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4/2/2011

Daniel Silver / Livingroom Exotica

Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus

Daniel Silver - Coming Together

In his sculptural work the London artist Daniel Silver (b1972, born in London) mixes all kinds of clichés of the western history of sculpture and culture together. Having grown up in Israel as the son of parent and grandparents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe to South Africa and Zimbabwe, he soon came in contact with the different heritage of each cultural context. His artistic work feeds from this "in-between state" and illuminates the multicultural inheritance in a subtly winking but also critical way. In particular his debate with African sculpture can be integrated into post-colonial attitudes to art. But Silver takes up a very personal position here and processes his own story again and again.

In his solo exhibition in the Kunsthaus Glarus he is showing several groups of works that came about in direct contact and cooperation with African sculptors in Zimbabwe. For the group of works called "Untitled" (2006-2010) Silver commissioned a group of professional sculptors in Zimbabwe to work police pictures of Afro-American prisoners condemned to death in Texas, which he had found on the Internet, into sculptures using traditional springstone and soapstone. What came about were expressive portraits, whose raw and sometimes unfinished directness have a curious mixture of abstract-modernist sculpture and African-expressive reduction.

In an another especially developed work complex for the exhibition in Glarus he repeated this cooperation with pictures of classicist portrait busts and thus permitting the western and African traditions to strike even more directly onto each other. The cooperation leads to a blurring of authorship and to an experiment for those commissioning the works and the artists commissioned. For both groups of sculptures Silver develops specific forms of presentation. Instead of showing them on pedestals in the traditional way, he dresses the portraits up or gives them a basic bodily architecture. For the clothing, for example, he uses African materials that he finds in London, or he builds a landscape of pedestals reminiscent of an urban skyline. The display of the new series with its patchwork collection of African fabrics of different origins and the cooperatively developed sculptures reminds of exotic shop window- and even touristic sales displays.

The fascination for direct sculpture and handcraft with the material carries the modernist-romantic cliché of authenticity, individual expression, directness and vitality. Silver uses these associations to question contemporary sculpture as to what remains of actuality today in the play between personal expression and cross-cultural references. In his work with sculptors in Zimbabwe he does not simply make use of a one-sided formal working style but finds the way to a blurring of authorship and an experiment for the commissioner and the commissionee.

In the Kunsthaus Glarus, Daniel Silver is showing his work in a Swiss institution for the first time. It has already been seen in a solo exhibition in the Camden Arts Centre in London (2007) and in group exhibitions, for example in the Saatchi Gallery in London (2010) and the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan (2010).

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Livingroom Exotica

Kader Attia (FR), Isabelle Cornaro (FR), Rashid Johnson (USA), Fabian Marti (CH), Lili Reynaud Dewar (FR), Vanessa Safavi (CH), Costa Vece (CH), Danh Vo (DK)

This group exhibition brings together eight Swiss and international positions concerned with objects that have connotations of colonial history and their integration into bourgeois cultures. Collections of exotica have a long, constantly changing tradition, from powerful representation to fetishist or trivial and banal decoration. Possessing an exotic object is an imaginary entry into another world and a sigh of the knowledge, power and wealth of the new owner. It is almost always a matter of the fascination of the exotic, wild and primordial. Exotica evoke in the viewer a romantic shudder of an exciting and mysterious otherness. Major currents in art history - especially Primitivism in the 20th century - have been inspired by this fascination. At the same time, since Claude Levi-Strauss's "The Savage Mind" and "Tristes Tropiques", there has been a discourse on change in contact with western culture. Today, under the key word of "globalism" the question arises as to whether marketed and instrumentalised artefacts are still able to convey authenticity. The borders between authentic cultural inheritance and tourist kitsch are becoming increasingly blurred. Mass-produced exotica, now often used in contemporary interior design, evoke a "Back to the Roots" atmosphere and even contain a latent criticism of civilisation.

When artists concern themselves with such themes, it is in the sense of alternative views of the relationship between cultures and their objects. They reflect rather a multiple break in the longing for the original, various references to art history or a criticism of conventional reception history. Almost all works in the exhibition are concerned in a very personal way with colonial influences in western culture. At the same time, with their multiple references from the history of art and its reception, they can be integrated into an expanded post-colonial discourse. The artists use the meaningful objects and items such as rugs, vases, masks, jewellery, cards or plants, often collected during voyages of conquest perhaps as trophies and today as tourist souvenirs, as the starting point for a preoccupation with conventional mechanisms of representation and identity constructs. In doing so they refer rather to the quotation than to the original and in some cases even concentrate on formally citing and stylising objects and stereotypes. In all cases the objects move between the poles of cultural originality and western representational aesthetics.

Image: Rashid Johnson, Two Rugs, 2010. Persian rug, Zebra skin, embroidery. Photo: Gallery David Kordansky

Opening: 5 February 2011 - h 18

Kunsthaus Glarus
Im Volksgarten - Glarus
Hours: tue-fri 14-18, Sat-sun 11-17

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