Ian Giles
Jonathan Kipps
Katja Larsson
Nadine Mahoney
Julia McKinlay
Milou van der Maaden
Janne Malmros
Kate Keara Pelen
Cyrus Shroff
Printers’ Symphony
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Re-Launch at UCL Art Museum
27 April – 12 June 2015
curated by Andrea Fredericksen & Keef Winter
edited & designed by Keef Winter
limited to 200 copies
ISBN 978-1-904800-11-8
All photographs courtesy of the artists unless otherwise stated.
Cover: Katja Larsson, Cat© Compact, jesmonite, 75cm x 40cm x 66cm, 2015
Back Page: Cyrus Shroff, A More Extended Sleight of Hand, Charcoal on IKEA MALA paper, plaster
3d print, museum labels, display case, Dimensions Variable, 2013, (artist wishes to acknowledge the
support of the V&A)
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Ghada Habib for her transcription of the conversation between Susan
Collins and Andrea Fredericksen.
UCL Art Museum
South Cloisters, University College London,
Gower Street, London
WC1E 6BT
Open Monday - Friday 1-5pm
T: 02076792540 E: college.art@ucl.ac.uk
ucl.ac.uk/museums/uclart
i
A Quiet Affair
Nina Pearlman
The growth of art museums has significantly increased in the
past fifteen years. As living and breathing repositories of cultural
production, museum collections have expanded, global franchises
have emerged and sector leaders continue to expand their existing
footprints. The grand architectural gestures that brand these
revamps and re-launches are often brash and noisy affairs. As
audiences flock to consume novel and stimulating experiences,
museums can’t help but mimic the conditions of spaces such
as airports or shopping malls, insofar as crowd control and
management emerge as characteristics now integral to a museum’s
institutional genome. Such spaces are challenged with balancing
the visitor’s physical access to more art with maintaining suitable
conditions for a meaningful experience.
In stark contrast to this narrative, UCL Art Museum’s HQ sits on
a footprint that is just short of that of half a tennis court. For close
to thirty years, it has occupied the same prime spot in UCL’s
neoclassical building, designed by and named after the celebrated
Victorian architect William Wilkins, of National Gallery fame. While
an inaugural public exhibition of a selection of works from the
University’s art collections took place in the space as early as 1930,
it wasn’t until the late 1970s that the Collections were able to claim
the space as a permanent home. With the University’s largest
holdings being works on paper, the space was designed at this time
on the model of a traditional Print Room. Conceived as a repository
and archive, access to and use of the Collections, which comprised
of works dating as far back as the 15th century, were limited to the
scholarly few. If not outwardly discouraged, use by general visitors
and even by students was not seen as the Collections’ prime
purpose.
A reversal of the ‘restricted use’ approach to UCL’s art collections
began in the 1990s. When the Flaxman Gallery – a prime site of the
University’s artistic heritage, situated beneath UCL’s iconic Dome –
was restored to its Victorian grandeur, the Print Room also received
its first makeover. An open display of wall-mounted plaster models
from the studio of the acclaimed neoclassical artist John Flaxman
became the prime feature of this makeover and the two sites
became visually and conceptually linked for the first time. Some
2
of these plasters were studies for full-scale models that could be
found embedded in the walls of the Flaxman Gallery; they were also
connected to Flaxman’s signature line drawings stored in the Print
Room cabinets. When the Collections were then awarded museum
status at this similar juncture the relationship between a range
of diverse yet interrelated sites that host art across the university
campus was firmly set.
The Museum emerged at this time not so much in the form of a
noticeable spatial transformation but in the form of a conceptual
turn. This shift signaled a new administrative entity that was
charged with responsibility and care for the art works in the
Collections, the administration and regulation of their visibility
and use, as well as their continued development and growth.
Under this single umbrella, the entire contents of Flaxman’s studio
joined works such as Marmor Homericum – a sculptural relief by
Romantic sculptor Henri de Triqueti. These examples comprise the
University’s first bequest in the mid nineteenth-century, as well as
UCL’s first contemporary public sculpture commission. Equally,
other site-specific installations by Slade artists such as Henry Tonks’
The Four Founders (1922), and the salvaged Rex Whistler murals
later installed in what became the Whistler Room, combined with
works by past masters and award-winning Slade artists that were
stored in the Print Room and painting stores. Together they came to
form the Museum’s holdings, now comprising over 10,000 objects,
organised around a singular administrative core.
The 2015 refurbishment and re-launch of UCL Art Museum is
a quiet affair. The permanent structural improvements to the
Print Room footprint, the first since the 1990s, are in fact largely
invisible – under the floor boards and inside the walls. The grand
architectural gestures of 21st-century museum makeovers are
limited to an intervention, as part of a temporary exhibition, in
the form of a full-size column that stretches from floor to ceiling,
prominently situated at the centre of the space. Interrupting
Wilkins’ ordered neoclassical system of column and beam, this
addition is the work of artist Jonathan Kipps. As a makeshift
plaster-board verticality, it exists in the space as a performative
conceptual intervention rather than a structural one. Kipps’ column
is complemented by Katja Larsson’s Cat© Compact, a jesmonite
cast of a digger bucket that sits in a large bay window between two
of Wilkins’ columns; a decontextualised and destabilised replica.
Larsson’s digger bucket is a still and pristine ‘relic’, evocative of
3
that which is left onsite, usually underground when diggers are
inanimate on a building site at the point at which a commerciallydriven architectural scheme draws to a close.
As the Collections continued to grow over the past decade and
encompass new forms of creative practice and engagement with
the art objects, a new model that would be adaptive, responsive
and reflective needed to emerge from the traditional idea of
the Print Room. Experimentation with methods suited to the
exploration of the Collections’ contemporary relevance and the
key narratives that they impart with respect to collecting and
learning have been at the core of the Museum’s transformation.
The fact that works in the Museum’s collections were either
explicitly collected for the purpose of instruction, or were the
product of a process of instruction or research by artists early on
in their career, makes the Collections particularly rich for such
investigations. Significantly, the Print Room transformation has
also been a driving force in the development of research-based
education across disciplines through direct engagement with art
objects. Use of the Collections has transcended the disciplinary
threshold of art to encompass those from anatomy to zoology,
geography and history, through to science and technology. It is
therefore, at this re-launch juncture, that a wider and diverse
range of activities are overlaid on a single footprint: different
formats of teaching and research as well as experimentation with
different forms of artistic practices as modes of engagement.
In its 2015 configuration, a conceptual drive is cemented into the
existing administrative framework of the Museum. While its prime
footprint remains unchanged, focus is drawn to how the Museum’s
vision and functions are developed with its audiences and
partners, as well as the Museum’s role within the specific urban
locality it inhabits. Narratives within and about the Collections and
the Museum are continuously being deconstructed and rebuilt
with creative, academic, curatorial and institutional collaborators.
These collaborations bring with them new insight and ideas from
across a wide array of contemporary agendas – from the sociopolitical, through to the personal and technological. The Print
Room has become a project space in which it is possible to catch
a glimpse of how the concept of a museum is being reshaped
in real time. Conversations ensue in an environment of bespoke
furnishings and digital platforms that serve to unify distinct sites
and highlight works from the Collections ensconced in boxes,
4
cabinets and vitrines. At once operative and intellectual, didactic
and creative, a space where the focus is on the conditions of
access to and encounter with the art object, the traditional Print
Room has now morphed into a critical device that explores the
multi-faceted aspects of what constitutes a museum. As such it
provides the freedom and fluidity to play with the components
that make up a museum – reshuffle them, pull them apart and put
them back together in new configurations. Our model is that of a
working art museum, which interrogates not only where is the Art,
but when is the Art.
Nina Pearlman is a writer, a curator and the manager of UCL Art Museum.
5
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ix
A Cloud to the Back
Daniel C. Blight
In the sky a mixture of things float around. Without gravity they
are able to drift and bump into one another. Here, motion is
something lethargic, calm and soundless.
On the ground things move faster and snow covers almost
everything in sight. A glove sticks out from the earth, a small
totem for the related ideas of death and burial, but also for the
safe building of things – the sense of ingenuity and ability the
people here possessed. As the land is white, the glove is visible
from hundreds of metres away. In this sense distance offers it a
perspective and its own landscape too.
Running northwards through the middle of a shallow valley is
a shimmering line. Metal – silver and black in colour – runs the
length of this ground. If you walk from one end to another as
the sun sets over the top of the valley, you can watch the last
remaining shards of light bounce off the snow and reflect about
the place. The metal was used for domestic objects before
everything moved upwards. Plates, cups, knives and forks
were cut directly from the ground and distributed evenly and
adequately amongst the population.
Now that everyone has gone we can study this place without
fuss. I’m introducing you for the first time because, as you will be
aware from that brief conversation we had on the phone, we’d
like to invite you to take over; manage this place, as it were.
Something strange happened and we doubt those things will
return from the sky, but for now we can still see them clearly and
we wish you to learn about their meanings and use them as a
point of departure for your own investigations here. It would be
good if you could make new things and create an environment
that people want to return to. This is a good space where you
will be happy I’m sure, at least for a few days and then we can
move you on to a new project.
The important thing here is culture. You have to make sure
that as one culture transforms into another, or one grows
larger and another next to it shrinks as a result, that no object
18
is underprivileged. Things will inevitably be different in size,
you cannot chop and prune to avoid this, but you must make
sure that there is balance and understanding. Everything is
of fundamentally equal importance. The older things have a
relationship to their own time and are no more or less principal
than what will be made now. The relative value and quality of
materials is no longer what ties them to that form of historical
presence or legitimacy – the one you have heard and no doubt
read about – as we are now considering the ideas and the
interactions of things as more crucial. We must see this as an
opportunity to build something worthwhile.
Soon the land will thaw. Until then my colleagues and I
recommend you study the sky until about eight o’clock every
evening, when the sun sets, and then make notes to ensure you
don’t forget anything.
*
Something pithy sits there in the sky. It sits because it is
conscious enough to be upright, to adopt the pose of a human.
But it is sinew, like the stuff I pull from an orange and toss to
one side. Some white material in the shape of a human body.
I walked away from that thing in the hope a more general
familiarity with the landscape might ease me into it.
There was an ineffective air to the objects scattered above;
a sense that they could be forgiven for being functionless at
first glance, but that they would make you run through all their
backstory before they’d stop whatever it was that they were
doing to intrigue. It was my job, and by extension when the place
was populated, everybody’s responsibility to understand such
things.
Old black branches lay out at my feet in the form of veins.
Unrestrained by anything that might contain them they tunnelled
through snow and emerged in clumps on the surface. Black,
but also purple, they were what gave the ground life, uneasy
as it was. My employer, a tired bureaucrat from Somerset, had
convinced me that this place could be turned into something
more promising and despite my first impressions I was willing to
believe him. This was a job after all.
19
My colleagues had prepared a few things for me. Some greentinted glasses that dulled the sunlight exacerbated by the
reflective qualities of snow; coffee in a bag, mostly consumed
with its top rolled down and a bulldog clip sealing the packet
half-fresh; a towel too small to wash a child with and a tub of
Priorat red paprika in a box of mixed veg. I waited until the sun
set, removed the glasses and turned in.
In the morning I drank the coffee and left the glasses on the
table. My eyes hurt from how they turned everything I looked at
lime green. I couldn’t study the objects in the sky at all properly
while wearing them.
My employer had mentioned an old piano in the sky at the end
of the valley, so I walked for thirty minutes or so until I saw
something above me. Tilted on its side, it droned-out a series
of minor sevenths. If you can’t recall the sound of this chord,
think mellow, the most obnoxiously laid-back timbre imaginable;
what you might hear repeatedly as it moves up and down in
scale. A bit like a tired relative you are obliged to eat with at an
overpriced jazz restaurant. It’s an incessant and mind-numbing
intonation.
Families function in the same way minor chords do. They
complement and drag out the sad procession of life. You’ve
got to love them because they offer you candour – a feeling of
complete honesty – but there is absolutely no guarantee their
advice is right. Give them a chance and they’ll put you right
because they have to, ignore them and you’ll wish you listened
more carefully in the first place. Take it or leave it, case-bycase, like the complication and absolute necessity of the cultural
landscape. I don’t envy those people who see things obscured
by a cloudy head. You’ve got to push away what doesn’t stay
useful, with the familiar an unfortunate exception.
I left the children with my ex-wife to come here. I couldn’t live in
the same city as her, despite the feeling of sadness that came
with the thought to move away. When my wife left she took
only those possessions she owned before we met; as if to state
that our relationship was some kind of hiccup and her life could
return to the way it was before us. I put the remainder of her
things in a plastic box on top of the wardrobe in the bathroom.
The box was transparent. I enjoyed, with some conceited
20
sense of humour, looking at our life all collapsed together in a
container, visible but without space or order; a failed history of
the idea of family. I could see the thing reflected in the mirror
when I brushed my teeth in the morning and at night. I’d laugh
out loud and splutter toothpaste all over the sink. Living alone
brought with it a series of new and previously unimaginable
pleasures.
I looked down to rest my neck and spotted the mess I’d made
on my shirt earlier. The faded green squares in rows specked
with yellowy white. Tooth brushing was my mental complex
made physical. This habit will follow me forever. Working and
living alone helps no end. All those banal secrets we have; the
ones we ought not to be embarrassed about just because other
people would find them uninteresting. The secrets that make
you as dull as you expected to be from childhood. The sneaking
suspicion you would never live up to your own expectations. I
thought I wouldn’t write this down or mention it to my employer.
Several days passed and my list of objects grew longer.
The glove, silver and black metal, the conversation with my
colleagues, they all came together to create what I had been
taught to understand as culture – the difference and diversity
of things. The specific and at times abstract relationships
between cultural objects no longer left me bewildered, but
instead I felt them familiar. I had formed relationships between
things I thought meaningful before the snow started to melt and
the clouds came and obscured everything in sight. The piano
was the only visible object, because it was static and sounded
out. Listening became a device for remembering the location
of objects in relation to the ground. As the contents of the sky
changed position gradually, I could no longer locate myself.
Not seeing clearly invited me to listen. It was in this act that I
realised that my personal crisis – the sense of confusion and
frustration with new things as they relate to previous personal
experiences – was of little consequence to the meaning of the
place I had encountered. Culture necessarily finds a life outside
the interpretations of a single individual.
Daniel C. Blight is a writer, critic and curator based in London. He is the Blog Editor at The Photographers’
Gallery and the curator of Chandelier project space.
21
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Extracts from a Conversation between Susan Collins, Slade
Professor, Director, Slade School of Fine Art (SC) and Andrea
Fredericksen, Curator, UCL Art Museum (AF).
AF: Back in 2009 the Slade and UCL Art Museum collaboration
was conceived as an invitation to Slade students to revisit the past
masters at UCL Art Museum and create new work in response.
The purpose was for them to excavate, explore, and/or explode
the archive; to continue to develop their own practices using
contemporary media and contemporary modes of thinking. Over the
seven years it’s produced some amazing results.
SC: We were approached by Simon Gould (Contemporary Projects
Curator) and Wynn Abbott (Web Projects) because the collaboration
was originally conceived as a web-based exhibition. Jon Thomson
and I were both teaching in undergraduate Fine Art Media at the
time, with particular responsibility for the electronic media area, so
we initially became involved as the academic staff at the school with
the most online expertise. We were very aware of the importance
of the relationship between online space and real space, for both of
us address that in our work, so we knew that the exhibition needed
some physical presence. I was also aware at this point that we would
be less likely to get Slade students on board if it was a purely online
thing. Therefore together we came up with the idea that they would
be able to intervene in the museum space itself. Was it just for one
afternoon?
AF: Yes, the first exhibition in 2009 was one afternoon, as a pop-up
for the students, usually with the art work that inspired them by their
side. Then the next year it was an entire weekend, and the year after
it was a week. It was always situated in and around the exhibition
and they would infiltrate, taking over the space. Then in 2012 we
made it the summer exhibition, and then last year it was done in
collaboration with One Day in the City: A Celebration of London
and Literature, a festival coming from the UCL English Department.
There was the exhibition but the Slade artists were also part of the
programming. Over the years, it’s developed from something very
small and it keeps getting bigger. I wondered what you thought is
drawing the students in?
SC: I think there’s so much in the collection, there’s so much for them
to draw on. I think for them it’s a privileged access to a collection. It’s
one of the things that makes this university quite special; that they
30
actually can have such direct access. They can walk just across
the Quadrangle; it’s just on their doorstep. This treasure trove is
accessible and in some ways inaccessible. It’s accessible in terms of
proximity, in terms of your accessibility in opening up the collection to
them, but so much of it is hidden in drawers and to be found, and so
there’s that sense of discovery, and of individual discovery. There’s
so much there that they’re not really going to run out of new things to
find. If you’re exploring one particular thing in your work in any one
given year you will notice things that you might not notice in the next.
SC: I’d like to ask how much has this influenced the way you look at
the collection?
AF: Well, every time a student comes in they have a different idea
of what they want to see. They say, for instance, ‘I’m interested
in doppelgangers’ or ‘I’m interested in the colour yellow’ or ‘I love
…’. It ranges from something really simple to the complex. Then
together we’ll go through the boxes, and usually there’s a team
of other people helping out as well. It’s first an hour but then they
often come back and do some more. It’s really digging deep into
the material. They may start with one idea and leave with another.
There was a student, for example, doing really interesting video
work, who started with mezzotints because she was really interested
in black and white but then her interest morphed into anything to do
with the Madonna and Child, then anything to do with children and
mothers. It was just within one hour that the whole idea changed so
I had to keep thinking about what it is she might want to look at. It
was a real exchange between the two of us. It’s interesting to see
what they start off with, what they leave the room wanting to do, and
then, eventually, what it is that they create. I find the process really
rewarding and I think they do as well.
SC: There are occasions that do come up for artists when you’re
invited to do something in response to a particular situation so in
terms of giving them the experience of actually working with you, of
researching content, researching an archive and collection and then
actually working out how to respond to that in a tangible, interesting
way; that’s really an invaluable opportunity for them.
…..
SC: It’s also a challenge working in your space because you’re not
a white cube gallery space. You are a museum space, or rather a
cross between a museum and an archive – it’s a collection. The
31
students are intervening in a very particular kind of space and
you’re usually showing their intervention alongside the source of the
inspiration so one’s always seeing the collection through their eyes
or through new eyes, and it’s drawing different things out. And I think
that’s the strength of it actually.
AF: I like the idea that it’s a collection, it’s a resource, it’s an archive
– that it’s living and there for them – and they can do whatever they
want with it. They can also think of it as a venue, and just explore
the idea too of what you can do with an archive – an archive of the
Slade’s past – something that they can actually contribute to, that
they can change.
….
SC: I wondered if you’d witnessed particular shifts in flavour in terms
of the kind of proposals made from one year to the next. Or are they
always quite diverse?
AF: They’re always diverse but there are certain themes that people
gravitate towards. There’s always the archivist in the group; someone
who is really interested in systems, the process underpinning
movement sheets, the things that we do on an everyday basis, that a
library does or an archive does. People are intrigued by paperwork.
Or someone who’s usually interested in the anonymous, or seeing
what they can find out about the collection or UCL Art Museum
without ever entering into the space, or what you can do with the
unknown. Or, John Flaxman is always a pull, as are the Japanese
woodcuts.
…
AF: We had fifty students make research appointments last year;
though not all of them submitted proposals. We managed to whittle
the number down from about forty proposals to a final seventeen
participating students. So, it’s quite a process.
SC: And the process is important because our students might
already be very interesting as artists but they have no experience of
making those proposals. It’s not just about them actually accessing
your resources, and understanding, and having those doors open,
and how that affects the development of their work and whether or
not they end up in the show, and how successful the show is. The
additional benefit is the really important professional experience for
them in terms of developing proposals because it’s in-house, they’re
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doing it before they’re out in the world, and they’re getting really
good feedback from staff about the merits of their proposals or
how they might improve them. I think that’s a very good learning
experience.
…
SC: I think it’s also led to us collaborating, or groups from the Slade
collaborating with other collections from UCL as well; the Sculpture
collaborations with the Grant Museum of Zoology and the Rock
Room for instance. I don’t think that the doors were ever closed; I
think that it’s about people making the effort. Individuals will always
go and find what they need, but because we tend to be so busy, so
fully occupied, there hasn’t always been the kind of traffic between
us that there should have been. Maybe that’s exactly why UCL
brought in people for periods to actually catalyse interdisciplinary
activity. I think that we at the Slade have been more proactive in
engaging over the past few years, and it’s brought back so many
riches. I think it’s been hugely enriching for us and hopefully we’ve
been useful and interesting to the people we’ve engaged with as
well, not just within UCL but beyond.
….
SC: So with this year’s show you’re already doing a rethink?
AF: This year – because UCL Art Museum has been closed for
refurbishment – we have invited some of our former student
collaborators back to celebrate the opening with an exhibition
Re-Launch. We’ve been hoping to do more of this because we
now have these worthwhile relationships with Slade alumni, and
they’re doing such interesting things. Over the past few years,
as part of our push to promote access to and research of the
collections, we’ve been keen to nurture new and more interesting
relationships with these emerging artists. Whether through the
development of more performance-based work, artist residencies,
or collaborative projects such as the recent Flaxman Exchange with
Slade alumnus Marcia Farquhar – now also organised by Martine
(Learning & Access Officer, UCL Art Museum), it’s been our ongoing collaboration with the Slade that has driven these new artistic
relationships and successes.
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INDEX
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
xv
xvi
xvii
xviii
Julia McKinlay, Looking Moss, steel, paint, varnish, 50cm x 50cm x 30cm, 2014
Ian Giles, Leap of Faith, video installation, 3 mins 48 secs, 2012
Ian Giles, Leap of Faith, video still, 3 mins 48 secs, 2012
Kate Keara Pelen, Soft Gauntlet (detail), needlework, 40cm x 15cm x 12cm, 2008
Kate Keara Pelen, Soft Helmet, needlework, 40cm x 15cm x 12cm, 2008
Janne Malmros, The Hunt, print on paper, 210cm x 154cm, 2015
Janne Malmros, The Hunt (detail), print on paper, 2015
Janne Malmros, The Hunt (detail), print on paper, 2015
Cyrus Shroff, Dish, EMap screen-shot, variable dimensions, 2015 (artist wishes to acknowledge the support of the V&A)
Milou van der Maaden, Sacred Life, video still, 25 mins, 2015
Milou van der Maaden, Sacred Life, video still, 25 mins, 2015
Printers’ Symphony, A Generic Tree, selection of prints, various techniques, 20 x 24cm each, 2014
Printers’ Symphony, A Generic Tree, documentation, 2014
Jonathan Kipps, Untitled (Fake Bronze Series), paper, graphite, emulsion, masking tape, 25cm x 20cm x 20cm, 2014
Jonathan Kipps, Columns, plasterboard, drywall screws, wood, steel, each 60 x 60 x 477cm, 2014
Nadine Mahoney, Journey Man, oil & acrylic on aluminium, 60cm x 40cm, 2013
(photo: Tom Carter)
Nadine Mahoney, Once more with feeling, oil on aluminium, 104cm x 124cm, 2015 (photo: Tom Carter)
Katja Larsson, Hullmandel, stone, 15cm x 8cm x 7cm, 2014