Certain Materialities. Damian Skinner. 2017
Certain Materialities
Damian Skinner
No doubt you’ll have your own thoughts after looking at Lucien Rizos’s Marble Art Ltd., but here is my conclusion: inauthentic objects can be the carriers for sincere emotions.
Many of the objects that Rizos tracks in his visual archaeology are inflected with regrettable ideas and histories, domesticated and mass-produced reminders of the superiority of the west and an arrogant tendency to turn other cultures into trite designs. Add to that a less offensive but still pitiable urge to reduce great artistic achievements to trinket scale: Rodin’s Thinker or Michelangelo’s David for the dressing table. There is a lot more in this vein that could be said about Marble Art Ltd., which was a manufacturer of souvenirs and objet d’art for the Kiwi home, peddling faux cultural signs in faux ivory, alabaster and jade.
All of this I knew before I started looking. And while I still agree with these ideas having finished Rizos’s book, the unexpected sensitivity that emerges is a real and surprising gift. In this complicated and subtle interweaving of the lives of the Fotiadis family with the commercial trajectory of their company Marble Art Ltd., the lived reality of cultural discourse and the way people engage with objects becomes visible. I’m left with the feeling that my preconceived theoretical models and cultural judgements are too blunt to cope with the multiplicity of how things and people interact.
People are many things (it is a bad pun, but fitting), all at once in a contradictory and probably absurd way. Objects are right there with us, sharing in these complexities and contradictions, if not actually making them possible. Marble Art Ltd. tells me that culture doesn’t quite work in the way I think. It proves that objects are complicated and powerful, exceeding and eluding our ability to explain them. This is something I know and pay lip service to, but too often betray in the conclusions I draw or the expectations that I hold.
Rizos’s project introduces a moment of sincerity into objects that I mostly believe to be drained of such potential by their proximity to mass production and the tourist industry. It opens up a vertiginous, slippery and exciting space in which real and fake interact with unexpected outcomes – not the loss or disappearance of the difference, but rather the rewards of paying attention to what they have to offer if the difference isn’t fixed and held as critical to the conclusion.
There are some unique factors in the story Rizos tells in Marble Art Ltd. The objects that were manufactured under the brand name are rich and wacky enough to scramble received categories of culture; and immigrants from Europe bring experiences, cultural practices, histories and objects that unsettle the desire to find clear and obvious identities.
Then there is Rizos himself, with his canny and generous ability to insinuate his artistic practice into the zones of the family album and archives, the suburban lounge, and the product catalogue, and make art from the result.
But Marble Art Ltd. ultimately suggests an interesting and, I think, hopeful possibility that maybe any life could, with the kind of careful, thoughtful and creative sorting that Rizos applies here, reveal a similar richness of fabulous identities that become possible in the material worlds all of us create.
Damian Skinner
No doubt you’ll have your own thoughts after looking at Lucien Rizos’s Marble Art Ltd., but here is my conclusion: inauthentic objects can be the carriers for sincere emotions.
Many of the objects that Rizos tracks in his visual archaeology are inflected with regrettable ideas and histories, domesticated and mass-produced reminders of the superiority of the west and an arrogant tendency to turn other cultures into trite designs. Add to that a less offensive but still pitiable urge to reduce great artistic achievements to trinket scale: Rodin’s Thinker or Michelangelo’s David for the dressing table. There is a lot more in this vein that could be said about Marble Art Ltd., which was a manufacturer of souvenirs and objet d’art for the Kiwi home, peddling faux cultural signs in faux ivory, alabaster and jade.
All of this I knew before I started looking. And while I still agree with these ideas having finished Rizos’s book, the unexpected sensitivity that emerges is a real and surprising gift. In this complicated and subtle interweaving of the lives of the Fotiadis family with the commercial trajectory of their company Marble Art Ltd., the lived reality of cultural discourse and the way people engage with objects becomes visible. I’m left with the feeling that my preconceived theoretical models and cultural judgements are too blunt to cope with the multiplicity of how things and people interact.
People are many things (it is a bad pun, but fitting), all at once in a contradictory and probably absurd way. Objects are right there with us, sharing in these complexities and contradictions, if not actually making them possible. Marble Art Ltd. tells me that culture doesn’t quite work in the way I think. It proves that objects are complicated and powerful, exceeding and eluding our ability to explain them. This is something I know and pay lip service to, but too often betray in the conclusions I draw or the expectations that I hold.
Rizos’s project introduces a moment of sincerity into objects that I mostly believe to be drained of such potential by their proximity to mass production and the tourist industry. It opens up a vertiginous, slippery and exciting space in which real and fake interact with unexpected outcomes – not the loss or disappearance of the difference, but rather the rewards of paying attention to what they have to offer if the difference isn’t fixed and held as critical to the conclusion.
There are some unique factors in the story Rizos tells in Marble Art Ltd. The objects that were manufactured under the brand name are rich and wacky enough to scramble received categories of culture; and immigrants from Europe bring experiences, cultural practices, histories and objects that unsettle the desire to find clear and obvious identities.
Then there is Rizos himself, with his canny and generous ability to insinuate his artistic practice into the zones of the family album and archives, the suburban lounge, and the product catalogue, and make art from the result.
But Marble Art Ltd. ultimately suggests an interesting and, I think, hopeful possibility that maybe any life could, with the kind of careful, thoughtful and creative sorting that Rizos applies here, reveal a similar richness of fabulous identities that become possible in the material worlds all of us create.
