Christian Andersson
Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden
Christian Andersson’s exhibition, ‘From Lucy with Love’ deals with the discipline of museology – of both contemporary art and ancient artefacts. The installation From Lucy with Love (2011) is essentially a display case, containing diverse historical and contemporary objects arranged according to some cryptic order. Included in this collection are items of questionable historical significance – such as postcards, comic strips and mirrors – as well as possibly inauthentic objects, such as the renowned skull of the ancient hominid, Lucy, alongside other skulls labelled ‘Piltdown man (fraud) (1912)’ and ‘Homo Neandethalensis 50000 YA’. Mirrors and the case itself cut into and reflect the surrounding objects, so that as the viewer moves, objects are displaced, adjoining themselves to items elsewhere, opening up new juxtapositions. Consequently, one can indulge in the visual weaving and reweaving of history, as one notices the strikingly similar silhouette of an antique urn overlaid on a lava lamp, or the transformation of an ink-blot drawing of a wing into a virtual pair, with the simple addition of a mirror. Like the optical trickery at play elsewhere in the exhibition, these reflections destabilize our confidence in our senses and problematize the differentiation between fact and fiction. As if attempting to liberate these objects from their encasement within the discipline of history, a film projector inside the vitrine projects a film through the glass onto a facing wall of the gallery. In this found footage, a man in a biohazard suit enters a room (perhaps a laboratory of some sort), and discovers that what sounded like a Morse code signal was in fact the random tapping on a telegraph of a Coca-Cola bottle caught on a window blind. Random acts do not easily conform to a lineage of causality, just as unexplainable occurrences do not easily fit into the fabric of history.
The strange, imposing sculpture, To R.M. for EVER (2011), is a replica of a gigantic, Stonehenge-like structure first painted by René Magritte in L’art de la conversation (The Art of Conversation, 1950), in which the arrangement of massive blocks spells out the word ‘rêve’ (‘dream’). If history begins with writing, this construction could be seen as its inaugural gesture – a gesture that attempts to synthesize history and pre-history in some impossible moment, outside of time. In Andersson’s three-dimensional version we find that ‘rêve’ reads as ‘ever’ from behind. Even though his version is evidently made after the ‘original’, the relationship between his reproduction and the original structure is not constrained by historical lineage: one appears to be the backside of the other. As if in a dream, their coexistence in time seems to become possible.
Andersson’s work seems to suggest that the concept of the ‘original’ is not some irreducible singularity; it too can change or disappear with time. His sculpture Angel of the Hearth (2011), based on Mies van der Rohe’s ‘Barcelona chair’, barely replicates the original. Its cushions are torn as though from some dramatic accident, but the awkward bends in the frame appear deliberate, as if some aspects of the original design have been corrupted and reconstituted. The chair originally resided inside the German Pavilion of the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, which is partially recreated here as a reference to both its original incarnation, which was torn down before it was finished, and the curious fact of its reconstruction in the 1980s. Similarly, Paper Clip (The Baghdad Batteries) (2009), was created in reference to a theory rather than an existing object. As one theory goes, the battery was invented in Baghdad, centuries before Alessandro Volta’s modern version. The disputed original battery was supposedly composed of a clay vessel filled with vinegar. Andersson’s numerous copies of the ‘original battery’, which he connects here with wires, appear to produce enough electricity to uphold a paper clip on a metal rod.
‘From Lucy with Love’ attempts to continue the trajectories of history, to follow its unfolding stories, rather than just documenting or displaying them. Andersson’s retracing of certain past events usually excluded from official records because of controversy or speculation – like the invention of the Baghdad battery – gives new possibilities to history. But his retracing also relies on the individual viewer’s faith or belief. Andersson’s exhibition allows the viewer to feel as if we are taking part in a reconfiguration of the practice of history – a practice that in this exhibition is consistently reengaging with the same events, but always from a slightly different angle.
Wojciech Olejnik
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