Hadley+Maxwell
16 Jan - 07 Mar 2010
HADLEY+MAXWELL
“Improperties”
2010-01-16 until 2010-03-07
Improperties is the first large-scale solo exhibition by Canadian artist duo Hadley+Maxwell in The Netherlands. The title refers to their love for making new, ‘improper’, use of objects, as well as concepts, gestures, ornaments and so on. It also refers to their fascination with the role that aesthetic constructions play in our simultaneous resistance to and longing for being captured by images. Their oeuvre addresses issues such as craftmanship, ornament, function and the ultimate impossibility to make words, objects and images maintain a fixed meaning. In this, the artists' work exploits the continuing tension between Classical and Modern perceptions of subjectivity. The installation, A Desk will be a Desk, for instance, presents an altered antique table on a slightly tilted plinth. The table is a literal gradation from the original Classical object to its Modern reduced form, where ornamentation is gradually faded away in a deconstructive process of sanding and sawing, until perfect corners and straight legs merge.
Hadley+Maxwell often make use of this type of iconic imagery and traditional forms, stemming from everyday life and pop-cultural or artistic movements. Another work, Something To Do with Origins, which is closely related to A Desk will be a Desk, consists of a crudely carved wooden sculpture of Maria Immaculata. The sculpture, like the desk, is hand-cut on a (wandering) right angle to sit flush atop a pile of seven different English translations of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevksy. The pages of these same books have been cut to produce “Nature appears, As one looks Looking at this that painting, such a picture, ...", a collage that combines the seven translations, creating a new reading of Dostoyevsky's description of Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (dating from 1521). The collage builds a nice reference to another new element that accompanies this constellation of works: a green wall with a negative space over the door of 200 x 30.5 cm, the exact dimensions of Holbein's painting. The green wall is the same colour as the walls in Basel, Switzerland where the original painting, which plays an important role in Dostoyevsky's novel, still hangs.
In deconstructing and recombining the symbolic economies of these images and forms, Hadley+Maxwell perform a critique of their ideological inderpinnings. Their alterations change the aesthetic ‘properties’ of all types of objects and images, and in so doing the artists highlight, create and celebrate a shift in meaning. The video installation I (developed from a study of head-banging styles) is an excellent example of this. It presents a 21-minute endurance performance, focusing solely on shadows of a dancer’s body thrown by coloured spotlights. Heavy metal is extended here from its associations with masculinity and violence; it is presented as a sublime and ornate form of resistance to the utility of modern aesthetics. This series is completed by Art Nouveau-esque drawings of head-banging heads and a new video piece, B-a-n-g-e-r-s, showing a still image montage of headbangers that eventually shifts into the process colours of halftone dots. The fourchannel sound installation, O Friends, there are no Friends, for which various sounds from the countryside were recorded, could also be considered part of this series, as after a while the natural sounds are imitated by a guitar that slowly builds up to a heavy metal 'ornamental' guitar solo, and then gradually winds down, returning to the original sounds.
The mimetic game that is played in O Friends, there are no Friends is reflected in the mirror-play of Baroque Baroque (for Lady Milford). This is an installation with a singlechannel video, mirror and tripod. The video maps the sunset as it reflects changing light into a corner; an absent baroque-style mirror frame is projected onto its mirror; the mirror reflects the image of the recording camera back on the wall behind the projector, which now sits on the same tripod the camera once sat. Another video piece, ...Um, is deceptively simple. A video documents a series of playful experiments that probe the theatrical and poetic possibilities of a bare light bulb, a projection and a shadow. The video is projected back through the bulb, creating a magical hallucination between light, shadow, image, object and absence. Two more video works also deal with light, shadow, object and absence. This time the work is complete when This becomes That and back again is a single-channel video projection of a candle as it is captured and released by a screen of smoke. The second work, “Time repeatedly donates inexperience to cognition”, is a video installation on two monitors, one showing an inchworm negotiating the geography of a cup, and the other a moth that gradually becomes identifiable as such while flying towards the light of the video camera.
Avoiding any over-explanation of these works seems quite in synch with Hadley+Maxwell’s artistic aim “to celebrate the movement of meaning (through aesthetic means), without capturing meaning itself (or letting meaning capture us).” In this respect, it might be more useful to quote Patricia Reed in an Art Papers review of the artists: “Ultimately, theirs is a simultaneous practice of ‘art plus curatorship making’ – where sense-making is left up to the imbroglio of connections and disjuncture of abutments presented in the ensemble of works. Like the ‘+’ nestled between their singular names, Hadley+Maxwell confront us with a ‘summative’ practice whose scope of thought lend themselves best to a compounded experience of a forever incomplete whole – not this and that, but rather, this plus that.” Lisa Robertson’s essay, Perspectors/Melancholia, on the next pages also offers an insightful parallel approach to the video works. The text was written especially for Hadley+Maxwell and introduces the compound word 'videosoul,' discussing the way “videowork makes models of what change or thinking might be.”
“Improperties”
2010-01-16 until 2010-03-07
Improperties is the first large-scale solo exhibition by Canadian artist duo Hadley+Maxwell in The Netherlands. The title refers to their love for making new, ‘improper’, use of objects, as well as concepts, gestures, ornaments and so on. It also refers to their fascination with the role that aesthetic constructions play in our simultaneous resistance to and longing for being captured by images. Their oeuvre addresses issues such as craftmanship, ornament, function and the ultimate impossibility to make words, objects and images maintain a fixed meaning. In this, the artists' work exploits the continuing tension between Classical and Modern perceptions of subjectivity. The installation, A Desk will be a Desk, for instance, presents an altered antique table on a slightly tilted plinth. The table is a literal gradation from the original Classical object to its Modern reduced form, where ornamentation is gradually faded away in a deconstructive process of sanding and sawing, until perfect corners and straight legs merge.
Hadley+Maxwell often make use of this type of iconic imagery and traditional forms, stemming from everyday life and pop-cultural or artistic movements. Another work, Something To Do with Origins, which is closely related to A Desk will be a Desk, consists of a crudely carved wooden sculpture of Maria Immaculata. The sculpture, like the desk, is hand-cut on a (wandering) right angle to sit flush atop a pile of seven different English translations of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevksy. The pages of these same books have been cut to produce “Nature appears, As one looks Looking at this that painting, such a picture, ...", a collage that combines the seven translations, creating a new reading of Dostoyevsky's description of Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (dating from 1521). The collage builds a nice reference to another new element that accompanies this constellation of works: a green wall with a negative space over the door of 200 x 30.5 cm, the exact dimensions of Holbein's painting. The green wall is the same colour as the walls in Basel, Switzerland where the original painting, which plays an important role in Dostoyevsky's novel, still hangs.
In deconstructing and recombining the symbolic economies of these images and forms, Hadley+Maxwell perform a critique of their ideological inderpinnings. Their alterations change the aesthetic ‘properties’ of all types of objects and images, and in so doing the artists highlight, create and celebrate a shift in meaning. The video installation I (developed from a study of head-banging styles) is an excellent example of this. It presents a 21-minute endurance performance, focusing solely on shadows of a dancer’s body thrown by coloured spotlights. Heavy metal is extended here from its associations with masculinity and violence; it is presented as a sublime and ornate form of resistance to the utility of modern aesthetics. This series is completed by Art Nouveau-esque drawings of head-banging heads and a new video piece, B-a-n-g-e-r-s, showing a still image montage of headbangers that eventually shifts into the process colours of halftone dots. The fourchannel sound installation, O Friends, there are no Friends, for which various sounds from the countryside were recorded, could also be considered part of this series, as after a while the natural sounds are imitated by a guitar that slowly builds up to a heavy metal 'ornamental' guitar solo, and then gradually winds down, returning to the original sounds.
The mimetic game that is played in O Friends, there are no Friends is reflected in the mirror-play of Baroque Baroque (for Lady Milford). This is an installation with a singlechannel video, mirror and tripod. The video maps the sunset as it reflects changing light into a corner; an absent baroque-style mirror frame is projected onto its mirror; the mirror reflects the image of the recording camera back on the wall behind the projector, which now sits on the same tripod the camera once sat. Another video piece, ...Um, is deceptively simple. A video documents a series of playful experiments that probe the theatrical and poetic possibilities of a bare light bulb, a projection and a shadow. The video is projected back through the bulb, creating a magical hallucination between light, shadow, image, object and absence. Two more video works also deal with light, shadow, object and absence. This time the work is complete when This becomes That and back again is a single-channel video projection of a candle as it is captured and released by a screen of smoke. The second work, “Time repeatedly donates inexperience to cognition”, is a video installation on two monitors, one showing an inchworm negotiating the geography of a cup, and the other a moth that gradually becomes identifiable as such while flying towards the light of the video camera.
Avoiding any over-explanation of these works seems quite in synch with Hadley+Maxwell’s artistic aim “to celebrate the movement of meaning (through aesthetic means), without capturing meaning itself (or letting meaning capture us).” In this respect, it might be more useful to quote Patricia Reed in an Art Papers review of the artists: “Ultimately, theirs is a simultaneous practice of ‘art plus curatorship making’ – where sense-making is left up to the imbroglio of connections and disjuncture of abutments presented in the ensemble of works. Like the ‘+’ nestled between their singular names, Hadley+Maxwell confront us with a ‘summative’ practice whose scope of thought lend themselves best to a compounded experience of a forever incomplete whole – not this and that, but rather, this plus that.” Lisa Robertson’s essay, Perspectors/Melancholia, on the next pages also offers an insightful parallel approach to the video works. The text was written especially for Hadley+Maxwell and introduces the compound word 'videosoul,' discussing the way “videowork makes models of what change or thinking might be.”