File Note 73: Simon Martin

Speaking of a photograph of a painting of a photograph of a young girl, Simon Martin once mused, ‘its physicality as a reproduction drew me in… as if it would somehow give up more the longer you stared at it.’¹ The allure of a reproduction, what it might preserve or conceal beneath its surface lies at the heart of Martin’s investigations. At Camden Arts Centre this allure holds force across his diverse selection of exhibits. And when each one prompts our footsteps for a closer inspection, Martin seems to ask, what kind of physical or social encounter is this? How does it feel?

Martin’s exhibition represents the final part of a trilogy of works. The first two were videos, Carlton (2007) and Louis Ghost Chair (2011). Carlton explored how an illusive object might be caught in an image. It’s named after a peculiar looking postmodern bookshelf designed by iconic Italian collective Memphis in 1981. In Martin’s video a professional female voice-over ponders the unorthodox appeal of this unusual object, its glossy polychrome partitions all at odd angles to its shelves. Her monologue is accompanied by the low, slinky panning shots of an expensive advertisement so that we are not only seduced by the surface of this flashy object, but also the slickness of its image. ‘[Carlton] started from looking at a photo of it in a book’, Martin says, ‘a desire in some way to cross over into this image.’ ² By contrast, Louis Ghost Chair scrutinises how an image might be reproduced within an object, historical aura as something congealing around a commodity over time. It’s evident in the transparent plastic version of the Louis XV chair recently redesigned by Philippe Starck and mass-produced by Kartell. The original’s silhouette retains its historical aura, a graceful posture that overpowers its new plastic frame. Later on, the bare wood of the original appears like an apparition. Other image-objects feature too, including a kitsch plastic gnome stool and a Donald Judd sculpture painted red because, in the minimalist’s words, ‘it’s the only colour that makes an object sharp.’³ Judd’s wooden box cradles an iron pipe so snugly it appears to be made from plastic. In contrast, the plastic stool is painted like a tree stump, as if jovially acknowledging its own faux-rigidity. These objects are affectations of other things, obscure furnishings that ward off our touch. So what do we see of them, when they‘re photographed once again? 

Here, in the gallery, Martin focuses on the magnetism of the canny reproduction and the space in which it exerts its pull. He has arranged for us a collection of items whose exterior we might somehow want to penetrate or otherwise get inside. The collection poses fewer questions about the material truth of individual pieces, but rather how we perceive their protean surfaces. Can a bookshelf show off? Can a colour point? Can a chair haunt? What is the impact of an object’s surface as opposed to the impression of its image? Do they affect us differently? Might they ever let you in?

In contrast to a photograph we might imagine climbing into, sits the sculpture of a chair we might once have climbed upon. ‘Chair’ (1965–2000) is by American artist Richard Artschwager who once said ‘I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye, and a painting for the touch.’ A furniture designer in the 1950s, he later immersed himself in abstract painting and then combined the two disciplines in his ‘sculptural objects’ from the early 1960s on, adopting the forms of domestic furniture and rendering their surface with the pared down symbolism of architectural motifs. ‘Chair’ is a blocky chair-sized structure laminated with the black and white photograph of a rustic wooden chair in corresponding aspects. We see the intricate wicker weave of its seat and back and its carefully hand-painted frame. The work challenges how we look at objects, how our perception is altered by their display. Its image pasted on Artschwager’s cubic prism, the original chair is no longer a mute support on which to sit. Its contours and craftsmanship come into full view. Similarly, the piece raises self-reflective questions about the complicity of museum display and sculptural impact. 

Martin will also include his own work. His photographs present the engine of a Toyota Prius Hybrid alongside bomb damage still evident on the paw of one of the bronze sphinxes at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle on Victoria Embankment in London. This engine is a curious hybrid of old mechanics and new technology. It is weirdly clean and suspiciously quiet when it runs; what is its secret? Like the shrapnel marks and holes in the sphinx, there is something dubious to its fabric. Its tempered form is smooth and far from that of its original — oily, noisy and lethal — so as to seem duplicitous. And what happens now, when Martin further reduces these discords, flattening and halting their progress in print? 

The exhibition is what Martin calls a ‘thinking through’ of what will eventually be a video work, the third part to his video trilogy. Moving from the allure of an object’s image, to the anomalies of an image-object, the third part questions how these two phenomena exert their pull, and in what kind of social space they might do so. Here in the gallery Martin’s think-through is our walk-through. Over ley lines old and new, footsteps tentatively following UR-feeling.