Amalia Pica in Oxford: Or, a Satire on Vanity

Mollifying Inherited Pretensions

Amalia Pica’s striking For Shower Singers exhibits a number of works in the UK for the first time. Amid the seductively disparate themes and images that abound in the Argentinian-born artist’s latest offering, mockery of institutions and the otherwise earnest ambitions of the individual might be identified as her principal concerns here. Spanning various genres, from wall displays to installations, London-based Pica satirises our cautious preservation of traditional and proverbial status, implying that we construe anachronisms for legitimate emblems, historicism as a worthy arbitrator of would-be social and creative enterprises.

Red Carpet (2010), duct tape on cardboard, traverses a wooden floor in straight and curved forms. How much Pica echoes the incorrigible celebrity culture in which we are saturated, a breathless and peculiarly Western desire for fame mirrored, here, in a suitably contorted rather than logical presentation. Soberingly, Pica leaves us wondering whether hierarchic structures, aside from their Hollywood superficiality, possess any more virtue as social constructs or as instinctive moral and artistic categories. 

If contemporary art is sometimes accused of intellectualising the everyday, of imposing nuance on the manifest, then Sorry for the Metaphor #5 (2010) offers an “apology” for this, only to objectively mimic the ground for that criticism. A figure stands by a reservoir, holding a notice. A signifier has been uprooted, an instruction ignored, prescribed clarity “burdened” with ambiguity. The scene is composed of 128 A3 photocopies. Pica, purportedly sympathetic to decried meditations on the implicit, wills that our appreciation of the world is as natural and imperfect as that realm itself, not defined or governed on our behalf. She prompts those cynical about aesthetic complexity to contemplate whether they would ordinarily tolerate a primitive, ordained configuration of their own experiences, or whether we would sooner intuit, cultivate and interpret those fragmented impressions for ourselves.

Number 1 (2012), a plinth daubed in turquoise paint, attests to a disparaged classicism, the archaic, however affectionate our popular view of it, here portrayed in the most embarrassed light. A foundation has been defaced, material and principle alike defamed. Here, as elsewhere in For Shower Singers, Pica simulates a deft collision of the precious and the anarchic, questioning whether the axiomatic significance accorded to rank and to established values carries a rational or supposed wisdom.  

For Shower Singers
Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street
December 14th, 2012 – February 10th, 2013.