Bethan Huws
Forest
2008-09
88 Bottle-Racks & neon piece (Detail view)
Installation at Serralves Foundation Porto 2009
Courtesy: the artist & Yvon Lambert Paris-New York
Photo: Charles Duprat, Paris
© the artist and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2009-2010
bethan huws
il est comme un saint dans sa niche: il ne bouge pas
5 March to 24 May 2010
»I do Duchamp like I do a crossword puzzle.« The work of Marcel Duchamp, one of the most influential and important artists of the 20th century, is obscure and mysterious. So it seems appropriate for Bethan Huws to say she does him like a crossword puzzle. She has been involved with his work for years, approaching it in the form of numerous notes, yet without putting forward solutions. Her activity is also one of thinking about the making of art itself. Aside from the notes, Huws’s works of art are concerned with both Duchamp as a person and his work, sometimes specifically, sometimes less directly. The exhibition Il est comme un saint dans sa niche: Il ne bouge pas at the kestnergesellschaft brings together a selection of filmic, text-based and object-like works that give an impression of Bethan Huws’s involvement with Marcel Duchamp.
Bethan Huws can be considered a conceptual artist, if the term is understood as art that sees the process of finding and thinking about the work as a part of the work itself; that ascribes a more essential role to the intellectual than to the visual; that asks what art is — what the visual or linguistic is, what representation is. The formally very clear and precise works of Bethan Huws are concerned with the relationship between image and language, with the question of the production of meaning through art and with the understanding of art. »What’s the point of creating more artworks when you don’t understand the ones you’ve got?« can be read in a word cabinet as a self-reflexive question that is also addressed to the viewer.
The seven-minute film Fountain plays with this aspiration to want to understand. While a number of baroque fountains can be seen, we hear a woman’s voice speaking English, French and Welsh with a strong accent. She is talking about Duchamp’s final work, Étant donnés (1946-66). The film assumes nine French figures of speech to be central to its conception. Bethan Huws presents the results of her investigation into the work here, and underlines the great importance to it of language.
The title Fountain refers to one of Duchamp’s most famous works: his readymade of 1917 with the same title, a urinal placed on its back and signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt. In this work the designation »fountain« and the pissoir shown are a provocative discrepancy. But in Huws’s film the title and images coincide. On the metaphorical level too the sound of running water is for the artist equivalent to the process of speaking and thus of thinking. The sentence formed by the neon work At the Base of the Brain There Is a Fountain can also be understood in this respect. Although the film Fountain does not show Duchamp’s final piece, another one of Huws’s works at least partially cites it, presenting the quote in isolation. Mounted on a wall is the imitation of a human arm holding a gaslight (Armleuchter, candelabra, a pun in German which means idiot). But Huws’s Étant donnés primarily recalls Duchamp’s original work, which here — to those who know its puzzling complexity — appears humorously summarized.
A similar dry humor can be appreciated when Huws places around a dozen dates on a pedestal and gives them the title of Dates are important. In her adaptation of the concept of the readymade, Huws once again deals here with the relationship between language and image, and the ambiguity of words. In this case it is not only fruit that is important; the title also implies that rendezvous are too. And this collection of dates can indeed be read as the visual representation of a meeting.
A deliberate confusion of levels of meaning can also be found in the film The Chocolate Bar, which circles around the multiple meanings of the word »Mars« in the attempts to explain and understand, yet continual misunderstandings, of its two protagonists. »Where does he come from, Mars?« The question can certainly refer to the bottle-dryer that is visible on screen. Port-bouteilles is another famous readymade by Duchamps from the year 1914. Something as mysterious and incomprehensible as if from another planet? Bethan Huws brings together almost 90 of these tree-like objects as a forest we can walk through. With Forest she takes Duchamp’s attitude of indifference to aesthetic premises in a new direction, again drawing attention to the relationship between speech and things.
At the kestnergesellschaft the film A Marriage in the King’s Forest will be integrated into this installation. The film is the documentary of a wedding in the south of England, and was in fact premiered in a forest. The combination is not only a conscious reference to the work’s own exhibition history, however: in French »marier qc. à qc.« means to unite something with something else or to combine, and for Huws refers in this sense to an aspect of artistic creation itself. Her desire to become profoundly and objectively involved with Duchamp’s work is integrated, as already implied, into her reflections about making art and exhibiting. In the context of this exhibition Huws also announces herself as a viewer who is concerned, as we are, to understand. We do not necessarily need to know anything about Duchamp, as it is the process of observation itself, and thus of understanding, that is enacted.
The title of the exhibition also stems from one of Huws’s lines of thought about the status of works of art. In their materiality they are, like saints in their niches, immovable objects. The outdated French figure of speech »Il est comme un saint dans sa niche: Il ne bouge pas« means nothing less. Which takes us even more decisively to the fact that it is only in being viewed that a work of art becomes complete.