Published February 2009
Out of Place / Out of Context
You stand in an old palace – you wear slippers on your feet to protect the floors. A metre in front but stretching far above you a glazed man stands proud, probably on a horse. He’s probably supposed to have the fine homoerotic curls of a Macedonian emperor. He’s dressed in… garb, probably, all kinds of garb and finery and then there’s something wrong. The anachronism, that thing that lies shiny and rude, seemingly out of time, out of order and out of place bounces off a mirror and echoes through the room.
To view something and say ‘that is out of place’, is to say that it shouldn’t be there – to know, or suppose, what ‘should’ be there and to recognise ‘that comes from somewhere else’. To have put that thing there in the first place is a decision, perhaps the whim of Louis XIV who saw in Alexander The Great a little of himself, perhaps it’s the victim of circumstance or a nod in the direction of ‘let’s make something new of this’.
For this issue we have chosen to profile a selection of artists that find, either in their practice, their values or their setting, ‘the out of place’ – that find themselves straddling a dichotomy – be it between their artwork and the audience or presentation, the artist and their audience or within the works themselves and how they’ve come about. You walk into a gallery and see a work and a bell rings but each of your ears is computing a different sound. You look around – was that a mistake or was it the beginning of something new?