[Title] The wardrobe and the mattress
[Artist] Smiljan Radic and Marcela Correa
[Date] September 4th (Wednesday) – November 30th (Saturday), 2013
The Wardrobe and the Mattress
Comments on an exhibition based on the writings of Tadeusz Kantor* and Bruno Schulz** .
Smiljan Radic
1. The Wardrobe and the Mattress are two of the smaller common domestic objects that can be associated with architecture.
2. The fil di ferro plans used to build traditional Japanese houses, the rural houses on the island of Chiloé and the island’s large wooden churches all remind us of the delicate outline of an old wardrobe. The thin walls isolate the somber interior from the outside REALITY.
3. The mattress is rooted in a more primitive world: sheep’s wool, horse hair, maize leaves and dry straw were the ancient materials used to fill them. This raw material acquires its form thanks to the pattern of how the outer material is cut and the cotton ties that bind the sides of coti hide.
4. The Wardrobe and the Mattress without use are in ruin, without raison d’être. Without the habits hanging from the hooks, without the slow breathing of the sleepers.
5. Both objects possess a creeping mobility that differentiates them from other domestic furniture. We could say that they are items of furniture DESPITE themselves.
However, their size on the human scale gives them a lasting character… the wardrobe and the mattress are sufficiently big by themselves to form ANOTHER PLACE.
Dresses hang from the hangers, they are part of ourselves and they have the secret power of change, of metamorphosis and transvestism. The wardrobe is home to our belongings, souvenirs, our past, memories, letters, secrets…* All that one small room is able to remember.
The mattress is a playing field that silently takes the weight of the sleepers, there lies LIFE, nothing more.
6. In order to clean a wardrobe we must turn it to ruin. Render its interior ASUNDER, empty it of its secrets, expose them to the cold light of day, where they are not used to being. We must then ourselves go into the wardrobe and clean out the bug filled nooks…Like the bottom of a bottle, tribes of trapped flies, forever enclosed in their painful agony, blurred into long monotonous laments in an airy and pitiful buzz…**
7. You clean the mattress by hitting it with a stick in the open air. With each blow the primitive stuffing inside the mattress recovers its memory and breathes again, airing out old smells in the sunlight. In the deepest part of the stuffing, vague smiles are drawn, tensions are born, the outlines of shapes build up. The material inside oscillates in the infinity of possibilities that run across its surface in strange chills. Awaiting the habit of regenerating the spirit, it moves endlessly, playing with thousands of sweet soft curves, devising blind delirium. Lacking its own initiative, luxuriously malleable, femininely plastic, docile to all impulses, it constitutes a world outside the law…*
8. When we peek at a mattress and its sleeping occupant, we see a unique and ABSENT being. Sleeping people breathe away hours of their lives on soft foundations… Dreams lie in places where new ways of being arise,
the world is this one and there is no other,
the abandoned sleeper seems to say.
Enormous deep beds await, layered in fresh sheets, receiving our bodies. The cataracts of the night creak under the weight of the dark masses of sleep, of the viscous lava preparing to overflow from the banks, to break out of the locks, the doors, the old wardrobes, the fireplaces, where the wind whistles out its lament.**
9. In this exhibition, the mattresses are heavy bodies airing themselves in the sunlight from the windows. They have names: Marita Peña, Cora Ramírez, Patita de la Cerda, Inés Piraíno… perhaps the name of the grandmothers who once slept in them. Those bodies are the mark of their dead weight… they are shapeless creations, without an internal structure, born of the material’s tendency to mimic, using its memory to habitually repeat shapes once learned.**
10. By tensing the threads of cotton that criss-cross the shapeless stuffing of these embalmed bodies, their primitive interior is subjected to a pressure and from this a SHAPE is extracted from that which appears formless, that which is a case or a coincidence: the MATERIAL, the most passive and defenseless being in the cosmos. Anyone can knead it and mold it: it obeys all.**
11. Then there is the Wardrobe which we present as an assembly that has grown to the extent that it goes beyond the conventional scale of an old wardrobe, becoming a small pavilion, a folie. The reference for these new proportions is a chair, a sink and a series of fly-catcher bubbles hanging from coat-hangers that populate this inhabitable interior, together with glass piano legs that are the foundations for this fragile archaic construction.
12. Consider the meaningful act
That (the wardrobe) assumes expressivity and meaning
Only at the times when
It is… closed
Then, unexpectedly the meaning and the prestige surrounding it
Are valued. It is reaffirmed…
Change the scale of the meanings…
The space is separated, it is enclosed, isolated.
And in that moment it begins to fully simulate,
It at least simulates the beautiful facades of building,
It assimilates rapidly, and easily, the necessary styles,
Irrespective of the circumstances…
Its frames open impetuously
Towards regions, steadily deeper and darker
From this interior that appears so domestic.
Then… as if on a soft mattress…
Dreams make their way…
Not in a mystical cloudy place
But indeed separated by subtle and fragile walls of everyday reality…*
13. More wardrobes
More mattresses
Fewer homes…
Citations are translated into English by Smiljan Radic. Original versions of the books are written in Polish.
* Tadeusz Kantor, Wielopole/Wielopole, Il Luogo Teatrale, trad. Luigi Marinelli, Ubulibri, Milano, 1981. (Wielopole, Wielopole, Teatr Cricot 2, Kraków, 1980.)
** Bruno Schulz, Le Botteghe Color Cannella, trad. Anna Vivanti Salmon, Einaudi, Torino, 1991. (Sklepy cynamonowe, Towarzystwo Wydawnicze „Rój”, Warszawa, 1933.)