Text taken from "I Thought I Was The Audience And Then I Looked At You"
catalogue published by University of Essex 2004. © Helen Legg 2004
Crafted, constructed and luridly artificial, the day-glo scene in front of me might best be described as a kind of post-Changing Rooms Bosch-esque vista. Ceramic ornaments litter the ground, each one dolled up with decorative paraphernalia - hair bobbles, toothpicks, pipe cleaners, glitter - while others stand on ziggurat structures made of painted and decorated occasional tables, stacked one upon the other. Still more figurines sit astride rickety looking precipices consisting of rolls of wallpaper propped on their ends, towers of upended bowls and lampshades, all precariously suspended on the verge of collapse.
I thought I was the Audience and then I looked at You is an ongoing sculptural installation constructed from a repertoire of adjusted figures and objects that are constantly updated and added to, resulting in a riotous glut of individual detail that is both utterly compelling and repugnant. The bizarre encounter of twee, period dressed figurines with their glitzy glam-rock accoutrements gives rise to a kitsch humour balanced with disturbing psychological overtones. Due in part to the visual aggression of the tableau, with its relentless flood of over-stylised tat in exhausting combinations of colour, shape and texture, this unpleasant sensation derives largely from the fact that the head of each and every figurine is, as Claxton puts it, 'blindly cosseted in isolating balls of suffocating prettiness'. Their senses baffled, these creatures fail to experience the world around them because they are suspended by the wonder of what is right in front of their eyes. While thereís clearly a nod towards the prevalence of the spectacle within modern society this is more than a simplistic expression of consumerist critique. In fact, the melee of sequins, sea shells, feathers, fringing, pomanders, combs, paper party decorations and picture frames is positively relished, celebrated for their material properties, their carnivalesque campness and colour. This theatrical assemblage is the offshoot of earlier attempts by Claxton to reconcile scientific and technological realities with everyday experience. The somewhat romantic and incredible descriptions of celestial phenomena such as meteor showers or rainshadows, found in a scientific guidebook, spawned the production of sculptural ëequivalentsí constructed from everyday objects found in her home. The Hubble Space Telescope Calendar with its descriptions of newly discovered and/or documented phenomena, such as the Trifid Nebula, ëa glowing cloud of gas, dust, and stars some 9000 light years distant towards the constellation Sagittariusí, proved to be another useful source, resulting in a large sculptural work made from thousands of pieces of foam pipe lagging. Around this time Claxton also began using the Internet as a source for generative material, beginning a series of linked searches that were intended to unearth similarly rich textual descriptions of things beyond our comprehension, beyond anything that we can relate to on the basis of our being in the world, our lived experience of space, scale, duration and the mutually dependant relationships between them.
In the unbridgeable gulf between such texts and Claxtonís resolutely earthbound and material imaginings lie innumerable questions concerning the relationship between technological progress and the human sphere of bodily, grounded experience. How can we really understand the physical and temporal existence of things that we cannot measure through the scale of our bodyís physical relationship with the earth or our lived duration upon it? Does the increasingly commonplace view of the imperceptible, made possible by super high-tech vision machines alter our capacity to evaluate what is right in front of our eyes? And what might be the consequences of perception set loose from experience?
Potential answers to these questions can be found in the nightmarish visions of urbanist and cultural theorist Paul Virilio, whose writings of the last thirty years warn of a potentially dehumanised future driven by the relentless logic of technological progress. Throughout his analysis of ëaccelerated modernityí, with its focus on speed, warfare and political control, he has consistently returned to the effects of technology on perception. Expressing his fear of a standardization of vision he makes it plain that this is an ethical question. If it is through the subjective process of seeing, measuring and experiencing that we formulate reality, then the undermining of our faith in tangible experience threatens to erode that reality. The remaining void would be left wide open to manipulation by a ëvision industryí, with all of the social and political consequences that this implies. The erosion of difference, collapse of distance and the inertia and insularity that he predicts as a consequence of being perpetually connected to a fast-paced information interface, are all presented as damaging to democracy, a system whose existence depends upon the collective renegotiation and debate of experience.
The gap opened up by Claxtonís working process might then be read as a space of resistance, resistance to what Virilio has termed ëtechnological fundamentalismí. Similarly, her stubbornly comical failure to provide anything like an adequate representation of the phenomena she purports to depict resembles his call for a ëright to blindnessí as a means of safe-guarding the independence and integrity of the individual.
The sightlessness of the figures in I thought I was the Audience but then I looked at You, is less an ethical choice than a pathological condition though, the bulbous growths covering their eyes having a spookily organic quality, despite ‚ or perhaps because of - their artificial substance. Placed individually or in small groups on narrow platforms scattered through the space and often elevated, they rework the romantic motif of the wanderer communing with the landscape for a world standing in awe of a technological sublime. Itís tempting to see the driving force behind this work as a further attempt to represent a space thatís difficult to understand in terms of our physical experience; the world wide wunderkammer, the Internet, a virtual space without form or size, expanding continually without the guiding hand of a centralised planner or pre-determined structure. The introduction of mirrors in the workís latest manifestation mimics virtual space by blankly reflecting actual space; moreover it negates the area between the viewer and the work, collapsing distance. Walter Benjaminís incomplete masterpiece The Arcades Project dedicated an entire section to the proliferation of large scale mirrors in 19th Century Parisís new public spaces, and he was clearly fascinated by their effects, both spatially, in terms of the way that they intertwined interior and exterior, expanding space, making it ambiguous and difficult to navigate, but also in terms of the psychological and social effects of this new panorama. It seems but a short step from the Arcadesí ëcollusion with nonbeingí to the internet, just one more stage in a technologically driven dematerialization of space.
As the streets of Paris were morphing into a hall of mirrors, Benjamin also noted a corresponding shift in the way that people styled their homes. ëThe space disguises itself ‚ puts on, like an alluring creature, the costumes of moodsÖthe nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream.í He recognised the fantasy value of space and the growing desire to invest in illusion, which he saw as a reaction to the sealed office or work environment that divorced individuals from a sense of the wider social sphere and their function within it. From this, he noted 'derive the phantasmagorias of the interior - which, for the private individual, represents the universe.' Claxtonís motley crew of objects and ornaments, picked up at car boot sales and second-hand shops, are hot-wired into this investment in illusion, that corresponds to the erosion of the public sphere. The fancy figurines with flowing dresses, pierrot clowns and carved wooden stags favoured by her are surely specific to the lower middle-class, pre-Ikea British home, deeply romantic flights of fancy that are treasured by their owners.
Despite the workís formal flirtation with painting ‚ like so much recent sculpture, I thought I was the Audience and then I Looked at You operates pictorially, packing a mean retinal punch ‚ its battleground is resolutely sculptural. Claxtonís practice is concerned with asserting the significance of our phenomenal experience in the world, of maintaining a link between the world of material, mass, volume and gravity and our image of it - even if this entails a kind of blindness. I thought I was the Audience but then I Looked at You simultaneously presents the virtual as artificial and over-decorated while revelling in the imaginative, DIY potential of the colloquial and the everyday.
Helen Legg 2004
Image / Exhibition view 2004
catalogue published by University of Essex 2004. © Helen Legg 2004
Crafted, constructed and luridly artificial, the day-glo scene in front of me might best be described as a kind of post-Changing Rooms Bosch-esque vista. Ceramic ornaments litter the ground, each one dolled up with decorative paraphernalia - hair bobbles, toothpicks, pipe cleaners, glitter - while others stand on ziggurat structures made of painted and decorated occasional tables, stacked one upon the other. Still more figurines sit astride rickety looking precipices consisting of rolls of wallpaper propped on their ends, towers of upended bowls and lampshades, all precariously suspended on the verge of collapse.
I thought I was the Audience and then I looked at You is an ongoing sculptural installation constructed from a repertoire of adjusted figures and objects that are constantly updated and added to, resulting in a riotous glut of individual detail that is both utterly compelling and repugnant. The bizarre encounter of twee, period dressed figurines with their glitzy glam-rock accoutrements gives rise to a kitsch humour balanced with disturbing psychological overtones. Due in part to the visual aggression of the tableau, with its relentless flood of over-stylised tat in exhausting combinations of colour, shape and texture, this unpleasant sensation derives largely from the fact that the head of each and every figurine is, as Claxton puts it, 'blindly cosseted in isolating balls of suffocating prettiness'. Their senses baffled, these creatures fail to experience the world around them because they are suspended by the wonder of what is right in front of their eyes. While thereís clearly a nod towards the prevalence of the spectacle within modern society this is more than a simplistic expression of consumerist critique. In fact, the melee of sequins, sea shells, feathers, fringing, pomanders, combs, paper party decorations and picture frames is positively relished, celebrated for their material properties, their carnivalesque campness and colour. This theatrical assemblage is the offshoot of earlier attempts by Claxton to reconcile scientific and technological realities with everyday experience. The somewhat romantic and incredible descriptions of celestial phenomena such as meteor showers or rainshadows, found in a scientific guidebook, spawned the production of sculptural ëequivalentsí constructed from everyday objects found in her home. The Hubble Space Telescope Calendar with its descriptions of newly discovered and/or documented phenomena, such as the Trifid Nebula, ëa glowing cloud of gas, dust, and stars some 9000 light years distant towards the constellation Sagittariusí, proved to be another useful source, resulting in a large sculptural work made from thousands of pieces of foam pipe lagging. Around this time Claxton also began using the Internet as a source for generative material, beginning a series of linked searches that were intended to unearth similarly rich textual descriptions of things beyond our comprehension, beyond anything that we can relate to on the basis of our being in the world, our lived experience of space, scale, duration and the mutually dependant relationships between them.
In the unbridgeable gulf between such texts and Claxtonís resolutely earthbound and material imaginings lie innumerable questions concerning the relationship between technological progress and the human sphere of bodily, grounded experience. How can we really understand the physical and temporal existence of things that we cannot measure through the scale of our bodyís physical relationship with the earth or our lived duration upon it? Does the increasingly commonplace view of the imperceptible, made possible by super high-tech vision machines alter our capacity to evaluate what is right in front of our eyes? And what might be the consequences of perception set loose from experience?
Potential answers to these questions can be found in the nightmarish visions of urbanist and cultural theorist Paul Virilio, whose writings of the last thirty years warn of a potentially dehumanised future driven by the relentless logic of technological progress. Throughout his analysis of ëaccelerated modernityí, with its focus on speed, warfare and political control, he has consistently returned to the effects of technology on perception. Expressing his fear of a standardization of vision he makes it plain that this is an ethical question. If it is through the subjective process of seeing, measuring and experiencing that we formulate reality, then the undermining of our faith in tangible experience threatens to erode that reality. The remaining void would be left wide open to manipulation by a ëvision industryí, with all of the social and political consequences that this implies. The erosion of difference, collapse of distance and the inertia and insularity that he predicts as a consequence of being perpetually connected to a fast-paced information interface, are all presented as damaging to democracy, a system whose existence depends upon the collective renegotiation and debate of experience.
The gap opened up by Claxtonís working process might then be read as a space of resistance, resistance to what Virilio has termed ëtechnological fundamentalismí. Similarly, her stubbornly comical failure to provide anything like an adequate representation of the phenomena she purports to depict resembles his call for a ëright to blindnessí as a means of safe-guarding the independence and integrity of the individual.
The sightlessness of the figures in I thought I was the Audience but then I looked at You, is less an ethical choice than a pathological condition though, the bulbous growths covering their eyes having a spookily organic quality, despite ‚ or perhaps because of - their artificial substance. Placed individually or in small groups on narrow platforms scattered through the space and often elevated, they rework the romantic motif of the wanderer communing with the landscape for a world standing in awe of a technological sublime. Itís tempting to see the driving force behind this work as a further attempt to represent a space thatís difficult to understand in terms of our physical experience; the world wide wunderkammer, the Internet, a virtual space without form or size, expanding continually without the guiding hand of a centralised planner or pre-determined structure. The introduction of mirrors in the workís latest manifestation mimics virtual space by blankly reflecting actual space; moreover it negates the area between the viewer and the work, collapsing distance. Walter Benjaminís incomplete masterpiece The Arcades Project dedicated an entire section to the proliferation of large scale mirrors in 19th Century Parisís new public spaces, and he was clearly fascinated by their effects, both spatially, in terms of the way that they intertwined interior and exterior, expanding space, making it ambiguous and difficult to navigate, but also in terms of the psychological and social effects of this new panorama. It seems but a short step from the Arcadesí ëcollusion with nonbeingí to the internet, just one more stage in a technologically driven dematerialization of space.
As the streets of Paris were morphing into a hall of mirrors, Benjamin also noted a corresponding shift in the way that people styled their homes. ëThe space disguises itself ‚ puts on, like an alluring creature, the costumes of moodsÖthe nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream.í He recognised the fantasy value of space and the growing desire to invest in illusion, which he saw as a reaction to the sealed office or work environment that divorced individuals from a sense of the wider social sphere and their function within it. From this, he noted 'derive the phantasmagorias of the interior - which, for the private individual, represents the universe.' Claxtonís motley crew of objects and ornaments, picked up at car boot sales and second-hand shops, are hot-wired into this investment in illusion, that corresponds to the erosion of the public sphere. The fancy figurines with flowing dresses, pierrot clowns and carved wooden stags favoured by her are surely specific to the lower middle-class, pre-Ikea British home, deeply romantic flights of fancy that are treasured by their owners.
Despite the workís formal flirtation with painting ‚ like so much recent sculpture, I thought I was the Audience and then I Looked at You operates pictorially, packing a mean retinal punch ‚ its battleground is resolutely sculptural. Claxtonís practice is concerned with asserting the significance of our phenomenal experience in the world, of maintaining a link between the world of material, mass, volume and gravity and our image of it - even if this entails a kind of blindness. I thought I was the Audience but then I Looked at You simultaneously presents the virtual as artificial and over-decorated while revelling in the imaginative, DIY potential of the colloquial and the everyday.
Helen Legg 2004
Image / Exhibition view 2004
