AMSTERDAM. Something They Have To Live With is a new installation by Brussels-based, Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie. Corporeality and the politics of space are two running themes in this, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Amsterdam. Previous concerns in her work are also expressed – from gender relations and architecture to fashion and artisanal culture, with a focus on how architectural spaces inform movement and bodily awareness. McKenzie draws connections between bodily interiors (seen in the bare mannequins in the middle of the room) and the architectural interiors of palaces and other authoritative spaces. Ideas surrounding the construction of space – what is private or public, real or idealised, masculine or feminine space, are brought out in the grand, lofty confines of the Stedelijk museum.
Walking amidst the high white walls and imposing ceiling of the IMC Gallery, where McKenzie’s installation is located, you get the feeling of a Russian doll motif – of houses within houses within houses. McKenzie’s painted wall fragments and models of paper houses reconfigure the gallery space so that, like the palaces which her installation references, we may make connections between the spatial harmony and architectural authority of these palaces of Modernist and Arabic design and the white walled palace of art. Perhaps this is her incisive comment on the closeted world of the art museum.
McKenzie took as her starting point, three sites she visited in late 2012: the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain; Adolf Loos’s Villa Müller in Prague; and an exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s wall paintings at the M-Museum Leuven, Belgium. Both the Alhambra Palace and the Villa Muller are grand, palatial buildings, closed off from the real world – protected sites of cultural heritage, yet also places where women’s movements are controlled. Hidden away within its hallowed walls, the female body is restricted, her sight limited, her mobility constrained. Writing on Artforum, McKenzie observed that: “In the Villa Müller, for instance, there is a boudoir with a small window that looks down into the main space so that the lady of the house could watch but not be seen”. The contrast between the body and architecture is further brought out in Quodlibet XXVI (Self Portrait), where the artist confronts the problems of appropriation. The piece is a direct attack on images appropriated of her by the artist Richard Kern, and it’s a damning indictment.
As viewers, we are free to wander through the large and faux-marbled model interior of the Villa Müller, while the other side of the room is dominated by three large oil paintings of geometric pattern motifs from the Alhambra palace in Granada. A series of small, detailed architectural models presented on plinths offer alternative spaces in miniature; ‘Bedsit Glasgow’ is placed next to ‘Apartment Gallery’, once again bringing into question the power relations and monetary influence of the art world.
Two metal mannequins stand in the centre of the gallery, wearing designs by Atelier E.B. (http://www.ateliereb.com), an original interiors company and label launched in 2008 with Edinburgh-based textile designer Beca Lipscombe and illustrator Bernie Reid. The label is rooted in the artists’ shared interests in small-scale traditional production processes, such as the Scottish textile industry. Liscombe, for example, has written a passionate plea to the Scotsman (which can be read on their website) on the fate of Caelee Mills after it went into administration.
The connections between all these interests are subtle but cleverly interlinked. McKenzie encourages us to make something of a psychogeographical journey from the colourful and imposing walls of the exotic palace, through miniaturised architectural models of small houses, and past the hollow mannequins of fashion. The body moves in space.
Text by Sophia Satchell-Baeza
Something They Have to Live With is organised by Stedelijk Museum curator Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen, and is on until 22 September 2013.