Déclassement
June 23 – September 30, 2018
Château d'Oiron, France

Déclassement was a group exhibition, curated by Barbara Sirieix, that looked at contemporary protocols for cultural heritage. The site for this exhibition, Chateau d'Oiron, is notable in having a dual status as a historical monument and contemporary art collection, which includes works by On Kawara, James Lee Byars, and others. The artists invited to participate in Déclassement were encouraged to respond to the particular conditions of the site and explore subjects like conservation and restoration.

For this exhibition, I made two concrete replicas of a sculpture found on the side of a bank in Düsseldorf, which were re-sculpted and cast by Milo Carney. The sculpture depicts a man squatting over a sack and excreting a stream of gold coins. When Freud wrote about the association between wealth and shit, he had statues like this in mind. According to Freud, in the “anal phase” of early childhood, we’re trained to eject from our bodies what we’d prefer to keep inside—the things we associate with personal wealth.

Beyond money, I see this figure as a symbol of larger ambiguities in how we define and differentiate things of value and waste — particularly in debates about conservation and restoration. To that end, one of the replicas hangs on an exterior castle wall and is designed to mimic the existing stonework; made of a deliberately poor admixture of concrete, water and sand, it is endowed with "inherent vice": a criterion for the deaccessioning of artwork due to irreparable internal flaws.

The second replica lies face-up in a field near the castle; its concrete has been mixed with a novel "healing agent" in the form of bacteria, which precipitate calcium carbonate to repair any cracks it may endure. This object, in other words, restores itself.

My second project focuses on Norio, an accessibility robot commissioned and employed by Chateau d'Oiron. Visitors unable to climb to the first floor of the castle can instead operate a video interface on the ground floor, which allows them to telenavigate the robot and thus see the artworks through its eyes. To date, Norio is the only robot of its kind in a museum in France.

I have long been interested in the imminent and distant horizons of automation, robotics, and telepresence. For this exhibition, I cast Norio in a new role: instead of being an aid to humans, the robot becomes a protagonist in its own right. Throughout the exhibition, when not utilized for accessibility services, Norio looks out the windows at the end of the Gallery of Paintings. The robot's screen is filled with a running text-based monologue, wherein it reflects on the history and possible future restoration of the gallery—and wonders if it too might be preserved for the benefit of posterity.

Click here to read the monologue in English and French.