We Live Here Now

We Live Where Now?

Che Horst-Prosier takes a look at the work of Sigismunda Conrad, and the controversy that still surrounds her 2015 installation We Live Here Now.

It’s difficult to know where to begin with a piece like this. Let me propose a question: What do you remember, now, about Sigismunda Conrad? It seems straightforward enough, doesn’t it? But try answering.

You might recall something about 2011’s The Red Thread, or—more likely—remember her breakthrough piece ‘Guest/Host,’ the Serpentine summer smash of 2012. You could try to impress by showing off a discreet knowledge of her early work, the smaller drawing-photograph hybrids recently coming onto the market again. You might be able to say something intelligent-sounding about her work with space, or architectural form, or note that she was one of the first British female artists to show at MOMA. You might vaguely remember her as the woman who built houses, or rooms, or spaces. Most likely, though, is the question that would arise on hearing her name: ‘Didn’t she…?,’ ‘Wasn’t there that thing in…?,’ ‘Whatever happened about the…?’

That said, it is quite possible you do not remember her at all: when I told my partner I’d been commissioned to write a piece on Sigi Conrad, I got nothing but a blank stare. Reputation is a fickle maestra.

Unique in being the only major contemporary artist who has no Wikipedia page, Conrad (originally from ‘somewhere in Oxfordshire’ according to friends) first emerged in the late 1980s, alongside but quite definitely not with the feted YBAs. Her work, at that time intentionally introspective, quiet, minor, would clearly find little space alongside the pickled sharks in vitrines, unmade beds and self-portraits in frozen blood. Conrad was never one for being seen at the Groucho Club or the Met Bar, preferring to spend time alone, reportedly wandering less modish parts of London with sketchbook or camera in hand, recording things others would miss.

Friends from Central St Martin’s remember her as affable but unclubbable, occasionally evasive or even aloof. ‘She always gave off the sense that she had somewhere else to be, or something else—perhaps something better—that she could be doing,’ recalls Carolynne Fox, now a senior curator at the Royal College of Art.

It wasn’t only a question of character which marked her out from the Sensation group, though: while Hirst, Emin et al were arguably making their best work at the beginning of the 90s, there is also the brute fact that much of Conrad’s early work simply isn’t that good. The catalogue for her first solo show (at the long-defunct Tobacco Factory space in Clerkenwell) includes a few interesting architectural sketches which linger ambiguously between drawing and photography, and some small but striking composite pictures of ‘impossible’ spaces, but ultimately they are the work of a talented but derivative, upper second Fine Arts student. They suggest promise, but are yet far from delivering it. Over-exposure at this stage would surely have done her more harm than good; she’d have ended up as one of the unnamed hangers- on in Johnny Shand-Kydd’s photos of the time, slightly out of focus with a B&H in one hand and a G&T in the other.

It was perhaps to her advantage, then, to become known in mainland Europe before the UK or the US. The untitled piece (now listed as ‘Wardrobe’) at the Leipzig Kunstverein collective show in 1994, a solo exhibition at T293 in Naples a year later, then a few of her installation pieces at a Krakow Biennale, all show an artist who needed space to develop and take risks far from the harsh glare of the horribly parochial Anglophone critical sphere. So when The Red Thread opened at the Whitworth in Manchester (as part of the MIF), and then later, the briefly famous Guest/Host at the Serpentine, it was little surprise that some less attentive observers thought she had emerged, fully formed, blockbuster exhibition ready.

It was during this gestational period that I first experienced one of Conrad’s works— ‘Camera, Camera’ at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. This was one of those fashionable-in-the-noughties ‘takeover’ projects, in which an artist—following some supposed curatorial principle—was given free rein to re-organise the museum however they liked. I later found out the process had not been an easy one, and contrary to what she believed she had been promised, Conrad had only been granted the freedom of some of the minor galleries towards the back of the main building. The impressive banners on the lead up to the museum’s main entrance were therefore somewhat misleading: on entering, you’d have noticed hardly anything different, and would perhaps wonder what kind of miniscule intervention the artist had made on the museum’s continuum. A viewer may have spent fruitless hours looking for the tiniest exhibit that had been moved or modified, a small picture placed where a large one should be, or a text description that had been subtly altered, before only then noticing the signs directing visitors to the Conrad Ausstellung which was situated far to the back of the main museum space. When you eventually found your way there, instead of a creative reimagining of the gallery space or the rehanging of a few neglected classic paintings, now strikingly juxtaposed with, say, a relic from the museum’s notable collection of Hapsburg armour, or a gilded salt cellar, or indeed one of Conrad’s own works on paper, all that she seemed to have done was open up the back stairs, an emergency exit and one of the junk rooms leading down into the car park beneath.

This might sound cynical or snide, but it’s not meant to be. It was genuinely one of the most affecting experiences I’ve ever had in a gallery space. Being unable to tell where the work ended and the world began was disorienting in a remarkable way, forcing the viewer to genuinely see the world anew—a much-vaunted but rarely achieved aim of art. It marked me as a Conrad fan, if not quite devotee, from that moment.

(That said, there is an odd coda to this story. When researching this piece, I tried to find the catalogue for the show, and cannot. Moreover, there is no record of it on the museum’s website. Nor can I recall quite why I was in Vienna in 2008.)

Though the show was coolly received it didn’t set her star back and over the next couple of years she managed to do larger or smaller installations for the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, the Kuenstlerhaus Bremen, the Kunsthalle in Bregenz, the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

UK commissions for The Visitors, The Open Door, Flow and The Red Thread followed. ‘It was a busy time for her,’ says Fox. ‘Up until then she had always approached her work methodically and sequentially, like a novelist might, one project on the go at a time, a new work to appear every three to four years. But by the late noughties she had several things running at once. Her older shows were still touring and she was trying to get newer ones off the ground.’ It was around that time, Fox also recalls, that Conrad had begun to lose touch with her old friends. ‘Her mobile went straight to voicemail. She didn’t reply to texts. If I ever saw her she’d claim she’d lost her phone and now had a new number. The last time I saw her was some time in 2012, I think.’

It was this run of work which consolidated her style, with comparisons to Rachel Whiteread, Mike Nelson and Ilya Kabakov abounding, as well as to the then modish work of immersive theatre companies such as Punchdrunk or choreographers like Beata Baum. To me such equivalences seemed facile. The epithet ‘theatrical’ suggests a sense of play, or an awareness of the artifice of the work, if not both of these things. Conrad’s works had neither of those. There was nothing theatrical about them in the least. They were deadly serious.

‘Through the 90s and into this century, art underwent this massive growth in scale,’ says art historian and curator Dan Herman, another former friend of Conrad. ‘There was the gigantism of people like Richard Serra or Anish Kapoor—artists whose work necessitates a huge team of engineers and architects to help put up those rusty metal hulks or the colossal red things—but there was also that of the serial producers, artists who were flooding markets with sheer quantity. A surprising number of people still seem to think that Damien Hirst does all those spot or spin paintings himself, or that Anthony Gormley spends his days casting every one of those figures.’ We still want to believe in a lone Romantic genius, chipping away at a marble block, sketching furiously into the night by the flicker of a single flame or grinding their own pigments from pig bones and beetle’s blood, but the market demands numbers, sales-ready objects, never-ending product.

Conrad didn’t offer that, but did have the potential for scale and spectacle, undoubtedly one of the things which brought her to the attention of the increasingly avaricious early 21st cCentury art-industrial complex. But to meet that demand she needed more people, even as she seemed to be shedding friends. As well as the emerging artists and grad students who often make up such a crew, Conrad had always employed craftsmen too, people who had worked and continued to work other jobs—builders, decorators, mechanics, anyone who had the skills to do what she wanted for any particular project. Now she started taking on more of them. Howie Brennan worked in a garage that repaired her car after a minor crash—she liked the way he’d done the spray paint, and got him in to work on The Red Thread. Ryan Vaunt was a photographer who’d done a portrait of her, Kev Hewes had been her gardener, and Lewis Nardone was a gobby Glaswegian who had an NVQ in electrical installation engineering and a massive amount of self-taught (and self-proclaimed) knowledge. There was a brickie whose name no one seems to remember, but who’d done a job removing a supporting wall in her kitchen. And then there was Oreste Lauro, an untrustworthy Neapolitan who is telling me most of this.

A turning point came with the invitation to show at London’s Serpentine Pavilion, a space usually reserved for architects, or at least those of them ready to do the dance moves of contemporary art. In 2012, when the rest of the city was engaged in the quadrennial hoopla surrounding the Olympics, ‘Guest/Host’ became the feel-bad hit of the summer, a counterblast to the manufactured euphoria. Queues stretched around the park but cameras were strictly banned: the very fact that the experience wasn’t Instagrammable added to its attraction.

Not everyone fell for her. JJ Wilson, still one of the British broadsheets’ more pugnacious critics, reflects on the savaging he gave ‘Guest/Host.’ ‘I don’t regret it,’ he tells me via email. ‘They were just fucking film sets, stage sets, you know? Nothing more than that. It was theme- park shit.’ Carolynne Fox has a kinder view: ‘It was the peak of relational aesthetics, for me. It was, finally, where the world became the work, and vice versa,’ while the piece left Dan Herman perplexed, though ‘not unpleasantly so—I was never quite sure of the role I was supposed to be playing, or what I was supposed to get from any of this. It was very hermetic in its way, although at the same time strikingly obvious.’ I myself was undergoing some severe emotional distress that summer, and cannot quite remember if I saw the show or not, which—I suppose—was ultimately part of its intent. Despite this, the popular buzz around the show and its eventual appearance on many influential best-of-year lists led to an inevitable controversy when Conrad yet again failed to even be nominated for the Turner Prize.

‘I’m not sure that was as much of a knockback for her as has been made out,’ says Fox. ‘She was notoriously uninterested in prizes and all the attendant carnival.’ Herman is more pragmatic: ‘The Turner doesn’t mean so much these days, anyhow.’

The prize snub may also have been caused by the growing rumour that Conrad was somehow ‘difficult’ to work with. The accusation, often tiresomely levelled against female artists as meticulous or attentive to every aspect of their work as a male artist might be, is unsurprising given that Conrad’s work is, in parts, intricately detailed, and she insists on getting each and every one of those details exactly how she wants it. With Conrad, it may have been more of her by now well-established elusive personality and the tendency to go AWOLawol at crucial times. It was rumoured she’d just take off for weeks at a time, perhaps when the stress got too much, or when she wanted to work alone. ‘Everyone knew that she had a house on an island somewhere, in Scotland,’ concurs Oreste Lauro. ‘Sometimes she’d just up and go there. No phone, no internet, nothing.’