7 questions for Marc Camille Chaimowicz
7 questions for Marc Camille Chaimowicz
A certain simplicity of means, true luxury of life
The manner in which he interweaves art and life is as unique as it is exemplary. You could call it relational aesthetics avant la lettre. Yet it was not the generation of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick who rediscovered the work of this artist who was already active in the late Sixties. It is the young artists of today who see Marc Camille Chaimowicz as an important predecessor, a recognition that is being translated into a growing number of presentations in Europe and soon in Amsterdam too. Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s expansive body from the past thirty or more years inhabits a variety of forms: from painted oil on canvas to performance tableaux to environments that include adapted furniture and fabrics of his own design. Chaimowicz’s installations occasionally incorporate carefully placed found objects that draw upon the tradition of still-life painting and integrate text, photography or slide projections within these sculptural arrangements. Approach Road, produced from 1975-9, was a major project developed in the artist’s East End home and studio that experimented with a synthesis of the realms of art and domestic life. Early work such as Celebration? Real Life staged at Gallery House, South Kensington in 1972 was radical in its presentation of what appeared to be the scattered detritus from a party as a form of installation and involved the live presence of the artist who slept in one of the rooms and invited visitors to join him for coffee and discussion.Making – in the form of painting, sculpture and design – has always been central to Chaimowicz’s practice. But in distinction to the gestural and explicitly masculine work ethic of abstract and expressionist painting prevalent during his formative years as an art student in London, he deliberately chose not to separate out the working process and the art object from the processes and objects of everyday life. Approach Road represented for Chaimowicz both a living space that offered essential solitary retreat, and an ongoing work in its own right; giving the artist the space to formalise ordinary aspects of everyday life, at the same time as dissolving the boundaries of ‘fine art’ to embrace the ’feminised’ realms of applied art and interior design. In the intervening thirty years, Chaimowicz’s body of work has accumulated gradually and has been consistently re-ordered in a manner that perpetuates a bittersweet dialogue between past and present. Chaimowicz continues to reject art as a privileged and separate sphere, treating the decorative potential of art as a form of camouflage necessary to his survival as much as it is a pleasurable aesthetic ‘flourish’ laced through everyday activity.
Your work grafts the space of dreaming or fiction – the imagination – with practical reality, as is epitomised by the way in which you have decorated your house and the simplicity of your approach to certain things I have noticed: you have screen printed your own wallpaper ; your phone number is listed in the telephone directory ; you take the bus (even when – as was the case before your recent performance in Partial Eclipse– the Tate offers you a taxi!)
‘A certain simplicity of means may afford me the true luxury of time! … and it is perhaps because I am prone to reverie that I all the more seek some anchorage with the external world … taking the 36 bus can rudely bring one down to earth! This ‘grafting of fiction with reality’ is perhaps a sophist device … what led to a conscious domestic aesthetic began in the pictorial – from concept – as a means by which to negotiate that which is unpalatable, or indeed vulgar about the everyday – and resulted, in loop form, towards a new reality … which became my home and in turn a catalyst and a resource for work.’
One of your earliest exhibitions was held in the luxury department store, Liberty’s, on Oxford Street in a show called Four Rooms with Howard Hodgkin, Richard Hamilton and Anthony Caro. It seems to me that there was a real logic to your work in this context which maybe was not relevant for the other artists, possibly with the exception of Hamilton. Are you comfortable to trace a trajectory that links this moment to your recent decision to participate in a feature about your home in World of Interiors?
‘Having earlier worked on textile designs – as a way of questioning implicit hierarchical values which relegate the Applied Arts to a lowly order – this was a timely project.
I nonetheless recall certain reservations regarding Liberty’s; with its house style and the Arts and Crafts legacy … which Paul Nash has cryptically idenitified as suffering from “a certain Medieval malaise” … I was however thrilled, through the aegis of the Arts Council, to have the opportunity to extend maquettes, notably for furniture, to that of the functional prototype as well as realising fabric for Warners and wall paper for Coles.I nonetheless recall certain reservations regarding Liberty’s; with its house style and the Arts and Crafts legacy … which Paul Nash has cryptically idenitified as suffering from “a certain Medieval malaise” … I was however thrilled, through the aegis of the Arts Council, to have the opportunity to extend maquettes, notably for furniture, to that of the functional prototype as well as realising fabric for Warners and wall paper for Coles.
More recently, conceding to a photo shoot by James Mortimer the doyen and with Min Mogg co-founder of that illustrious magazine was irresistible! I did not so much participate, however, as surrender and feel somewhat distant to the result … which feels like elsewhere… But given that in the symbolic act of giving one is then freed of the gift as a process of formalisation it may the better enable me to distance myself from the risk of atrophy … Finally, if one is to summarily venture on occasion onto the ‘high street’ it is probable that it will be towards High End … and it has in each case been illuminating to measure viability according to criteria set outside of artworld practice.’ More recently, conceding to a photo shoot by James Mortimer the doyen and with Min Mogg co-founder of that illustrious magazine was irresistible! I did not so much participate, however, as surrender and feel somewhat distant to the result … which feels like elsewhere… But given that in the symbolic act of giving one is then freed of the gift as a process of formalisation it may the better enable me to distance myself from the risk of atrophy … Finally, if one is to summarily venture on occasion onto the ‘high street’ it is probable that it will be towards High End … and it has in each case been illuminating to measure viability according to criteria set outside of artworld practice.’
Your engagement with ideas of ‘hospitality’ and participation was evident in your practice in works such as Celebration? Real Life in the 1972 Gallery House exhibition in South Kensington well before these ideas became familiar in contemporary art practice though the work of those artists who have been characterised in terms of ‘relational aesthetics’. Do you see any common ground between your work and the practice of that generation of artists, i.e. Liam Gillick, Rikrit Tiravanija and others?
‘One cannot now imagine how parochial the London art scene was in the 1970s … there was a barrage of conservative and often reactionary values to contest. It would seem that an agenda which I hope to have helped establish has gained some critical currency and in this sense my work sits more easily in the current climate … as if then one can but try to forward key questions…
London is now more internationalist and aware and I enjoy much work from emerging generations… though fraught with risk I remain taken by the premise of collaboration, both directly and in proxy, as can occur with exhibition orchestration or when curating or commissioning the work of others as with “Jean Cocteau” and more recently working with young artists in France.’ London is now more internationalist and aware and I enjoy much work from emerging generations… though fraught with risk I remain taken by the premise of collaboration, both directly and in proxy, as can occur with exhibition orchestration or when curating or commissioning the work of others as with “Jean Cocteau” and more recently working with young artists in France.’
You wrote: ‘The sentimental nature of many of the objects provoked a sense of the residue of an attachment – discarded or half-remembered feelings, so their scatter arrangement on the floor suggested the residue of pleasure, a party abandoned or the memory of childhood play.’ (Past Imperfect, J.Hansard Gallery, 1984, p.9) The interplay between past and present is a strong theme in your work. I noticed recently that you had made a series of objects when you were on a residency in Rome that comprised ordinary things covered over with layers of newspaper so as to form miniature sculptures that were both formal objects and miniature documents of the time – even the specific day – on which they were made. Would you agree that these illuminate your practice in the sense that making objects always involves some kind of ‘fossilisation’ of the present that works against the ‘practice of everyday life’ in a lived sense? How do you deal with that perpetual tension?
‘For me the fulcrum, when at the British School at Rome, was that of existing in suspended time and mostly outside of language. Housed and fed, I was free from ‘the practice of everyday life’.
Its very location is removed from the heartbeat of the city … A daily ritual became that of drifting, and in the manner of urban beachcombing … of finding detritus. Some was then qualified, perhaps in the manner of “journals”. It was most perceptive of you to have identified that which seems to me not fully formed … they have not been shown, their status is ambiguous; the mute becoming anecdotal … their destiny is perhaps ideally to be held in the palm of one’s hand, as is found treasure.’Its very location is removed from the heartbeat of the city … A daily ritual became that of drifting, and in the manner of urban beachcombing … of finding detritus. Some was then qualified, perhaps in the manner of “journals”. It was most perceptive of you to have identified that which seems to me not fully formed … they have not been shown, their status is ambiguous; the mute becoming anecdotal … their destiny is perhaps ideally to be held in the palm of one’s hand, as is found treasure.’
Gender is complicated in your work: you have spoken of the idea of ‘decorative’ arts being associated with the feminine as opposed to the ‘heroic’ tradition of expressionist painting – but you are always drawn to these complications, to ‘grey half-tones’ rather than black and white, male-female. In what way is this a political attitude?’
‘But surely, from the moment we query inherited values, gender is complicated! And the one certainty is that it is hardly black and white … because that polarity is both archaic and redundant …In Tenderness (1973), a participatory project with pupils from Highbury Girls School with whom I later travelled to Rugby Boys School, the artist was extending the questioning of gender issues to that of class… how successfully however, is a moot point! I can nonetheless recall that these two events were examples of experiments in use as attempts to make some sense through practice…
The dilemma and challenge is how to deal with issues partially rooted in the socio-political realm whilst avoiding the piousness and dogma of Political Art which in itself can veer back towards a certain patriarchal tyranny. The review of gender stereotype was central to Table Tableau (1974) which proposed a static image of vulnerability and lament, the embodiment of passivity and thus demasculinised … Arising from critique, this work had grown feeling constricted by values inherent in the dominant culture…Although hopefully visually eloquent and accompanied by a commissioned violin sound track the piece was mute yet, in retrospect, perhaps prefaced Partial Eclipse … (1980) in which the protagonist acquires a voice by which to articulate (his) subjectivity and muse upon a relationship – a subject itself then outside of the masculine norm. Table Tableau had, in one version, been re-enacted as a private ritual by which to initiate Approach Road 1975-9 which in turn attempted to reclaim the once considered peripheral or minor spheres of the domestic and the decorative. This nourished a subsequent repertoire of work including Partial Eclipse… Built on a conditional dillitantism, paradox became the creative method, ambiguity its means. Inclusive and built on the conscious choice of diversification … it was perhaps an oblique means with which to redress negatively biased gendered sensibility?’The dilemma and challenge is how to deal with issues partially rooted in the socio-political realm whilst avoiding the piousness and dogma of Political Art which in itself can veer back towards a certain patriarchal tyranny. The review of gender stereotype was central to Table Tableau (1974) which proposed a static image of vulnerability and lament, the embodiment of passivity and thus demasculinised … Arising from critique, this work had grown feeling constricted by values inherent in the dominant culture…Although hopefully visually eloquent and accompanied by a commissioned violin sound track the piece was mute yet, in retrospect, perhaps prefaced Partial Eclipse … (1980) in which the protagonist acquires a voice by which to articulate (his) subjectivity and muse upon a relationship – a subject itself then outside of the masculine norm. Table Tableau had, in one version, been re-enacted as a private ritual by which to initiate Approach Road 1975-9 which in turn attempted to reclaim the once considered peripheral or minor spheres of the domestic and the decorative. This nourished a subsequent repertoire of work including Partial Eclipse… Built on a conditional dillitantism, paradox became the creative method, ambiguity its means. Inclusive and built on the conscious choice of diversification … it was perhaps an oblique means with which to redress negatively biased gendered sensibility?’
Your furniture pieces such as Desk on decline or the Arch appear to me as hieroglyphic forms that propose an alternative mode of living. To what extent were you designing these objects so as to be able to live with them, in a personal sense, and to what extent are they sculptures that are to do with representing your aesthetic?
‘The arch was once intrinsic to the furbishment of my sitting room in Approach Road. As well as indexing history and implying mental travel its role was perhaps to query function. The date, in that it has both a functional and a non-functional mode (rendered manifest when exhibited) negotiates this duality… It was conceived at a time when I was attempting to work with text and therefore as metaphor for the condition implicit to that practice.’
You have spoken of there being periods of more visibility and less visibility for your work throughout your career: what has this meant for your practice?
‘Beyond involuntary moments in which other facets of one’s life take priority … and which can in themselves in turn also nourish practice. Self-elected periods of withdrawal and reflection can refresh. … Especially so if crafting a practice on the subjective – as was the case with Approach Road. The dynamic of stopping in order to move forward can generate insight … what is later required is to formalise these towards a certain possible autonomy.’
Marc Camille Chaimowicz will have an exhibition at De Appel, Amsterdam in 2008.Marc Camille Chaimowicz will have an exhibition at De Appel, Amsterdam in 2008.
Catherine Wood
