A Questionnaire on Materialisms 95

AMIE SIEGEL

I once stepped into a psychoanalyst’s office in Chicago, and, rather than the
usual singular, authoritative Eames chair of the analyst—its bent rosewood and
leather form like a modern English club chair— I was surprised to see two Eames
lounge chairs facing each other, with a “kissing” (shared) ottoman. The arrange-
ment suggested—via the objects— a potential for democratic, empathic exchange
between patient and analyst, a visual loop of transference and counter-transfer-
ence, the interchange of recording and playback, entering my own imagination to
be returned as a work that itself took the form of a question.

Amie Siegel.
Provenance. 2013.
Exhibition view, the
Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York.

*
To allow an object to become a protagonist is paradoxical. In making
Provenance, a film following the Chandigarh furniture of Le Corbusier and Pierre
Jeanneret, there was almost immediately a recognition that people were ephemer-
al, merely passing through the frame, not capable of the kind of geologic time and
persistence of the objects they collected, and therefore not visually central to the
work. But in order to treat the chairs—bought, sold, exploited, restored, sat on,
and discarded—as if they had their own centrality, or consciousness, the work,
paradoxically, had to mimic the filmic tropes of transference reserved for humans,
to deploy the narrative devices through which we become invested in and feel for
others. The height of the camera was lowered, pitched in full sympathy with the
objects, promoting the kind of cinematic identification we are accustomed to
according human subjects, at standing height. In depicting a settee placed on a
table, on its back for restoration, the camera moves slowly along its length, render-
ing the settee as a vulnerable body and the restoration warehouse a kind of operat-
ing theater, lit from a skylight above. In order to present the objects as of their
own ontology, they had to be treated like people.
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*
The sales office for what will soon be the world’s tallest residential building—
432 Park Avenue—is located across from Central Park in Manhattan. Presenting
the showroom’s model kitchen and bath, the marketing director stops before the
bathroom’s stone counter, the washbasin a minimalist negative void in the marble
solid, to tell us that the sink is a single fifteen-hundred-pound block of Italian mar-
ble sourced from “the same quarry from which Michelangelo took the marble for
his David.”
People are buying the sink not because it is white marble and has no veins in
it, but because it is a spiritual event, performing the belief that there is something
intrinsic in material, something that moves from thing to thing. To have this
sink—this condo—is to possess something that the David possesses.
An interior design associate on the luxury project—in response to my query
about the source of the marble for the bathroom sink—replies that he thinks the
slabs were quarried and fabricated in China. The supplier’s representative tells me
over the phone that that particular marble comes from Macedonia. I ask the
design associate if the marble in fact came from Italy, as suggested by develop-
ment’s sales office, and he responds that the design firm has been only intermit-
tently involved with material procurement, and some substitutions have been
made along the way. A few hours later he writes back to say he believes the stone
came from Carrara, Italy.
In mineralogy, a pseudomorph is a crystal system consisting of one mineral
but retaining the appearance and form of another, which it has replaced. Autonite
becomes meta-Autonite, Calcite after Argonite. Scalopite after Siderite. It is a
“false form.”

Siegel. The Architects.

2014. Exhibition view,
Storefront for Art and
Architecture, New York.
Photograph by
Miguel de Guzmán
A Questionnaire on Materialisms 97

*
A yacht appears in Provenance. Sailing on the Mediterranean, its interiors are
filled with furniture from Chandigarh—teak chairs, coffee tables, and settees cast
adrift on plush white carpet. Shortly after I install Provenance in New York, I learn
that the yacht’s owners bought an edition of the work. I have the immediate vision
of Provenance—and the overseas migration of the Le Corbusier furniture it
depicts—sailing around the world on the very yacht that appears in the film.
Since then I’ve wondered if the movement of the chairs in the film comes to
mimic the individuals who collect them—wintering here, summering there, on the
move between homes, art fairs. . . . Or perhaps it is the inverse, and the collectors
mimic the movements of their objects, imagining themselves as things to be
looked at, emulated, photographed . . .
In fact there are two boats in Provenance—one for leisure (the yacht) and one
for import/export (the cargo ship). Yet the cargo ship image is a licensed clip, a
stock footage shot—one that I reuse from project to project. An image enacting
the transit of objects and their up-marketing through restoration, resale, and auc-
tion thus transits through my works.

*
A camera is an object. It is a device that looks at other objects. It is always
already deploying the psychoanalytic model—in a continual state of apprehend-
ing, forming a between, presenting and evacuating form, mimicking and repeat-
ing—becoming an object, becoming a subject, becoming an object again. Like two
Eames chairs facing one another.
The diagram doubles itself, layering, or performing, the behavior, or proper-
ties, of the system or object it describes. I auctioned an edition of Provenance, a film
depicting auctions, at Christie’s London, and filmed the auction of the film, which
became another film, Lot 248, exhibited together with the first. Provenance dia-
grams the movements, it reveals the script, or form, and then Lot 248 doubles back
and performs the script with the work itself as protagonist/object.
Recently, in a film work that slices through architecture offices like a section
plan, I became preoccupied with a 3-D printer whose lateral repetitive gesture
building up a single architectural model wall (or film screen) is mimicked by my
motion picture camera, tracking back and forth in parallel movement.

*
Visitors to my New York studio often get a strange look upon entering: their
eyes dart about and over things, a weather moves across their faces. They seem
deflated, puzzled. It has taken me some time to realize that these curators and
98 OCTOBER

writers, having seen works of mine concerned in part with objects, expect a design
aficionado, for my space to be a temple of clean lines, haute chairs, and rigorous
selection of objets. In fact I love a mess, and while I know where things are amidst
the piles of books, tables filled with project images, floor plans, hard drives, equip-
ment, cables, projectors, and magazines, these strangers who know only my work
see a landscape of clutter.
The studio is a topography of things to be put to use, packed with latent possi-
bility, but which in and of themselves have little interior animism. The animism is
brought by the artist or viewer, born between objects, between images, on desk-
tops, screens . . . a constellation of things or a thing in context. Sergei Eisenstein
called montage copulative—two shots come together to form a third thing—but
the third thing is not on screen, nor is it an object. It is an idea. It is conceptual. It
forms in us.

AMIE SIEGEL is an artist based in New York.