Sam Durant
Sadie Coles HQ (off-site), London, UK
Do you think Thomas Jefferson was considering the right to produce appallingly cheap, marginally functional, mono-block resin chairs when he and the founding fathers penned the revered trinity of rights – ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ - for the United States’ Declaration of Independence? I only ask because I am under the impression, standing in front of a rather large mirror emblazoned with the a blue, spray painted slogan ‘Let’s behave like Americans’, that the additional three blobs of spray paint seeping down the surface are evoking the aforementioned pillar of US society. Yet, as I stare at myself I am uneasy with the didactic – do I smirk and think why would I want to behave more like an American? Or should I brood on the fact that this statement is now such an affront for many? The ‘unalienable’ rights the founding fathers so cherished may have looked good on paper, but how they are interpreted today seems to be open for debate. One which American artist Sam Durant is intent on confronting, aided by a collection of porcelain chairs mimicking the mass produced mono-block version found in nearly every country on the globe.
Durant has a canny way of plucking poignant fragments of American cultural history from a lethargic archive and instilling the moment and the issues into the psyche of our current age. His current exhibition, shown at the Sadie Coles off-site space in East London, furthers this strategy. Brandished across large framed mirrors, two phrases, sourced from protest signs from both the 1960s civil rights movement and the more recent anti-Iraq war demonstrations in the US, herald a rather obvious message: ‘There is still a war going on.’ Durant seems agitated enough to ask whether America has learnt anything from the past – are we really still protesting about this? Well, yes, apparently we still need to. But that’s only part of it.
What is curious about Durant’s show is how the installation of hand crafted porcelain chairs, which dominates the main space, communicates with these mirror works and their blatant didactics. The titles attributed to the chairs – Light Blue, Unique Mono-Block Resin Chair, Built at Jiao Zhi Studio, Xiamen, China, Produced by Ye Xing You with Craftspeople Xu Fu Fa and Chen Zhong Liang. Kang Youteng, Project manger and Liaison (2006) – goes some way in explaining. Like an uncompleted puzzle, Durant’s work takes form once you fit the pieces together, evolving into a tight narrative elucidating the artist’s understanding of a particular political or historical moment. In this instance each individual chair, with its crayon-coloured palette, flawed surface and uneven paint work – all reiterating the nature of the hand made – stand as small refutations for the ‘Made in China’ tag and the accompanying connotations. There is no mass production, no indentured labour and no cheap material; rather, each chair is imbued with a different set of qualities: master craftsmanship (harking back to the ceramic traditions in Chinese art), uniqueness and fragility. It’s a literal project: go to China, employ a workshop of craftsmen, put your name, as a well know American artist, to the work and pull out the many strands of art historical (and, in this instance, globalization) debate that accompany such an endeavour. But I have my reservations on such a process, principally because of Durant’s insistence on providing a ‘useful’ text explaining the working process and the observations we are expected to make.
Daniel Buren once suggested that a work of art is closest to its own reality when it exists in the studio, but from the moment it leaves this bastion it does not stop distancing itself from this reality.1 I believe this to be the case in the artist’s studio, or, as in this instance, the craftsman’s. Durant’s textbook description thwarts my expectation of engaging with the work subjectively – elaborating the reality of the work as it exists in my context and political scenarios. In calling into question the ethos that has governed American society – and permeated our current age of globalization, given the US’s (former) economic dominance – but then dictating the terms in which we are to engage with the message, despite allowing the viewer to witness their own reflection in the context, Durant is unfortunately close to propagating an (albeit harmless) neo-imperialist strategy. It is a shame as it detracts from the subtle fragility of the pieces and the clarity of form each sculpted chair represents. It is not difficult to discern the political undertones that tussle for attention, but one needs the space to consider them, rather than receiving a lecture from the thoughtfully provided additional material.
1 Daniel Buren, ‘The Function of the Studio’, 1971. October, Vol 10, Autumn, 1979.
Nicola Harvey
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