The UCL Art Museum opens its doors patiently and punctually every weekday at 1pm. Like a curiosity shop, it doesn’t shout about its treasures to the passing trade but waits, quietly, occupying another unappreciated world.
Their recent collaboration with the Slade ends today. Most of Vincula’s pieces are uneventful but still, beautifully serene. Apart from two: the Doppelgangers by Laura Kuch look so natural in the room that, at first, I thought they were part of it. And they might as well be. They are two oil paintings from 1913 by two female Slade students, sitting next to each other while working on a life drawing of a female nude. Insignificant on their own, though not without talent, the paintings now also stand, next to each other, in stereoscopic devotion. The one is framed, the other is bare (it won 2nd prize after all). The model has her head and body turned away from us, she is as obscure and lost in 1913 as Dora Karrington and Fanny Fletcher, who painted her, are. The Doppelgangers stand a breath away from each other, quietly producing this ectoplasm of a 1913 Slade Studio Classroom: the subject, the students, the easels, the brushes, the slow wind from Gower St, all materialise in the small space between them. I was drunk with the view. Then, I played ‘spot the difference’ as the Doppelgangers look identical, but not quite so. And then a bundle of words and analyses started flooding my head, of art theories and gender theories and la la la which I silenced and expelled as they were doing the Doppelgangers no justice. For this is art in its purest form: an over-conscious eye, an opportunity, a simple idea, and one of the most complete, clever and honest pieces of found object art, that I have seen, was born. All out of a simple, single act: moving one object gently next to another.
After that, 1+1 can equal almost anything.
more info:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/uclart
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