Gesamtkuntswerk
The springboard for this exhibition was Kunstkammers
- collection cabinets and rooms of the 16th and 17th centuries in which European aristocrats could display their wealth while providing a framework for the classification and analysis of the material world. Often organised in a way that presented a visual narrative of evolution from the natural world to machines, and revealing a Baroque taste for foreign objects or exotica, they often included the latest mechanical toys and plaster reproductions of plants or animals painted to look real. For the European aristocracy, this ordering of a miniature world reflected their control over the external world, which, along with a faith in technological progress, sounds suspiciously contemporary at the end of the 20th century. In the darkened space of the gallery, Alexander Knox's Kunstkammer (1999) - a neo-Baroque portable entertainment cabinet - comprised a highly stylised gold-trimmed box raised on a shelf, its doors opened to reveal an infinitely reflecting mirrored interior. Like the stage set from a Gothic sci-fi disco, a chandelier-like explosion hung from the ceiling above the box's blue-lit floors. As a counterpoint, Alex Pittendrigh's ten wood-turned objects (Gesamtkuntwerk, 1999) shone pearly white in a sharp spotlight. Arranged in a pile on a waist-high shelf, their forms suggested erotic surfaces that blurred the boundary between the organic and the man-made.
Knox's Kunstkammer high-lights a fascination with vision and how it works in a multimedia world. In his theatrical miniature, mirrors don't reflect external reality but extend space infinitely. This interest in depthlessness finds obvious parallels in contemporary technologies such as virtual reality and video games, but the artist creates a sense of the Sublime through cheap tricks - it's all done with mirrors.
Pittendrigh's sculptures are based on ancient vessels or urns used for ceremony or storage. Painted with pearlescent paint, the objects reflect an obsession with artificiality as well as the seemingly arbitrary collection within a Kunstkammer, whereby objects of antiquity and the natural world were seen as equivalent. Pittendrigh's luminous grouping resonated like the surfaces of a Baroque painting, an impression reinforced by the sharp spotlight, as if light itself were the object of the piece (an idea which operated in parallel with the mirrors of Knox's Kunstkammer). Despite this, the objects evoked a desire in the viewer to reach out and touch their vibrant surfaces.
'Gesamtkunstwerk' - with its ambiguous exploration of sensuous surfaces, questioning of the complexities of an elusive and ever-changing world, and its sense of alternative realities - revealed the artists' almost Baroque sensibility, while reflecting upon contemporary technologies that privilege vision at the expense of touch. Nonetheless, 'Gesamtkunstwerk' highlighted a slightly different perception of vision. Pittendrigh's erotic surfaces and Knox's mimicry of depth are teasing works which are physically and conceptually elusive - the viewer could become entangled in their surfaces or lost in the infinite space of their reflections.
