Clegg & Guttmann: Galleria Lia Rumma.
Verzotti, Giorgio
In this complex yet amusing exhibition, "Studiolo Nuovo,"
which Lis Rumma installed in Milan after showing it in her space in
Naples, Clegg & Guttmann take as their point of departure the
Renaissance studiolo, or study--a private place, crowded with diverse
objects, and specifically set aside not so much for the contemplation of
art as for the development of thinking. Works of art were kept in these
spaces, but so were musical and scientific instruments and natural
objects. In this environment, seeing was inextricably linked to thought.
Painting, Leonardo said, is a mental thing; Clegg & Guttmann are
merely two of the most recent participants in this long Conceptualist tradition.
In this gallery-cwm-studiolo, Clegg & Guttmann presented five
wooden structures that could be activated to create forms, images, and
sounds. In the first structure, Esercizio Cognitivo I: la musica della
sfera (Cognitive Experiment I: The Music of the Sphere), 2007, built
like a geodesic dome, a keyboard invited us to play--but the keys were
marked with geometric shapes that also appeared as slide projections
inside the sphere; following the symbols, one produced a musical phrase.
The second structure, Esercizio Cognitivo II: la libreria piramidale
(Cognitive Experiment II: The Pyramidal Bookshelf), 2007, was a
pyramidal bookcase. Bookends bore handwritten indications of the
categories by which the books were classified, but the categories,
provided by viewers and constantly changing, were often bizarre. Near
the back wall, there was a device for playing music, Esercizio Cognitivo
III: il canone (Cognitive Experiment III: The Canon), 2007, a sort of
booth with holes for the head and hands allowing one to play a mandolin inside it.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The two last sculptures were akin to machines for drawing. In
Esercizio Cognitivo IV: I'oggetto nascosto (Cognitive Experiment
IV: The Hidden Object), 2007, a classical statue was housed inside a
structure that prevented it from being seen but allowed tactile contact.
Visitors could slip their hands into a series of holes, while chalk and
blackboards invited them to draw with one hand what the other hand
blindly touched. The final and most complex apparatus called for the
participation of five spectators. The work, Esercizio Cognitivo V:
cinque ciechi (Cognitive Experiment V: Five Blind Men), 2007, directs
one of them to put on a green apron, open at the back, and to draw a
shape--any shape--using a stick and working directly on the back of one
of the others who, in turn, will do the same with the next partner, and
so on, up to the last person, who is asked to actually draw with white
chalk on a blackboard the shape that he feels on his back. This work
explicitly refers to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Blind Leading
the Blind and at the same time to Dennis Oppenheim, who worked similarly
with his own young child in the video A Feedback Situation, 1971. In
fact, a similar shift of meaning left its trace on the exhibition
itself. The "mental thing" that is art as we understand it
originated with the early Renaissance revival of Neoplatonism;
traversing history, it kindled a wide range of practices and ideas. Yet
as much as Clegg & Guttmann draw on this legacy, their work actually
seems to overturn the Platonism that was its point of departure. Here,
thinking means working with all the senses, without hierarchies,
involving the body as well as the mind.
--Giorgio Verzotti
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
