Nathaniel Mellors
Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen, The Netherlands
Traditionally, an object is defined in relation to the subject and is seen as a reflection of what we are not. And yet, ‘The Object’ in Nathaniel Mellors’ absurdist drama series ‘Ourhouse’ (2010–ongoing) appears on the screen as a man in a white tracksuit consuming and excreting books from the library of the somewhat dysfunctional Maddox-Wilson household. To the members of the family, the appearance of The Object is not as straightforward as it may seem to us, and is in fact so puzzling it robs them of their ability to speak coherently. The different parts of the series show the changes in the relationships between the members of the family, influenced by The Object as it eats away at the family’s library.
The latest addition to this still incomplete series, ‘Ourhouse – The Nest’ (2011), is now on view at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of Mellors winning the biennially awarded Cobra Art Prize, which, in the spirit of the post-war avant-garde CoBrA movement, aims to stimulate experimental and innovative art. For this show, Mellors created a wholly new installation including a new entry in the series, already existing material from ‘Ourhouse’, and art works from the collection of the Cobra Museum. Mellors chose works by artists who, much like himself, were interested in and greatly influenced by the ‘primitive’ and the margins of rationality – specifically the relation between sculpture and language.
The installation of ‘The Nest’ displays the artist’s works as if trapped in shapeless nest-like constellations made of wood, chicken wire and newspaper. In an act of cannibalism the sculptures have apparently ‘eaten’ the works from the museum’s collection. The central sculpture, the one most resembling an animal or human-like form, is elevated on a platform and connected to the other parts of the installation by electrical wires hanging from the ceiling. In its ‘belly’ plays the ‘Ourhouse’ episode in which the family makes their acquaintance with The Object.
Although the installation gives the videos a distinctive physical presence, the exhibition as a whole is still sequenced like a movie: its starting point is a painting by Karel Appel with the beautiful title Door een daad aan het daglicht gebracht om zijn schoonheid te tonen (By an Act Brought to Light to Show its Beauty, 1961). The painting was especially made for the filming of a documentary on Appel’s work and has a large square hole in it so that the camera could film the artist while painting. In Mellors’ presentation, the visitor literally looks through this work to see, as if through a lens, a darkened room resembling a magical cave with large, strangely shaped objects and pulsating yellowish lights. The visitor is then guided by a simple floor plan from episode to episode; starting with the central figure, then ‘The Nest’ – which incidentally is the only video not incorporated in a structure but projected outward onto a screen – followed by a seven-minute loop from ‘Ourhouse – The Cure of Folly’ about an amulet resembling the Venus of Hohle Fels, the oldest human figurative sculpture ever found, and ending with another loop in which Bobby-Jobby, one of the family members, discovers the mounds of excretion from The Object and wrongly interprets them as sculptures with magical powers.
With his extremely rich and unique visual language, Mellors creates an installation that is so multi-layered it just keeps on giving. Connecting avant-garde art with contemporary and so-called primitive culture, the work objectifies man’s ever-lasting search for meaning, his inability to find it, and the objects’ role within this quest. It lays bare our deepest desire to believe in a higher purpose that we desperately try to understand and give shape to through language and art, but never quite manage successfully.
Irene de Craen
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