Wiebke Siem at the Henry Moore Institute - Brief Article

Art in America, Oct, 2001 by Lynn MacRitchie

Seven curious objects on a shelf turned out to be wigs carved from plaster. They were the modest introduction to the extraordinary universe of German artist Wiebke Siem, whose exhibition "Collection" recently filled the Henry Moore Institute. Large wooden objects, including carts and a wardrobe, occupied the floor of one gallery. On the walls hung felt rugs in neutral colors and a set of hollow padded forms of simple clothing shapes, something between dressmakers' dummies and the garments that might be made on them. Elsewhere, women's dresses and coats, harking back to '50s and '60s styles and stiffened with foam rubber, hung in rows on the wall. The shelves beneath them held pairs of shoes carved from wood and an array of oddly formed hats and handbags. Giant wooden toys sat around a rug, its felt tufts oversized and chunky, while life-size, doll-like objects leaned against the wall. The third room offered fur suits resembling scaled-down costumes for King Kong along with shelves carrying plaster stones painted to look real, above which hung a row of plaster masks of the artist's face.

Siem interrogates various types of objects and how the context in which they are presented confers status as fashion, art or ethnography. After graduating from art school in 1983, she showed work--dresses she and her friends wore, walls she decorated in apartment-block hallways--outside an art context. Deciding to make objects intended to be seen in museums, she began in 1989 to fabricate the components of "Collection," which she considers to be one work. It was first shown at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1997.

"Collection" is full of contradictions, though themes can be teased out. The artist claims that, in the tradition of modernism, her work is no more than visible surface. Certainly the pieces are exceptionally well made, but their perfection nonetheless conjures up a certain nostalgia for a lost childhood. The dresses look like those worn by Audrey Hepburn or Jackie Kennedy, remade by a mother clever with her needle (as is Siem's mother, who taught her daughter to sew). The wall-hung rugs may be modernism pastiched as design, but the one on the floor is more like Joseph Beuys reworked as nursery nightmare. And what is to be made of the odd furniture, all with wheels and handles, ready to be pushed away? The smaller objects could be loaded up on the carts in a trice, should flight be necessary. For those of Siem's parents' generation in Germany, a generation recalled in the retro look of things, flight might have been only too necessary. Siem's obsessive object-making has a great deal to say about history, but it is as much a personal as an artistic or cultural history, and all the more powerful for it.