DECONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN - Installation · PDF fileWORK IN PROGRESS SAMPLE VERSION Installationism: The ... DECONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN ... cessors brought art into life via design and architecture

WORK IN PROGRESS SAMPLE VERSION Installationism: The Expanded Field of Sculpture 1985–2005

DECONSTRUCTIVE DESIGNOne of the outstanding features of early twentieth cen-

tury modernism lies in the seamless integration of art and design. De Stijl, Constructivism the Bauhaus and their suc-cessors brought art into life via design and architecture. Such movements had a much more direct impact on life-praxis than Dada and Surrealism. Although there was a sig-nificant degree of interaction between the dadaists and the constructivists there was no ‘postmodern’ hybridization of these genres in the early twentieth century. Instead geo-metric abstraction in art, design and architecture became a stylistic hegemony that claimed to be the ideal form for an industrialized world. Herein lies a crucial distinction between modernism and postmodernism, the former seeks after the ideal style for the modern age whereas the latter is based an appreciation of difference and diversity.1

The elegant restraint of classical modernism became the dominant corporate style throughout the twentieth centu-ry. But vanguard art demands variety and after the cultural hiatus of WWII the transgressive side of modernism epito-mized by Dada and Surrealism moved from the fringes of fine art to the centre.

Transgressive modernism expressed itself in the prima-rily conceptualist direction inspired by the readymade,

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the dada and surrealist explorations of chance, and the relationship between fine art and popular culture. By the 1980s transgressive modernism had made sufficient cul-tural inroads for the architectural historian Charles Jencks to use the term ‘postmodern’ to refer to the work of archi-tects who turned away from the ideal forms of modernist geometric abstractionism towards a pluralist eclecticism {Jencks, 1987 #671}. Jencks’ notion of a postmodern turn pointed to an emerging visual-discursive territory wherein design was reintegrating with art and art with design.

There has been a slow but significant return to an integra-tion of art, architecture and design at the turn of the millen-nium. And in the new climate the ‘form follows function’ dictum of classical modernism is challenged by the capaci-ty to play with the repertoire of ism’s that is a key feature of postmodernism in both art and design. A reintegration of art, and/or architecture and design in art of the 1990s and 2000s is evident in the work of Liam Gillick, Langlands & Bell, Atelier van Lieshout (Joep van Lieshout), Jorge Pardo, Tobias Rehberger, Andrea Zittel Andreas Wohnseifer and Heimo Zobernig.

The reintegration of design and art was amplified in Doc-umenta 8 (1987) when the famous Italian designers Paolo Deganello (of the Archizoom group) and Ettore Sottsass (of the Memphis group), exhibited items of furniture that pushed the boundary of form and function to the point where they intersected with Kant’s definition of art as form without function.

Interestingly, there are many sculptors who cross-fertilize their work with furniture, they include: John M Armleder, Richard Artschwager, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Thomas Grünfeld, Niek Kemps, Atelier van Lieshout, Joep


van Lieshout, Reinhardt Mucha, Jorge Pardo, Tobias Reh-berger, Jan Vercruysse, Manfred Wakolbinger, Franz West, and Andrea Zittel. From the elevated perspective of Fine Art ‘furniture’ might seem a lowly topic. But in the wake of the readymade and the ‘just one more object’ attitude of American minimal artists a focus on furniture has ac-quired avant-gardist status.


The intersection of art with interior design is even more pronounced in the work of Jorge Pardo. Writing about the work of Pardo in April 2003 one commentator noted: ‘Paint-ers like to complain about insensitive collectors looking for art to go with their sofas. Los Angeles-based artist Jorge Par-do preempts such conflicts—he makes matching paintings and sofas’ {Metropolis, 2002 #887}.

In 1998 Pardo designed a house and its interior on the ba-sis of a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Emma Mahony notes an important part of his intention was, in his own words, ‘to make a work of art that a museum can’t handle’,3 but as with all attempts to escape the museum this project could not have been realized without the museum. Mahony reports that ‘MoCA … contributed a sum of about $10,000 towards the project, thereby validating it as a work of art commissioned by an art institution. Pardo raised the remaining $290,000, thereby making it his home’ {Mahony, 2001 #888}.

According to Mahony’s account it was the fact that the mu-seum ‘validated it as a work of art’ that enabled Pardo to raise the funds. This simple but powerful fact means that 4166 Sea View Lane reframes the Readymade. Duchamp claimed that the urinal became a work of art because the artist said it was a work of art. But Duchamp’s statement can be read as

JORGE PARDO


a parody of artistic hubris because he must have been fully aware that he could not have transformed the urinal into a work of art without the gallery. Artist and museum appear to be two sides of the same coin, ensuring that neither can fully dispense with or control the other. And the work of art is the result of a negotiation between these two halves.

4166 Sea View Lane is not a Readymade but it is a house that is historically connected with a museum that is therefore a work of art in a manner quite different from a say a house by Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright. It is in this sense that 4166 Sea View Lane represents yet another variation on the extremely fertile theme initiated by Duchamp’s (most prob-ably playful) inclusion of his Fountain at the Independents exhibition in 1917. Elaborating on the problematical aesthet-ic status of Pardo’s house, Mahony notes that:

4166 Sea View Lane raises a number of interesting ques-tions with regard to its role. The first thought that comes to mind is what exactly does it purport to be—a house, a home, a piece of public sculpture, or a museum? If 4166 Sea View Lane is a work of art, what kind of work of art is it? Why build a house as a work of art? What relationship, if any, has it to its location and to other contexts? And what were Pardo’s influences in terms of design, architecture and, most importantly, fine art? {Mahony, 2001 #888}

It is these questions and Pardo’s awareness of them that make his work an important contribution to the long-standing avant-gardist desire to integrate art and life. The questions outlined by Mahony indicate that whereas Bürger’s analysis


requires a resolution of the struggle to integrate art with ‘life praxis’ it is the problem per se and the questions it raises that may be of primary importance. Regarding the question of whether 4166 Sea View Lane is a house, a work of art or a museum Mahony reports that between the eleventh of Octo-ber and the fifteenth of November 1998:

it was run as a satellite exhibition venue by MoCA. For that period of time it became a museum. In effect, Pardo brought the institution into his own private space. … The property was policed with uniformed security guards and official museums opening hours were enforced. {Mahony, 2001 #888}

One can take issue with Mahony’s account because this work could not have been realized without the museum. Pardo did not bring ‘the institution into his own private space’ be-cause it would never have been his private space without the museum. Pardo had to allow MoCA ‘into his house’. Now Pardo is released from his contract with MoCA it is a func-tioning house (Pardo’s home) that, according to Mahony, fits well into the local architectural traditions as well as contrib-uting to them. Collaborating with an art gallery to create a functional result also marks Pardo’s project at the Dia Center for the Arts New York, 13 September 2000 to 7 June 2001. Here he worked on an expanded bookstore area introducing stylish seating and extensive shelving, the Dia Centre’s press release adds:

To reinforce the visual connections between lobby, book-


store, and exhibition area, Pardo will introduce mural paint-ings at these key junctures. The animating presence of these abstractions, along with the addition of large glass dividers, will call viewers’ attention to the differing qualities and func-tions of each of the … component spaces while at the same time facilitating smooth visual transitions among them. {Dia, 2001 #889}

Pardo’s concern with the way in which interior design af-fects the human body contributes a practical dimension to the minimal artists concern with the ‘phenomenological’ in-volvement of the viewer with the sculptural object. However in Pardo’s case the objects are not solely sculptural (which is to say devoid of practical function—the defining feature of ‘fine artness’ since Kantian aesthetics) they occupy a space in between sculpture and design.


Liam Gillick’s also crosses the boundary between art and de-sign as is evident in his piece for the Yokahama Triennale 2001 which is indistinguishable from interior décor coor-dinated with what appears to be seating (but I am not sure whether the museum would allow the visitor to sit on these pieces). It is interesting to note that Gillick’s design in the Yokohama is not especially modernist. Like other postmod-ern artists Gillick is eclectic, able to mix the rectangularity of classical modernist design with popist colour of the sculp-tural pieces and the funky curvilinearity of his wall decora-tion.

Adrian Searle has noted Gillick appears to be ‘testing the permeability of the walls we build around different spheres of human activity’ {Searle, 2002 #890}. To his credit Searle also notes that it is not entirely clear what that statement means. What is apparent is that Gillick’s work is at the op-posite end of the spectrum from Arte Povera. It is slick, mod-ernist, minimalist and corporate, but thanks to Gillick’s use of colour it is also popist and, on occasion, funky.

Gillick, however, obviously wants his work to go beyond mere formalism and intersect with a social dimension via the resonance of his work with architecture. The extent to

LIAM GILLICK


which he is successful in this endeavour will be proven, as in the sphere of architecture, via its social function. This is problematic when one is primarily a sculptor. Pardo comes closer to solving this conundrum by pushing his practice more towards functioning design than pure sculpture. In-deed according to his LA dealer Brian Butler (in conversa-tion with the author May 2005) Pardo has begun to employ industrial robots for his constructions. But in some instances Gillick has taken Pardo’s route and applied his design sensi-bility to real-life architectural projects.

The most positive way of viewing Gillick’s more sculp-tural, and less functional work, would be to compare it with a pioneer of conceptual installationism, Dan Graham. Since the 1970s Graham’s installations have intersected the dimen-sions of sculpture, architecture and a concern with human perception. This approach seems to be akin to what Gillick is trying to achieve. However, in the case of Gillick’s work style seems more salient than concept whereas in Graham’s work the reverse is the case. Graham has never been a for-malist whereas like his minimalist predecessors (in particu-lar Donald Judd) Gillick does travel very close to the formal-ist tradition.


Like Pardo, Andrea Zittel is an American artist whose work is an intriguing intersection of the conceptualism of avant-gardism with functional design. The result is idiosyncratic, eccentric and highly personal. She is a cottage industry in the postindustrial age. Unlike Pardo and Gillick, Zittel’s work seems closer to a constructivist approach than a con-cern with style. Her work is not polished and stylish, pop, urban, funky or postmodern. But it does appear to be focused on function, although there is an element of dadaistic absur-dity in her designs that is characteristically postmodern.

Her Collectors Coat for Frank Kolodney, 1993, is an exam-ple of how a focus on function without any reference to sty-listic parameters results in a work of art more than a stylish article of clothing. The coat seems self-consciously unfash-ionable. Like most of Zittle’s work its interest lies in its ec-centric and oddball character. Imagine Marcel Duchamp as a product designer and you have Andrea Zittel. For example it is interesting to examine her description of th development of her living unit concept from its inception in 1991 to its incarnation in 1993.

Zittel’s Management and Maintenance Units are remark-able in that they are dada-constructivist rationationalizations of a particular living space beginning with Zittel’s South 8th Street New York studio and extending into her analyses of the requirement of her collector-customers. She explains that

ANDREA ZITTELidiosyncratic design


he rationalization of her studio led to her first Management and Maintenance Unit:

This structure was the first attempt to satisfy the often con-flicting needs of security, stability, freedom and autonomy. Owning a Living Unit created the security and permanence of a home which could then be set up inside of homes that other people owned. It provided freedom because whenever the owner wanted to move they could collapse it and move the unit to a new location.

Why one would want to build a living unit within a liv-ing unit is a moot point. In this sense Zittel’s Living Units become a meditation on the postmodern condition in which mobility is paramount to the extent that we have to live in a device that is located somewhere between a house and a car as is evident when Zittle notes:

A-Z began producing Living Units for others. Because the original unit had jokingly referred to as a Winnebago [a US manufacturer of recreational vehicle/mobile homes] it seemed to make sense to aspire to make the VW Beetle of Living Units. It was also established that the new units would now be designed and produced like cars. Each year a new design would be featured, and as many produced as could be sold. In 1993 two A-Z Living Units were mass produced. {Zittel, 1993 #891}

But what is particularly interesting is her self-critical com-mentary:

One desire behind the “Management and Maintenance Unit” was to create a habitat that solved all of one’s prob-


lems. Instead, the final “pefection” of the unit resulted in loss of direction and a larger sense of general dissastis-faction. This led to a new awareness of how direction, or the idea of progress, can be far more exciting than any pos-sible end ideal. {Zittel, 1993 #891}

Her statement is significant because it suggests that an over-whelming focus on functionality can become an obsessive activity that eventually detracts from usability. It also res-onates with Russian Constructivism of the early twentieth century which was primarily conceptual due to the lack of financial and technological resources to actually build any-thing in a pre-Stalinist, pre-industrialist context. Zittle’s problem seems to be the reverse of the Constructivists. She lives in a hyper-industrialized nation with a plethora of re-sources at her disposal. Yet it is still the conceptual-creative dimension that drives her work. Her Escape Vehicles of 1996 are a case in point. Zittel explains:

During our travels with the A-Z Travel Trailers we observed that most of the trailers in RV [recreational vehicle] parks actually parked permanently on their sites and added elab-orate landscaping or “skirts” to conceal the mobility of their vehicles. At first we were disappointed that this seemed to conflict with our romanticized idea of travel trailers were a means to greater freedom. Eventually however we came to realize that rather than finding freedom in mobility, the owners of these trailers actually found their freedom in the intimacy of the small and completely controllable univers-es that they constructed within their trailers. {Zittel, 2003 #893}


The idea of living in a trailer does appear particularly perti-nent to the nomadic trajectory of postmodern living in which one can lose one’s job any day and be required to move on.

The A-Z Escape Vehicle is proposed as a new kind of rec-reational vehicle which can be used to escape to one’s “in-ner world” as instead to travelling to a destination in the external world. When you want yo escape all you have to do is climb in and close the hatch. Ten identical EVs were constructed at a Camper Company in Southern California. As each trailer was purchased, the new owner then con-structed his or her ideal escape fantasy on the inside. Some escape fantasies ranges from the construction of a floating tank, to a Cinderella carriage crossed with a limousine, to a recreation of a Joseph Cornell environment. {Zittel, 2003 #892}

In her Escape Vehicles Zittle produces a design in which fantasy and function intertwine. The closest correlation I can come up with is with a childrens’ tree house or Wendy house.


The first thing to realize about the work of Tobias Rehberger is that, despite appearances, it is not design. Design appears in Rehberger’s work as a subterfuge. One can make a com-parison with Andreas Slominsky’s design for a wardrobe in which a person in a wheelchair could hide if the spouse of the person he or she were having an affair were to return home unexpectedly. Rehberger is not quite as over the top as Slominsky, at least he pays lipservice to the domain of de-sign. In Rehberger’s work we see an antagonism to the func-tionality that is an absolute condition of modernist design. This rationalism was the foundation of the massive impact modernist design had upon the fabric of twentieth century culture. But by the late twentieth century there was a post-modern turn that was much more concerned with play and lifestyle. Rehberger, however, is not even definable in terms of postmodern design. He takes the deconstruction of mod-ernist design one step further by pulling it into the unchar-tered territory of the aesthetic with no name. There it is in-tepenetrated with concerns about identity, nonlinear narra-tive, and absurdism.

One can see the intersection of absurdism and design in Office for Twins Both 1.38m Tall, 1995. The title points to a determination to be ideosyncratic yet the design is dis-tinctly international style (albeit a little clunky). But Reh-berger shows that he is not bound to this or any other style. This is especially evident in a large exhibition in Turin that

TOBIAS REHBERGERdesigning narratives


Rehberger entitled Deadies (2002). ‘Deadies’ is American youth slang and is a play upon ‘death’ and ‘mommies and daddies’ thereby suggesting thereby a very Oedipal concept of the death of the father. As usual in Rehberger’s work de-sign plays a role but as the title of the exhibition suggests functionality is subordinated to narrative play.

Deadies was composed of a variety of sculptural installa-tions. One of these Rehberger’s rather macabre modus ope-randi was to purchase the contents of apartments of the re-cently deceased. In an interview with Alessandra Pace Reh-berger explains:

I bought entire environments, took them out of the apart-ment, broke them apart and processed them aesthetically by changing the original European into Japanese style. The only thing that remains about the original possessor is his name in the title.

One begins to understand Rehberger’s reluctance to speak of his work in terms of design. Design does not generally work with a narrative dimension yet Deaddies is permeated not so much with a story as with an allegorical dimension. Follow-ing Craig Owen’s discussion of allegory and postmodern art we can understand it in terms of counter-narrative, which is to say a narrative that does not defined here as a metaphoric narrative that avoids a one-dimensional message. This pres-ents a challenge to the viewer because there is no clear mes-sage.

At first one might find this work quite macabre. But in an interview with the curator of the Turin exhibition Alexan-


dra Pace Rehberger noted that ‘death is probably the most speculative thing that exists’. Which is certainly thought provoking. What happens to us when we die? Well as Reh-berger notes in his interview most people dwindle into vir-tual nothingness:

A person disappears and things belonging to that person also disappear. Some people inherit the belongings, some get thrown away, others are sold. The longer the time lapse the more this person disappears. Think about your own family tradition: you might know your grandfather, but no-body knows his great-great-grandfather.Turin p.97

Rehberger reports that his intention was to erase the identity of the owner. The fact that he achieved this aim by the im-plementation of an off-the-shelf Japoniste style would also appear to erase the artist’s identity. Yet the result is a Reh-berger: indicating the death-defying power of art. Because if he enters into the portal of art history Rehberger’s name will potentially live ‘forever’. He already has a foot in that door, and in another twenty years we will have a good idea of how much chance he will have of surviving ‘dissolution’. That must always be in the back of any artist’s mind.

The Deadies furniture is also a play on Oedipal concerns especially with respect to the legacy of previous generations of artists. Born 1966 Rehberger is relatively young. He is part of the new generation of artists enjoying the limelight until the art system swings towards the next generation (around 2010). In a sense the artists of the previous generation (born in the 1940s and 50s) are in the first stage of being deadies,


backgrounded by the shining new talents. And the reference to Japonisme harks even further back to the first manifesta-tions of abstractionist modern design in Art Nouveau and Jugendstil at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-turies. We all die of course but what survives us is culture. Japonisme is still as effective today as it was a hundred years ago. Which is to say it has become woven into the fabric of our culture.

Rehberger is almost like a hybrid of storyteller and design-er. Looking back into history one can note that the distin-guishing difference between Dada and Surrealism and De Stijl and Constructivism is that the former were also literary movements. Deadies makes it very clear that there is a liter-ary or narratological dimension to Rehberger’s work.

Revisiting the situation in the early twentieth century when Constructivism coexisted with Dada one can note that there were interactions between the two parties but these did not result in any substantive synthesis. The beginning of such a synthesis seems to be stirring now, almost a century later. There is some evidence of this in Deadies and in Rehberger’s installation Tsutsumu, created for Expo 2000 in Hannover. The artist created a Japanese garden with bonsai tree a stone block and garden bench for visitors. And as the event opened in Summer Rehberger provided some respite from the sun in the form of manufactured snow. The Japanese word ‘tsut-sumu’ means ‘wrapped’ which implies a boundary separat-ing the zone of the installation from the rest of the Expo.

What becomes apparent is that in Rehberger’s hands design is a simulacral and fictive medium. It is firmly released from the bind of engineering. If he needs such a thing he will em-


ploy the relevant professional. Can such a person contribute to the domain of design or is he destined to be a storyteller who uses off-the-shelf styles for allegorical purposes? Only time will tell if his flirtation with design will produce any concrete results in the real world as opposed to the world of art.


Simon Starling can be understood as a more focused ver-sion of Tobias Rehberger. Which is to say his strategy is more pronounced and sheds light on Rehberger’s less coherent oeuvre (understanding that coherence is not a requirement within the bounds of the postmodern aesthetic). One of the strategies employed by Starling is to transmute the substance of one designer object into another. For example creating a simulacral version of Poul Henningsen’s classic 1957 Arti-choke Lamp out of petal-shaped strips of metal cut from a Daihatsu Jet Van which is left somewhat untidily patched up. What is remarkable is that this cobbled together design classic retains a significant element of beauty, which cannot be said for the Daihatsu van.

In another incarnation Waratah (Artichoke, Kogle, Zapfen, Pomme de Pin), 2001, for the Sydney Opera House Starling used his upside-down version of Henningsen’s Artichoke Lamp as an analogue of the waratah which is the floral em-blem of New South Wales. In particular the work plays on the Australian designer Lucien Henry’s unrealized design for an ornamental lamp, entitled the Waratah Electrolier. The diagram below indicates that Henry’s 1915 design was ut-terly unconcerned with the design revolution taking place in

SIMON STARLINGa story of design


Europe in the early twentieth century. It is also evident that Starling is making an allusion to the petal like structure of the Sydney Opera House. The latter was based on the seg-ments cut out from an orange but these shapes can also be understood as a waratah with its petals turned 180 degrees.

Starling’s work seems more powerful than Rehberger’s due to its mathematical like exploration of the mechanics of analogic and metaphor. I say mathematical-like because the point of mathematics is to identify pattern in phenomena. The fact that pattern exists is proof that the universe is not simply entropic or random but is instead an infinitely com-plex symphony of structure (symphonies within sympho-nies within symphonies).

One can also relate Starling’s work with music which, like mathematics, is based on the interminable play of pattern. Starling has spoken of his work as involving ‘interconnecting the previously unconnected’ REF!! and this strategy is par-ticularly apparent in Inverted Retrograde Theme. In this work he creates a connection between sculptural processes and the structure of Arnold Schönberg’s twelve-tone music. The Secession commentary on this installation notes that:

Aspects of mirroring, inversion and translocation, which are characteristic for twelve-tone music, are transferred to the installation to spark a new, contemporary view of mod-ernism and its inherent visionary potential.10

The deconstructive-reconstructive process of twelve tone music is recapitulated in Starling’s dismantling of a grand piano and reconstructing it in an inverted state. This entailed


creating a mould of the piano’s cast-iron frame that was used to produce negative castings in a manner reminiscent of Ra-chel Whiteread’s negative sculptural castings of domestic objects and spaces. The two halves of the casting box was exhibited along with the inverted piano frame. Starling also created an inverted sound board and piano body.11

The idea of taking things apart and joining them up either physically and/or conceptually runs through Starling’s oeu-vre to the extent that he can be understood as a process-ori-ented artist. The meaning of a cultural object lies not simply in its physical appearance but in the contexts to which it is related—each of which provide the object with different significance. If one accepts that context is the provider of meaning then meaning can multiply according to the num-ber of contexts to which the object is related. This is a typi-cal aesthetic strategy that can be described as metaphorical, allegorical or mythical.

Instead of taking the fluorescent lighting in the Secession gallery for granted. Starling incorporated it into his work as a visual-kinetic accompaniment that brings the dismembered and inverted piano back into time based symbolic expres-sion. Starling had the gallery rearrange its fluorescent light-ing so that there were twelve rows each made up of seven tubes (the seven notes of the diatonic scale ABCDEFG). Star-ling had these lowered from the ceiling so that they hang over the tables upon which the piano parts are displayed. Starling used time switches to transpose a simple Schönber-gian twelve-tone composition into a rhythmic sequence of lights flickering on and off.

In Simon Starlings film Short Story, Brief History a nar-

Simon Starling, Flaga 1972-2000, 2002


rative unfolds in which a silver fork is transformed into its natural material and then metamorphoses into another form of artifice. Truth and fiction mingle easily through the me-diating device of the camera lens. The absurd protraction of Starling’s production process, and its subsequent notation, ideally paves the way for a fuller consideration of the social and cultural matrices in which these objects are embedded than they might ordinarily receive. In this instance he used petal-shaped strips of metal cut from a Daihatsu Jet Van to construct his own version of Poul Henningsen’s classic 1957 Artichoke Lamp.

It is a characteristic of Simon Starlings work to transform or reconstruct significant objects, or transfer them into dif-ferent contexts. In this way he poses a question as to the original intention and condition. Starling turns sculpture in-side out. Like Rachel Whiteread he displays negative space, but he goes further by exhibiting formers, jigs and moulds as sculptures in themselves.

Flaga 1972-2000, 2002, is a relatively simple work of art within Starling’s oeuvre but it clearly demonstrates some ba-sic characteristics of his modus operandi and is therefore a good starting point. It began with Starling finding out (most probably from the mass media) that as part of the process of corporate globalisation and the incorporation of the former Soviet Bloc nations into Europe, Fiat had moved production facilities to Poland (Ehlers 2003). This information stimulat-ed him to create a narrative sculpture based on an old model Fiat which he would transform into an automotive version of the Polish flag, which consists of red and white horizon-tal bands. The production of the work began when he pur-


chased a red Fiat 126 (manufactured in 1974) in Turin. He then drove the car to Warsaw where he bought a white ver-sion of the same model. The transformation took place when he grafted parts from the white car onto the original red one to create a rather sporty looking red and white version which he now exhibits bolted onto a wall (like a sculptural paint-ing).

The most significant feature of Flaga 1972-2000 that seems relevant to the general body of Starling’s work and has reso-nance with several other artists being examined in this study lies in its narrative dimension. In Starling’s case we are not considering ‘narrative’ in the classical, literary, sense. His is a more performative genre, a strange hybrid of sculpture, performance and theatre. Another feature lies in Starling’s interaction with the everyday world. Flaga was not created in a studio, and not much of Starling’s work is. According-ly his approach to sculpture can be understood, in part, as elaborations on the themes of process art, site specificity and an artistic interaction with everyday life. And the heart of his particular elaboration lies in his incorporation of a nar-rative dimension into the process. What is most interesting about Flaga is that if one did not know the story behind the piece and saw it in a gallery bolted to a wall one would be singularly unimpressed. It would look like yet another ad-dition to the ever-expanding catalogue of Readymades. The work acquires its interest-value from the story of how and why it was made. In terms of exhibition it demands an in-formation panel that will tell the viewer the story, otherwise it loses most of its significance. But of course in the esoteric domain of fine art most galleries do not append an informa-


tion panel, depending on the fact that anyone who dismisses it as ‘just another readymade’ would be demonstrating their ignorance.

Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Djungel, 2002, seems quite differ-ent from Flaga but there are resonances. ‘Djungel’ is Swed-ish for ‘jungle’ and refers to the botanical furnishing prints designed in the 1920s by Josef Frank, who spent most of his working career in Sweden. His print designs were based on jungle imagery found in childrens’ books. So as in Flaga we have a geographical starting point that implies a different geographical location as there are no real jungles in Sweden. The jungle reference seems a little weak in this work and po-tentially politically incorrect as Starling makes use of a West Indian cedar tree, felled in New Grant, Trinidad, on 22 March 2002 [what is the significance of the date??!!]. Starling used sections cut from this tree to make printing blocks which he used to print Frankian motifs onto an enormous white cur-tain. The sculptural painting which results is in the form of the huge curtain, hung in an ‘S’ shape, spanning the entire width of the Dundee Contemporary Arts gallery. Behind the curtain Starling left the remains of the tree after the wood blocks had been cut out of it plus his long makeshift table on which the wood-block printing was performed.

The commentator cited at the beginning of this examination of Starling also observed that ‘each object triggers a process of translocation, circular returns and violent leaps in time and space’ but one wonders whether ‘our perception of the meaning of objects is ruthlessly revised’. It is the word ‘ruth-less’ that I would quarrel with. It implies rigour when there is a strong element of the absurd in Starling’s work. Like Re-


hberger, Starling seems to work with a moderated version of the total absurdism evident in an artist such as Andreas Slo-minsky. In the instances of Starling’s work outlined above the textuality of the object is expanded into its construction process, its geographic origin, the site of its exhibition and thence to connections with virtually any other object related to any of these ever-expanding contexts. Indeed, such inter-textual interconnections might lead to a state of contextual limitlessness that would make the closure of the meaning of any specific object virtually impossible. It is within this space of intertextual limitlessness that many of the artists examined here seem to work.

Certainly, Starling can be understood as opening up a se-mantic labyrinth via the expanded field of sculpture. Un-derstood as sections cut out of a multidimensional narrative space his ‘stories’ may not have a definite beginning or end. Djungel for instance seems to be more a loose configuration of fragments than the story that accompanies Flaga. In this sense Flaga is easier to understand its fragments seem to hold together better than those that make up Djungel. Simi-larly Inverted Retrograde Theme is a more complex work, in terms of its sculptural formation at least, than Flaga but it seems to hold together better than the tenuously intercon-nected fragments that make up Djungel.

Site specificity, institutional critique and a self-reflexive approaches to the means of production (process over prod-uct) are all enduring salient features of contemporary avant-gardist art that form themes that Starling elaborates in his work. His process approach is deconstructive in the sense of exploring the object of enquiry in a manner that emphasizes


its internal forms and workings, its process of produc-tion and the systems and contexts to which it is inter-connected. His focus is on the relationships between the outside and inside of the object, and assumptions that we make about such everyday objects as pianos or fluorescent lighting—which we generally usually take for granted.

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DECONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN - Installation · PDF fileWORK IN PROGRESS SAMPLE VERSION Installationism: The ... DECONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN ... cessors brought art into life via design and architecture