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FEATURE DAVID ALTMEJD
The Index (detail, work in progress), 2007,
mixed media, 425 x 915 x 915 cm overall.
Photo: Ellen Paige Wilson. All images courtesy
the artist and Stuart Shave Modern Art, London,
and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
It’s the sensation of even growing through the space and roof, enclosed in its own glass vitrine – brought about the notion of an aviary. So, for his project here,
titled The Index, Altmejd invades the space with a complex of platforms, what Altmejd loves
mirror structures, illuminated channels, rock formations and arboreal
forms, an accumulation colonised by a multitude of birds; some real,
taxidermists’ specimens, many others of Altmejd’s invention. The to call ‘the object
werewolf has largely disappeared; a fragmented likeness lies stretched
out on a white platform, subsumed and absorbed by an explosion of
mirrored stalagmites. The werewolf is replaced by the watchful figure around the corner’
of the birdman, a move that Altmejd describes characteristically as a
‘power shift’ away from the darker energies of his werewolves, towards
a more open and dynamic interconnection between the iconography
of natural and synthetic, animal and human, static and generative.
Elsewhere Altmejd is working on The Giant 2, a five-metre figure
reclining against a wall – a monstrous humanoid whose body is full of
chamber built into the side of the platform – the chamber extends absences and cavities, to be inhabited by a host of sculptural flora and
around a corner, where the head lies, and the viewer can only see its fauna, an owl looking out from its eye socket.
reflection, while remaining fully aware that it is there – both present Riffing on the inescapably bucolic setting of the Giardini,
and hidden. It’s the sensation of what Altmejd loves to call ‘the object Altmejd’s previously urbane clarity seems to challenge itself to dissolve
around the corner’ – physically and metaphorically – delving into that the lines of demarcation between symbolic, fictional and formal genres
shadow world in which things are and are not, where rationality and the further, rather than holding them in taut stasis. If Altmejd’s previous work
clean lines of Modernism open onto the crypt and to the unconscious explored how a static sculpture could produce the sense of contained
energy of myth. energy, of the potential of something nevertheless endlessly stuck,
How will Altmejd’s introspective, sometimes claustrophobic charged without release, his excursion to Venice suggests the expansive
vision translate to the sunlit avenues and spaces of the Biennale’s unravelling of those charges, in which mirroring, interpenetration and
Giardini? For Venice, Altmejd took his cue from the intriguing organic excess replace their previous frozen forces; identity and non-
modernist architecture of the Canadian Pavilion. Designed by the identity in accelerating dialectical translation, sculpture as the energy
Italian firm BBPR in 1957, the pavilion’s eccentric steel, glass and timber not of things, but what they become.
space, curving around a windowed partition and full of sharp angles,
is already uncannily sympathetic to Altmejd’s fascination with the Work by David Altmejd is in the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale,
refractory, mirrored and crystalline, while the surrounding trees – one from 10 June to 21 November
ARTREVIEW eight.lintwo.lin
p076-082 David Altmejd AR Jun07.82 82 10/5/07 00:20:34
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