Sam Keogh, The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden Cartoon, mixed media installation with performance, 2024. Photo credit: Kerlin Gallery
Sam Keogh has work on exhibition at the moment at the Warburg Institute. His collages are attached to the walls and at times he will visit the gallery and animate his work. I have posted in the past on collage as well as animated collages, as extensions of contemporary drawing practice, but looking at Sam Keogh's work gives me an opportunity to look at how collage can quite naturally be extended into performance.
The great thing about collage is that it brings with it the various histories and associations connected to the context out of which the pieces of collage emerge. This approach can also lead to a way of thinking about research. In Keogh's case the research is itself a form of collage, whilst his work uses the cut up and put together forms of collage, but he usually makes the elements himself in response to the research. This sounds complicated I know, so it is probably easier to describe what he actually does in detail.
The Hunt of the Unicorn
The installation in the Warburg institute is a re-staging of some of Keogh's collages that were responses to 'The Hunt of the Unicorn', a series of seven tapestries normally housed in The Met Cloisters, a New York museum whereby medieval architecture is incorporated into a modern building, purpose-built to evoke the Middle Ages. Made in Flanders at the turn of the 16th century, these tapestries have a very complex iconography and provenance. Taken from their aristocratic owners during the French Revolution, they were at one point used to protect fruit trees and potatoes from frost as well as being used as blankets to keep horses warm in the winter. Rediscovered in a barn in the 1850s, they were returned to the La Rochefoucauld family, who then sold them in the 1920s to JD Rockefeller Jr, who subsequently sold them to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Keogh is obviously fascinated by this history as it challenges our notion of quality and the meaning of art. Something that can at one time be a horse blanket in a stable, can at another time be a million dollar artwork, hung in a major museum. This is perhaps echoed by the artist’s use of blue painters’ tape as a material to both attach his collage to the wall and join together its components. His imagery includes figures from The Lord of the Rings, ‘The Secret Identity Stamp of the Peasants’ from an old edition of Friedrich Engels’s The Peasant War in Germany, Anduril’s Sentry cameras (which operate along the South-East coast of England, an elusive and secretive physical AI border consisting of 5.5 meter tall towers which are fitted with radar as well as thermal and electro-optical imaging sensors which continuously scan the sea for people seeking safety in the UK), as well as other images taken from the Warburg institute's photographic archives. He redraws from his researched sources, using coloured pencils, graphite, watercolour and acrylic, which means that as he cuts and organises the collage, there is a certain 'handiwork' to the surface that gives coherence to its visual appearance.
On March the 11th there will be a performance when Keogh will "activate his collaged drawing in the exhibition with a live performance which brings two of its characters into dialogue as they search to find the origin of ‘The Secret Identity Stamp of the Peasants’." (Taken verbatim from the Warburg Institute advertising copy) In effect the 'script' for his performance, emerges out of the research for the imagery; the "stamp" represents a form of secret identification or clandestine communication used by peasants during the 16th-century German Peasants' War and I suspect that Keogh found in the Engels text, a foreshadowing of what was to become the French Revolution. Peasants, at the time of the French Revolution, comprised 80% of the population, and their involvement was critical to its success. While the revolution was led by the bourgeoisie, it was really the involvement of the peasants that forced the abolition of feudalism, allowed them to acquire the land they had worked on for hundreds of years. The killing of the unicorn is a complex symbolic fantasy narrative, Keogh's decision to remind us of the redistribution of land back to the people after the French Revolution, perhaps representing an even more fantastic fantasy, one where the aristocratic ownership of land in the UK is finally ended and returned to common land.
The Unicorn is Killed and brought to the Castle,
The Unicorn is Killed and brought to the Castle, 2023: colouring pencil, graphite, watercolour, acrylic, painters tape and gold leaf on 70gsm acid free layout paper, mic stands + recording of performance: Installation at The Paper Biennial 2024, Museum Rijswijk, The Netherlands
When you look at his installation for 'The Unicorn is Killed and brought to the Castle', you can see that his installations can also act as stage sets. I was reminded of those cardboard and paper cut out play stage sets for children, that used to be popular during the first half of the last century.
Children's play stage set
These model theatres were often used to stage Shakespeare's history plays, and I sense that Keogh would be happy for his audience to see themselves as if confronting a scene from one of them. Elden Knotweed NPC, 2022
colouring pencil, graphite, watercolour, acrylic and gold leaf on 70gsm acid free layout paper
Orcish Palisade NPC, 2022
The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden
The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden: Cartoon: 2024: acrylic, watercolour, coloured pencil, gold leaf and painter’s tape on 70gsm acid-free layout paper
I also think that Keogh wants to highlight the fact that writers such as Tolkien and their obsession with recreating history via fantasy, have given us all a certain narrative against which our histories are both compared and inlaid into. In images such as Orcish Palisade NPC, Keogh reminds us that all is in fact narrative and that it is mainly through story that we understand both ourselves and our world. Keogh's story overlaps with my own, I read Lord of the Rings when I was eleven years old. I was entranced by it and even now over 60 years later, that experience still lives with me and shapes my own narrative and how I envisage the stories of war that I hear and see in contemporary news footage. I now understand that Tolkien when writing his grand narrative, had in mind what was then the recent Second World War conflict. The book being a powerful anti-totalitarian narrative, the ultimate defeat of evil, not coming from superior military might or tyrannical power, but through the courage, resilience and voluntary sacrifice of "ordinary people".
These stories are I feel not that dissimilar to those we invent in relation to our bodies, something that makes me thoughtful as to how I might continue to develop work done in response to making my own versions of anatomical flap books.
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