'Walls Have Ears' by Dr. Maria Loh 

‘Poetry must be made by all and not by one’.

– Comte de Lautréamont

In the antiseptic halls of the National Gallery or in the orderly floors of the Tate Modern a certain, privileged history has been assembled for the visitor. One successive story follows another in a seamless narrative, as if it had always-already been worked out this way. First there was Cimabue, but then Giotto came along, after which Masaccio, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini, Tiepolo, Goya, Manet, Degas, Van Gogh, Picasso, Duchamp, Beuys (and so on) arrived in rapid, heroic succession. One walks through the Sainsbury Wing along a pre-determined chronological course, moving from Early to High to Late Renaissance painting as if this were an immutable order, in the same way that one navigates through the aisles of Sainsbury knowing that fruits and vegetables always precede the display of cleaning products and that the alcohol is always tucked away in the shadows of the final aisles. But what seems logical is only so because of our horizons of expectations. ‘This is how it has always been’ doesn’t mean ‘this is the right, true way’. It’s just one way to order things and that way has become all too routine and prescriptive.

In Michel Foucault’s preface to ‘The Order of Things’ the French philosopher invokes a wonderful passage from Jorge Luis Borges’ description of a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which animals have been classified under seemingly arbitrary rubrics. Things ‘belonging to the Emperor’, ‘suckling pigs’, animals ‘drawn with a very fine camelhair brush’, creatures ‘that from a long way off look like flies’… these are but some of the fabulous and fabulist categories enumerated. In encountering ‘the exotic charm of another system of thought’ Foucault argues that all systems of order and classification are revealed to be arbitrary, subjective, and personal. What holds ‘true’ for us may seem completely ridiculous to someone from another culture; what other belief systems deem ‘normal’ might appear entirely superstitious to us. And who constitutes this all-encompassing ‘us’ might not even be all that clear.

The exhibition of artworks and objects assembled in ‘Walls Have Ears’ frustrates the obsessive, controlling desire for the cold, rational division of things into neat, tidy dichotomies—high/low, art/artefact, nature/culture, primitive/civilized, right/wrong, us/them. It invokes an unruly space of simultaneous visibility, wonder, and awe that precedes the calculated post-Enlightenment drive towards scientific clarity and classification. In the early modern cabinets of curiosity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, man-made objects of art and objects of natural history, medicine, and optics co-existed in a heterogenous space of taxonomical mixture, free association, and fortuitous accident. Paintings, sculptures, and medals were crammed into the same room as giant elephant tusks, shells assembled together to form human faces, the toenail of a rhinoceros, suits of armour, fossils of lizards collected from the New World, skeletons of various species, illegible fragments of antiquities and religious relics, precious crystals and prisms, automaton that blink, play chess, and even defecate. Miraculous icons competed for wall space with maps, mirrors, anatomical prints, framed strips of lace, etc. Early modern collectors saw themselves as explorers and these chaotic and rich sites of sensory pleasure were assembled in the rooms of their homes in order to recreate an idea of a lost Paradise where all things were equal and solicited the rapt attention of the curious viewer. It was in such spaces that experimental, creative, innovative, and sometimes even subversive ideas, challenging the staid expectations of the established orders, were hatched and pursued. Friends and colleagues (and often rivals and enemies, too) gathered together around these wondrous objects, stories were told and shared, ideas tested and theories disputed. The lost fragments of the past were reanimated and given a new life in these moments of social and intellectual conversation inside the Wunderkammern, these ‘rooms of wonder’ where marvellous objects of art, nature, science, and everyday life confronted and pushed the viewer to think differently and creatively about the world around him/her.

These historical sites of invention, marvel, and messiness bear a closer resemblance to the dynamic and unpredictable domain of the artist’s studio and to the cosy familiarity of the collector’s home than the cold spaces of art display that have become standardized in the global market. There is a poignant sense of loss in looking at artworks set against ‘tastefully’ chosen heritage colours in museums and galleries or staged within the stripped, minimalist, reverent spaces of a white cube where the spectator is asked not to touch, not to run, and not to speak—just stand still in front of the image with the audio guide stuck to your head, don’t look at the image just look for the wall text, verify the picture and move on to the next picture at the designated moment as if you were on a conveyor belt, your ticket is timed and your time is up, move on because we need to push more numbers through… In these shiny new sites of exchange, artworks are taken out of context, drained of all life, pinned onto the walls like dead embalmed insects in a butterfly collection, one more beautiful than the next, each losing their sense of lived experience.

The curator and artists at Man&Eve, however, invite you to linger. These works are all ‘beautiful’ but in the sense that the nineteenth-century French poet Comte de Lautréamont described beauty as ‘the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella’. Look and listen to the stories told by the objects in these rooms and the images on these walls. The walls may have ears but they sometimes speak too and they address you in a hushed voice in the present with multiple tales from their past. In the intimacy of these spaces, these objects come to life for the visitor who stops to engage with them, they draw you over for closer inspection, and open up another space in which meaning production is negotiated through the chance encounter of the viewer and the wondrous mix of artwork that their makers have left behind—things ‘belonging to the Emperor’, ‘suckling pigs’, animals ‘drawn with a very fine camelhair brush’, creatures ‘that from a long way off look like flies’…