I Promise to Love You: Caldic Collection
Kunsthal Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Tracy Emin, I promise to love you (2007)
The relationship between art as a form of expression and the commercial practice that drives much of the art world is a recurring point of contention. If art is something in which everyone should have a share, then the idea of rich collectors having sole ownership of seminal works of art that may never have a chance to be displayed in public, could be a cause for concern. Alongside the question of ownership is the issue of whether such collections can add something constructive to the way we assemble, coordinate and display artworks, beyond the point of their initial public exhibition.
Staged in the museum-like, white-walled surroundings of Kusnthal Rotterdam, ‘I Promise to Love You’, is a selection of more than 80 works from the Caldic Collection, a personal collection built up over 40 years by the Dutch chemical industry mogul Joop van Caldenborgh. In curating this selection of Caldenborgh’s contemporary acquisitions of work made in the last ten years, the Kunsthal effectively seeks to answer the issues raised above by showing that such enormous, private collections can, in fact, act as auxiliary, mobile ‘museum’ collections, enabling the public to see assemblies of work they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
On a basic level, by bringing together a swathe of works by big names like Damien Hirst, Anslem Kiefer, Ernesto Neto and Ai Weiwei, among others, ‘I Promise to Love You’ certainly succeeds in displaying a large quantity of recent international art rarely seen in public institutions that have remit to focus on local art. The problem, however, is that once you move beyond the works as singular pieces, there is little chance for a dialogue to emerge among them. Essentially the result of a lack of context and concept, this criticism can be seen as a point of caution for displays of private collections in general.
Using Tracy Emin’s neon sculpture I promise to love you (2007) – her handwritten words re-cast in red light – as a starting point, what concept there is here focuses on the idea of a love for art and the dedication of the collector. There is little attempt, though, to explore the potential ambiguities of Emin’s statement. In the absence of such enquiry, the overall feeling of the exhibition is actually one of escapism. Many of the works seem to sit in a different dimension to our own. Either we find an Alice in Wonderland/Gulliver’s Travels aesthetic – as in Hans Op de Beek’s giant party cake, After the Gathering (2007) – or there is an indexing of real life, which has the effect of freezing objects and removing them from the time-frame of our moving lives – like Damien Hirst’s anaemic, translucent fish in formaldehyde, With You (2008) or Annette Messager’s photographic mobile of dangling body parts and orifices, Mes Voeux (1988–90). Where things do touch on the real world, it is shown in a staged, cinematic vein – Rodney Graham’s photographic self-portrait as a 1950’s lighthouse keeper in a clinically clean kitchen, Lighthouse Keeper with Lighthouse Model 1955 (2010), or Tom Hunter transplanting Millais’ Ophelia (1851–2) to contemporary East London, The Way Home from ‘Life and Death in Hackney’ (2000).
Silvia B, Blanche LeBlanc (2008)
It should be noted that ‘I Promise to Love You’ remains open in its intentions. The exhibition’s introductory text directs visitors to the fact that its curation has been reduced to matching the colour and tone of works. So among various other examples, we get a corner where red works are grouped together, the abstract prints of Daan van Golden and Silvia B’s taxidermied monkey with red nail varnish, Blanche LeBlanc (2008), contrasted by a grey corner, where Hans Op de Beek’s monotone, miniature installation, Still Life (2) (2010), sits alongside Levi van Veluw’s grey photographic self-portrait Carpet (2008). Beyond the fact that the side-by-side repetition of colours in some cases detracts from each work’s individual qualities, the bigger problem here is that the more conceptual works lose their context and purpose, becoming mere visual statements and suffering as a result. Such problems are not unique to ‘I Promise to Love You’ or private contemporary collections, and are often equally apparent in the display of museum collections, but more could surely be done to draw out the concepts and ideas with which the artists originally sought to engage. It is that retention of concept and context that is needed for contemporary works to maintain long-term significance, irrespective of the particular collections they happen to belong to.
Richard Unwin
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