Since 2011 the artist Bjarne Melgaard and the
Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta have been exchanging drawings, models and
documents as they work towards the realisation of a purpose-built house for the
artist ‘to die in’. The exhibition ‘Bjarne
Melgaard: A House to Die In’ at the ICA in London brings together their paper
architecture, along with cluttered but related ephemera from the artist’s
studio, laying bare the details of their design process and also their unusual
client/architect relationship.
Looming ominously over the lower gallery space is a
1:1 façade of the proposed building, its angled black surfaces glowing red from
within. The model seems at once bestial
and otherworldly, an alien space shuttle that has landed accidentally in a
similarly distorted domestic setting, complete with rucked yellow carpet
scrawled with purple heads.
Tables in this lower gallery space groan under the weight of
further, smaller, models, reams of printed correspondence, Melgaard’s scribbled
drawings and the aforementioned ephemera from his studio. Most of this ephemera is related to tigers:
a kitsch collection of objects, with plastic tigers seated alongside their
cuddly counterparts, a purple velour tiger sleeping on a drawing of its cousin,
and all blown by the wind of a monstrous tiger fan.
Whether this collection is evidence of research or obsessive
compulsion it is clear that the tiger was the inspiration behind Melgaard’s
original design for his house.
Snohetta’s architectural drawings, which here occupy the corridor of the
ICA, overlooking the lower gallery, show how they sought to rationalise
Melgaard’s drawings and clutter into propositions and models, abstracting the
naturalistic form into a proposal for a building that more relates to their
known practice.
These rationalised drawings are hard to interpret, however,
as they have, in-situ, been drawn over by Melgaard. Through the process of exhibition, if not through the process of
design, Snohetta are seemingly erased (or even scribbled out). Their collaboration seems more destructive
than productive and this violence is echoed in the upstairs gallery where
paintings, which were begun by Melgaard and completed by a group of artists
with little connection to the art world (and several of whom are in recovery or
suffering from schizophrenia), are hung alongside their collaborative
sculptures. Melgaard professes to
having been surprised that his initial drawings – principally self-portraits –
were, for the most part, effaced by his collaborators, but this effacement
seems to echo the situation downstairs.
There is a huge amount of energy contained in this
exhibition, and much invention, but perhaps not any joy. Just as Melgaard twists the logic to focus
on dying in a house rather than living in it, there is no happy ending to be
found here. Whether the house will be
built in its proposed site outside Oslo, also remains to be seen.
'Bjarne Melgaard: A House to Die In'
continues at the ICA, London until 18 November
