Amie Siegel’s work has long probed the psychological weight of the objects that litter our lives. Given that her mother owned a retail business and her father was a psychoanalyst, the blending of materialism and the mind that continues to emerge in her practice seems nearly unavoidable. Consider “Provenance,” her breakthrough 2013 three-part video and photo installation that tracks the ownership history of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret-designed chairs. Originally intended as functional furniture for an Indian government building, the midcentury pieces are now rarified art market commodities, only accessible to wealthy collectors. Punctuated by slow pans of homes and showrooms and auction house bidding footage, “Provenance” moves in reverse chronology and peels back layers of embedded postcolonial patrimony, which continue to influence the material and cultural value of these objects.In her first solo show in London, “Strata,” now on view at South London Gallery through March 26, Siegel pushes further into the recesses of the mind, exploring fantasy and fetish. Projected on a cinematic scale, “Quarry,” 2015, traces the extraction of marble from Vermont’s Danby quarry — the deepest underground quarry in the world, which runs a mile and a half into the earth — to its installation in luxury Manhattan skyscrapers. The process is rendered almost romantically thanks to Siegel’s camera choreography of tracking shots spliced by static tableaux; Neptune from Gustav Holst’s Planets suite dramatically scores the film. Yet the pristine interiors are mere make-believe: The artist used digitally rendered spec imagery used by real estate sales offices, suggesting that the value of these fantasy flats lies in one’s idea of them rather than the actual materials that dress them.“Fetish,” 2016, focuses on Sigmund Freud’s personal collection of archaeological artifacts. Filmed at the Freud Museum in north London, the film reveals the collection’s clandestine annual nocturnal cleaning. Like “Quarry,” “Fetish” asks one to contemplate how an object’s import is conveyed and underscores the power of symbolism, ritualism, and maybe even a touch of mania in the construction of value.Tying these two video works together is a piece of rose-colored Italian marble on display in a vitrine like an invaluable relic. The stone shard hails from the lobby of New York’s Trump Tower; Siegel bought the marble fragment on eBay, where it was listed for sale after the 2016 US election that stunned the world when Donald Trump failed to gain the popular vote but still won the Electoral College, propelling him to a hotly contested presidency that grows increasingly specious by the day. The marble, once just a mark of one-percent wealth, is now a symbol of America’s dark and dirty Id.After “Strata” opened on January 20 — the day of President Trump’s inauguration — ARTINFO spoke with Siegel about richness, ritualism, and the shadowy psychology of our political moment.“Quarry” has an undeniable opulence to it, given its filmic formal qualities (an orchestral score and cinematic scale), not to mention the luxury marble that populates it. Why did you choose to draw your imagery from simulated mock-ups of apartment interiors rather than real spaces? My work often takes on or performs the behaviors of the system it describes. In “Quarry,” this involves a certain “opulence,” as you put it, paralleled by the piece itself. The scale and fragmented use of an epic, even cosmic score meets the grandeur of the vast marble caverns of the quarry, and the aspirations of the Manhattan interiors in which the marble is deployed. Yet, those gestures also contradict. For example, when the same score heard in the magnitude of the quarry later returns as the camera slowly glides by a marble backsplash and sink faucet, the epic is faced with its opposite: the quotidian. Those grand aspirations, or reach, are naturally echoed in the luxury model apartments as the interiors — the built-out windows, walls, furnishing, fixtures — are speculative, they represent an idea of something to come, an idea of value, acquired for the future. “Quarry” slips between the real and the representation, using digital renderings, surrogates and substitutions much the same way the apartment models include imitation artworks “in the manner of” or reveal their false fronts, like a western town or movie studio lot whose tall facades you walk around to find a skeletal structure behind.In “Fetish,” you explore Freud's personal collection of archaeological artifacts and how they are cleaned. Why did you want to focus on Freud's collection specifically, and what attracted you to the ritualism of its care?A few years ago, I was in an exhibition at the Freud Museum in London and through that had the opportunity to wander the psychoanalyst’s former practice rooms at night. A museum caretaker caught me behind the velvet ropes looking closely at Freud’s object collections and a friendly conversation ensued where he told me of the practice of taking all the objects out of the cases and cleaning them at night. I was immediately struck by the parallels between the “behind the scenes” activity of the museum and the private disclosures of psychoanalysis. The moment felt ripe for exploration, a kind of “primal scene” of both Freud and museological practices, observing the private things one doesn’t or shouldn’t see and witnessing them in an indelible way, and that piece became the video “Fetish.”For this show, you introduce your own fetish object: A piece of marble from Trump Tower you bought on eBay. You bring “Fetish” and “Quarry” into conversation with one another through this tangible item. What was the interest in incorporating an object off-screen? Does this object provide a fetishistic commentary on now-President Trump? The Trump Tower marble is an object I found on eBay. I was struck by the material’s shift in meaning and value, that this small fragment of the Trump Tower atrium, itself famously clad in 2,500 tons of pink marble from northern Italy, was being offered for sale, auctioned off to the highest bidder. I bought the fragment and exhibit it in a vitrine — as if a rare museum object, a small shard that refers to the larger context from which it came — and paired it with the single evidentiary photograph of the Trump Tower lobby that the eBay seller posted, as well as two huge photographic scans I made of book-matched slabs of Breccia Pernice, the marble used in Trump Tower. The photographic prints appear as a Rorschach, a mirror image: an invitation of sorts to consider the darker psychological motives of our time.
↧