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Open Ended Objects
By Glenn Adamson

Try to describe an Anders Ruhwald sculpture. Initially, it will seem an easy prospect: here is an oversized black candleholder; there, a green shelf that leans against the wall. On the floor is a blob with a convex mirror inserted into it. Formally, each of these things has the reductive character of a Minimalist artwork. They subscribe to the aesthetic dictates of Donald Judd, who sought gestalt form that manages to be only one thing, with no internal dissension. Ruhwald’s work, then, seems at first to be a marvel of simplicity.

But not so fast. For all their compressed particularity, these sculptures are also enlivened by inexhaustible nuance. Ruhwald takes seriously the idea that surface is where form interfaces with spatial context, so his surfaces have an intensity in all registers. When his shapes curve, the lines have a tensile snap and swerve that bespeak complex engineering feats in clay. The pneumatic feeling is sometimes emphasized with a perfectly smooth surface texture, and sometimes undermined by a doughy, finger-marked surface, not unlike that of a pinch pot. The opaque, matte glazes that he uses might remind you of certain Chinese ceramics, or Arts and Crafts pottery. As in those precedents, the sheath of glaze is less like a decorative application than it is like the skin on a person’s body. It is a very active surface, which seem dappled with alternating shadow and luminosity. Perhaps this is why even the single, strong colours that he favours are hard to describe. The palette evokes the cheerful artificiality of children’s toys, but also the mysteriously selected accents that brighten civic spaces like malls, schools, and train interiors. And yet, despite these glancing allusions, his colours always seem to have been invented simply for the occasion—something of an achievement, given the demanding chemistry of ceramic glaze.

Things get really complicated when we consider the messier questions of cultural resonance—and resonance is the word for these objects, with their always unfulfilled but very suggestive references to functionality. Ruhwald’s work comes close to furniture in many cases, both in literal terms, as when he incorporates his signature blue lamp bulbs, or the metal strut of a folding table, and also in the more figurative sense that his objects are designed to fit into that flexible space between the body and the architectural surroundings. Perhaps, given the title of this exhibition, it would be better to say that he wants to render the body itself into a transitional object. Looking at his sculptures, one feels captured between the elusive forms of the work and the abstractness of space itself. Some pieces are mirrored, in the manner of a security camera, contributing to the nagging sense that in a Ruhwald installation one is simultaneously looking at the objects and being looked at by them. Other objects physically engage a wall or corner, addressing the environment without actually transforming it—an approach that he calls “site sensitive” (as opposed to “site specific”). Nor is he content to leave the actual space neutral. Perhaps in recognition that even the simplest white art gallery is hardly an uninflected space, he encircles his objects with curtains made of ribbons, with the effect that walking amongst them feels like crashing a private party; or, in the present exhibition, lines the walls with warmly reflective sheets of polished brass.

This attentiveness to the circumstances in which his objects are encountered is another link between Ruhwald and the Minimalists. He refers to his works as “life-sized,” which initially sounds curious, since they aren’t representations of anything in particular. But it is doubtless true that these objects are scaled to the body. In this sense, they the art of Judd, Tony Smith, Richard Serra and Robert Morris, all of whom sought to create works that had a characterful presence that would collectively activate the space they occupied, rather like actors on a stage. Yet, again, the connection is not a simple one. If Ruhwald’s objects have personalities, they are slightly dysfunctional ones. And if they claim space for themselves, they do so only tentatively. It is useful to compare Richard Serra’s well-known Prop pieces in lead of the late 1960s, a big influence on Ruhwald, with his own pieces that incorporate support-systems. While Serra’s sculptures are forceful and self-sufficient, Ruhwald’s are eccentric and provisional. The use of brightly glazed, fragile ceramic (instead of Serra’s heavy metal) infuses the sculptures with a sense of play, but the imagery could also be read in darker terms, as signifiers of loss, perhaps: fragments of ancient sculpture placed in museum mounts, or even amputees hobbling along on crutches.

All of this is to say that Ruhwald’s work speaks the language of sculpture adroitly, with a subtle mastery of art historical reference, psychological affect, and formal gesture. Given this the question inevitably arises: does it matter that his work is always made of clay? This is not to ask if these objects are best seen as art or craft—it is obvious that they are both, and unproblematically so—but rather whether they derive their meaning from their materiality in any important way, and therefore, whether they should be taken as an intervention into the field of contemporary craft. Ruhwald himself is ambivalent on this question. Clearly, it is important to him that his works be immaculately made. (This might be said to be the most “old school” aspect of his practice; he’s not willing to give up on the modernist equation between facture and presence.) There are teasing references to the decorative in his work—a tassel here, a few fistfuls of candles there—but one would be hard pressed to find in his work any specific reference to historical ceramic forms.

It may be that their 'handmadeness' is important only at a sublimated level. Ruhwald describes his works as “inconveniences,” interruptions in the otherwise predictable run of (mostly mass-produced) objects that surround us. He most enjoys seeing his works in a domestic context, where their “slightly functional” character manifests a subtle rift in an otherwise perfectly logical system of useful and ornamental objects. Subtle as it may be, there is clearly a connection between the purposeful awkwardness of his work and the Ruskinian claims that are often made for craft, in which it is conceived as a roadblock thrown in the otherwise seamless circuits of modernity. Art historians such as Johanna Drucker and John Roberts have recently contributed to this longstanding arena of debate by focusing attention on production values in art*. Drucker argues that the days in which art could legitimately be seen as a discrete sphere, severed cleanly from the world of commodities, are well and truly over. The consequence of this “contingent” condition, she argues, is that artworks must meet non-art objects head on, competing with them for attention and value. Through various strategies that are mostly unavailable to mass production—such as the intentional use of entropic composition, or “affective” techniques of making—she contends that art can simultaneously achieve a level of individuality, and engage with the milieu of contemporary life. Roberts, similarly, argues for a flexible and potentially critical situation in which artists stake out new, unstable positions within a triangle whose three corners are the Readymade (or found object), the handmade (the artisanally fabricated object), and the discursive (art activities that entail management or analysis, rather than making). It seems to me that these theoretical positions perfectly describe the way that Ruhwald’s sculptures operate. They are sufficiently charismatic to sustain comparison with any store-ready commodity, and also just personalized enough, through their quirky imagery, hand-modeled surfaces, and off-kilter compositions, to activate a sense of aesthetic unease. Though substantially made using well-honed craft skill, they also incorporate found objects, and then are presented in non-hierarchical and curious arrangements, which suggests that their purpose is not to stand there and be admired, but simply to create new situations.

So, if a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is one of Ruhwald’s objects worth? As this short essay has perhaps indicated, talking about them feels inevitably like a mere scratching of their surfaces. Despite their apparent simplicity, his sculptures are both allusive and elusive: their meanings are not fixed as points in space, but rather permeate and recondition the space they inhabit. They are open ended objects: propositions rather than answers, beginnings to a conversation.


Glenn Adamson is the director of the Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY. Formerly he was the head of Graduate studies and the Deputy head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Publications include Thinking Through Craft and The Craft Reader (both Berg Publishers). 



*) Johanna Drucker, “Affectivity and Entropy: Production Aesthetics in Contemporary Sculpture” in Objects and Meaning: New Perspectives on Art and Craft (2004); John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (London: Verso, 2007).

Obstructivism

By Ezra Shales

An artist in the age of IKEA, Anders Ruhwald explores the enigmatic emotional connections between décor and sculpture, the constructions that Alvar Aalto called “inhuman” and “dehumanized” furnishings (1). Lamenting formalism and rationalism, and with it tubular steel and harsh white artificial light fixtures that were not “cosy,” Aalto suggested “…the yellow flame of the wax candle and the interior decorator’s tendency to brighten her light compositions with yellow silk are more in line with human instinct than the electrician with his photometer and his stereotyped ideas about white light (2).” Ruhwald’s wax candles flicker with Aalto’s humanism but also smart with allusions to middlebrow home furnishings catalogs. Their limited lifespan and diminished lumens traditionally index the brevity of life, like the contorted gestures of the ancient Laocoön statue. But these candles wallow in mundane “mood lighting,” almost satirizing their own theatricality. In his scale and repertoire of forms, Ruhwald readily participates in the language of decorative art and avoids grandiose myths, aside from Aalto himself and Scandinavian design as a whole. Catalog photography of blond birch veneers and white laminates, set off by sea glass and vanity publications hold the stage as the lingua franca of contemporary Western visual culture. In this odd middle landscape, “new age” candle and ancient votive collide, muddying the distinctions between the pastoral and the metropolitan, organic and technological.

Sculpturally, Ruhwald refers to vases, light fixtures, and chairs, and yet his hand-built versions are mottled and monochrome simulacra that deny the natural and celebrate artifice. When he intentionally connects the cool hedonism of a good-looking pristine commodity to its descent into the abyss of domestic chaos, he deploys the organic strategically. Wavering black sculpture obstructs the gallery, and returns the viewer to fundamental questions about the ways objects intended to engender sociability actually inhibit our lives. We see our own middling temporary possessions, especially the ones that become abject so quickly. The candle is one such ephemeral commodity that invites our familiarity and pleasure of recognition. Bonded to a ceramic fixture, modern material impoverishment hovers eloquently alongside echoes of Modernist design. For instance, Ruhwald excavates Aalto’s Savoy vase of 1935 to use as a mirror for our own displaced yearnings and stumbling as consumers. This is an ultra-contemporary derivative, cheap crud fused with a primary object of virtù. In the 1980s, Haim Steinbach hung commodities such as boxes of detergent on the wall, but as clinical specimen. Ruhwald moves the goods back off the shelves to their roles as “biological units” in the domestic sphere, to again draw upon Aalto’s terminology. He draws on Scandinavian Modernism, both high and low, as a morass of commodities and material culture. Scandinavia is in quotation marks, as a cultural construction (3). In this tactile and cerebral space of fungible capital, artistic and social, the sculpture camps out.

Material Culture
If you divide the candlestick into many more parts, it will appear crowded, as it will want distinctiveness of form on a near view, and lose the effect of variety at a distance…. - William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1743) (4)

A trademark of the rational, or ATM of $? I write as an American who is self-conscious when he hears and sees his country’s denominations reproduced illegibly, like sports logos littering the global mind and body. Likewise, Iittala Oy now reproduces the Savoy vase as a rubber ice cube mold, a cookie cutter, and a pattern on a dishcloth, a feat Aalto had not considered remotely feasible when he lectured on “Rationalism and Man” to the Svenska Slöjdföreningen (which translates as “Swedish Association of Industrial Designers” or “Arts and Crafts,” depending on the decade) in 1935. To recall Hogarth, the form of the Savoy has become both crowded and indistinct. But in our contemporary visual culture, it is rational obscurantists who hyper-fetishize commodities. Ruhwald’s proxy for the Savoy vase contains equal parts skepticism and recuperation. He participates in the degeneration of meaning and yet returns to a primary desire, the wish to engender new social relations via design. Hogarth’s baluster candlestick remains interesting as an icon of luxury to investigate quality despite, or in spite of, its materiality. Hogarth savored the “line of beauty” in the lowliest Londoner, and avoided conflating goodly beauty with ethical goodness. He democratized pleasure, or at least tried to do so, by placing it in the perception of form, not material essence. Except for television shows on gourmet food, such lessons in connoisseurship are unfashionable. Yet our engagement with visual culture pivots on these most basic distinctions of artifice, be it the granularity of an apple pie, ceramic body, or photographic emulsion. Ruhwald seizes the candle as an object lesson in much the same way, as an opportunity to re-inscribe the artistic pretensions of the most basic material culture. 

Ruhwald draws on candles and tassels because they are good for thinking, not good material or especially good thoughts. Such materialist philosophy can also be applied retroactively to the past. A Mondrian painting can be experienced as the ineluctable modality of the purely visual, but also as intervals of color which masking tape once cordoned apart. My knowledge of the taped line corrodes my ability to perceive Mondrian’s artifacts as autonomous. Similarly, a John Chamberlain sculpture is inextricably linked in my mind to the great American Adonis of the roaring twenties, Ford’s Model T and its sexy pelvis. The twisted, crushed chrome fender of the twentieth century was the permissive cause of beauty in Chamberlain’s work. Today’s plastic auto bodies might melt in interesting ways but would deny that genre its specific allure. Seeing the masking tape and the chrome fender does not weaken this art, it reconnects it to its technological and material contexts. The rational explanations render human artistic intentions that are so often classified as a mystical and intellectual. As others have noted, histories of modern art suppress this aspect of material culture, attempting to leverage meaning apart from tawdry consumption. Today’s artists, crafters, and designers hacking IKEA products call attention to this process. The company’s accessible and economical furnishings have eradicated romantic and historical notions of raw material. Sculptors in Tel Aviv and Vancouver alike shop the store to buy readymade flat-packed furniture to retool in the unmade, a paradox of no mean proportion. Chamberlain’s feigned naivety about his materials is no longer possible.

Social Art, Anti-Social Craft
Like Jorge Pardo, who “reprogrammed” Alvar Aalto’s designs as units in his own work, Ruhwald does so with the intention of reanimating an artifact socially. In Post-Production, Nicolas Bourriaud claims that artists like Pardo and Tiravanija are re-socializing commerce, reframing consumption as production in a democratic manner (5). But Aalto himself considered his works complete only when they were in use and usable.

A standardized object should not be a finished product, but on the contrary be made so that man and all the individual laws controlling him supplement its form,” he wrote, saving out the final step for the irrational human in his lecture on “Rationalism and Man.” When I first encountered an installation by Rirkrit Tiravanija in 1993, I had precisely this sensation looking at a bottle of sriracha sauce on his table cluttered with ingredients. I savored the tacit knowledge of what it tasted like, how it vaporized in the frying pan. I saw myself refracted, a product of material culture, and felt the journey from my grandmother’s kitchen to my own in one glance. In such events of “relational aesthetics,” Bourriaud claims the cloister of art is reopened to living humanity. But such a premise of creative consumption has always been front and center in the decorative arts, and was even acknowledged by Aalto. Historically, craft and the decorative arts are rooted in the very place where relational aesthetics strives to go. Very few craft practitioners grasp this essential social taproot and plurality of craft. Often the attributes of function, invented cultural and ethnic traditions, and materiality are mistaken as truths in their own right. Humans forget that conjectural attributes like honesty need to be socially grounded. Alone, or abandoned by time, such qualities turn overtly dishonest. The social life of an artifact is, of course, what distinguishes the pot from a vessel, and remakes the abstraction of form into a plate: good conversation transforms what is artistic into culture. Ruhwald grasps that respecting the incompleteness of an artifact or implanting potential future sociability is what makes the anthropomorphic grandfather clock or sugar bowl enduringly fantastical.

Ruhwald represents a chair or the outline of a television as a bodily obstruction, a question mark about how these machines for seating the body and mind prevent the flow of shared space. Instead crafting a poetic metaphor for “chairness,” he builds an endoskeleton of the commodity. The craftiness in his use of clay lies not in its virtuoso handling but the implication of the audience’s carnal appreciation. His alternation between irregular and silken ceramic surfaces sustains the question of what is gained in our era of lost distinctions. The meatiness of clay operates in opposition to banal postmodern quotation marks placed around style. Transforming Aalto’s Savoy vase into a birthday cake is flat-footed artifice. He recapitulates both IKEA’s and Iittala’s transformation of the primary objects of Modernism, interweaving the high and low intentions.

He might resemble an “installation artist” but it is more specific to his method to label Ruhwald a craftsman of industrial design. This interpretive perspective behooves the large field of artists working in what are historically considered craft-based media and responding to contemporary material culture. From this perspective, Ruhwald’s sculpture extends the postmodern craftsmanship of Adrian Saxe, who pioneered using such knick-knackeries as tassels. Whereas Saxe’s work relies on centripetal attention and singularity, Ruhwald turns to the decorative ensemble, and turns our body centrifugally outward to streamers and tassels as décor to brush against. Instead of producing enriched artifacts that stand in isolation, Ruhwald begins with a habit and outlines a spatial occupancy. Saxe’s expositions fed off of ceramic vessels as allusions to specific historical styles; Ruhwald comments on the commodification of visual languages and their failure as social catalysts.

A parallel to Ruhwald’s objects that stump our sociability is the furniture design of Scott Burton. In the roaring 1980s, Burton encouraged viewers to admire Brancusi’s pedestals without its sculpture, his stated intention being to reclaim the bases themselves as sculpture. This was sculpture in the expanded field, but oddly ingrown into the white cube itself. Simultaneously, Burton constructed seating for plazas in midtown Manhattan that riffed on these stacked masses, but made them out of polished granite. His bold forms became corporate cenotaphs when isolated in the cement field of city sidewalks, while Brancusi’s bases became lovely below-the-waist fetishes. Both yearned for a more domestic context, a space where they might have been more loved or tended.

Ruhwald’s sculpted interior decoration is rooted in the twentieth-century Scandinavian tradition of the Formgiver, in which the artisan compensates for modernity and our enigmatic dissatisfaction with it. He returns to Aalto’s suggestion that “a standardized object should not be a finished product,” which preempted Bourriaud’s thesis by seventy years. Aalto continued:

The things surrounding [humans] are hardly fetishes or allegories with mystical eternal value; more than anything else, they are cells and tissues, living beings like himself, building components that make up human life. They cannot be treated differently from other biological units, lest they run the risk of not fitting into the system and becoming dehumanized (6).

What Aalto feared has come to pass: consumer fetishization of commodities like instantly scratched plastic chairs, watches, and other hardware for living has displaced the chthonic laws of human sociability. Ruhwald turns the myth of a Scandinavian design ethos, a post-war phenomenon in which Aalto was a key player and in which Ruhwald himself developed, into an insular minefield, revealing it to be one part promise of democratization, one part tactical marketing, and one part insidious social engineering.

The artist’s references to the household violence wrought by mass-produced commodities upon our psychology delineate a broad contemporary predicament. His exhibition is both a boutique of mainstream Modernist ornament and a slew of props for glam rock or gothic fashionistas. His sculpture might best be seen as the ornamental domestic equivalent of the anti-terrorist cement and stone bollards that punctuate our cities, providing discomfort as physical perches and psychological reminders of our failure to operate as a collective. This urban décor of stanchions, barriers, and impasses, similarly obstructs camaraderie, or alerts us to its absence.

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Ezra Shales holds a PhD from Bard and is an art historian, curator, and artist whose research, publications, and exhibitions explore the intersection of design, craft, and art in modern and contemporary culture. He is currently a professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston and the author of Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (2010).

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1) Aalto, “Rationalism and Man”6 (1935) as reprinted in Alvar Aalto, In His Own Words, Göran Schildt, ed., Timothy Binham trans., Rizzoli, New York, 1998, p. 91-93.
2) Alvar Aalto, In His Own Words, 92. Aalto also notes that “even the wax candle can be a subject of study in the techno-humanist laboratory that decides the questions of what kind of artificial light is the most rational from the human point of view.” Ibid.
3) See Widar Halén and Kerstin Wickman, eds., Scandinavian Design Beyond the Myth, Arvinius/Form, Stockholm, 2003, especially Kevin M. Davies, “Marketing Ploy or Democratic Ideal? On the Mythology of Scandinavian Design,” pp. 101-110.
4) Hogarth Restored, J. Stockdale and G. Robinson, London, 1808, p. 121. Nicolas Bourriaud, Post-Production 2nd ed., Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2005, p. 31-5, 45-9.
5) Alvar Aalto, Designer, Pirkko Tuukkanen, ed., Alvar Aalto Foundation, Helsinki, 2002, p. 29. For a less socially-based concept of the supplement in decorative arts and craft see Glenn Adamson, who draws on Jacques Derrida’s use of term to consider framing devices. See Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, Berg, London, 2007, 9-37
6) Alvar Aalto, In His Own Words, 93.

Life among objects and life among things

By Louise Mazanti

On Facebook today you can find an image of a young boy, carefully composed to suggest a thoughtful artist with a guitar in his hand. In the blurred background you can see a blue object on the wall. Marked Space (2006) by Anders Ruhwald has been tagged on Facebook. This object has started to live a life of its own and produce its own meanings. It has started to exist in a life among ‘things’, in the real world, playing a role that is seemingly much more insignificant than the privileged position of a life among ‘objects’, which the art museum provides.

Life among objects and life among things…. Objects and things belong to the same category of ‘manmade artefacts’, but, leaving etymology to one side, in this context their function is radically different. In the exhibition space, formal questions are asked. Objects perform a role as aesthetically and formally privileged artefacts independent of time and situation; objects that addresses us as subjects. The thing on the other hand, belongs to the mundane world of function, actions, drifting meanings, attachments and situations. In the first case the object controls the situation, in the second, we determine the use and destiny of the thing. The identity of the object is much more insecure than the identity of the thing. In this context, the thing occupies a clearly identifiable position in the life cycle of consumption and function, , a position that is unstable, though always meaningful. The meaning of the thing is defined by context, situation and subject. The object rejects this fixation. It allows possible meanings, but keeps an enigmatic layer to itself. In short; the thing is a ‘thing’; something we know – the object is a stranger; a piece of art.

In this distinction, we face the most basic definition of art: Art as an autonomous, self-containing sphere, which totally opposes the mundanity of everyday life. This is how the aesthetic field was defined by the early German idealist philosophers such as Baumgarten and Kant , and this tradition has become hegemonic for the conception of art; reinforced by the art museum but challenged by the always present avant-garde, appearing in different historical forms. For the avant-garde, ‘things’ have played a crucial role; from Duchamp’s ‘pissoir’, Oppenheim’s ‘cup’, Warhol’s ‘Brillo box’, to contemporary strategies like Tracey Emin’s self-exposing ‘bed’: things, which challenge the autonomous pretention of the object.

Facebook and German idealism might seem as a strange couple when speaking of Anders Ruhwald and his current exhibition at MIMA. Though, as a representation of the tension between object and thing, between art and life, autonomy and avant-garde, they represent a very precise access to the universe that Ruhwald defines.
Ruhwald wants it both ways, and he plays both hands. Entering the exhibition space clearly marks the entrance into a logic that transgresses familiar reality. Our predefined concepts of reality are put out of use: we are left to the premise of the artwork, we do not control the situation, but are totally dependant of the context, as our whole mind and body is surrounded and controlled by the exhibition. The will of the subject is suspended; the object controls the situation.

Or does it? The reflected image of the spectator situates us as a perceptive subject; as a physical body exposed to sensuous impressions, and a mind trying to get a grip on these impressions and recapture the control; to understand, so to say, having in mind that knowledge and understanding equals control and power. This is essential: Ruhwald continuously builds up environments around his objects; curtains, walls, reflections; physical devices that situates the subject in the perceptive situation. Environments, that function as openings and increase the tension in the way we engage with the object. When we are defined as physical, perceptive subjects, we enter a dialogue with the object. The balance is changed, and the object is no longer just relating its enigmatic presence to us. We perceive according to our perceptive framework, and from this dialogical point, the object enters an existence as a thing.

This model of meaning creation is fundamental to the aesthetic field as such. Here we find a direct relation to the way Kant defined aesthetics as the turning point of the theory of knowledge; as the bridge between subjective reality produced by the mind, and the objective, sensuous world which in the principle we could know nothing about. For Kant, the aesthetic field guaranteed a glimpse into objective reality before it was formed into concepts by the mind. The art object guaranteed a relation between mind and physical world; a reconciliation between subject and object.

Ruhwald’s objects precisely embody this philosophical turning point. The black spot in Kant’s theory of knowledge was the ‘Ding an Sich’; (the ‘thing in itself’) the object as object when not perceived by a subject. Ruhwald’s ceramic objects are indispensably connected to vaguely defined functions that serve as markers of meaning. Meaning for the subject, which recognizes a hint of familiar form in the ‘chair’, the ‘table’ or ‘mirror’. But still, the objects resist transformation into a ‘thing’; they resist being conquered by the power of the perceiving subject. Titles such as Interior #6, L-stand and Untitled #9 (from the functional series) both contain a predestined relation to the world of ‘things’, at the same time as keeping an openness and resistance to the predefined and culturally learnt concepts of the mind. We simply cannot conceive these objects and their inner logic; we can get a glimpse, but we cannot turn them into things.

Not only the form, but also the surface contains this paradigmatic opposition: the monotonous, vacant colour palette does not allow us to fixate on some kind of recognition or personal attachment. Nonetheless, soft curves and discrete marks of the fingers reveal an opening; a communicative intention aimed at the viewer. As Ruhwald himself named an exhibition last year at Miyako Yoshinaga Art Prospects, New York We float in space and cannot perceive the new order. This title, derived from the German poet Rilke, who, in many ways, carried German idealism into Modernity. Among the historical references that Ruhwald plays with in the exhibition, we find the dislocated subject continuously in the process of decoding ‘the new order’ as embodied in the object. This ‘new order’ is an interesting concept. On the one hand it contains the result of Kant’s idealistic view of aesthetics as an epistemological field per se, which turned into pure Modernism; the conception of l’art pour l’art; the aesthetic object as existing in an autonomous sphere of its own; unbound by moral or utilitarian functions. A new order in the sense of a promise for a sphere raised above mundane reality, embodied in the enigmatic art object.

On the other hand the ‘new order’ has also been an agenda for the avant-garde, which had lost faith in art’s transgressive potential. For the avant-garde, the new order had to be materialized directly. The walls between art and life had to be torn down. Autonomy was thought to be sterile, and only a direct engagement with everyday life was considered fruitful in the search for a new order – art as the turning point for a realisation of subversive intentions and as a shock mechanism, which could awaken the ever slumberous bourgeoisie.

Ruhwald’s work is situated in a position that contains both the position of Modernism and the avant-garde. His objects exist in a semi-autonomous space. They not only represent the ‘new order’ as an image, they materialize it as a reality. This is the reason why it is so essential for Ruhwald to build up settings for his objects. Here he situates the spectator as a physical, perceptive subject. In this way he avoids the pretention of the autonomous art object separated from the mundane reality, which is logically stressed in the only seemingly neutral exhibition space of the art museum. Ruhwald takes this point to the extreme in the final gallery space at mima. He creates two almost identical settings, which are separated by a kind of wall. This means that they cannot be seen as one, formal installation and only the consciousness of the double identity remains, with two results: the autonomy of each object is further destabilized as a repeated version exists, and the orientation of the spectator is also destabilized, as the rooms mirror each other.

It is not a coincidence that Ruhwald’s settings are domestic. The everyday is his scene. As we see on Facebook, his objects are able to live their own life; the art museum is not the only platform. In the case of this exhibition though, it is the perfect space for staging a step-by-step, complex understanding of the subject-object relation. This relation is opened by the first gallery’s commoditisation of the object through the slowly spinning podium, and physical awareness of the subject. In the second, the stage is set for a meeting, and in the last room that mirrors itself, the identity of the object is destabilized, and can only be recreated by the mental process. We are back to Kant’s primordial definitions of the aesthetic as a field that constitutes the relation between subject and object: out there, in the same world as us and the things that we surround ourselves with.


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Louise Mazanti is an art historian, writer and curator with a PhD from the Danish Design School, Copenhagen. In 2008 she was appointed Professor in Design, Craft-Theory and History at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden.

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