The Art of Silence
Louise Stern
It is a strangely pervasive misconception that silence exists in opposition to noise, that it is the warm embrace of the womb besides impotent white noise that has the advantage of being out in the world. That silence can be a reflexive reaction; in fact silence is simply there, without any demand made to tug it over to join itself bodily to anything else.
Most art is silent in itself and many curators take this literally and push it to slot into noisy contexts so that it will not get lost.
The Expander show at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 2004 was remarkable next to the madness of the art fairs that were happening at the same time–Frieze, its little brother Zoo, Scope and various other exhibitions. Its literal reckoning of the notion of expansion managed to allow the art to create its own subtle atmosphere. Nothing as blatant as direct connections were made, yet the show was much more than a motley collection of objects gathered together. The artworks included Christopher Landoni’s velvety black-on-black paintings, Mark Titchner’s wise pronouncements and Toby Ziegler’s quiet landscapes and they clearly appreciated co-existing with one another.
Now the assistant curator of Expander, Michael Bank Christoffersen has moved on to bring the same quiet, natural context to other artists and other shows. The Danish-born Christoffersen most recently curated "Solitude: London Artists Today" at Upstairs Berlin.
Although in his introductory essay Christoffersen states "Here we are confronted with a generation that has seen the real powers that be around them, who have resisted the temptations of a consumerist culture gone wild, resisted the need for categorization within art and resisted the temptations of decision makers who never listen anyhow. This is perhaps a lost generation, but not in any way that has been seen before," the strength of his curating lies in the timelessness of the themes. They could exist with equal relevance in any age and with any artists.
The facets of solitude which get the most exposure in this thoughtful show are not the cerebral threads of the idea of solitude, but the embodiment of the idea of space, space to breathe, space to allow the starry works to burn as bright next to each other as they do alone.
Indeed the works chosen by Christoffersen do this beautifully. Mat Collishaw’s decadent spiky blooms hang like chandeliers against pure black backgrounds, as sharp and pointy as Mauro Bonacina’s paintings of nails sinking into their bright blue foregrounds. The Oriental delicacy and strength of Anna Genger’s bleeding blooms shed bits of themselves as do the crystal snowflakes melting in Barnaby Hosking’s video work.
Christoffersen’s shows start with a flexible nucleus of an idea at the centre. Bits from his readings, the idea of Blanchot’s Orphic Gaze here, an especially melancholy and frustrated passage from Lermontov there, fuse intuitively with personal experiences and remnants of popular culture over time. Artists whose work has resonance with this central idea are found, rather than individual works selected and the show shapes itself from there.
This fluid and personal way of curating seems an ideal way of creating a continual series of shows that will all have a common generosity towards what is yet to come for the young artists Christoffersen works with.
Since the central notions share a sense of infinity, they can come together or draw apart as they choose, bearing well for a body of shows, if you will. The limit of human experience and emotion and their translation into art and the idea of failure and death are themes presently being mulled over by Christoffersen, who has exhibitions in the works in both the United States and Europe.
