The Fine Art/Interior Design boundary has never been definitive. Marc Camille Chaimowicz uses Inverleith House to export ’The Interior’ into the world of fine art not as a shell to be filled but a subject to be analysed. Indeed the parallel has often been drawn between Chaimowicz’s work and the Gesamtkunstwerk; total work of art. What Chaimowicz so cleverly procured in Inverleith House was what effectively looks like a stately home. The full-length windows look out onto the idyllic Botanic Gardens (maybe not quite yet but come spring we can but hope). This setting frames the work somehow and draws the architecture as well as the surrounding landscape into the interior. Pieces no longer become distinguishable from one another but meld into a single environment.Chaimowicz commissioned a carpet from Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios. This carpet sits on an oddly lop-sided plinth. The insignificant becomes the significant not by merely being raised above floor level, but raised to an uneven level above floor level. I bloody love plinths! What ever happened to them? Where did they go? Or does every gallery still use them to death but now that we are all so used to seeing things floating in mid air we no longer take note of what they are on. I read an article in ’Map’ recently about the artist called Audrey Reynolds who makes a feature of the plinth. Reynolds’ plinth and blob-on-top-of-plinth (and sometimes carpet under plinth) become one complete picture. The plinth traditionally has never been given much credit - perhaps not quite as aerodynamic as the plane, the plinth, never the less, does still perform the pretty unimaginable task of making an object float in a space. Chaimowicz’s tables and furnishings ARE plinths, Chaimowicz and Reynolds are together reinstating the plinth. These plinths are a bit of a cut above, beautifully carved, cast and … functional.
If Reynolds’ work has been described as a sort of grubby minimalism, then Chaimowicz’s pastel hues and flower prints, strategically placed mink stoles and silk knickers could perhaps be described as candy-floss minimalism. The antithesis of minimalism in so many respects and still perfectly in tune with the minimalist sensibility. An art built on such a multitude of stereotypes only proves a development in artistic opinion. There is no longer this desire to conform to a similar style. Perhaps we are moving into a freer, more liquid time where artists seem to be picking indiscriminately from various disciplines and styles. They are proving that there is more to be gained from throwing ideas together than segmenting them apart.
The digital age has re-aligned our opinions on where, what and whether to separate different disciplines at all as origins become blurred into cyberspace. Chaimowicz embraces this modern Gesamtkunstwerk, yet his execution and the subsequent forms reference a different era of functionality, slick design and precision in implementation. Can work be overtly masculine AND feminine, cluttered AND sparse, minimal AND, somehow, maximal? Or, maybe, these polar opposites never existed in the first place. Labelling something results in elimination of the shades of grey, categorisation places everything that does not exactly epitomise it, outside of it. Chaimowicz (and Reynolds) with the help of a few plinths, are bridging the gap.
