Simon Starling, from the video ‘Red (in the Search of the Elusive Okapi)’
Ah, back from an involuntary break, as my computer decided it would go on strike.
At any rate, I just visited a show here in Paris at Galerie Kamel Mennour. I have to admit that every time I go to that gallery I’m set for disappointment as they seem to only show artists with a proven market, which more often than not just means sellable art and not necessarily good art.
This time was an exception. Though they split half the gallery with Roger Ballen‘s ‘Boarding House‘, work which, though good, I’ve seen so often and in so many different venues that it utterly fails to interest me at this point, they devoted the other half to two works by Simon Starling, on loan as part of the Berlin-Paris exchange from the Neugerriemschneider Gallery.
Simon Starling came to my attention, and most other people’s, when he won the 2005 Turner Prize. His work tends to be concerned with process and context, a not-entirely-original preoccupation in today’s artworld, and though the two works on show at Kamel Mennour were no exception to this, they did highlight other, more interesting preoccupations of his.
The first body of work, ‘Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolation and Bifurcation’, takes up the front room of Kamel Mennour and consists of quite a few (I forgot to count) platinum prints that display the usual tonal glory of platinum prints. The subjects of the images are real and fictional variations on the story of the German architect Eckart Muthesius, who was given a commission to design a fabulous palace for an Indian maharaja, completed in 1934. The subject is simple enough, but Starling presents the palace and it’s objects as almost technical records of imagination – the images don’t entirely make sense together (in a positive way) and you’re left to draw what meanings there are from them on your own.
The real highlight for me was actually Starling’s film ‘Red (in the Search of the Elusive Okapi)’, shown in an adjacent gallery. It alternates between red-toned photographs of a trip down the Hudson river in a canoe which ends on the steps of the Museum of Natural History in New York and video shot in a darkroom where the same photographs are being developed, where the safe-lights cast the same red tone one finds in the photographs. The entire video is accompanied by voice-over reading the text of the journal of Herbert Lang, a naturalists whose trip down the Congo provided two Okapi specimens still seen in diorama at the same Museum of Natural History. I found the tying together of photography, natural history, colonialism, collecting, traveling, and history perfectly tuned: Not overbearing, but not insensitive to its own implications either.
Go see them both at Kamel Mennour in Paris, up until March 6th.
A blog post on the making of ‘Red; by Dante Birch, of MassMoca, here.
An interview with Starling here.
Nick Smith, ‘Aristarchus Plateau’
