The Object is Alive Matthew Darbyshire
Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery 28 January — 14 May 2017
Bear Jug, c. 1750 – 75 Salt-glazed stoneware, 270 (h) × 135 (w) × 180 (d) mm
Wooden Fertility Ashanti Doll, c.1902 Wood, wire, and glass, 375 (h) × 120 (w) × 45 (d) mm
NCM 1931-1, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
NCM 1926-143, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
Red Knight in Armour, date unknown Hand-painted plastic figurine, 90 (h) × 90 (w) × 64 (d) mm
Winged Figure III, Lynn Chadwick (1914 – 2003), 1959 Bronze, 720 (h) × 910 (w) × 205 (d) mm
Made by PAPO, France
NCM 1962-70, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
Mother and Child, Opus III, Estcourt J Clark (1906 – 73), 1950 Carved oak, 1980 (h) × 480 (w) × 620 (d) mm
North American Animal Figure, 1800s Earthenware, 151 (h) × 350 (w) × 65 (d) mm
NCM 1950-28, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
NCM 1947-44, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
Emily LaBarge There appeared out of the darkness, suddenly and in increasingly greater number, DOUBLES, MANNEQUINS, AUTOMATONS, HOMUNCULI.1 Replica, duplicate, clone, twin, facsimile, model, doppelgänger, dummy, surrogate. How many ways to say the same? A surfeit of terms for the duplicate, triplicate — multiple — and so — and on — ad infinitum. Imitation, impostor, mimic, mime, echo, fake, ersatz. How many ways, and why, to say the same, but different; for better and/or for worse? Proxy, backup, understudy. In his groundbreaking play The Dead Class (1975), the Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor equipped his actors with puppets, wooden figures that he referred to as marionettes, or sometimes über-marionettes — ‘über’ meaning ‘over’, ‘above’, ‘across’ — greater, more significant than — not ordinary. The play is loosely based on Stanisłav Witkiewicz’s Tumor Brainowicz, which details the trials of the mathematical genius, Tumor, who falls in love with his diabolical stepdaughter Iza, and creates a revolutionary new system of mathematics based on transfinite numbers. In Kantor’s play, aged men and women revisit their classroom of old to face lingering ghosts of the past: each carries a mannequin that represents his or her childhood, which cannot be shed and remains mute and inert throughout. How to overcome, how to liberate something from itself — subject, object, symbol, likeness — in order that we might see it better? For each approximation is also an absence, a prosthesis: the phantom limb that flushes in its proximal want, in its embodied remembrance, as it hovers over the form of the original. As Kantor wrote, means are critically rooted in the method and the material: COMPRESSION, CRUMPLING, CRUSHING, COMIXING and DEGRADATION. EARTH, MUD, CLAY, DEBRIS, MILDEW, ASH, DOUGH, WATER.2
But papa only writes poetry to keep his mental balance when the numbers have gone clean through all of his pores right into his soul.3 In Matthew Darbyshire’s series of sculptures, process is a critical strategy by which to address this question of liberation. Objects from Nottingham Castle’s collection are re-interpreted using 3D models that range in degree of resemblance: in some cases, exactitude is foregrounded, while in others, metonymical shifts move us to glance sidelong, from a knowledge broken, distant and skewed. The works are entitled Xerox No. 1–12 — a nod to Kantor’s pursuit of ‘zero zones’, spaces in which illusion is impossible — and invoke Darbyshire’s ongoing interest in dismantling, through aspects of craft, mechanical and digital means of reproduction. Each object, elected by the artist’s instinctive affinity, is cast from 100 litres of concrete, the volume of the average human body — rendering all of the new works, regardless of their original references, identical in volume. Surfaces of rough concrete extrusions are tightly pressed, rigid intestinal coils that curl towards the fleshy heart of the matter: process achieves gradations of similarity and difference that pull us inside the object to see what it is really made up of, the messy organic materials. In form and content alike: take it apart to put it back together. The same, but different. And it is the almosts, the not quites — ever the never, even the impossible — that sustain us, inside and outside of objects, alive in the knowledge of their contours. Length, width, height — volume — which is to say — dimensions, in three. While Darbyshire’s sculptures explore the complexities of replication, and the rich possibilities therein, they are also studies of repetition — reversion, inversion, perversion. Compulsive attention to serial repetition, embedded in the artist’s process, highlights the structural and aesthetic distinctions of each new object. As the objects inexorably repeat their altered forms, tensely suspended between the digitally printed and the handmade, they give rise to the freedom of obsessionality as a
form of company that departs from the exact to embrace skill, craft and the ardently belaboured. Immaculately ordered filth, carefully contained extrusions are frozen mid-coagulate, as if at the heart of the heart — beating or no — is the hopeful truth of repetition: it brings into being that which otherwise passes unseen. Attention equals life or its only evidence.4 In many of his writings, Kantor insists forcefully: THERE IS ONLY AN OBJECT WHICH IS TORN OUT OF LIFE AND REALITY… But the object is alive.5 This contradictory impulse, the swinging hinge of life and death in every object, the sharp hunger of discontent, is at the core of Kantor’s productively anarchic sensibilities, which present alternative understandings of anthropomorphism with regard to materiality and form. In his world of props, ‘bio-objects’ that are autonomous but also connected to the actor, there is a relationship at stake, an exchange value: it is impossible to use, and likewise to behold an object without paying the due price for intimate understanding.
inside of the beginning of the beginning, which — in the end — should closely resemble, though not too precisely, the end? It is difficult to say exactly how something goes through a process to become almost, not quite, close to — itself. The same, but different. Except that of course we all know what this is like: to be returned to oneself after a departure of sorts. Masticated or swallowed whole, consumed, digested, expelled. These are not separate states, though they occur with the devoted and discriminating rigour that is necessary to attain results. For the tenderest democracy is that which refuses sameness as an absolute and embraces difference — great and slight — as the accomplished failure of simulation.
Dr. Emily LaBarge is a writer and researcher based in London. She has a PhD in Critical Writing in Art & Design from the Royal College of Art, where she is visiting lecturer.
In his poem ‘The Library’, William Carlos Williams writes, I love the locust tree / the sweet white locust / How much? / How much? / How much does it cost to love the locust tree in bloom? As though it is a burden, relished and strange, to bestow attention, to care, to pursue that deep familiarity with a thing that demands in return a small piece of the self. An indentured autonomy — which is how we all live, in any case. Language is the non-being of objects.6 Objects as a kind of poetry — touchstones for the happy accident of deeper contemplation, the glittering insights of the ordinary: how clay feels in the hand, pressure applied just so, light through the window as it dries, the smell, how long it took to make, and will it all hold, will it be enough, in the end. How to make something as ordinary as possible when, after looking so carefully and for so long, there is no ordinary left? How to return it to the
1 Kantor, Tadeusz, The Theatre of Death.
3 Witkiewicz, Stanisław, Tumor Brainowicz.
2 Kantor, Tadeusz, The Reality of the Lowest Rank.
4 O’Hara, Frank, Standing Still and Walking in New York.
5 Kantor, Tadeusz, ‘The Milano Lessons: Lesson 12’ and ‘Embellages’, Journey. 6 Lacan, Jacques, Écrits.
Anatomical Votive, 200BC – 100AD Terracotta earthenware, 205 (h) × 250 (w) × 90 (d) mm
No. 36 Mills Grenade, British, manufactured between 1918 – 1970 Cast iron, 101 (h) × 57 mm (o/d)
NCM 1910-187, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
2008-7252-1, The Sherwood Foresters Mercian Regiment
Baby’s Feeding Bottle, 19th Century Earthenware bottle, 41 (h) × 150 (w) × 46 (d) mm
Figure of a Buddhist Monk, 18th/19th century Teak wood, red laquer, gilt and glass, 380 (h) × 295 (w) × 250 (d) mm
NCM 1956-12, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
NCM 1946-133, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
White Nike Baseball Cap, c. 1995 130 (h) × 190 (w) × 230 (d) mm Made in China
Standing young man, year unknown Bronze, unattributed artist, 740 (h) × 270 (w) × 195 (d) mm
The Object is Alive: Matthew Darbyshire is the first in a series of collaborative exhibitions and artist commissions proposed by Radar at Loughborough University Arts. Nottingham Castle’s commission will be followed by Mike Cooter at New Walk Museum, Leicester (Winter 2017), and Giles Round at Derby Museums (Spring 2018). All three artists have engaged with the work and ideas of Tadeusz Kantor. The Object is Alive has been supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and using public funding by Arts Council England.
Photography: Freddy Griffiths Š Nottingham City Museums & Galleries Design: Mark El-khatib