- Venue
- House Gallery
- Location
At the entrance to Beggars Banquet, visitors are greeted by two large (child sized) anthropomorphic figures. They are works from Cathy Hart and Esther Jervis’s individual sculptural practices. One, by Hart, is made from striped fabric and takes the loose from of a donkey stood upright on two short leg stumps. It has an oversized head that rests precariously on a thin tubular body. The other, by Jervis, is a roughly hewn, squat bear made from plaster; faint pencil traces indicate where the creature’s eyes, nose and mouth would be had they not been entirely plastered over. The sculptures, whilst distinct from one another, clearly contain similarities; they are both life-sized and fairytale-esque, they manifest an ambiguity or looseness of figural form and their muffled features give them a disturbing, gothic aura.
Upon entering the gallery space proper it is obvious that Beggars Banquet is not an exhibition of individually crafted, discrete sculptures: Hart and Jervis are in the space, covered in dust and plaster, surrounded by various forms made from plaster, wire and fabric in different states of finish. They go about their work – they drink tea, stop to chat and re-do or start anew on the various objects that surround them.
Hart and Jervis are working together in House gallery over a two week period to explore collaboration, artistic production and process in relation to their own object based practices. The experiment started when Hart and Jervis, who share a London studio, realised their work shared a similar territory: that of myth and fantasy. The exhibition at House Gallery continues that interest within the context of ‘Beggars Banquet’ a Biblical tale (Luke Ch 14 v 15-24) in which a lavish banquet, originally organised for dignitaries, is instead attended by a community of local poor people, misfits and illegitimates from the street. Creating their own community of artistic misfits then, is one of the aims of Beggars Banquet, the show. However, the fusing of Hart and Jervis’ individual practices, their collaboration over this two week period, is also equally under the microscope and being made public in Beggars Banquet. In this sense, the two creatures at the entrance are the control element that marks Hart and Jervis’s collaborative experiment in the gallery as such; they act as a sculptural benchmark against which visitors can measure the differences, similarities and the evolution of the work Hart and Jervis create together.
On the 4th of September, the collaboration was in its early stages, as were the sculptures. The creatures were predominantly white and roughly plastered, with bits of wire showing through where arms, legs or heads had been taken off and re-arranged; they were clearly more raw, lumpen and less ambiguous in their unfinished state than the two figures in the entrance. The sculptures will become more developed, featured and specific as they are worked on. Eventually they will populate the Beggars Banquet in full. However, the artists have agreed to maintain the overall pared down look of the work to allow them to focus on the fact of their collaborative making: to enable them to pinpoint, without distraction, the place where their two practices meet or merge within their combined output.
Hart and Jervis’ focus on their working processes in Beggars Banquet, their making public the usually private aspects of studio based practice and the exhibiting of themselves and their ‘unfinished’ work, is not an attempt to undermine the beleaguered art object in a plethora of contemporary live, collaborative and other critical non object based practices. Nor is it a political anti-modernist statement to put the artist, her unseemly feminine body, centre stage in the gallery. It is not an instance of relational practice per se, nor – thankfully- an extended open studio event; a chance to ‘meet the artist’. Beggars Banquet is a much more hybrid blend of these narratives.
Beggars Banquet puts the process of art, the collaborative encounter and collaborative mark making, to the test in direct relation to and with the art object. It is an exploration into what is at stake when a studio based artist makes herself and her practice public or subject to an audience, to another artist and to another practice. As such, it raises real questions of studio based ‘practice’ itself, or in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, the ‘it’ or the thing of practice: is practice internal, singular, unique, authentic or autonomous? Can a ‘practice’ really ever be altered, or does it remain intact and simply absorb any and all input or collaboration? If art objects are currently translated in terms of authorship or individual critical voice, what conditions could a wholly collaborative object based practice be considered under?
Intriguing questions, and to what extent the resulting banquet of characters will reveal the answers in and by its materiality – rather than be mediated in the form of a critical text – remains to be seen. But art historical, empirical and quantifiable results have no bearing within this experiment. The outcomes are ultimately and necessarily unpredictable. Hart and Jervis are conducting this exploration into their own work by being ‘in the moment’ and inhabiting the process. In doing so they put real critical pressure on themselves and their artistic work: simultaneously risking both their collaboration and their individual practices.
The proof-should you need it- of the liminality of Beggars Banquet as an artistic experiment will not only be the community of malformed Halflings at the penultimate banquet –a collection of objects that will no doubt befit Hart and Jervis’s illegitimate collaborative encounter with sculpture – but the confused status of the show’s ‘private view’: an art world ritual that usually marks the public opening of a spectacle or event, which in this case is on the 11th September; three days before the show closes. Get there whilst you can.
