The impossibility of authentic authorship runs through Danh Vo’s work like an electric charge, emboldening rather than diluting a practice as maddening as it is miraculous. Fuse art objects with found ones, curation with craftmanship and creator with their influences. The ‘hunter-gatherer artist’, a kind of Midas. Touch something, and turn it into yours.
If relationships in dialogue could take physical form, they’d look something like Vo’s ‘Untitled’ at South London Gallery. Characteristically slippery, the show dares you to label it ‘curation’: featuring far more work ‘by’ other artists than ‘by’ Vo himself, the assembly resists our superstitious investment in privileging Handwork over Thought Experiment. Nothing is ex nihilo, things are what we call them – and this is a Danh Vo exhibition.
If relationships in dialogue could take physical form, they’d look something like Vo’s ‘Untitled’
On its walls, a hubbub; men, close to Vo, all speaking at once, across mediums and as ventriloquised by the artist. Lover Heinz photographs nephew-muse Gustav, who’s reflected in mirrored panels by ex-tutor-turned-collaborator Peter Bonde along with painstaking calligraphy – a medium at pleasing odds with its message – of quotes from Friedkin’s The Exorcist as drawn by Vo’s father Phung. Phew.
This knotted string of symbolic associations, and the question of who authored them, flits from snapshot to gothic character via reflective surface and back, ever airborne. Rather than presuming to resolve questions via art objects, Vo’s much more interested in the subtle mechanics of posing them. As such, ‘untitled’ seems a fitting name – not only for the exhibition, but shared with numerous works within it including several composite sculptures ‘by Vo’ himself (whatever that means).
One such hybrid sits in the middle of the intimate cacophony, positing an alternative kind of dialogue: half a Venus sculpture, and a marble fragment of a Satyr, are held in a whole. Both came to life under the hands of unnamed artisans in 1st-2nd century Rome, and each object has existed independently over millennia. For all they share, Vo’s assembling their half-forms into a single unit highlights their incompatibilities as much as their consistencies. ‘Untitled’ – how else to articulate infinite histories, associations shed and gained, in a pithy couple of syllables?
One such hybrid sits in the middle of the intimate cacophony
Across the road, at SLG’s Fire Station venue, is black walnut wood. It comes from an orchard which was once intended to provide material for rifle stocks, gifted to Vo by Craig McNamara whose father was a principle architect of the Vietnam war. Now, the wood interacts with and infuses numerous works across the Fire Station’s three floors, in furniture and frames – and in the panelling for a room containing photographs of Vietnamese boys.
Taken by anthropologist Joseph Carrier during his employment as a counter-insurgency specialist during the Vietnam war, the images had existed only as undeveloped negatives until Carrier approached Vo with his archive in 2006. American Carrier made the trip, pressed the shutter, but Vietnamese Vo – a boy who might have featured in those gentle tableaus, had the war not forced his family to leave – brought them to light. Authorship and belonging become a more complex – and far simpler – equation than ‘who saw it first’? Rather, for these snapshots set upon rifle-stocks-that-never-were, the question seems – how does proximity alter meaning?
Inheritance, power dynamics, perspective: move via personal histories – commission and dialogue, lovers and families – into voices beyond Vo’s immediate sphere, poised in something like a forum and stripped of intimacy’s shorthands. Here’s Nancy Spero, and her furious bid to ‘forc[e] a ‘collaboration’] with notorious misogynist Antonin Artaud. Here’s Andres Serrano, investigating authorship from an inverse perspective and including his own urine in Immersion (Piss Christ). Here’s another ‘Untitled’ Vo chimera, this time combining a 2nd century marble Eros with remnants of a 19th century sandstone eagle from the Prussian Ministry of Public Works. The list goes on – and rather than auditing what is included, the question seems instead: what isn’t?
Where do ripples combine to become waves, or exhaust themselves and peter out? A story begun far away, in time or space, becomes something to claim as it enters your orbit – doesn’t it? Every essay you’ve ever written is based on every essay you’ve ever read. Every joke, on every joke. Idea, idea. Nothing, from nothing. Here is everything in the world, sprung from something else. Objects and concepts, in conversation and talking themselves into being before our eyes.
