FORMS OF IMAGINING 09.05–28.06.14 PROJECT ARTS CENTRE
Barbara Bloom Curated by Tessa Giblin
Staging Barbara Bloom’s The French Diplomat’s Office 1 Biographies 8
This precarious balancing point between abstraction and representation (narrative) seems to be my favourite fulcrum. – Barbara Bloom1 Sometime in the 1980s, Barbara Bloom purchased a small watercolour in a Paris flea market because she found its stylistic peculiarity intriguing. Assuming it to be a proposal for the interior design of a rather formally appointed room, she was struck by its curious marriage of traditional French fussiness (ornate furniture, cinched drapes, gilt-framed landscape paintings) with the clean-lined modernism of what was once called the ‘international style’ (the carpet, specifically). The contrasting look of the room’s furnishings were accentuated by the manner in which they had been rendered by the anonymous artist. Upon closer inspection, further anomalies of depiction became evident to the exacting eye of an artistcollector naturally inclined, it seems, to look a gift horse in the mouth; in particular, the difficulty of telling for sure whether certain painted shapes in the composition were designed to represent shadows cast on a floor, or the abstract pattern of a woven rug. In a flight of calculated fancy, Bloom supplied this oddly indeterminate picture with a title, ‘The French Diplomat’s Office’, by which she hoped to convey “that combination of modernist austerity and gilt-edged historicism that is such a forceful marker of the post-war ‘haute monde’”.2 Some years later, she elaborated this still puzzling flea-market find into a full-blown installation, also called The French Diplomat’s Office, intended as “an exploration of painting, set-design, décor and narrative”. It premiered in 1997 at S.L. Simpson gallery in Toronto and was subsequently presented at the Peter Blum Gallery in New York in 1999.3 Its revival, fifteen years later at Project Arts Centre in Dublin, affords an opportunity for the reappraisal of an artwork that by now registers the traces of multiple processes of abstraction, displacement and translation. Then again, such operations of removal and reconstitution have been integral to Bloom’s art from the beginning. She is sometimes associated with that cohort of her contemporaries that came to be known as the ‘The Pictures Generation’, whose defining strategy was the expropriation of pre-existing images with an established currency, be that in mass-mediated
THE FRENCH DIPLOMAT’S OFFICE
Staging Barbara Bloom’s The French Diplomat’s Office
popular culture or in museum or market-sanctioned fine art. Yet she has always been more kindred spirit than core member of this group. For a start, her penchant for the rarefied domain of the decorative arts is quite particular. She also differed from her peers (at least according to canonical accounts of their early aspirations) in showing little interest in subverting received ideas of authorship or originality, or in demystifying the image in order to expose its ideological matrix. Rather she is an artist who, in the decidedly specific, rather than generic or iconic nature of her appropriations, accedes to the inherent fascination of the chosen object. That she is now more commonly characterised as a ‘collector’ than an ‘appropriationist’ per se, is partly due to her acclaimed 2008 exhibition The Collections of Barbara Bloom, as well as the substantial book that accompanied it, though this designation causes her some misgivings.4 (The critical success of an earlier work The Reign of Narcissism, 1989, prompted comparable misreadings of her project as ultimately autobiographical in nature.) At heart a philosopher-littérateur manqué, Bloom likens her role within the visual arts to that of a ‘detective’; whereas the critic Dave Hickey has assigned her the more ostensibly magical, and notably less materialist guise of ‘diviner’. Writing of that enhanced attention to the visible world that is, ideally, art’s reward – and, as he would have it, ‘wisdom’s font’ – Hickey distinguishes between artists who aspire to conjure this ineffable frisson ex nihilo, as if by sorcery, with those others who seek to reveal it through something akin to divination; Barbara Bloom, the diviner, is more interested in locating this fugitive ambience than in creating it. She teases specific, often unnamable ‘qualities of attention’ into visibility out of tiny eccentricities and rhymes in found photographs and texts.5 If we add ‘found paintings’ to the mix, we are well on our way toward an account of the dynamics of The French Diplomat’s Office (Staged). For this new – and significantly transformed – ‘staging’ of the work Bloom has chosen to highlight Project Arts Centre’s long tradition as a venue for theatrical productions, not to mention the dramaturgical leanings of its visual arts programme in recent times. The white cube gallery designed to accommodate that programme has, for this occasion, been transformed into a mini-theatre comprising two elements: (i) a raised stage-set, and (ii) several rows of chairs set out at ground level in apparent anticipation of a seated audience. The set is a pared-back replica of the room depicted in the found watercolour and is accessible by some steps tucked in discreetly
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THE FRENCH DIPLOMAT’S OFFICE
to one side of front-stage. Hollowly echoing an antecedent image, this tableau’s conspicuous absences are as resonant as their remainder, and are amplified by the proximity of their pictorial source. The prototypal watercolour hangs prominently ‘in the wings’ on a liminal wall, which belongs to neither stage nor auditorium, though it confronts the viewer immediately on entering the gallery space. The signal difference between the fictive two-dimensional room in the found image and the actual threedimensional room of the fabricated set is the evacuation from this space of all those ostentatiously non-modern images and objects that once bedecked it. These disappearances are not, however, without residue. A row of three rectangular shapes painted several shades darker than the surrounding wall, and a number of circular spots picked out in dark grey wool on the specially commissioned carpet, are clearly intended to represent traces left by the absent pictures and the legs of the missing items of furniture, respectively. In addition to the latter markings, a double trail of stylised black footprints has also been woven into the rug, suggesting a micro-narrative of movement about the room executed in tandem by a man and a woman. (Bloom has often drawn attention to what she terms ‘visual innuendo’ as a crucial aspect of her modus operandi). In perfecting her delicate balancing act “between abstraction and representation (narrative)” as cited in this essay’s epigraph, Bloom owes an acknowledged debt to the object-driven fictions of the French nouveau roman, in which the roles of plot and character are radically curtailed. A noted cinephile, she has also quoted with approval the exasperated response of the film director in Wim Wenders’ The State of Things to the troublesome producers who fault his movie for its lack of “a story”: “Isn’t it enough” he asks, “to have the characters and the space between them?”.6 Like a movie, the current incarnation of The French Diplomat’s Office (Staged) has a dedicated soundtrack, produced in 1999 in collaboration with the artist Christian Marclay, though its relation to the installation is understandably oblique. Much as the scenario on stage is bereft of characters, so is its musical accompaniment void of human utterance. And just as the original watercolour has, in this latest realisation of the work, been relocated to the wings, the supplementary soundtrack has been displaced to the gallery foyer, thereby reaffirming the significance of displacement and abstraction (in its original meaning of ‘drawing away’, cf. Latin abstrahere) to Bloom’s work in general. Emblematic of the nexus between abstraction and narrative to which Bloom seems so ineluctably drawn, is the one element in the constructed set that has no equivalent in the original painting. While the stylised footprints meandering across the carpet recall most immediately those
familiar to us from countless animated cartoons, they also call to mind a significant, if somewhat more obscure art-historical precedent, i.e. the no less stylised footprints of Andy Warhol’s Dance Diagram paintings from 1962. (Musing on a possible arc for her “invisible narrative”, Bloom herself envisages the couple at one point “perhaps dancing a few steps”.) The series of paintings by Warhol has been read as a response to the revolutionary drippaintings of Jackson Pollack a generation earlier, whose conventional wallhung presentation did little to belie the fact that their site of production was the floor; Warhol simply took the next step in this progressive abaissement of traditional easel painting by installing his canvases horizontally rather than vertically.7 While it is unlikely these specific pictures played a major part in Bloom’s conception of The French Diplomat’s Office, the blank rectangles painted on the stage-set walls, in lieu of the original watercolour’s framed landscapes, are surely generic intimations of the modernist monochrome, especially given her description of the installation as “an exploration of painting, design, décor and narrative”. In any case, regardless of the artist’s intentions, these echoes and traces, once registered by the alert and informed viewer-cum-detective, can never be entirely disavowed. The same holds true, of course, for any number of other associations this evocative scenario of resounding absences might engender. As Jacques Derrida once put it, “a trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself.”8 Such is the refined quality of attention evinced by Barbara Bloom’s most compelling works, including The French Diplomat’s Office (Staged), that the contemplation of their manifold intricacies and manifest eccentricities will always lead elsewhere. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith
1 Barbara Bloom, Ghost Writer/ Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind…, Passagen Verlag, Vienna, p. 69. 2 Press release, Barbara Bloom: The French Diplomat’s Office (Staged), 9 May – 28 June, 2014, Project Arts Centre, Dublin. 3 Peter Blum Gallery, New York, March–April 1999. 4 Unless otherwise indicated, all opinions attributed to the artist are from conversations with the author in Dublin, 6–9 May 2014. 5 Dave Hickey, ‘Introduction’, The Collections
of Barbara Bloom, International Center of Photography/ Steidl, New York, 2008, p.8. 6 Bloom, Ghost Writer, pp. 10–11. 7 Yve-Alain Bois & Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, Zone Books, New York, 1997, pp.99–102. 8 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, Northwestern University Press, 1973, p.156.
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Barbara Bloom, The French Diplomat’s Office (Staged), 1997–2014,(detail)
Barbara Bloom, The French Diplomat’s Office (Staged), 1997–2014, Installation view, Project Arts Centre
Biographies Born in Los Angeles in 1951, Barbara Bloom is an artist who can turn collections into riveting stories, objects into talismans, and an exhibition into a vortex. Coaxing us to will further dimensions into an experience of life, her practice shows a deep care for the objects and histories that make up our collective cultural holdings – ones that are subjective, reflective and fuelled by the imagination.
Munich, 1991; The Reign of Narcissism, Serpentine Gallery, London, Kunsthalle Zürich and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 1990; and The Diamond Lane, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1980. In 2016 she won the Foundation of Contemporary Arts Grant. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith is a critic and occasional curator who teaches in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore at University College Dublin. He has published widely on contemporary art, is a contributor to Afterall, Artforum, Frieze and Parkett, and was a juror for the 2005 Turner Prize.
Bloom’s work has been shown widely, selected solo exhibitions include: Framing Wall, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015; Propaganda for Reality, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, 2014; As it were… so to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom, Jewish Museum, New York, 2013; Half-Full, Half-Empty: Web Project, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2008; The Collections of Barbara Bloom, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 2008; More Collections of Barbara Bloom, Printed Matter, New York, 2008; The Collections of Barbara Bloom, International Center of Photograph, New York, 2008; The Gaze, Parrish Art Museum, Southhampton, New York, 2000; The French Diplomat’s Office, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, 1999; The Collections of Barbara Bloom, Wexner Centre for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 1998; Just Past (special project), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1996; Pictures from the Floating World, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1995; Never Odd or Eve, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 1992; Signate, Signa, Temere Me Tangis Et Angis, Kunstverein München,
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The French Diplomat’s Office (Staged) Barbara Bloom Published as an edition of Forms of Imagining, a series published by Project Press based on the exhibitions programme of Project Arts Centre. Dublin, March 2016 ISBN 978-1-872493-52-7 Editor: Tessa Giblin © The Artist, Writer and Project Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission of the publishers Text: Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith Designed in Ireland by WorkGroup Series Editor: Emer Lynch The French Diplomat’s Office (Staged) Barbara Bloom 9 May – 28 June 2014 Project Arts Centre, Dublin Curator: Tessa Giblin Assistant Curator (2014): David Upton Production Manager: Joseph Collins General Manager (2014): Niamh O’ Donnell Artistic Director: Cian O’Brien
Project Press Project Arts Centre 39 East Essex Street Temple Bar Dublin 2 Ireland + 353 (0)1 881 9613 gallery@projectartscentre.ie www.projectartscentre.ie Project Arts Centre is supported by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council. With warm thanks to Barbara Bloom, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Tracy Williams, Ltd., New York and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan.