The Use Of the Everyday As Ornamentation

The connection between Gunilla Klingberg's piece at Moore and my own work makes me instantly interested in what she's doing, how it makes me feel, and ultimately whether or not I judge it to be "successful." First, I am impressed by large scale works and all five of the artists at Moore hit that soft spot for me. Not realizing Klingberg's piece would be at the doorway of the foyer made me stop in my tracks as I walked toward our meeting. One thing Gerard asked us was to think about the architecture of the building and how the art worked in that specific setting. For me, these riot-proof, stark, spartan spaces are great for displaying work because the do not compete with the piece in question. They are just like the gallery being a white cube.

So, I want to start my accessment saying that I started off LOVING the Klingberg piece. I loved walking through it, seeing it from far away, then getting so close you almost cannot see it anymore, and then seeing it in reverse on the inside of the building. Light, too, is a very powerful friend to this piece. It only heightens the dramatic nature and scale.

But I was dissapointed by what Klingberg wrote about the piece. While I would not pick Krispy Kreme as the ultimate example of the death of small business, stores like KMart and Target are very loaded for me. The piece was inherently political. And when you read what Klingberg writes about her piece, she is more interested in taking the ubiquity of logos, the fact that they are so pervasive, we don't even see them. For her, the ornamentation of the logos is about making the everyday more beautiful.

I am not certain that these logos are so benign. There is a lot of evidence that these businesses provide sub-par jobs. They kill off their competition and then become the ONLY option. They blur regional differences by streamlining their products in every store. There is something SO political, and so ripe for the taking in Klingberg's piece that to merely say it is about taking boring stuff and making it interesting misses the point.

When I look at the piece at Moore, I see a playful rearrangement of companies that could potentially sue her pants of for using their registered trademarks without consent. I see someone poking fun at capitalism. Even if she doesn't.

For me this is one way that using ornamentation is very successful. You are using the everyday, like Virgil does with interior design, but the building blocks are unlike anything you would ever see. And the whole inversion is playful and subversive. Referencing ornamentation is a great way to take a stance on the political or question our cringe-factor or repurpose something that creates a lot of environmental issues and give it new life. Ornamentation is a very powerful tool, perhaps more powerful than the artist using it is aware.