by proponents of Conceptualism as a travesty of the advances that movement had made in the 60s and 70s. This miniature minimalist vignette overcompensates for its occasion – the abstraction of the red dot – with its material specificity: a hole drilled into the plasterboard wall and filled with cadmium red oil paint, as plump as putty. Extrapolating phenomenological experience from a cipher, the paint redeems the convention it mimics, transforming the artwork as a sign of market value into a specific object. A cynical confirmation of consumerism proves to be its discreet nemesis. But the fact that Sold is also a painting – a modernist monochrome as much as a demonstration of minimalist materialism – derails any simple binary between painting as commodity and the red dot as its anticonsumerist inverse. Parity between Baselitz and Floyer is restored at the last moment.
Sold’ s conflation of conceptualist abstractions and Minimalism’ s phenomenological specificities, each undermining the other, is the structural baseline of Floyer’ s art. As much as the specific object challenges a sign’ s abstractions, the sign’ s slippery illusiveness, its refusal to correspond to any particular object, challenges the certainties of empirical perception. Floyer likes to make something that looks like an objective phenomenon – the light under a door; a drip landing in a bucket – prove to be an illusion, a sign that stands for all the instances of which it is not one. This making generic of the object by its image is a means of holding the nostalgia of the found object – its function as a trace of its own past – at arm’ s length. When Floyer engages with nostalgic sentiment, she places it in inverted commas; has it default to her medium, by making it synonymous with the artwork’ s self-reflexivity. Hence her use of pop songs – that most nostalgic of artforms – as in Things( 2009): 50 white plinths with embedded speakers, each emitting a clip of the word“ things” extracted from various pop tracks. The ideal minimalist object, a plain-sided box, is forced to do what minimalist orthodoxy forbids: refer. And yet, by making reference an act of self-reference – as the installation’ s title implies, the plinths double
as the‘ things’ they are naming – the minimalist object is made selfconscious( nostalgia, of course, is one of the forms self-consciousness takes), and this self-reference is extended to encompass art-historical allusion( a kind of art nostalgia), in this case to Robert Morris’ s seminal conceptual / minimalist Box with the Sound of Its Own Making( 1961). Containing a tape recorder playing the sound produced by its construction, Morris’ s plywood box compromises the ideal, minimalistic art object – the unadorned cube – by means of the recording it contains which enables its self-reflexivity.
Helix( 2001) is a curious exception in Floyer’ s art, in its accommodation, rather than testy rejection, of the function of objects as traces, even as nostalgic keepsakes. The exception is signified by the work’ s buzz of consumer-product colour, a telling crack in Floyer’ s sternly black-and-white universe. Various found objects are inserted into a metric template’ s holes to precisely fit their spectrum of circumferences. The work’ s title is even more ingenious than usual. It refers to the template’ s product name at the same time as comprehending how the objects three-dimensionalise the holes by extending them into vertical space, transforming a geometrical abstraction into a foundobject particular, resonant with traces of individual history. It is as if the found object were managing to squeeze itself into the parameters of an abstraction, while remaining standing within it to flout its attempt to generalise it. A dictionary defines‘ helix’ as a three-dimensional extension of a geometric shape, as a coiled spring extends a circle. But the extension is also temporal, into the pasts of the objects. Standing in their allotted holes, a shower head, a jumbo marker, an egg timer, a perfume sampler, a keyring, a button and a screw resemble a miniature model of a New York-style highrise skyline( Helix was first produced in the year of 9 / 11), another image improvised out of the stuff of a reality that belies it. ar
Ceal Floyer: On Occasion is at Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, through 10 April
Helix, 2015, shelf, Helix template, assorted objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin
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