Clegg & Guttmann

Lia Rumma, Milan
Through April 15

In brushing up on their studies and the principles of perspective illusion, Israeli-born and adoptive American artists Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann have realized a site-specific installation in which every element helps to create the overall vision of a False Perspective. The gallery has been divided into two areas—though the split is not obvious at first glance—and it hosts a series of bookcases whose shelves have been replaced with photo-collages, perfectly blended together, which depict the shelves found in various city libraries including New York and Berlin.

At first the twelve structures, which the artist describes as Knowledge Sculptures, seem to be identical. We need to walk the corridors of this personalized library to discover that this is not the case: although belonging to a variety of disciplines—such as geometry, architecture, psychology, linguistics, politics, and religion—the books are ultimately united by the theme of illusionism. Passing along the corridor also allows the visitor to perceive the various devices that have contributed to radically modifying how space is perceived and how a deeply unreal feeling is imparted: the pavement has been partially inclined, the ceiling and the walls converge at a vanishing point and the dimensions of some of the bookcases have reduced proportions.

From the individual or group portrait photographs, in which the figures often emerge from dark backgrounds without any temporal context, through landscapes and still life, to the series of photographs whose subjects are orderly shelves of bookcases, Clegg & Guttmann have broadened their concept of the “social portrait.” The library is no longer understood exclusively as a place which conserves individual and collective memory, wisdom, experience, and knowledge through amassing these vast volumes, but rather witness and proof of that which has, over the centuries, been theorized, studied, analyzed, and narrated by man.




Daniele Perra
Translation by Anna Clarkson