EDIFIED by institutions in Denmark and the United Kingdom respectively, these two male, white, living humans have been reared within educational establishments and cultivated with support from cultural agencies in ways that have enabled them to create objects for display in museums and similar spaces, or to teach in similar institutions as they were schooled in themselves.
Typically, value is assigned to their production, whether classified as artistic, intellectual or social, either through exhibitions held in institutions of display, or according to criteria established by committees of bureaucrats and representatives affiliated with the selfsame institutions. These individuals are largely dependent on the approval of such committees to make their living and for their continued production to be commissioned, financed, displayed and housed.
A R T W O R K D E T A I L S
Stored: Self (1981/1980)
32cmx58cmx199cm /
30cmx60cmx187cm
2 living human beings: 1 white male with blue eyes and blond hair / 1 white male with brown eyes and brown hair.
no distinguishing features
registration numbers: 0402813563/1405801457
“We are writing to attain permission to live, during both waking and sleeping hours, in Designmuseum Danmark during the exhibition ‘Storage’. Our piece for that exhibition is called ‘stored’. The work is an attempt to make a home for ourselves within what could be seen as the frame of your institution: the vitrines that were designed by Kaare Klint in 1927 for the museum when it was first established and the building was converted from its former use as a hospital. [Our remakes of these vitrines] have now become integrated part of our artworks, carrying vestiges of the institution’s formal confidence and authority. Through our work we want to ask what it means to be at home within an institution, and how institutions make our homes.”
“Designmuseum Danmark continues to view it as its primary task to be a home for the public that educates and inspires people to appreciate and create quality design. Unfortunately, we have not yet reached a point where designers or members of the general public can live at the museum around the clock. Conservation and thus security remain important priorities, also in museums of art&design, and we have to watch over our collections. As the number of visitors during the night would be expected to be quite limited, we do not stay open at night. However, you are welcome to live in the museum during our normal opening hours, and the more ideas and forms from the museum’s collections you bring into your homes and lives, the better, as that is precisely the mission of Designmuseum Danmark: to enlighten, inspire and stimulate development.”
“The Museum is an asylum. The work set in it is sheltered from the weather and all sorts of dangers, and most of all protected from any form of questioning. The museum selects, collects, and protects. All works of art are made in order to be selected, collected and protected (among other things from other works which are, for whatever reasons, excluded from the Museum). If the work takes shelter in the Museum-refuge, it is because it finds there its comfort and its frame; a frame which one considers as natural, while it is merely historical.”
DANIEL BUREN
A R T W O R K D E T A I L S
Stored: Storage
(2013)
80cm x 80cm x 191cm
Teak, leather, linen, paper yarn, brass, human secretions
Mutated teak vitrine, after original by Kaare Klint
This work borrows its detailing and materiality from vitrines that Kaare Klint designed for The Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen, when it was first established in the former Frederick’s hospital building in 1926. Klint designed a museum display system that echoed the modular structure and contamination-limiting function of the hospital wards.
Kaare Klint is often referred to as a ‘father’ of Danish modernism. His principle of stripping down and mutating inherited classical forms, rather than radically rejecting history, distinguished Danish modernism from other more revolutionary currents within modernism, like the Bauhaus.
This is one of a series of mutations of Klint’s museum furniture,in which the standardised proportions and details are specifically adapted to its contents, and the glass has been removed so that two human bodies are accommodated within the institutional framework through the provision of spaces that control and frame three authorized human body postures: sitting, standing and lying down.making. To assume that this is the point of them is nevertheless a misunderstanding. The birds were supposed to be painted in naturalistic colours and were never intended to be displayed as we see them here.
