An exhibit with legs — thousands of them
Claire Twomey’s installation growing to 3,000 figurines, which she’ll give away Jan. 4
The gasps that inevitably escape the lips of first-timers at the threshold of Clare Twomey’s Piece by Piece at the Gardiner Museum tell you much about what you’re about to see. Remarkably, though, they steal little of its thunder.
That’s been my experience, at least. I’ve been three times, most recently this week, tailing quietly along behind a group whose breath was predictably taken. Twomey virgins, likely, but it never gets old: through the doors of the museum’s third floor gallery, a darkened space is littered with thousands of tiny, ghostly white figurines.
Moody light lends a suitably otherworldly sense to the scene, which seems equal parts aerial view of a grand public square, with its dozens of miniature human dramas cast from one corner to the next, and outsize Petri-dish, with its swarms of tiny captives engaged in a survival-of-the-fittest experiment.
The truth, of course, is neither, but maybe also both. Twomey, a Brit, was commissioned by the Gardiner to craft one of her intimate, audience-participatory works for Nuit Blanche back in October; while it’s not officially one of the event’s 10 extended projects, it has more legs than any of them — literally and conceptually — by a long shot.
That’s partly because it keeps growing: Twomey began by installing 2,000 raw, unglazed figurines in the gallery space for the opening overnight display. That was only the beginning. Since that night, a team of makers have been faithfully casting new figures and constructing new scenes every day, pushing toward an end goal of 3,000 by exhibition’s end Jan. 4.
Piece by Piece is a living, dead thing. Twomey took as her starting point three figures from the Gardiner’s collection of 18th-century figurines: a Harlequin and a Scaramouche, both masked and impish, posed with exaggerated gestural flourish, and a high-society lady, balloonish bustle flowing from her cinched waist. Each of the three originals sit under glass elevated on plinths above the fray, as though watching a Darwinian drama unfold.
Each of the eventual 3,000 are recasts of one of the three, 1,000 of which have been made for the past couple of months right there in the same room. The Maker (there are a team of them) methodically reproduces new figures four hours a day and then abandons them to the complex drama unfolding below.
They are evolving things, some- times dictated by the repetition of form, or just as often by a playfully ominous narrative sense. There are Harlequins or Scaramouches in lockstep, like an army of opaque dandies, or clusters of ladies, bent in balletic pose who, arranged just so, ap- pear to be gossiping amongst themselves and behind each others’ backs.
Here and there, bursts of epic narrative rise above the fray: a lady hoisted high on the shoulders of others, or a small army of figures pushing a block above the crowd, like la- bourers building a pyramid, and a heap of broken bodies — failed castings, you can guess — that in the midst of the scene takes on the macabre sense of a funeral pyre.
There’s much to that, really, when you consider the history with which Twomey is playing. Figures like these were among the first iterations of an art in the age of mechanical reproduction: mass-produced, although by hand, then packaged and sold as reproducible commodities. That’s the world we live in now, thanks largely to automation, but in the 18th century this was a technological revolution, offering the first glimpse at a rift that would grow between the unique and the endlessly duplicatable, the precious and the throwaway.
That’s a debate at the core of much of Twomey’s work, which has been seen all over the U.K. in such places as London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, where she scattered 4,000 tiny porcelain birds throughout the museum’s Cast Courts (within hours of the opening, all 4,000 had been pocketed by visitors, which was fine by her).
More telling, maybe, was her project for the Tate Liverpool called “Consciousness/Conscience.” There, Twomey cast thousands of unfired bone china tiles, which she then installed in a tight grid of the floor. There were other pieces in the show, but to get to them, viewers had to traverse the tile floor, which they inevitably crushed underfoot with each step.
By the end, the floor, Twomey’s most monumental work, was nothing but shard and dust to be swept up and thrown away.
There’s a potent push-pull here between a breadth of things: the past and present, light and dark, unique and replica. Ultimately, though, Twomey’s gesture is about value, commodity and how an esthetic doesn’t have the power to serve as a bridge between the precious and the throwaway.
That she does this using a medium that served as the pilot project for our entire disposable culture only deepens the work. She’ll put a fine point on it, too, when the exhibition closes Jan. 4: the museum will be giving every single figure away to any member of the public there in time to claim one.
The lineup to do so should be huge, if there’s any sense in the world, which says more about the gesture than the objects, while it draws the line neatly from the present to past. How perfectly contemporary.