What do you think when you are presented by an object? That inner monologue of reference, search for meaning and desire to invent is at the heart of the work of British artist Steven Claydon. He makes objects that confound and confuse. Classical busts are transformed with added elements that sit between discomfort and humour. The histories of art and display are tweaked with a well-placed lump of clay, cardigan buttons or off-key sunglasses. Hair is created by a strewn string vest or a wig of wire wool. Claydon’s practise is broad – print, video, sound, installation – but the bulk centres around sculpture. His eccentric objects emerge in a very personal visual language that plunders strange corners of history and the archival. At the centre of his approach is “the thing”.
“It’s really about encountering a thing in its constituent ‘thingliness’; its contingency,” he says in his surprisingly low-key studio in a back street of Dalston in East London. Blonde-bearded and engaging, Claydon gives off the sense of a cool professor getting his teeth into a tutorial. “I’m fascinated by the value of a thing and we can bestow cultural value on a thing. Often that is to do with how it is presented.” Claydon makes audiences aware of our desire to read things, their compulsion to bring narrative to every object we encounter. In his pieces, the plinths and bases of his sculptures are a strong focus: he plays with materials like Hessian, and modernist shapes, drawing attention to the bases which become anthropomorphised – bodies to his sculptural heads. “What I’m trying to do is to elicit or engender an original encounter,” he notes. “To try and remove provenance from a thing and to skew it, so that its roots and pedigree have somehow been contorted or conflated. To really mess with the appropriate nature of a material. So everything is admissible in that mechanism – that’s where I get off.”
There’s an evident high level of research and detail in Claydon’s process, yet the viewer’s knowledge of his references aren’t necessarily important. In fact, not knowing is part of what makes the process of looking so interesting in his work. He plucks elements from the past and throws them together – a wooden flute, an old bust, a brick, a pixel. “We create narratives where there are none. We are hardwired to do that, otherwise we’d be stuck staring at things. I think narrative is a really curious and slightly dodgy thing. Even in the most rigorous academic and legalistic way – it’s always emotive.” And so it’s proving to be. Claydon is having a bumper year with four international solo shows including exhibitions at Sadie Coles and David Kordansky and his has been a steady progress to the big league. Glenn Brown curated him in a group show at The Approach back in 1998, but it was in the mid-2000s that Claydon started to show seriously, at now-defunct galleries Hoxton Distillery and Hotel.
Before this his focus was on music. The Chelsea and St Martins graduate played as a member of enigmatic yet under-achieveing electronica band Add N to (X) between 1994 and 2003, and his interest in objects emerged out of his fascination with the possibilities of keyboards. “I came round to my understanding of objects in a lot of different ways from looking into museums, being fascinated with museums, being fascinated by commodities, being fascinated by utility and the chemistry of the thing and especially through sound. Especially through my relationship with synthesisers and trying to sort of exude a sound from an obsolete technology.”
In other words, Claydon’s approach is to share his own fascination with the mystique and possibility of objects. Here, there are elements of institutional critique, references to modernist ideas of exhibition design, and a very informed awareness of the role of history in how we see art. Claydon explores modes of display – the way objects are presented, the relationship between things, how sound changes what is seen. Yet his approach is more about using playful hands than pure theory. There is plenty of humour, visual puns and remnants of a playful take on process. Home-made googly eyes on a face; a plastic frog cast and soldered to a metal base; hair made from everyday objects and thrown on. “Even in the most deadly serious thing there can be a kind of element of the ridiculous or the absurd – especially with the serious topics. When you create a kind of collision or equivalent between two things that are not usually put together, that kind of absurdity can either engender a laugh of nervousness or proper hilarity.”
Speaking to Claydon it is clear that he is fascinated by conceptual and philosophical references, yet there’s a pleasure in the objects outside of these parameters. A highly intentional accessibility and openness; a resistance to being compartmentalised into an intellectual ghetto. In fact Claydon seems enamoured with tripping up his own work, infusing it with a sense of slapstick. “I don’t mind lightness at all. What I would worry about is if people thought I was playing a trick on them because really what I want to do, in the most humanistic way possible, is to sort of put my arms around the people who are looking and have them see, in some small way, through my eyes.” Add N To (X) may be gone, but sound remains a key element in his work and very much part of his creative process. “I’ve just cleaned up a bit today and pulled out my synthesisers,” he says, gesturing to a bank of keys. “I’ve got this old MS20 – it’s the epitome of being zoomorphic. I have conversations with this thing when I get bored, or when I’m trying to work something out or just terrorise everyone around me by making loud noises like foxes fucking. It’s cathartic and it’s productive and I really do think of it as a kind of physical thing.”
Almost every exhibition he has created has included some aural element. In his last Sadie Coles Show “Rat. Pearl. London. Onion:”, videos emitted drones on screens within a sculptural cage, the humming monitors presented as art objects in their own right. “There is something about exhausting the possibilities of a sound or an image or processing it to a degree it starts to lose its original purpose,” he continues. “I really do think that sound is an object. A sound is performative. It’s really physical.” In fact, he often uses instruments as elements in his sculptural works that imply performance, yet make no noise. “It’s that tree-falling-in-the-woods thing – I think objects are incredibly performative, especially once they’ve had that utility. The transformation that happens to a thing in a museum, for instance to a bone flute or a violin, where it’s transformed from being a thing of utility to a cultural heirloom… It’s value completely mutates.” The artist’s work reflects an interest in Buckminster Fuller and at the end of our conversation he makes the remark that, of all these disparate influences and references, “all that geological, physical visceral mulch builds up into something you realise might be something valuable to you.” And “value” is indeed the watchword: what something is, how it is created, and what it means. Claydon is constantly questioning how we look at things and imbue them with meaning and importance. His works make us question how and why humanity values art at all.
Steven Claydon, Total Social Objects David Kordansky, Until June 22, 2013