Review: Oliver Laric's Kopienkritik at Skulpturhalle Basel




Curiously, also on display in Basel is Mexico City-based artist Francis Alÿs' collection of other artists' portraits of the lesser-known saint Fabiola, the patron of nurses (having built the first hospitals in Rome) and of disenfranchised women and divorcees (having become an ascetic Mother Theresa-type after leaving an abusive marriage). Each piece in the massive collection centers around a now lost late 19th century painting by French artist Jean-Jacques Henner imagining Saint Fabiola as a beautiful young woman donning a red cape. The 300 copies, ranging from paintings to embroideries, function in a similar way to that of Laric's ancient plaster copies: they all effectively inform a more skilled, academic original version which is now lost and exalted by society. Importantly, both collections are meant to be taken as a whole, or a sum greater than its parts, with little heed paid to the identities of the artists or autonomy of their constituent art works. Thus, the works included in the exhibition are pawns in a larger game, or words strewn together to create sentence nearly divorced from their original meaning.

While there is some room for artistic freedom in the copies presented in Alÿs' presentation—depictions of Fabiola range in age, hair color, and medium— there's little artistic license found in Laric's arrangements of plaster casts: the copy is supposed to appear as "true to form" as possible. Such a subtlety points to the variations in Laric and Alÿs' impetus to produce artistic meaning through the rearranging of artworks. Alÿs illustrates the irony of collectively shared feelings of marginalization obsessively expressed through self-made kitsch. Laric highlights the still-pervasive authority of the “original,” underscoring the lack of innovation in each successive copy of the Greek sculpture while couching it in modern art historical rhetoric surrounding the study of classic sculpture.

Also informing his collection is Laric's long-held interest in the infrastructure of the internet. Perhaps in a contemporary setting, Laric's assemblages could be seen as a form of crowd-sourcing information similar to infrastructure of many Web 2.0 platforms. Here, authority and informational integrity is rendered not by totemic truths, but by populism—like the function of Wikipedia, truth is conferred not by what a subject is, but what most people think it is. Beyond this, Laric signals that the politics of identifying where substance and truth lies in interacting with our increasingly complex world is age-old question with no plain answer.