The Trading Museum Comme des Garcons presents Katerina Jebb’s new work
Simulacrum & Hyperbole
We Can Find Beautiful Things Without Consciousness materializes from
Jebb’s recent video series, Simulacrum and Hyperbole. In this work,
Jebb sees the boundaries between actuality and satire confused and
disrupted. In creating an imaginary TV channel Lucid TV, the viewer is
offered parody endorsements such as Tilda Swinton’s Hot Dollar, where
actresses sell themselves with feeble sincerity. In Mind and Soul
Control we are reassured, “It’s not you that’s the problem, it’s your
life.” The artist grasps the medium of television advertising and
feeds it back in to itself within the context of reality.
This is heightened in the case of We Can Find Beautiful Things Without
Consciousness, for what is displayed is an actual perfume created by
Comme des Garcons. The result is an indicative exploitation of the
crisis of identity, awareness, and authenticity that surrounds the
complex layer cake of psychological interplay underpinning commercial
advertising.
The path the artist takes us down is a precarious one. It is scattered
with truths that may turn out to be innuendos, literal crudeness
disguised as innocence. For instance, a sprightly terrier bounces down
a Paris street, as we enjoy his buoyancy the camera cuts to a frame
that shows the dog has only 3 legs, with the assertion, “We go out on
a limb”. Often in Jebb’s work, the realisation of numerous
incongruities creates a tension within the line of humour. The work is
a declaration of lavish juxtapositions: silver with black, ominous
serenity with thrashing brutality, high polish aesthetic beauty with
shallow motives. This tension is enhanced by the inappropriateness of
the subject and our instinct for self restraint, creating an impulse
to laugh, in accordance with Freudian theory.
Jebb’s idiomatic vision of the perfume bottle, a translucent globular
form, is permeated by the white light of the scanner. The sequential
process of the scanner’s flow is harmonious with the tripartitions of
the advert. Just as the light emanates to meet the wall of the perfume
bottle with fluctuating intensity, the hyperbole of Jebb’s mantras
oscillate, further blurring the distinction between farce and
sincerity.
We see Jebb’s work displayed within a vitrine reminiscent of a woman’s
vanity table. Here, the real Comme des Garcons perfume stands as a
valid soldier amongst satires, such as Talk of the Town, Tender
Stalking and Art and Fashion. Once again the viewer is invited to
enjoy the absurdity of bombastic statements being used to describe the
nature of a scent.
With the work, the viewer may be forced to question the way they are
personally affected by such endorsements. The location of the work
within a trading museum makes this matter even more uncomfortable, for the
artwork is surrounded by desirable objects. The troubling matter may
not be that we continue to fulfill the desire to attain but that the
culture of fashion increasingly exacerbates the way people identify
their worth. Within this realm of beauty and confusion, Jebb with the conspiritorial
patronage of Comme des Garcons looks to disrupt the protocol and offer
us something thought provoking and abnormal.In this strange out of context the viewer may engage with that which he consumes .
Ariella Wolens & Spencer Noble, 2011