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Forms of Production and Socialization of Exhibits
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Let us begin from the wellspring.
In the latter half of the twentieth century the concept of the artist’s studio has changed dramatically, particularly during the 1960s and 70s with the proliferation of innovative artistic strategies and behaviours. Studios stopped being isolated places where the artists existed and engaged in solitary work, but rather became collaborative training grounds befitting the phenomena and forms of completely different artistic activities. Similar places also existed within the context of the historical avant-garde in the first half of the century, but they were usually more the topoi of excess than any common practice. The distinctive features of Richard Deacon’s workplace are often highlighted in texts that accompany and analyse his artistic work. So much so that it raises the question: why has it become so important to emphasize the specific place where the work originated? The answer is very simple: the work remembers! It remembers places, time, relationships… It may sound odd, but it would not be uncommon at all to assign anthropomorphic qualities to an art object. That is just the way things are! The observer’s curiosity will then initiate the process of reconstruction, description, analysis, recognition, approval, rejection, criticism or, in turn, something else entirely. It will set in motion the new dynamic of experience and interpretation, revive the passive properties of the exhibited work. Indeed, Richard Deacon’s interest in the technology of production – or factual realisation – of a work of art and his deep involvement in the very process of creation is evident from the characteristics of the resulting production. It has already been stated many times – but we cannot resist repeating – that Deacon is a great researcher and experimenter in the field of sculpture, whence he generates the diversity of his sculptural procedures and their results. Deacon even suggests that the process of his creative work be called production. He will talk about this as early as the 1980s, when he intensively engaged in the practice of sculptural production, abandoning the previously established methods of sculptural design: in this sense, he sees himself as a producer, and his works as products. Either way, Deacon’s works pulsate not only because of their intriguing formal properties but also because of the observer’s attempts to figure out which production process was used to create all these works. His art objects seem to initiate a retrograde process and encourage the unmasking and identification of the staging of the work, the artist’s crypto-performance of sorts. Citing performance is no accident here because the artist’s first interests, going as far back as his days at St Martin’s School of Arts in London, are tied to the collaborative domain of performance art (and the use of film and photography). He will later attend courses in the Environmental Media Department at the Royal College of Art in London where he will realize that what matters is not only what is produced, but also the context wherein what is produced will be located.
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Let us now enter the exhibition space.
The focus we have placed on the physical production of Richard Deacon’s work is the basis of our further approach, particularly the detection of relationships that are articulated inside the gallery space. For the most part, the exhibition is set-up in the Kula Gallery, its walls dating back to the fourth century AD and clearly mapping the appearance of the monumental in the small. One has to ask, is this diminutive but consequential Kula Gallery not one of the oldest spaces that showcases works of contemporary art? The second part of the exhibition is displayed in the atrium of the Museum of Fine Arts (on a side note: an external, and yet internal space!). Let us, however, return to Deacon’s exhibits! As much as the forms of his works stand in correlation with his experimentation and understanding of production technologies, we cannot extrapolate them from the vast magma of the associative field that is resolved and formulated in linguistic explications. In fact, Deacon has, from the very beginning, been interested in the mechanisms of language, so the titles he adjoins his works are by no means harmless or unambiguous. They should not be understood as neutral and secondary labels on the gallery wall, but as constitutive indicators of the artist’s thinking and work. The artist himself will say that these titles play a multi-layered role: to remind the viewer of something, guide him through the work or, quite legitimately, to mislead him completely. Let us, for example, consider the community of works, the sample of which appears on the exhibition invitation, which is not to be understood as a mere coincidence. So, special attention in the space is drawn by the centrally positioned structures which date back a dozen or so years and are produced from handmade paper that is marbled and bent. Deacon titles them Housing. The title calls to mind the architectonics of sorts that is rather ambivalent, but also has social implications. On the one hand, it is reminiscent of common living or working spaces, but on the other, there is a pronounced fragility of paper material. These structures initiate both an exterior view and invite us to peek over into the interior. The observer’s attention, metaphorically speaking, can literally be housed by a work of art. At least for a moment. In addition, what characterizes these structures hand-crafted by Richard Deacon is that they are unapologetically beautiful. In his writing about the artist’s work, Tony Godfrey has already pointed out their aesthetic appeal, while being critical of the “canon” of how aesthetic and formal judgments are supposedly objectionable in conversations about contemporary art and should be completely eliminated (Richard Deacon at STPI, 2012). Either way, it is advisable to view the gallery as a space of reciprocal socialisation of works. For instance, these paper structures, with their multiple polygonal profiles, are associated with a series of works titled Assembly Model (2008), multi-component structures made mostly from galvanized steel. But the immediate kinship at once becomes its opposite, based on the experience of the material and the way the parts are connected. Furthermore, similar profiles can also be seen in fragments of the more recent works Square Cut (2019), the impression of scattered particles of which is mitigated by the balanced (almost) square formats of the works Flat (2019), displayed on the opposite wall, which Deacon is showing to the public for the first time in Split. The delicate structure of glazed ceramics is largely disproportionate to the heavy weight of these works, just as in the eponymous and aesthetically equally seductive works with an accentuated polychromy placed on stone pedestals in the atrium of the Museum of Fine Arts. Finally, As Well As (2016) and Tub (1999) are works that only seemingly appear as excessive exhibits, the completely recherché phenomena – the first displayed in Kula, the second in the atrium of the Museum of Fine Arts. Nevertheless, the calm – but reflective and able to absorb the movement of light from its immediate surroundings! – organic form of Tub is connected with the dynamic formations of the works Flat, at least on an associative level, while the other work whose indicative title ostensibly implies the principle of similarity and repeats it with the basic module of its wooden and epoxy structure, suggests a diagram – we could even say metrics – of relationships that are developed between various exhibits in the Kula Gallery space.
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This text stands as only one of a myriad of possibilities of reading the complex sociability of Richard Deacon’s exhibits. (text Dalibor Prančević)
Ricahrd Deacon
Born 15 August 1949, Bangor, Wales
Richard Deacon studied at Somerset College of Art, Taunton, from 1968-69, St Martins School of Art, London, from 1969-72 and the Royal College of Art, London, from 1974-77. He studied part-time at Chelsea School of Art, London, in 1978.
From 1977-92 Deacon was a visiting lecturer in sculpture at various art schools, principally: Central School of Art & Design, London; Chelsea School of Art, London; Sheffield City Polytechnic; Bath Academy of Art and Winchester School of Art. He was visiting Lecturer at Ateliers 63, Haarlem and Amsterdam (1989-93); guest Professor at Hochschule für Angewande Kunst, Vienna (1995-96), and guest Lecturer on the MA Programme at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, in 1998. Deacon was Professor at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris 1999 – 2009 and Professor at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, Germany 2009 – 2015.
Deacon’s first one-man show was held in 1978 at The Gallery, Brixton, London. This led to a string of solo exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, notably at the Riverside Studios in 1984; Tate Gallery, London, in 1985; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1988, and at Tate Gallery Liverpool in 1999. He was one of three artists to represent Wales at the 52nd Bienniale of Art in Venice. He has exhibited at the Lisson Gallery, London, since 1983, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, since 1986, Galeri Susanne Ottesen, Copenhagen since 1999 and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, since 2006. Since 1981 Deacon has participated in many key group exhibitions throughout the world. A major retrospective of his work The Missing Part was shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, in 2010, travelling to the Sprengel Museum in Hannover in 2011. Tate Britain mounted a major survey in 2014. Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland showed a ten year survey On The Other Side in 2015, this toured to the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan and will open at the Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany in 2016. A full retrospective of his prints and drawings, Out Of Line was presented at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany in 2016. This exhibition, the first to closely look at these aspects of Deacon’s practice revealed the strength and diversity of his engagement with both drawing and with printmaking and its interconnectedness with his more familiar activities as a sculptor.
Since the beginning of the 1970s, Deacon has written extensively on his own practice and in relation to contemporary art in general. So, And, If, But – Selected Writing 1970 – 2012 was published (in English and German editions)by the Richter Verlag in 2013. I Wanted To Talk About The Future But I Ended Up Thinking About The Past, an illustrated lecture, was published by Lisson Gallery in 2019.
Richard Deacon: In Between a ninety-minute film by the film maker Claudia Schmidt was put on general release in 2013.
