Marc Camille Chaimowicz Concertina

Notes regarding Concertina The principal space of my first solo show, „Sweetness“, at the Sigi Krauss Gallery, London 1971, consisted of an empty room save for the floor which was filled wall to wall with once discarded shoes, now painted silver.

(I had, earlier, enacted Shoe Waste? Piece in agitprop and thus clandestine fashion on various sites above and beneath the River Thames.)

Plans for L’Escalier à deux vitesses arose whilst on scaffolding, 13 metres from the ground, to execute the commission to paint the ceiling of the chapel L’Hôtel-Dieu at Cluny in 2003. If this Commande Public was to be permanent the exhibition at Les Ecuries Saint-Hugues that summer was temporary, and consisted of a suite of autonomous 3D works, which were each grounded. Of these, the Two Speed Staircase was the biggest and, at over 4 metres, also the tallest. Almost touching the ceiling it was therefore perhaps a visual link between the terrestrial and celestial …

(A domestic version had earlier been proposed within an integrated design solution for a friend’s London studio flat - and was later prototyped as a quasi-functional feature within the „Jean Cocteau“ interior of 2003 in which, whilst implying ascendancy, it also functioned as a unit for display.)

Concertina shown at the Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin, June 2005, is the first time these two aspects of Repertoire coexist, in time and space; it thus compresses a time base of 35 years into one experience. As with the Deleuzeian temporal fold which negotiates the fold of time, the past folds into the present, and the present into the past.

It is also the first occasion in which I have used Carrara marble (2 1/2 tonnes!), its inherent nobility perhaps here heightened by the pedestrian nature of reclaimed shoes.

This then is background, I leave a multiplicity of possible readings to you and your audience.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz Berlin, June 2005

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Marc Camille Chaimowicz "Concertina"