Celine Condorelli ‘How To Work Together’ May-June 2014
The closed show curtain is easily taken for a tease. It projects an aura of seductive civility whilst performing its intended role of exclusion and concealment. So when a gust of wind blows it apart we instinctively glance into a world within, only to witness our intrusion when the gaze is returned. Celine Condorelli’s curtain takes centre stage, has nothing to hide and only intends to reveal more; albeit to its own advantage. Translucent and shimmery gold but devoid of any fluted pretensions it forms a flat sigmoid curve-like shape near the entryway, swayed by an above extractor fan especially installed in the archway. This makes visible through affects a coordinated airflow that gently links and unveils a room of commonly recognised furnishings: bench, table, curtain, lights, cord extensions and door. Providing a narrative environment in which purposeful objects are adjusted and rearranged for shared processes of use, allegorised towards a multidisciplinary of friends who receive thanks for their various roles of support.
This show and tell between behind-the-scenes and downstage was already self-evident in projects like ‘Support Structure’, giving away Condorelli’s PhD background in architectural research, informed by architecturally-led installations of the early 20th Century. Such acknowledgements continue here; Expo Modernist game changers like Lilly Reich’s silk curtains, Frederick Keisler’s user adaptive displays and El Lissitzky; all committed to communicating architectural ideas through the medium of exhibition. A phantom baton she picks up and runs with for the benefit of a future where artistic installation is a distinctive architectural practice, and where interdisciplinary play carries heavy historical contexts. It seems appropriate then, that this thematic turn towards purposeful personalisation should take place at London’s Chisenhale gallery, a white space demonstrating globalised commonality which is given personification, and which she has previously exhibited in. This time under its project umbrella ‘How To Work Together’ sharing itself with two other galleries and reflecting a like-minded attempt for a funded space to engineer invested interests in such extra alternative networks of production.
The airflow leads us towards a white office door wedged ajar; this new entry appears at once unintentionally open and now curiously inviting as an interior world of administrative support usually enveloped behind white walls is unfolded. The wedge was apparently one of many props previously used to hold up the roof of Old Spitalfields market during its reconstruction, found and given by artist Simon Popper (who has a unique view on gifts). The act becomes Condorelli’s own ‘Red Wedge’ manifestation, an inoffensive resistance to the white cube enclosure, revealing the humbug wizard of art operations that keeps a gallery ticking. Suspicious towards any Parrhasius-like contest at visual illusions and preferring instead to accept ‘Alterations To Existing Conditions’, the title that groups these disparate interventions. However playful, architectural design cannot avoid running into political expressions and although not entirely declared, one of the triumphs here is a proposition that friendship offers a pertinent universal context in which to communicate any ideological inheritances within the materialised social space; that is if it still wants to. A kind of ‘function follows friendship’ philosophy well suited to developing the modernist macrostructure as its own familiar but flawed friend that needs a sip from the relational cup. Likewise, a concrete canvas in the middle of the room loses its material brutality appearing draped over something to be revealed-and it is-made with musician John Tilbury in mind, serving as his piano bench for a later performance. Positing personalised phenomenological social relations encoded into the contemporary gallery domain. This information would be overlooked, were it not for the accompanying reference booklet providing a script of contextual insights, alluding to its own role as the public-goers ever supportive companion.
Whilst an interrogation of hybrid functions and physical closure and openness is all well and good, Condorelli directly addresses the more pressing over-arching concern here within the supporting text when she calls this re-working of friendships a “refuge from productivism” within capitalist society. Yet there is something amiss; for all the impregnated contextual warmth and opening up of the gallery it never quite breaks through the material detachment of minimalist application. The objects are freed from their ordinary ‘productivist’ functions in order to serve alternative self-fulfilling ones. But friendship is exclusive as it is inclusive, and who are Celine’s network of friends but Philosophers, Curators, Lecturers, Artists and a Musician. This is the production company that institutional contemporary visual culture already happily provides havens for. And so the exhibition space reveals itself to be a self-made sanctuary that allows the artist to produce such refuges.
So what else can the viewer gain from this ‘How To’? ‘The Double And The Half’ best aims to put into practice these shared desires. By the side of the room a table apparatus appears scaffold; crossbred between study and playground equipment. The wall facing side has had both its legs removed now propped up by ladders; a readymade bracing which actually offers necessarily better support because attached is a climbing frame- reminiscent of a life guard’s ladder-reaching up towards the galleries’ exposed window. The tabletop is a Royal Mail one, upon which a final message is given access to us; a print-out of ongoing conversations between Condorelli and others, intended for publication through the gallery, leaning unsurprisingly towards a cooperative nature and entitled ‘The Company She Keeps’. Taking the subject of friendship and work as its trajectories, the entire exercise here is brought into a dialectical enquiry with-and of-itself which encourages lengthy engagement. Included among the collaborators is sociologist Avery Gordon, with whom the table is also bestowed for future use. Consequently, the window view and evidence of a wooden step ladder-the kind typically used for accessing hard to reach book shelves-could double as a metaphor to Gordon’s own professional encounters. Indeed, in the accompanying list of artworks it states; ‘climbing the work is at your own risk’ (an indirect invitation if ever there was one) and one wonders whether this is not some kind of in-joke or game with human behaviourism. It seems odd that any tactical refuge from production should be achieved by expanding productions but here professional is intertwined with personal identity and whilst never intentionally escaped, alternate opportunities of production and alliances are explored, in the hope to at least make light work of it all.
Philo can be for friendship and love of thought. In the far end of the room Philodendron plants rest atop a hexagonal ottoman island bench under a halo of makeshift grow lights, appearing conceptually baroque in its dramatic simplicity. ‘The object breathes into the surrounding and also inhales the realities of the environment’, Frederick Keisler once said. Artificially photosynthesising plants tend to exist in artificial surroundings and from here a full view of the gold curtain suggests its showbiz quality. Like the room’s airflow, capitalistic production is omnipresent, revealing itself through affects. But if unwanted work suffocates life, then Condorelli desires to breathe a wanted life back into her work.
* supporting exhibition text can be found here
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The closed show curtain is easily taken for a tease. It projects an aura of seductive civility whilst performing its intended role of exclusion and concealment. So when a gust of wind blows it apart we instinctively glance into a world within, only to witness our intrusion when the gaze is returned. Celine Condorelli’s curtain takes centre stage, has nothing to hide and only intends to reveal more; albeit to its own advantage. Translucent and shimmery gold but devoid of any fluted pretensions it forms a flat sigmoid curve-like shape near the entryway, swayed by an above extractor fan especially installed in the archway. This makes visible through affects a coordinated airflow that gently links and unveils a room of commonly recognised furnishings: bench, table, curtain, lights, cord extensions and door. Providing a narrative environment in which purposeful objects are adjusted and rearranged for shared processes of use, allegorised towards a multidisciplinary of friends who receive thanks for their various roles of support.
This show and tell between behind-the-scenes and downstage was already self-evident in projects like ‘Support Structure’, giving away Condorelli’s PhD background in architectural research, informed by architecturally-led installations of the early 20th Century. Such acknowledgements continue here; Expo Modernist game changers like Lilly Reich’s silk curtains, Frederick Keisler’s user adaptive displays and El Lissitzky; all committed to communicating architectural ideas through the medium of exhibition. A phantom baton she picks up and runs with for the benefit of a future where artistic installation is a distinctive architectural practice, and where interdisciplinary play carries heavy historical contexts. It seems appropriate then, that this thematic turn towards purposeful personalisation should take place at London’s Chisenhale gallery, a white space demonstrating globalised commonality which is given personification, and which she has previously exhibited in. This time under its project umbrella ‘How To Work Together’ sharing itself with two other galleries and reflecting a like-minded attempt for a funded space to engineer invested interests in such extra alternative networks of production.
The airflow leads us towards a white office door wedged ajar; this new entry appears at once unintentionally open and now curiously inviting as an interior world of administrative support usually enveloped behind white walls is unfolded. The wedge was apparently one of many props previously used to hold up the roof of Old Spitalfields market during its reconstruction, found and given by artist Simon Popper (who has a unique view on gifts). The act becomes Condorelli’s own ‘Red Wedge’ manifestation, an inoffensive resistance to the white cube enclosure, revealing the humbug wizard of art operations that keeps a gallery ticking. Suspicious towards any Parrhasius-like contest at visual illusions and preferring instead to accept ‘Alterations To Existing Conditions’, the title that groups these disparate interventions. However playful, architectural design cannot avoid running into political expressions and although not entirely declared, one of the triumphs here is a proposition that friendship offers a pertinent universal context in which to communicate any ideological inheritances within the materialised social space; that is if it still wants to. A kind of ‘function follows friendship’ philosophy well suited to developing the modernist macrostructure as its own familiar but flawed friend that needs a sip from the relational cup. Likewise, a concrete canvas in the middle of the room loses its material brutality appearing draped over something to be revealed-and it is-made with musician John Tilbury in mind, serving as his piano bench for a later performance. Positing personalised phenomenological social relations encoded into the contemporary gallery domain. This information would be overlooked, were it not for the accompanying reference booklet providing a script of contextual insights, alluding to its own role as the public-goers ever supportive companion.
Whilst an interrogation of hybrid functions and physical closure and openness is all well and good, Condorelli directly addresses the more pressing over-arching concern here within the supporting text when she calls this re-working of friendships a “refuge from productivism” within capitalist society. Yet there is something amiss; for all the impregnated contextual warmth and opening up of the gallery it never quite breaks through the material detachment of minimalist application. The objects are freed from their ordinary ‘productivist’ functions in order to serve alternative self-fulfilling ones. But friendship is exclusive as it is inclusive, and who are Celine’s network of friends but Philosophers, Curators, Lecturers, Artists and a Musician. This is the production company that institutional contemporary visual culture already happily provides havens for. And so the exhibition space reveals itself to be a self-made sanctuary that allows the artist to produce such refuges.
So what else can the viewer gain from this ‘How To’? ‘The Double And The Half’ best aims to put into practice these shared desires. By the side of the room a table apparatus appears scaffold; crossbred between study and playground equipment. The wall facing side has had both its legs removed now propped up by ladders; a readymade bracing which actually offers necessarily better support because attached is a climbing frame- reminiscent of a life guard’s ladder-reaching up towards the galleries’ exposed window. The tabletop is a Royal Mail one, upon which a final message is given access to us; a print-out of ongoing conversations between Condorelli and others, intended for publication through the gallery, leaning unsurprisingly towards a cooperative nature and entitled ‘The Company She Keeps’. Taking the subject of friendship and work as its trajectories, the entire exercise here is brought into a dialectical enquiry with-and of-itself which encourages lengthy engagement. Included among the collaborators is sociologist Avery Gordon, with whom the table is also bestowed for future use. Consequently, the window view and evidence of a wooden step ladder-the kind typically used for accessing hard to reach book shelves-could double as a metaphor to Gordon’s own professional encounters. Indeed, in the accompanying list of artworks it states; ‘climbing the work is at your own risk’ (an indirect invitation if ever there was one) and one wonders whether this is not some kind of in-joke or game with human behaviourism. It seems odd that any tactical refuge from production should be achieved by expanding productions but here professional is intertwined with personal identity and whilst never intentionally escaped, alternate opportunities of production and alliances are explored, in the hope to at least make light work of it all.
Philo can be for friendship and love of thought. In the far end of the room Philodendron plants rest atop a hexagonal ottoman island bench under a halo of makeshift grow lights, appearing conceptually baroque in its dramatic simplicity. ‘The object breathes into the surrounding and also inhales the realities of the environment’, Frederick Keisler once said. Artificially photosynthesising plants tend to exist in artificial surroundings and from here a full view of the gold curtain suggests its showbiz quality. Like the room’s airflow, capitalistic production is omnipresent, revealing itself through affects. But if unwanted work suffocates life, then Condorelli desires to breathe a wanted life back into her work.
* supporting exhibition text can be found here
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