In the
early 1970s Marc Chaimowicz was interested in ideas of art, which could challenged
artists to move beyond the Duchampian readymade that had challenged the concept
of the art object. During the period, Chaimowicz wrote about performance art
for Studio International, in addition to actively participating in the origins of avant-garde
artist film and performance in Britain. His early works reflected the artist’s
close identification with both filmmaking and the visual arts. It is an art
that is both performance and temporary installation. He is part of a generation
that vastly expanded the parameters of visual language often fusing
experimentation and the classics: electronic imagery and thorough explorations
of process expanded technical and performance possibilities within the visual
arts. During a period which gave rise to Fluxus, Structuralists and
Conceptualists, Chaimowicz and his generation of visual artists advocated new
strategies and new notion about the art object that opened nonrestrictive
creative vitality and diversity affecting not only the visual arts, but also
performance and music.
Similar to
many of the young artists to emerge in the late sixties, Chaimowicz
re-evaluated the efficacy and morality of the western materialist society
through art practices. The response by these artists was to reappraise both the
traditional modes of representation and those of the institutions of
art—galleries, museums, and the market structure. The objective was to
investigate how the heterogeneous set of codes that comprised the creative
process produced meaning and how art could be democratized with the culture as
a whole. For these artists, this
meant rejecting the phenomenological and “permanent” status of the art project
in favor of more self-critical and discursive practices of time-based
procedures, involving the spectator as a collaborator in the given meaning and
completed status to the art work. However, for Chaimowicz, there is an evolving
attempt to de-emphasize the role of the artist in the performance while at the
same time retaining the idea of the work as a creative process shared by
artists and audience.
This
outlook resulted in Chaimowicz’s artistic production moving across disciplines.
He has continually been intrigued by the exploration of different media and
situations outside the isolation of the studio. Chaimowicz has over the course
of his evolution grown closer to the disciplines of applied arts. His interest
in design is directly related to his desire to create a holistic and
aesthetically integrated environment. This emphasizes the concept of “place”,
which is evoked through both the choice and arrangement of its formal elements,
in addition to the use of lighting and the content itself.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Since his early work “Approach Road”,
the artist has invented structures filled with decorative elements that
populate and impact his environmental works and installations.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Most of these constructions play off
the conventions of two and three dimensionality, in terms of both sculpture and
architecture. Site and location is important for the site or the context of the
body, is also the point of exchange with the world.
During the
70’s, when engagement with political and gender issues were the normal for
those involved with performance, Marc Chaimowicz’s approach was notable for his
play with ambiguous sexuality. The artist however appeared quite at home with
Bacjelard’s notion of the poets of
space. His performances during that period has been described as investigations
of the secrets of femininity in the most male of men. His performances were not
statements but rather points of opportunities for the viewers to negotiate and
reflect on gender politics.
Marc
Camille Chaimowicz’s outlook is reflective of his transnational identity. His
father was Polish and studied pure mathematics in Warsaw during the 1930s, and
also worked with Marie Curie in Paris. The family came to England in 1954 and
first settled in Stevenage. Chaimowicz received an education between England
and France. Chaimowicz studied at Camberwell School of Art under Frank Auerbach
and Michael Andrews, and then went to on to study at the Slade School in the
early 1970s, where Coldstream sympathized with his critique of painting and
supported him in his need to find new ways to practice. Chaimowicz presently
teaches both at the Reading University in England and the Ecoles des Beaux-arts
in Dijon.
Chaimociz’s
influences are vast, with figures like Cocteau and (especially) Proust whose
concepts of self are close to his own. Proust imagined the self as an “ empty
apparatus”. Similarly, throughout Chaimowicz’s career, a single pattern
predominates: the self who requires validation and the support that love can
offer. He has talked of his early
paintings as greatly influenced by Jasper Johns and Arshile Gorky. Adolf Loss,
later a mentor for Chaimowicz, provided the artist a point of entry for the
investigation of architecture and sculpture. His fascination with architecture
is not surprising given that site and space, in terms of pubic and private
aspects, controls our connections with other people. Union with others is both
a danger and desired aim in Chaimowicz’s art. In his early work, this takes the
form of erotic attachment. |
