Geoffrey Farmer
"Geoffrey Farmer" by Mark Clintberg, Winter 2007, p. 94
Perhaps in a bid to pre-empt criticism, historians are fond of pointing out the omissive nature of their discipline. Artists are equally possessed by these gaps. Geoffrey Farmer’s bratty, incorrigible exhibition at The Drawing Room in London focuses on the agonistic relationship among archive, source and the interpretation of history. The artist has mined the pages of the pulpy Reader’s Digest publication The Last Two Million Years—a populist encyclopedic guide to history that is chock full of artifacts and historical objects—in order to create a miniature cut-and-paste museum arranged on foamcore plinths.
Scrappily cut icons have been positioned in an awkward dance. Pieces of balled-up paper have been placed in a pile behind vitrines. One couldn’t get much further from Finish Fetish.
Farmer’s categorization of objects and aesthetic movements results in some strange patterns. It’s a chaotic archive, and chronology be damned. His work, also called The Last Two Million Years, wittily points out the hubris of surveys and summaries. Instead of drawing vast equivalences between cultures, Farmer demonstrates how arbitrary notions of global cultures and collective histories are. Subjective, cut-and-pasted history rules here. We live in an age defined by revision, reimagining, retelling, re-anything, for better or probably worse.
A collage fragment reads “countdown to civilization,” but this installation doesn’t aim for a grand gesture. Loaded and poetic metaphors notwithstanding (including a burnt-out stick of incense on a marble tome), the vivid presence of Scotch tape and packing tape stops the show from waxing too epic. This exhibition’s aesthetic is closer to a high-school science fair project: full of ambition, curiosity and impish chronological inaccuracies.
Farmer, at first glance, might not seem well positioned to provide historical commentary. But his exhibition “Catriona Jeffries Catriona” (2001), an installation of improvised forms that progressively grew and changed over 62 days and seemed to respond to art-historical sources, suggests that the artist’s interest in historiography is clearly not simple kitsch. Like a precocious and crafty child locked in his parents’ kitchen, Farmer often uses the most basic of domestic supplies—tinfoil, Postits, coloured paper, fabric—to present a nostalgic mise en scène that relies heavily on reductive formalist solutions despite the use of decoupaged thrift-store materials. Out of this attitude of play, Farmer has devised a game of history that is staunchly unapologetic.
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