MishMash group
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MishMash group
Construction Set for David Hume, 2019–2021
25 mixed media assemblages, metal, glass, tree branches, plinth
Plinth diameter: 518 cm
Courtesy of the artists
Construction Set for David Hume features twice in the exhibition. The first part is a multimedia installation that brings together 24 tower sculptures in a symbolic circle on a sacred gold base. Placed under glass domes as if in a cabinet of curiosities, these fragile towers, stoically presented by their creators for future transformation into ruins, in fact consist of random objects that have been piled on top of each other to become assemblages, referencing the mythological prototype of the Tower of Babel. Like any “sublime” object, they establish distance, both physical — protecting themselves from accidental intrusion with a hedge of bare branches—and intellectual—by eluding rapid comprehension and deciphering. Above the center of the gold circle is suspended an odd, completely inaccessible object. It is a karmushka, a play on the Russian word for feeder (kormushka) and karma.
The installation is assembled from elements accumulated over a number of years and develops the tradition of hideoism, a movement discovered by the MishMash duo in 2018. Originating from the word “hideous,” as an aesthetic principle hideoism opposes designed, sterile beauty, rejecting pattern and canon in favor of the random, other, and different. Here, new meanings appear like grass growing through the asphalt, in the organics of the urban environment, which can be understood as “the synergy of architect, climate, janitor, vandal, passer-by, incident, layering, and history.”
In these unobvious, bizarre, and absurd combinations of the durable and the ephemeral, a new, exquisitely uncanny beauty is born: whimsical and ugly, nondescript and emotional, open to the inexplicability of the world beyond cause-and-effect relationships.
EL