Chris Dorsett
exhibiting in the dining room from Sunday, 3rd July 2011
It is a place where things are, as on a table
John Cage
Dorsett's sabbatical project Quiet Varnish (2010) involved the creation of over-drawings on high-resolution photographs of historic violins (e.g. the Ashmolean Museum's Hill Collection which includes instruments that have not been played for over a century). Some works from this series were exhibited in Delay: delayed by illness (2010) and Dust on the Mirror (2011), whilst others were mounted for horizontal display beneath long-redundent banqueting silver on the dining table at Wallington.
The engagement with cross-sensory semiotics generated by Dorsett's drawings on long-silent musical instruments led to his recent presentations, conference papers and essays on themes such as: 'Semiotic Uncertainty and Resonant Presence’ (at Transformations in Art and Culture, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, 2011); 'Synaesthetic Presences: new sights from old sounds' (British Forum for Ethnomusicology Conference Making Sound Objects: Cultures of Hearing, Creating and Circulation, 2012); and ‘Safe Houses on Enchanted Ground’ (an essay on Joseph Addison’s 1713 ‘frozen voices’ story for Sian Bowen’s Rijksmuseum publication Suspending the Ephemeral, 2012). The concept of curating artworks on table tops also featured in a keynote presentation by Dorsett entitled 'At a Moment’s Notice, According to the Pleasure of the Holder' (Design, Semantics, Form and Movement Annual Conference, Jiangnan University, China, 2013). Table-top installations, as a form of curatorial sense-making, also inspired a sequence of train-table conversations about genetic archives filmed by Dorsett for his projection piece 'trainslidingtalk' in Extraordinary Renditions: the cultural negotiation of science, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2013).
For more on curating tables see Dorsett's chapter 'Things and Theories: the unstable presence of exhibited objects' in Dudley, S., Barnes, A. J., Binnie, J., Petrov, J., & Walklate, J. (eds) (2011) The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation, London and New York: Routledge
The engagement with cross-sensory semiotics generated by Dorsett's drawings on long-silent musical instruments led to his recent presentations, conference papers and essays on themes such as: 'Semiotic Uncertainty and Resonant Presence’ (at Transformations in Art and Culture, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, 2011); 'Synaesthetic Presences: new sights from old sounds' (British Forum for Ethnomusicology Conference Making Sound Objects: Cultures of Hearing, Creating and Circulation, 2012); and ‘Safe Houses on Enchanted Ground’ (an essay on Joseph Addison’s 1713 ‘frozen voices’ story for Sian Bowen’s Rijksmuseum publication Suspending the Ephemeral, 2012). The concept of curating artworks on table tops also featured in a keynote presentation by Dorsett entitled 'At a Moment’s Notice, According to the Pleasure of the Holder' (Design, Semantics, Form and Movement Annual Conference, Jiangnan University, China, 2013). Table-top installations, as a form of curatorial sense-making, also inspired a sequence of train-table conversations about genetic archives filmed by Dorsett for his projection piece 'trainslidingtalk' in Extraordinary Renditions: the cultural negotiation of science, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2013).
For more on curating tables see Dorsett's chapter 'Things and Theories: the unstable presence of exhibited objects' in Dudley, S., Barnes, A. J., Binnie, J., Petrov, J., & Walklate, J. (eds) (2011) The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation, London and New York: Routledge
The fifth panel of William Bell Scott’s mural in the Great Hall shows border reivers gathered for a meal in their castle. Here the act of bringing a spur to the table on a plate signified to the reiver family that the larder needed replenishing. This would have been achieved by raiding local farms.
Fast-forward through history to the 18th Century and the elegant dining room at Wallington. Arthur Young’s book Northern Tour (1770), which is displayed near the table, describes this decorated environment as ‘light and pretty’. Imagine the continuing evolution of the reivers’ spur-platter custom at this time of increased prosperity. The pewter platter is now a silver basket and the only suggestion of borderland violence is the Calverley and Blackett ‘arms’ engraved on the tableware. Thus we can imagine the spur replaced by objects of a cultural, rather than military, significance.
Fast-forward through history to the 18th Century and the elegant dining room at Wallington. Arthur Young’s book Northern Tour (1770), which is displayed near the table, describes this decorated environment as ‘light and pretty’. Imagine the continuing evolution of the reivers’ spur-platter custom at this time of increased prosperity. The pewter platter is now a silver basket and the only suggestion of borderland violence is the Calverley and Blackett ‘arms’ engraved on the tableware. Thus we can imagine the spur replaced by objects of a cultural, rather than military, significance.
Spur-Platter Variant, photographic over-drawing with silverware from the Trevelyan family collection
Spur-Platter Variant has been created using pencil, french polish, ink-jet prints (photography by Tucker Densley), modern kitchen equipment and silverware (made by John Jacobs of London in the 1750s). The assemblage of images and objects has been installed on the table using a platform built of museum-grade materials.
From the 'Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border' (1821)
The rider's spur brought to the table on a platter is exactly the kind of unexpected juxtaposition of object and context that interests Dorsett as an artist and a curator. This is his core idea about placing contemporary artworks in historical environments such as Wallington and the notion of an unexpected juxtaposition encapsulates the spirit in which Unfinished Business was conceived. From the beginning the project was about intervention not integration - Dorsett asked himself what other kinds of signifiers could be brought to the table instead of a spur.
photographic 'over-drawings' in situ, versions during July 2011
Curating on tables
Table-top arrangements also figure in 'trainslidingtalk', Dorsett‘s contribution to Extraordinary Renditions: the cultural negotiation of science, an exhibition at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2013). He regularly meets genomics experts Volker Straub and David Elliott (both of the Institute of Genetic Medicine, Newcastle University) on a local commuter train. Across a moving carriage they swap ideas about 'junk' DNA and institutionalised collection-holding. The motion of the train is part of their exchange: the stations they stop at a reminder that inactivity, rather than continual transition, can shape both evolution and history. Dorsett’s recent photographs and audio-recordings of these journeys explore, in the format of short fragmentary films, the archival significance of non-coding DNA for scientists and the experimental value of museum collections for artists. See http://vimeo.com/album/2549219
The Extraordinary Renditions symposium and networking event (9th September, 2013) explored how extra-ordinary knowledge can be 'performed', rather than illustrated. The contributing artists (Borland/Condon, Crisp and Dorsett) shared their current research and fostered new associations with invited scientists, artists, writers and curators. See http://vimeo.com/75586281
Biographical details
James Putnam (2001) 'Art and Artifact: the museum as medium', Thames and Hudson
Chris Dorsett is an artist and exhibition-maker whose career has been built on collaborations with collection-holding institutions such as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. In large-scale collaborative projects such as Divers Memories (1987-1994) he sought to resituate the changing aesthetic and political ambitions of experimental art within the widest range of historical and scientific contexts. Dorsett's pioneering work began long before the 1990s groundswell of museum-oriented art projects as an exploration of the interface between contemporary art and museum collections (Putnam 2001 cites 145 museum-as-medium projects from that decade in comparison to only 48 from the previous twenty years). Over the years this focus has produced artworks and curatorial experiments that rethink museological claims about the construction of knowledge through the display and interpretation of objects. However, Dorsett has also regularly engaged with knowledge as an attribute of physical dislocation and cultural difference. His fieldwork residencies in the Amazon (organised with the Centre for Economic Botany, Kew) and the walled village of Kat Hing Wai (commissioned by the Arts Development Council of Hong Kong) have led to a body of theoretical writing aimed at readers in the museums studies sector. See Chris Dorsett's website
