Steven Claydon
Sadie Coles HQ | Balfour Mews
James George Frazer opened his anthropological study The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890) with a description of J. M. W. Turner’s 1834 painting of the same title. “Suffused with the golden glow of imagination,” Frazer wrote, the painting of the Italian woodland around Lake Nemi depicts the site of a “strange and recurring tragedy.” In antiquity, one might find a priest guarding the sacred tree, waiting to be killed for his priesthood in the same way that he killed his predecessor. Steven Claydon called his recent exhibition “The Gilded Bough,” and his slight modulation of Frazer’s title nods to the ways in which ideas mutate as they pass between cultures and through time. In keeping with this concept, he produced two versions of the bough for the show. Stochastic Conveyor (Transference), 2016, is a twenty-one-foot-long resin cast of a wooden beam, oriented horizontally, with open ends that expose its hollowness. Placed on one end are cast-resin objects that appear to have been borrowed from an ethnographic museum; on the other, gilded casts of telephoto camera lenses. The work formed an x-axis along which the exhibition’s themes moved—from auratic artifact to mechanical reproduction. The bough of Antenna (Anesthesia), 2016, installed vertically, was the show’s y-axis. Affixed near its center are a resin mask and a gilded pill package, together representing the tensions between magic and science.
Frazer’s analysis in The Golden Bough led him to the conclusion that human cultures move sequentially from magic to religion and finally to the scientific rationality of Victorian England. If we dismiss Frazer’s claim as the product of blinkered imperial self-confidence, then, ironically, we risk simply extending the view of history as linear progress from dark to light by placing ourselves at the most enlightened extreme. Claydon’s evocation of Frazer’s work recalls Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s 2014 essay on the anthropological turn in contemporary art, in which she described the ways in which artists such as Camille Henrot and Cyprien Gaillard “revel in the seductions of a certain National Geographic aesthetic, which walks a fine line between the romantic and the nostalgic on the one hand, and the critical and the provocative on the other.” I wonder if Claydon read her text: His Bifurcated Development suite, 2016, features a National Geographic cover printed on plywood (The Search for Early Man [Bifurcated]) paired with a phallic Roman-bronze fertility amulet (Survival Instinct [Bifurcated]). Claydon’s exhibition had an Apple Store–meets–British Museum aesthetic: We saw curved wooden or eroded iron surfaces juxtaposed with primary-colored elements, steel, and clean lines—he intermixed materials that variously evoked the auratic and the technologically sleek.
Of course, the idea of “turns” in contemporary art is itself a metaphor of progression. Dieter Roelstraete once described the volume of results that appeared when he googled “turn in contemporary art,” most of them prefaced with the phrase so-called. Indeed, whether all of these turns add up to some advancement, or if they have us endlessly circling the same territory, is unclear. The truth is that as cultural paradigms have shifted to embrace magic, religion, and science, there has never been a clean turn of the page. Rather than murderously replacing each other, as Frazer’s priests did, these worldviews always overlap.
Walter Benjamin described aura as that nebulous quality that disappears as “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” But Claydon’s shift from “Golden”to “Gilded”doesn’t represent a nostalgic loss or the devaluation that occurs when substance is traded for surface. The exhibition text describes the scientific process whereby ultrathin layers of gold are applied to objects to increase the accuracy of scanning electron microscopy; the gilded surface takes us closer, rather than farther, from understanding what is in front of us. Yet the artist’s faith in science doesn’t preclude an interest in where magic and the market meet: In 2005, Claydon formed the band Weird Sisters with members of Radiohead and Pulp to perform in the 2005 film Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.