<strong>Strange Magic</strong>
Imagine a new museum in a major city. Imagine an architect that took his initial cue from artists. Imagine a character that assembles brands in a collage, that makes images that involve national identity. Imagine the materiality of the notion of luxury. Imagine an artist with the keys to the museum and the factories. An occupation of sorts. What if there was no luxury that one could ever achieve or ever afford? Afterall, it is a state of fantasy. A propaganda of fantasy always based in materials that transport the viewer. Because one can consume any fantasy without a purchase – just with vision. This fantasy, this accumulation of images, is based on an alchemical mix of materials. Grapes, Flowers, Leather, Cloth, Girls, Pigment, Steel, Wood, Glass. Processes of distillation. Twenty-seven kilometers of vintage champagne with natural penicillin growing in some corridors. Rose de Mai being quickly picked by female fingers and made into a ‘concrete’ which is traded and is an element of a major selling perfume. Flowers becoming solid becoming liquid. Perfumes represented by film stars. Millions of bottles being filled. Labeled and packaged and distributed. A rapture of sorts. A female image is conjured again and again. Intoxication as a state of lightness, of transportation, of vulnerability, of strength. Imagine or visualize the material wealth that truly makes the museum, that supplies it. The capital. A museum in the midst of a children’s park, an equestrian center, a park across the street where other types of visual exchanges take place. Much waiting around. Killing time. Selling time in units. Offering open visceral fantasies. The point is the construction and adrenaline. An image of a future that is slightly not the present. A journey to begin. This process is similar to art using existing reality as the base for all future, the base for fiction, the base for a narrative to take place. Using architecture as a questioning device, using competing agendas to one’s own end, for one’s own vocabulary. It all comes down to production. The production of space, the production of brands, the production of art. The production of dreams and desire, paradoxically intangible at the end of the day. These dissonant zones, a Venn diagram which usually exists on paper only, can momentarily coincide, conflate and then distance again.
Sarah Morris
July 2014