text written by Kazimierz Jankowski and Mihaela Varzari
In some of the photographs that
populate Lynda Morris’s exhibition Documenting
Cadere, 1972 – 1978 we see the artist
André Cadere in a familiar guise; decked-out
in flared jeans, wooden clogs and a Breton-striped shirt,
an iconicity that was complete only with one of his Barres de Bois Rond in tow, carried by the artist
as a walking stick of sorts, as though some Shepherd to the artworld, or perched against
the wall of the gallery, often as an unsolicited addition. These pointedly irreverent artistic
strategies, such as his adding of the Barres de Bois Rond without permission to an existing
exhibition, or his conspicuous wielding of it at any number of art-openings, as
he was famous for doing, suggests that attempting to convey this work is
almost immediately curtailed if a curator decides that they
want to convey this performative aspect
of his work to a contemporary audience (as Lynda
Morris chooses to do). Because without
the living spark of André Cadere the man, the Barres de Bois Rond remains an object
of mystery, no less intriguing than the romantic image, often portrayed, of the of the artist himself.
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| Courtesy to MODERN ART OXFORD |
Lynda Morris’s exhibition does not
suffer such curtailment, principally because
it does not appear to be a ‘Retrospective’ in any conventional art-historical
sense. Archives appear not to have been thoroughly and exhaustively plundered,
as one may find with a big museum show, nor is there a sense in which the
material presented intends to create a balanced, objective view of Cadere’s
practice. Whatever the reason, Documenting Cadere, 1972-1978 chooses to
re-animate only a portion of his career through carefully selected
material that refer mostly to his time in London
and Oxford (although not exclusively) during those six years.
This material includes plenty of postcards and invitations that Cadere
used to publicize his presence with the Barres de Bois Rond in the UK, but also Italy and France as well as photographs of him
holding the Barres de
Bois Rond or giving lectures
to groups of bearded students in vast,
white studios in, New York, Milan and Paris, often with
a single thin ‘Bar’ intriguingly positioned at the deep end of one of
these large white rooms. In spite of the standard museum-like display strategy and the linear “time-line” that structures the show
and accumulates photographs, posters, letters, invitation cards in an anti-clockwise
motion around the room, culminating, somewhat stoically, in
a single Barres
de Bois Rond pinned to the wall, Morris
manages to create a rare encounter with the artist
and his work. An ‘OK Magazine’ article from 1974 furnishes one vitrine with
a tabloid-style ‘but is it art?’ type
story on Cadere, next to which
we can see a hand written letter to Morris from Cadere expressing thanks and delight in receiving the article. Elsewhere,
a photo-montage of Cadere visiting an Oxford pub
with his ‘Bar’, resembles a
collection of old holiday-snaps in their
blurred, discoloured, amateurish feel, as does an
awkwardly cropped image of a cigarette smoking Morris
with a jet-lagged Cadere in a pub, with the famous ‘Bar’
in the foreground.
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| Courtesy to MODERN ART OXFORD |
It seems
that the absence of Cadere
is overcome by Morris through her choice
of photographic and journalistic ‘snapshots’ that
capture not only Cadere’s work, but also the periphery of his activities, which
include a record of the artistic climate but
also of the social unrest at the time – exemplified
perhaps by the inclusion of an article on the Venice Biennial in ’68, which was marked by social rioting in Italy. These snapshots
create an intimacy with Cadere’s work,
by favouring fragmentation, blurriness and over exhaustive, lucid comprehensively. It
is this sense of intimacy through this fragmented view of the past has the effect
of drawing the viewer closer to
the artist and his work, perhaps because
this approach has the effect of beginning to dissolve the image we have of
Cadere the Icon.
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| Courtesy to MODERN ART OXFORD |
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