FINDING ELSA (object) (2017)
Steel and porcelain, 83 x 40 x 40”
FINDING ELSA (2017)
2-minute excerpt of 16:29
Dave Simonds (film and editing)
A video/surround-sound installation that creates a rupture between the projected image, the architectural space, and the soundtrack. A virtual, life-size figure appears, via projection, scaled in relationship to the actual space. The figure performs a choreography of gestures in order to break each of the 52 handmade porcelain forms. We see the figure throw the porcelain objects, but they vanish as they exit beyond the free-standing projection wall. The shattering, however, is heard emanating from the exact locations where you would expect to hear the objects break, due to a series of strategically placed speakers, but without any visuals, or shards of the breakage. There is a disconcerting and confusing fissure between what you see and hear.
The title of this work was inspired by the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven, a poet and artist at the center of a controversy about origins of the FOUNTAIN, (credited to Duchamp). The controversy began with the discovery of a letter from Duchamp to his sister in April of 1917 that states: “One of my female friends, under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture. Since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it.”
Before discovering Elsa, I had begun with the Duchampian bottlerack structure and was making a piece about inescapability, layered cages and futile attempts at breaking down constantly changing boundaries. The fact that the Fountain, on which so much art history is based, could be mis-credited for so long, and most likely made by a woman who pushed all boundaries, overlayed neatly with my concepts for this work. It reinforced questions about the multiplicity of limitations and pointed to what is lost in translation about what is real and what is conjured, who receives credit and who is left out, what barriers exist, and the constantly changing landscape that constructs the “reality” on which so much our human understanding is based.