Output details

Bloom Stool

A sound sculpture made of a reflex horn speaker, studio stool, tape recorder and audio tape. First shown in the solo exhibition L'imitation, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, February-March 2009, as part of Berlinale Forum 2009 (http://www.tanyaleighton.com/index.php?pageId=193&l=en).

The intention of the work is to cross reference a reading of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) with various aesthetic and conceptual precedents and antecedents in modern sculpture, and to reflect on the links between plastic and linguistic experimentation in avant-garde art and literature. The morphology and iconology of all the constituent parts of the work are active in this respect. The stool (and the work’s title) is an allusion to the (in)famous “bowel movement passage” in the novel. The sound, a recording of a flushing toilet slowed down beyond recognition, is played from a journalist’s portable tape recorder with the tape looped around one of the stool’s legs, mirroring the use of a newspaper in Joyce’s account. The same features can be understood as references to seminal works of modern art. The form of the work resembles closely Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913). The kinetic action of the rotating tape recorder spools, the sound of a 'waterfall' and the provenance of the stool in a painting studio support that association. Conceptually the components of the work and their use also evoke such key historical works as Joseph Beuys' Fat Chair (1964), Bruce Nauman's A cast of the space under my chair (1965), or (through its juxtaposition of object and language) Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs (1964). The aim of the project benefited from the circumstances of its first exhibition as a part of Berlin Film Biennale, where it was shown in the context of an artform strongly associated with the transformation of text (the script) into images.