Woven in the Air
'How exquisite life had once been! How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration!' Thus Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's ravishing and doomed creation of 1890, as he considers the history of fine textiles. Excited and sickened in equal measure by the success of his Faustian compact with a painting and afflicted with a 'fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne', Dorian seeks to still his spirit in the contemplation of beautiful things, and turns at length to the acquisition of fabulous tapestries and embroideries. For a year, he builds his collection. It includes, Wilde tells us:
dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates, and stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings; the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the East as "woven air", and "running water", and "evening dew"; strange figured cloths from Java; elaborate yellow Chinese hangings; books bound in tawny satins or fair blue silks, and wrought with fleurs de lys, birds, and images; veils of lacis worked in Hungary point; Sicilian brocades, and stiff Spanish velvets; Georgian work with its gilt coins, and Japanese Foukousas with their green-toned golds and their marvellously-plumaged birds.
Texture, finish, motif and pattern: these form for Dorian Gray the medium by which he hopes not only to forget his horrifying predicament, but to transmute its terrors into a cruel and distanced aesthetic philosophy. But there is a type of textile that is still more entrancing, even better suited to the elaboration of his dandified and isolated ethos by virtue of the fact that it no longer exists, and may thus be idealised and endlessly pored over in the dandy's imagination. Wilde essays an inventory of these lost and legendary fabrics:
Where had they passed to? Where was the great crocus-coloured robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked by brown girls for the pleasure of Athena? Where, the huge valerium that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, that Titan sail of purple on which was represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by white gilt-reined steeds? He longed to see the curious table-napkins wrought for the Priest of the Sun, on which were displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast; the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic ... and the coat that Charles of Orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which were embroidered the verses of a song beginning "Madame,
je suis tout joyeux"....
The several passages such as these, in which the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray lingers over the details of real and imaginary interiors, extant and mythical draperies, are not only inspired by his protagonist's urge to blank out the rigours of his double life. Famously, Wilde modelled large portions of the novel on similar descriptions in Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature (1884), a book that contains perhaps the fullest expression of the dandiacal vision of the late nineteenth century. Among the aesthetic ambitions of the novel's hero, the desiccated aristocrat Des Esseintes, is complete control of the interiors where he tries to forget the outside world to which he has become painfully allergic. Fabrics and carpets play a precise part in the self-seclusion of Des Esseintes, to the extent that in the novel's fourth chapter he acquires an unfortunate tortoise solely for the purpose of setting off the hues and patterns in 'an Oriental carpet aglow with iridescent colours'. Such is his commitment to a hermetic but fantastical décor - an air-locked existence in which he may pursue fantasies of being abroad, at sea, or even underwater - that one might almost say Des Esseintes invents a kind of total or immersive installation avant la lettre.
Looking at Marc Camille Chaimowicz's installation at Bloomberg SPACE, in which six carpets of the artist's design are suspended in space, we are assuredly at some remove from the concerns of the literary aestheticism of the 1880s and 1890s. (Though we might note here the artist's avowed debt to Huysmans, or to a later avatar of the nineteenth-century dandy such as Jean Cocteau.) And yet, Chaimowicz, whose work has time and again returned to the question of the distance between art and decoration, surely shows us how far we are too, historically and aesthetically speaking, from the uniformity of Modernist space - which had sought to eradicate the gorgeous visual profusion imagined by Wilde and Huysmans - and from the attenuated theatricality of Minimalist sculpture and installation. At the
same time, his is an art that consistently blurs such easy historical and aesthetic distinctions: Chaimowicz's work seems keenly aware that both the Modernist banishment of 'mere' ornament during the first half of the twentieth century, and the rigorous renovation of the gallery space undertaken in the second, have their roots (however obscurely) in the nineteenth-century dandy's merciless control of his immediate environment. (We ought to recall here, for example, the carpeted continuum that links the Arts and Crafts movement of the Victorian era with the interior designs of the Bauhaus, domestic Constructivism with the late-Modernist murals of the post-war period.) Chaimowicz's intervention at Bloomberg SPACE is a delicately wrought reminder of the ambiguity of such notions as 'installation', 'ornament' and 'interior'.
The most well known - in a sense, still, the most scandalous - instance of Chaimowicz's expansive sense of the installation as immersive environment is his Celebration? Realife, a work first shown at Gallery House in London in 1972 and subsequently restaged or reinterpreted - as Celebration? Realife Revisited - on several occasions. In that work, Chaimowicz revealed himself to be a dandy of sorts - his conception of the theatricality of installation was sensual rather than perceptual, schooled on Huysmans, Cocteau and half a century of pop-cultural glamour and fantasy rather than the rigours of phenomenology. With its profusion of artefacts, images and ornaments, Celebration? Realife conjured the deliberately wrought interiors of avant-garde salons, teenage bedrooms and countercultural crashpads, while private and social spaces appended to the installation proper suggested just how narrow was the gap between art and décor, installation and performance, the everyday and the fantastical. Chaimowicz, in other words, established himself as an artist whose conception of installation was both aesthetically rarefied and deliberately mundane. Where other artists of the era might have theorised the new horizontality of Minimalist sculpture, Chaimowicz's art proliferated at carpet level.
Several later works tether Celebration? Realife to the present installation, refining Chaimowicz's investigation of the proximity of the fine and the decorative arts, but also (and more profoundly) extending his delicate understanding of the installation as bridge between the gallery space, the domestic interior and the realm of fantastic, dandiacal invention. Of these, perhaps the closest to the Bloomberg SPACE piece is Tapestry (2005), in which the woven pink-brown fabric of the title, fringed at one end, seems to float above the gallery floor on its bare white support. Like Tapestry, the pink wood-and-lacquer bureau of Desk ... on Decline (1982-2003) is inclined toward the gallery floor so that the rectilinear surfaces of the space seem to have become liquid - at Bloomberg SPACE, one has the same sense of a shifting, precipitous space - or rather six spaces - opening up around the discrete elements.
Where a work such as Carpet (1992) suggested a single plane or landscape - mapped or interrupted in this case by the variation and repetition of pink and grey motifs - the current work is a proliferation of imaginary interiors which are at the same time invitations to tread a type of fantastic geography: a topography of subtle and seductive design.
It is this sense of the carpet as entrance to a novel and potentially unlimited space to which the dandies Dorian Gray and Des Esseintes may be said to respond in the respective novels of Wilde and Huysmans. In both cases, the secluded protagonist discovers, in the close precincts of his own domestic space, a portal to another kind of space, be it the space of untrammelled pleasure, the historical frieze of art history or the heights of cold metaphysical speculation. The trick is effected by his submerging himself in colour and pattern, but the magical realm must first be delineated as such: like, says Des Esseintes, 'those Japanese boxes that fit one inside the other'. Chaimowicz's carpets are as if carved out of the space of the building itself, affording glimpses of another, endless and ramifying, architecture, an archipelago of enigmatic and imaginary rooms that floats amid the extant surfaces and volumes of the building. All of this is achieved with a lightness - in terms of colour, motif, the airborne nature of the artefacts and their oblique attitudes to the architecture around them - that suggests Chaimowicz is a contemporary dandy of exquisite and audacious discipline.
Brian Dillon
Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet magazine. He is the author of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005).