The Auras of Eras
Gair Burton, 2020

“… a passage in Borges … quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Things’ (1970)

A curious taxonomy is encountered in Lena Amuat and Zoë Meyer’s on-going photographic project, now over ten years in the making and numbering hundreds of images, which inventories the models and teaching objects they have unearthed from European universities and recasts them as glamorous icons within luscious images. Simply titled and numbered according to the artists’ own categories — Mathematisches Modell (Mathematical Model), Verlorene Sammlung (Lost Collection), Flügel (Flight) to name but a few — or else given
a laconic descriptor — Rote Farbe (Red Colour), for instance — the photographs celebrate relics of recent European thought and reveal a particular way of understanding the world.

While Borges’ impossible encyclopaedia describes a fictional universe, Amuat & Meyer’s compendium of made, found, reconstructed, confiscated and lost objects offers a glimpse of an actual system of knowledge that is both familiar and abstruse; one that is perplexing and exotic partly due to the passage of time and partly due to the artists’ highly idiosyncratic treatment of their subjects. With information and provenance entirely exorcised from their titles, we are left knowing almost nothing factual about each of the photographed items: not the collection they belong to or the place of that archive; nor when they date from, who made or found them or how they came to be collected;
nor any explanation as to the ideas, theories and natural laws that each of the models apparently embodies. Instead, they are left to communicate through the power of their visual identity alone.

Furthermore, like Borges’ ordering system which adheres to a pictorial and fabulous logic, the objects documented by Amuat & Meyer no longer inhabit the three-dimensional realm, but in becoming images are freed from the impositions of physical existence and apotheosized as art. The process is both research-based and highly subjective. First the artists research their quarry, contacting the archives to seek out rare collections; then they travelling there to uncover artefacts and models, always unsure of what they will find. It starts as a quest for discovery and learning along the Romantic tradition — a kind of archaeology perhaps that echoes the exploration of the objects’ origination in reverse.  Then, in a complete overthrow of Kantian aesthetic logic, they dismiss all a priori information, stripping their subjects of their rationalist identities and submitting them to a screen test. Each of the selected objects is treated to the artists’ mobile photo studio where they are sympathetically posed in front of coloured paper backdrops (sometimes assembled with other items, but most often standing alone), seductively lit and skilfully shot: their charisma given the chance to shine.

And shine they do. Each thing is presented as a readymade artwork in its own right, addressing the viewer as bold, precise and enigmatic forms. The mathematical models (which outnumber all the others in the series) exhibit their complex geometries with gestalt conviction, Brancusi-esque in their promise of representing “not the outer form but the idea, the essence of things”. Many are reminiscent of modernist sculpture, their forms the more compelling for being encrypted with meaning, embodying concepts that can be perceived if not understood — much as religious icons derive part of their impact through the channelling of faith. Others are more Minimalist in form and made from more synthetic, mid-twentieth century materials, resembling works by Judd perhaps. While still others seem garishly post-modern, their dynamic shapes, bright colours and zippy contours articulating a more eclectic moment in time.
Within the series, the mathematical models converse formally with other objects. Those with lattice-like forms summon the works of Barbara Hepworth or Naum Gabo perhaps, but their reticulations also relate to the Flügel (‘Flight’) images of bird wings in which the overlap between functionality and outlandish beauty in nature is savoured. In contrast, works such as Biologie Modell Nr. 1 (2012) seem manmade and mannered, their colourful biomorphic forms suggestive of surrealist paintings.

Keeping company with these models are images of images of ancient statues, likely to be casts or even casts of copies of the originals. In these, we are looking at layer on layer of mimesis: of reality perceived and perfected, copied and translated artfully into sinuous compositions of line, tone and colour, each further changed and accentuated in Amuat & Meyer’s photographic portrait. These images have been titled not according to categories of model, but after the models themselves: Venus, Apollo, Erinys, Heracles, Amor & Psyche and other persona from Roman and Greek mythologies, whose forms and physiques have inspired artists for centuries, their stories subsumed within style.

Remnants of Ancient Greece and other antiquities are encountered also in works displaying consumer goods: Coca Cola presents the titular can amongst stone frieze fragments, a still life of culture contracting thousands of years; while Lucky Strike (2017) shows the eponymous cigarette packet alongside a miniature simulacrum of a Greek column as though of equivalent design stature. In Cap a bright blue baseball cap adorns the armless statue of a young Adonis; the sculpture’s delicacy of execution and injured, singular perfection provocatively contrasted with the American utilitarianism of his hat.

Posing fragments of Classical art and architecture alongside twentieth century consumer goods, these images call to mind Warhol’s paean to mass-production: “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” They also inevitably challenge Walter Benjamin’s polar opposite theory of his 1935 essay ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, which famously warned that mechanical reproduction — such as photography — devalues the aura of an artefact's uniqueness as art. In photographing models, artefacts and natural specimens collected in the twentieth century and enhancing their auras, Amuat & Meyer’s project is a response to both viewpoints. Moreover it comes from the vantage of the digital era. Whether man- or machine-made, singular or multiple, each object they photograph belongs to an analogue means of making sense of and articulating the world, one that is increasingly obsolete. As such, there is an elegiac quality to the artists’ endeavour, which cumulatively orchestrates a sugar-coated requiem to the legacies of another millennium.

Aura lies at the heart of Amuat & Meyer’s collaboration. It is invoked in their pilgrimages to places of learning and ritualistic process of seeking out secular relics dusty from decades of disuse and submitting them to their very particular photographic process. And it emanates in their images through the mysteries each object embodies and the glamour they project.

Rather than being inherent and spiritual, aura is created through the inscrutability of the objects, their underlying mystery, and heightened by an awareness that each model encrypts a knowledge that is kept from us. The paucity of factual information incites one’s imagination and allows the photographs’ allusive qualities come to the fore, reverberating in the minds of viewers and reflecting back our own references with the infinite inferences and subtlety that images can command. If modernist artworks are suggested by some of the works, post-modern sensibilities are conveyed by others, while the seductiveness of fashion and commercial photography is also summoned — like the animals in Borges’ fable, Amuat & Meyer’s images have the quality of being many different things at once.

Furthermore, their aura is powerfully aesthetic: achieved through the artistry in which each image has been fabricated, composed and shot; and felt in the feeling for beauty that flows throughout the series, articulating a heady sensuality that is startlingly at odds with the archival plunder depicted. Far from being presented with scientific objectivity, each object has been given star treatment, poised against backdrops chosen to enhance their visual qualities to form still lives of individual beauty and collective aesthetic cohesion.

The inherently Duchampian nature of Amuat & Meyer’s undertaking — the appropriation of objects and their transformation into artworks through photography — is underscored by the backdrops that create mise-en-scènes around each archival model. The antithesis of a neutral background, these have been composed of coloured papers the artists have collected over decades — some hung onto since their school years, others scavenged from bric-a-brac stores, each with its own unknowable back story and retro quality. They envelope their subjects in intoxicating hues of sherbet and flesh tones, cobalts, viridians and clarets, enhancing their model’s charisma. In some, the colour palettes are further complimented through graphic patterns that echo the objects’ own lines and contours.

What rules the artists set out for themselves are made to be broken. Many of the photographs are shot in analogue, deliberately going against the tide of technological advancement. Yet others — the Unmögliche Figur (Impossible Figure) works — are collaged. And others still are handmade and photoshopped, such as the Verlorene Sammlung images that document the documentation of lost objects, the entries physically cut out then underlaid with black paper out so that what is missing takes on visual form. The latter too possess a graphic power and temporal sensibility in the bright binary opposition of digitally realised black and white.

Throughout, the works’ individual auras — the mystery and majesty imbued in each of Amuat & Meyer’s salvaged objects — is accompanied by playfulness. In their colours and patterns, the mash up of antiquity and consumerism, the anomalies of title and technique, the variously impossible or lost forms and, above all, in the sheer gorgeousness with which these dug-out and dusted-down teaching models have been represented, the artworks play among the ruins of vanishing eras.

Gair Burton, June 2020