Shahryar Nashat
plaque (slab), 2007
Artist
Shahryar Nashat
Title
Plaque (Slab)
Year of creation
2007
Technology and duration
Betacam video, 9'40 min.
Year of acquisition
2011
Acquisition of the foundation
The fact that it is not Glenn Gould but a stele that attracts Shahryar Nashat's attention is one of the conditions that allows us to talk about art and not about culture. The pianist Glenn Gould was a great artist, to be sure. Many decades after his death in 1982, his recordings have become part of the famous canon; Today they can be purchased in all cultural department stores in the world. The commemoration that Shahryar Nashat calls on us to do with a stele, on the other hand, is more and quite obviously aimed at the hidden.
On May 15 and 16, 1979, Gould recorded Toccata in C minor by Johann Sebastian Bach at the Eaton Auditorium in his native Toronto; and it is this piano playing that opens the video Plaque and accompanies it for 5 minutes and 7 seconds. The first images we see in this time frame show the pianist in a spacious studio at the CBS television station. He sits in front of a Steinway grand piano in a black suit with a white pocket square. In a sequence of 64 black-and-white photographs, the eye is slowly drawn to the stage decor, which does not steal the show from Glenn Gould, but which, contrary to expectations, becomes the protagonist of the second chapter of Plaque. They are steles that are made of marble, at least in appearance, and tower over the pianist like silent giants. They put his body, which is bent over the piano and, as always, on a stool whose legs have been trimmed, into its fragile confines. In the second chapter of the video we end up in a factory hall where two men are reproducing stele figures. Incidentally, we sit on a bench that - Cast in the Same Vein - picks up the veins of the marble and raises us like a pedestal to a work of art that, as we all know, only emerges in the eye of the beholder.
Concrete slurry flows into a mold lined with steel mesh; before it dries, the men work on the concrete manually with shovels, hoses and sponges until the surface no longer has any cracks or pores. The concrete stele is slowly erected at the end of the video; it is a perfect replica of the decor and at the same time a phallic gesture. But imitation, mimesis, this principle of all artistic things exalted and at the same time demonized by Plato, must give way to the gaze of the camera. As production progresses, she feels, yes, tenderly, the mud and the hoses and the bodies of the workers. She looks for the bare skin that appears under the boiler suit behind the shovel, the muscular arms, the striking facial features, the slender hands and the bright eyes in which one almost discovers something like a love for the craft. Brutalism is actually followed in Eros' footsteps. “To talk about camp is therefore to betray it,” writes Susan Sontag, and yet she finds a rule that applies to Shahryar Nashat’s meanderings between object and body: “Camp taste is a kind of love…. Enjoy it […] instead of making judgments about it.”
Antje Stahl
