Miscellanies

Los Angeles, California, United States

Installation, 2016

Claes Oldenburg has been famous for his collecting habit. Among his collections the “ray guns” have a unique place. Next to his Mouse Museum he exhibits a total of 258 different “ray gun” objects. Although there are a great variety of collected objects from toy guns to rocks they all are constrained with the angle of a pistol. Roaming over the collection creates an expectation that allows one to observe obviously not-ray-guns as ray guns. A controlled miscellany of items make it possible to curate the perception of the observer around an object.

The displays of Oldenburg's objects have a significant relationship to the store front. Examining the relationship between a museum and retail presentation, just like Oldenburg, has been a great interest of Andreas Gursky. In his fictitiously arranged fantasy worlds Gursky displays retail objects which are placed on minimal shelves. The relationship of the objects to their display cases versus the panoptic view of the image creates an unstable status in reading his photography. Organization of the horizontal shelves in Gursky's photographs have a deficiency of perspectival depth. Each level of shelving works like a separate ground to the displayed objects, therefore the image establishes multiple layers of ground within itself. This augmentation of ground levels of equal importance – a relative of Leo Steinbergs discussion of “tilting of the flatbed picture plane”-- both challenge the typical picture plane.

Today along the endless corridors of retail markets a surfeit of different beverages are arrayed in various colors of bottles with many challenging figures. Miscellanies observes todays retail bottles and curates a collection of corresponding shapes. A medley of these two dimensional figures generate a collection that creates the anticipation of belonging to a certain genre that can be found on retail displays. The miscellanies of objects find themselves on a set of display boxes that establish a relationship between the object to its ground. This relationship is advanced through coloration of the display box and the object itself. The pseudo-materiality of the pedestal affects the displayed object as the object gets 'dipped' into the pedestal. The figures are composed into a formation which imitates the shelving in retail stores and creates multiplicities of the ground level on the overall composition. The relationship of one object to its display box – a singular ground level- and the understanding of the whole composition with equally important, multiple grounds create an unstable situation in defining the picture plane.