AGAMNEMONICS (detail), 2013. Photo: Serge Hoeltschi. All images courtesy of the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin
When granted access to the storage rooms of Vienna’s Museum for Applied Arts, hometo period masterpieces from the Wiener Werkstätte, Art Nouveau and Secessionist movements, artist Pae White opted for the sections housing the un-authored variety of objects, the kind that probably never leave storage for display. Focusing on items from the turn of the last century, White first created the show “Others” last autumn, installed as an intervention into the permanent collection, and continued her investigation of anonymously crafted artefacts in a second show, “Orllegro”, which opened this autumn.
Occupying the museum’s upper floor, the show features a massive assemblage of renderings of one subject: a trove of painted wood toys from the 1920s. To celebrate these objects of ambiguous value, she reimagined nine pieces as figures in a chess set and sent pictures, but no instructions, to her worldwide network of collaborators asking for interpretation and fabrication. And so, set up meticulously in a long display case is the work entitled “Agamnemonics“ (2013), made up of a myriad beautiful, strange forms that repeat and recall each other as they appear in a variety of sizes, materials and styles. Fabricators in China, Ethiopia, Mexico, Lithuania, and Germany, and a group of Los Angeles-based artists, are just some of the interpreters whose signatures shape this landscape of cross-pollinating pieces. Her displaying the items as chess sets and not as “objets”, however, posits them again on the border between art and design which White so aptly blurs.
“Orllegro”, the show’s title, is also the title of the second artwork on view. It’s taken from a fictitious coinage invented by the textile industry in the 1950s to denote material that was a faux version of something real; indeed, polyester never sounded so good. The coinage reveals the era’s different attitude towards synthetics – with a familiar ring, yet of no recognisable etymology, the word was meant to activate a false nostalgia while at the same time promise a stylish, more sophisticated future. White’s piece of the same title is a monumental glimmering tapestry woven entirely from metallic thread. Giving permanence to ephemera, the pattern shows broken URL links, digital debris, or entire sections from White’s own library. Bee motifs run across the pattern too. (Elsewhere around the museum, dusty Gobelins depict historical events).
Installed at slanted angles, both the expansive tapestry and the chess sets just about fit into the rather small exhibition space, leaving the viewer little space to navigate around. This decision seems to further highlight the confounding effect White’s work is often characterised by, of using humble means to create grandeur.
Pae White, ORLLEGRO. MAK permanent collection contemporary art, Vienna. Until October 12 2014
Taken from Sleek 40″ Man/Boy”