THE
EMANCIPATION OF
THE COMMON OBJECT
Sculpture
by Victoria Fuller
Victoria is showing recent sculpture
at the Chicago Cultural Center from October 12 - December 9, 2001
as part of Chicago Artists' Month. Introduction courtesy of Lanny Silverman,
Curator
of Exhibitions for the Chicago Cultural Center Department of Cultural
Affairs.
KNOB JOB AND THE POWER BOX
SELF EMPOWERMENT
CO-DEPENDENCY
THE
WALL OF EXCESS
AND THE
DOOR OF INDECISION
STACKING TOY
The
Emancipation of the
Common Object:
Sculpture by Victoria Fuller
Chicago-based artist Victoria Fuller employs common household objects and transforms them into poetic, if not surreal, artworks. She has employed the Surrealist notions of dissociated or displaced objects exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's readymades and advanced these precepts with hints of 1960s minimalism and a distinctively engaging sense of humor.
The famous Surrealist citation "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table"1 has provided a model for the liberation of objects and the freeing up of their expressive potential by artists since the early 20th century. Duchamp's displacement of a urinal into the art arena allowed us to see it as a source of sculptural beauty and to appreciate the irony in this antisocial recontextualization.
Fuller utilizes manufactured components that are part and parcel of the modern industrial age: doorknobs, electrical outlets, extension cords, etc. all of which can be bought at the local hardware store. The bright, unmodulated coloration of extension cords, for example, attests to their artificial fabrication and unwittingly reveals a facet of our consumer culture. Fuller's strategy is to liberate these objects from their everyday functions by combining them in whacky configurations that tease us with some sense of use, much like an elaborately set up Rube Goldberg contraption that actually does nothing. In one interactive piece, The Wall of Excess and the Door of Indecision (2001), the viewer can only open the door by discovering the one functional doorknob amid a door covered with knobs. Thus function is at least teasingly subverted by overload. The artist has revealed some sense of the logic of mass-consumed contemporary industrial design, or at least its superficial structure, while displacing any of its quotidian purpose.
Fuller's compositional strategy of geometric grids combined with the industrial fabrication of her materials humorously calls to mind the now historical practice of '60s minimalist sculptors. The forms she cherishes ‹ cubes, spheres and cords ‹ have their correlates in the natural world, at the microscopic level of cellular structure and diatoms, as well as in the visible organic world of vines and tendrils, and Fuller's visual punning accommodates these references in addition to metaphoric sexual allusions of male and female through outlets, plugs and sockets. Language also plays a role in deciphering these levels of meaning, as when, for example, a title such as "Self Empowerment" is given to a morass of extension cords plugged into a cube built out of numerous electrical outlets.
Fuller is not above "quoting" Pop Art too, as in Stacking Toy (2001), which again combines the platonic sensibility and industrial fabrication expected of minimalism, but whose gigantism mocks its functional possibility as a toy.
Fuller's original extended title for this exhibition incorporated the "subjugation" of objects concomitant with their emancipation. It is indeed the artist's skillful manipulation of objects, bending their multiple meanings to her will, that allows them to be freed of their usual readings. This is what provides viewers of Fuller's work a fresh perspective on their world.
Lanny
Silverman
Curator of Exhibitions
Chicago Cultural Center
Department of Cultural Affairs
See ART of Chicago's interview with Victoria in January 2001.
