GOSHKA THE NEW
MACUGA MUSEUM
Constructing cultural identity
words SKYE SHERWIN
IN THE MAGICIAN, Ingmar Bergman’s philosophical, Perhaps it’s not surprising then that one
gothic comedy of 1958, Max von Sydow, heavily of Macuga’s primary strategies is to offer an
disguised in a false beard and wig, plays a travelling antithesis of the blank, decontextualised space
mesmerist in nineteenth-century Stockholm. of the traditional white-cube gallery. “I am going
Staging spectacles of mind control, the magician against this neutral display of works… going for
represents the irrational power of art, which is something absolutely the opposite”, she says.
set against the post-Enlightenment, scientific Macuga, who once worked as a window dresser,
rationalism of the moral watchdogs whose household he sends into has an extraordinary flair for theatrical display, and over the years her
chaos. Encapsulating issues of authenticity and authorship, subjective work has taken on increasingly complicated forms, evolving from the
experience, the real and the fake, the movie was included within single unit of the brown-paper grotto Cave (1999) to a contemporary
Goshka Macuga’s installation Sleep of Ulro (2006), shown during last interpretation of the picture gallery of Sir John Soane’s house (Picture
year’s Liverpool Biennial, and makes the ideal introduction to the ideas Room, 2003), through to Sleep of Ulro, her most ambitious project
and concepts that underpin her art. to date. Structured around the geography of a Catholic afterlife
To Macuga’s levelling eye, artworks are readymades; since the – comprising Heaven, Hell and Purgatory – Sleep of Ulro comprised
1990s she has been displaying museum curiosities, bric-a-brac and a network of corridors, rooms and antechambers inspired by the
both historical and contemporary art within her installations, or ‘total expressionist set design from the film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920).
environments’, as she prefers to describe them. Though the Polish- The scale of the work expanded dramatically on that of earlier projects,
born, London-based artist appropriates the work of others – anything and was filled out with artworks and museum objects discovered over
from a painting by the British surrealist Paul Nash, in Sleep of Ulro, to the course of a previous year’s research.
a series of handbound monographs depicting the complete works Sleep of Ulro tackled the task of creating a supernatural art
of twentieth-century greats such as Duchamp or Warhol, covered in environment. Heaven, a white 12-sided crow’s-nest of a room, was
bindings created by the artist and shown as part of her 2005 solo show accessed by a vertiginous winding staircase and through a trapdoor.
at Kate MacGarry, London – and presents them as elements within her Here, housed in a glass display cabinet, were all manner of handmade
own artwork, she is not imposing her authorship in place of the original botanical curiosities, unearthed by the artist in the archives of the
artists’ in a straightforward way. Rather, this process becomes a strategy Manchester Museum. Precious ivory carvings and old manuscripts were
for exploring her personal, fragmented experience of the world. protected in Perspex boxes, alongside early-twentieth-century Brendel
As she puts it, “It’s not the attempt to project my identity as flower models, which also sprouted at foot-level from between the
much as to find my identity in the process [of creating an artwork]. I’m wooden floorboards. On a sensational level, Macuga stage-manages
not living in my own country. I’m not speaking in my mother’s language. artworks and artefacts to produce an effect of wonder, discovery and
The history that I’ve been educated with in Poland is not valid anymore excitement akin to her own sense of elation when making discoveries
because all the history books have been rewritten, so in a way I’m just through research or in conversation with other artists.
creating my own histories, based on objects and artworks and certain The germs of this strategy date from the 1990s, when, as a
experiences.” student at Goldsmiths, she would stage exhibitions of her friends’
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