittily uses the reference to his literary forebears to play with ideas of the shipwreck and the subsequent isolation of the protagonist, something Nelson borrows to reapply to the artist and his nomadic studio. To apply and emulate this, Nelson looks into his own production, cannibalising both visual motifs and references to conjure new, or future works from those pre-existing. He uses the analogy to futuro-linguistics, referred to in Stanislaw Lems's 'The Futurological Congress' (1971), to explain this process in which words are morphed, twisted and conjoined to produce new words which will exist in the future, and logically will describe things we have never seen. Nelson takes this literally, producing the word 'futurobjectics' to apply to his own process - a bastardisation of the word taken from Lem. The work is both serious and mocking, the idea of parody has long been of interest to the artist and in this respect often leads to something almost 'Baroque', especially when its definition is taken from the preface of Borges' 1953 edition of 'A Universal History of Infamy' which states that the Baroque is the exhaustive condition of self-parody pushed to its logical extreme. In both Paris and Munster, Nelson looks back to a temporary public work that was once to exist, but was not realised; here, he builds maquettes for its possible realisations, only for them to become memorials to a phantom work - like a severed limb whose digits can still be felt. In this way, the teleological dealing of time suggested in the earlier works is hi-jacked in an attempt to exorcise a lost work.Keywords
- Art and design