Output details

House of Wax

House of Wax was a one man performance for the symposium The Eagle Document: The New Collection of Enumerated Things, curated by Monika Oechsler, at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, 21 November 2009 (http://www.stephenlawrencegallery.net/OS-Eagle-Intro.html). Contributors were international artists and curators from Israel, Germany, Greece and the UK. Lloyd’s work formed part of the symposium’s consideration of the place of the collection in contemporary society and attempt to reinvent the collection in a new and imaginative, less institutional, less static form as a creative interplay between artists, artwork and situations. The symposium and accompanying exhibition were part of the Object as Subject programme (September 2009- December 2010) at the University of Greenwich (http://www.stephenlawrencegallery.net/OS.html).

Lloyd’s humorous, deliberately stripped back retelling of André De Toth’s House of Wax (1953) employed the choreography of the stand-up comic or static storyteller. His ‘translation’ of the narrative of a horror film about a deranged curator’s opera omnia, a macabre assemblage of corpses-as-waxworks, anthologized an imaginary collection in preference to a museum display (http://www.vimeo.com/75085659). Developing the ideas expressed in Crew and Sims’ seminal essay ‘Locating Authenticity: Fragments of a Dialogue’ (1991) that personal experiences of a collective source, such as cinema, become forms of universal archive, the performance explored the notion that exposition and the recounting of entertaining narratives are as valuable as other forms of socio/historical documentation, thereby challenging the role of the art object as collectable.

The symposium was complemented by the exhibition The New Collection, which included artwork by Lloyd.