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 Unicorn in Captivity
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
Keogh's response to the The Hunt of the Unicorn is to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge, not by giving us some sort of historical reminder of what has happened over time to the tapestry, but by creating what his gallery terms, "an indeterminate space in which materials, memories and affects begin to smudge into each other." I.e. he tries to make an analogy, whereby he reminds us how the messiness of history is often cleaned up by historians and artists, who themselves, whether they like it or not, are always caught up in the messiness of life.
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.
As I walked through the Arsenale I was very aware of walls that were hundreds of years old, these were walls that had 'history' and some works sat better than others against that background. Certain artists had invested time and energy into their images' surface construction, and these works had a textural intensity that allowed them to hold their own against the patina of the old Arsenale walls. A good example of this was the work of Felipe Baeza. Baeza is a Mexican artist that uses cut out and manipulated papers to build his images. He makes incisions, scrapes surfaces down, sands back through layers and dyes areas using what look like batik techniques, to create variegated textures and develop intense differentiated surfaces.
Felipe Baeza: Surface detail of 'Imaginary self portrait'
In his images bodies are transformed, sometimes becoming half-human and half-plant, as in “Emerging in difference” where the lower limbs have turned into thorny branches, or “Por caminos ignorandos” where a network of branches emerges from the head and invades the rectangle's pictorial space, finally reaching down to the mouths of two half buried men.
“Emerging in difference”
Detail
Detail of a surface and the edge of the paper 'floating' within the frame
Each surface has its own intense presence. The spikes of the thorns are cut out and I presume glued onto a brown suede like surface, this is itself cut out and set into a subtlety textured grey background that looks as if it had been created by some sort of paint resist process; the man's body was constructed by sections of much lighter paper, this also had a very particular surface quality and each section was carefully fitted, so that the edges between became precise lines that carried the message, 'I am exactly where I have to be'. This precision also operates to make the image believable and to give the work authenticity. If you want an image to be convincing, especially if it is something of a mythic or fantasy nature, it is a good idea to include something that grounds it in reality, and in Baeza's case he uses his surfaces to do this.
It is also interesting to see how the paper he is working on comes to an edge and how this is presented in the frame. By 'floating' the work he is able to stress the objectness of the paper he works on and its physicality, issues that directly confront the work's fantasy nature.
Imaginary self-portrait
“Por caminos ignorandos”
Paper edge. Look at how paper has been treated to achieve textural intensity
Detail: “Por caminos ignorandos”
Felipe Baeza: Wayward
Sometimes it is the way things are presented that draws me to them. Violeta Parra, a musician, back in the 1960s began making 'songs that paint themselves' as a natural extension of her music. Like Baeza her cut out and stitched, knitted and macrame forms give textural weight to her images
Violeta Parra: details
Violeta Parra: Installation of framed works
However it was the way that the curators had installed Parra's work that drew me in. Those of you that follow this blog will be very aware that I'm fascinated by presentation techniques and how they affect the way a work is read. By having the images presented at an angle and at the low height that they were, it changed the viewer's relationship in a variety of ways. First of all it suggested the relationship a maker often has with the thing made. For instance textile frames such as those for weaving are often set up like this to allow the maker to work in such a way that their hand can access all areas of the piece being made, or drawing boards might be set up in this way. So in some ways the relationship between spectator and work was made to be very physical. However these works were still behind glass and framed, so that the distancing this creates was still in effect. These 'plinths' however also suggested a more sculptural understanding of the work and as such this 'elevated' the material aspects of the images, making me more aware of their physical nature as cut out pieces of worked on fabric. Like Baeza she was making imagery that was unreal and of a private fantasy nature, and I was being made to look at it as a physical reality. She was though first and foremost a musician.
Violeta Parra
The fact that someone could be known for two or more art forms in the 1960s was rare and in some ways Parra was well before her time. Her music still sounds relevant and holds its own against a contemporary soundscape and I would suggest that her images need to be looked at in conjunction with the art-form that they in effect emerged from.
Violeta Parra
I also sensed a shamanic aspect to her imagery, and it reminded me of images I had seen a long time ago made by an Amazon shaman and like Baeza, Parra is south American. The conjunction of music and imagery being central to many spiritual practices, the one aiding the other as the brain is taken on a journey out of reality and into the spirit world.
Ilit Azoulay: Queendom: detail
There was a very different technical approach to textural content in the Israel pavilion. The surfaces of Baeza and Parra rely on the textual reality of fabric and paper to give them gravity but there are other more contemporary ways of developing surface texture and its conceptual read, one of which was used by Ilit Azoulay. Photography is a wonderful tool when it comes to being able to use textural reality. Using the right lens and focal distance you can ensure that almost hallucinogenic detail is captured. In this instance Ilit Azoulay re-appropriated the research work of art historian David Storm Rice. He had made detailed documentary photographs of thousands of pieces of inlaid and embossed metal tableware, objects made and sold in the Middle East, regardless of their ethnic or religious origins. Most of these objects had been found in Western museums which was where Storm Rice photographed them. This fact alone had a lot to say about post-colonial history. Ilit Azoulay scanned Rice's original photographs then enlarged, cut, superimposed and transformed them by photomontage, thus giving the objects a new life and a new story, now setting out these constructed images as if they had emerged from an ancient feminine “Queendom”. This digital female kingdom explains Ilit Azoulay being a response to the poor functioning of patriarchal power structures.
Ilit Azoulay: Queendom
Azoulay relies on the textural similarity of ancient metal objects to enable her to join up the various images coherently, this together with the surface texture of photography itself coheres these images together, but in effect they are still collages and operate within the collage tradition.
There were hundreds of artists to look at in Venice, these few posts being a very small taste of what to expect. If and when you do go, try and look for things that you can use to extend your own work, in this case I was of course thinking about how in making my own images I could attend far more to surface detail, and the material qualities of the images I make.
