Victorian Visual Culture

Artist Lenka Clayton was featured in the 2021 Patricia and Edward Falkenberg Lecture, which is featured as a virtual event on the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum website. In her section of the lecture, she explained pieces from her exhibit “Comedy Plus Tragedy” and the inspiration behind the pieces. The exhibit was in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum, and featured items from the collection. She spoke alongside a slideshow of pictures of her pieces and items not directly featured in the exhibit from the Skinner Museum that inspired her. In the exhibit, the main focus was the way in which the items were displayed. For example, she had items that were invisible in some way, a meteorite hanging from the ceiling, and a row of vases/vessels arranged in height order. The arrangement of the displays in itself says something about or emphasizes certain aspects of the items. 

I found it particularly interesting how Clayton chose to play with the placement and spacing of her pieces. The placement of art and the way it interacts with the pieces around it can change the meaning and how people look at it. I am currently taking a course in 19th-century art history, in which we have discussed the style of art hanging in the Salon. That style features as many paintings as one could possibly fit on the wall; it is very crowded and busy. This style of presentation changes the way we look at art as opposed to how we view it in a spread-out format, like modern Museums and Clayton’s exhibit. The placement of Clayton’s pieces feels more deliberate as opposed to just cramming everything in that will fit.

One piece that I found really interesting was “Four Invisible Objects.” The objects were a wedding cake eaten by mice with only the box remaining, stolen diamonds with only the identification tag remaining, a flag that is too fragile to unfurl, and a cannonball that exploded with only its stand remaining. The most compelling part of this piece was how the main focus was not even present. The remainders of the objects only serve as placeholders to signify the once extant object that has since been lost to time. In talking about the inspiration behind this piece, Clayton recalled her visit to the Skinner Museum and said, “I found a lot of nothingness.” That sentence and the way she turned nothingness into somethingness really resonated with me. 

Another piece that really stood out to me was “Meteorite at its Highest Height in 50,000 Years.” Clayton hung the meteorite from the ceiling to put it back in the air 50,000 years after it crashed into the Earth. The meteorite is both suspended in air and in time. It is taken back to its fall and frozen there. The way the shadow hits the wall behind it and all the empty space below it also does something interesting. The dynamic between the object and what is not there puts all the more emphasis on the very deliberate placement. I liked that this piece encouraged me to think about space and time (though maybe I went a tad bit too existential with my train of thought). Clayton explained how she sat with and held the meteorite before she did anything with it, which I thought was a fascinating method and showed the extent of the thought she put into this piece. 

One last piece that stood out to me was “Remainder.” It was a row of vessels arranged in height order, and the vessels themselves spanned 4 continents and 400 years. Each vessel also has sand around its base, the excess of sand poured from the larger vessel before it. Clayton chose the vessels from hundreds in the Skinner collection but picked carefully to represent a range of cultures, materials, time periods, and functions. In her talk, Clayton did not go into a ton of depth on the purpose of this piece, but I enjoy it when artists allow the audience to interpret the work in different ways. I took away from this piece that no matter what, a little bit of the past always remains in the present, both in a worldwide sense and a personal sense. Cultures, society, and technology are only built off of what came before them, just as we are built off of our past experiences.

Overall, I think Lenka Clayton’s exhibit was fascinating, and the talk that went along with it provided some interesting insight into her choices. I liked how she played with placement, space, and time to create something unique and thought-evoking. One thing I don’t understand, though, is why it is called “Excerpt from ‘My Grandmother Lived to be One Hundred Years Old.’” It is an excerpt from a larger lecture, but “My Grandmother Lived to be One Hundred Years Old” is never mentioned in it, which I think makes the title a little confusing, and creates a conflict between the audience’s expectations going into it and the actual content.

“Lenka Clayton: Excerpt from ‘My Grandmother Lived to Be One Hundred Years Old.’” Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 18 Aug. 2022, artmuseum.mtholyoke.edu/virtual-engagement/lenka-clayton-excerpt-my-grandmother-lived-be-one-hundred-years-old?bc=node%2F1972.