Laurie Simmons, Kaleidoscope House, 2001
The Kaleidoscope House was designed by Laurie Simmons and Peter Wheelwright in collaboration with Bozart Toys, which produced toys with leading contemporary artists for 6 year olds and above. The 1:12 scale modernist architectural house invited children and adults to fill it with an accessory line of modern furniture at an additional cost from contemporary furniture designers such as Dakota Jackson, Keiser/ Newman and Robert Kitchen. Similarly, the house also could feature paintings, photographs and sculpture by Peter Halley, Laurie Simmons itself, and Cindy Sherman, as well as realistic "action figures" of the artist, architect and family. At the time, Laurie Simmons was already well known for her photographs of dramatic tableaux set within dollhouses.
The Kaleidoscope House aimed at reflecting the “kaleidoscopic” range of 21st-century families. Aside from this utopic, egalitarian vision, the work was canny and pragmatic, geared more towards collectors than children. Nevertheless, it is hard not to read this project as a reification of the house, solely intended as an object of desire, a status symbol. An architecture that is stripped of all functionality and life in order to become pure aesthetics.
Keyword: toy, modernism, consumerism
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Robert Gober, Burnt House, 1979–80
Half Stone House (1979–80), one of Gober very first sculptures, featuring an array of seemingly incongruous motifs that aims at exploring and challenging personal issues relating to childhood, sexuality, and religion. The house was build using materials he had found on the streets and it was first conceived as a way to easily make some money. Similarly, Burnet House resembles the typical home of a middle-class family that instead of fostering feelings of comfort and security, incites danger and unease. The house seems eerily abandoned. The roof and top floor windows have been charred by a fire. In the silence and emptiness evoked by the sculpture the viewer is pushed to projects all his fears and disorders.
Keywords: abandonment, neglect, danger
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Miriam Schapiro and Sherry Body, Dollhouse, 1972
Miriam Schapiro collaborated with Sherry Brody on Dollhouse as part of Womanhouse (see post below 26/09), providing another level of depth as a set of rooms within rooms. The work combines the beauty and supposed safety and comfort of the home with the unnamable terrors existing within its walls. When closed, the house reveals nothing, suggesting the way a woman's public persona was supposed to convey well-trained compliance and little individuality. Yet, when access is granted to the interior, much is revealed about the personal interests and lifestyle of the owner of the house.
The artists turned a symbol of domesticity into a literal house of horrors as the tiny rooms evoke cells in which the hopes of women are often imprisoned. In the artist’s studio, a nude male model stands on a wooden platform while Schapiro herself assumes the role of artist, thus reversing the traditional roles of male artist and objectified female model. Dollhouse grew out of a series of works that Schapiro called her "shrines," in which she explored her shifting identities as artist, wife, and mother.
Keywords: violence, domesticity, representation
#miriamschapiro #sherrybody #hafh #research #archive #contemporaryart #architecture #home #design #exhibitions #artproject #artcurator #whatishome #arthistory #documentingspace
Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975
As she speaks, she names her own oppression -
In Semiotics of the Kitchen Martha Rosler begins her demonstration of kitchen utensils in alphabetical order in the style of a seemingly straight TV feature. Her physical interaction with the objects is unapologetically sudden and violent. In her subtly anarchic and comical presentation of the tools, in fact, Rosler addresses the aggressivity that is inherent in archetype of the "Woman in the kitchen" – from outside as well as from inside. Each display is a thinly veiled gesture of frustration with the language of domesticity as the kitchen becomes grounds for resistance and change.
Keywords: domesticity, feminism, violence
#martharosler #homeawayfromhome #hafh #research #archive #contemporaryart #architecture #home #design #exhibitions #artproject #artcurator #whatishome #arthistory #documentingspace
Stephen Willats, Living with Practical Realities, 1978
In her work Stephen Willats tackles the ways in which people construct their world in relation to the social or physical constraints that are put upon them. Living with Practical Realities was realized by the artist in direct collaboration with an elderly woman who lived on her own in a tower block in Hayes, West London. The work centres on the isolation of the elderly, physically and socially symbolised by the tower block. The visual references are directly located within the tower in which she lived and represent different aspects of her tower-bound life. Similarly the written references are from the tape recordings made with the woman, and the three problem situations: her physical situation, her economic reality, her social reality. The panels contrast the institutional reality of the tower block with the day-to-day reality of her life. Each panel asks a question of the viewer, a question that is not only particular to the woman’s situation, but of universal relevance concerning the elderly, and in the lower section presents self-organised strategies for countering the isolating deprivation of the tower block’s physical reality.
Keywords: isolation, alienation, urban agglomerations, strategies for survival
#stephenwillats #tatemodern #homeawayfromhome #hafh #research #archive #contemporaryart #architecture #home #design #exhibitions #artproject #artcurator #whatishome #arthistory #documentingspace
Sheba Chhachhi, Shahjahan Apa - Staged Portrait set-up, Nangloi, Delhi, 1991
Seven Lives and a Dream is a group of nineteen black and white photographs taken between 1980 and 1991. They include both staged and documentary images selected from a body of work by photographer and activist Sheba Chhachhi that spans decades of engagement with, and participation in, the feminist movement in India. The women’s movement in India had been galvanised after a notorious rape case in Delhi in 1978. Chhachhi’s sister was a founder-member of an activist group, and Chhachhi herself became involved both as an activist and a chronicler. Chhachhi’s images became a record of the struggle and were used for posters and pamphlets on issues such as dowry, as well as for street theatre and protests.
The feminist movement spanned class boundaries, and Chhachhi decided to re-examine her role and the power dynamics involved in her representation of the women whose personal struggles she had witnessed and supported. For Seven Lives and a Dream, Chhachhi reshot individual portraits of a select group of women, asking each to take control of the process and decide how they wanted to be portrayed, and encouraging them to choose objects of personal value to develop a more complex and staged image. Chhachhi has called this ‘an invitation to perform the self’ (Sheba Chhachhi, unpublished artist’s statement sent to Tate curator Nada Raza, June 2013). The power of the gaze, acts of representation and questions of agency or individual choice are central to gender politics.
Keywords: body, feminism, representation, protest
#shebachhachhi #tatemodern #homeawayfromhome #hafh #research #archive #contemporaryart #architecture #home #design #exhibitions #artproject #artcurator #whatishome #arthistory #documentingspace
