© 2010 Carol Bove. Courtesy of the Artist and Kimmerich Gallery, NY / photo Thomas Muller, NY
On view
Not Yet Titled,
2010
In Not Yet Titled, Bove arranged objects, some found or scavenged, others fabricated for this work. Most are familiar, but some bear unexpected characteristics, such as the netting made of silver chain. Others, removed from their original contexts and juxtaposed with unlike things, take on new qualities and behaviors. The peacock feather becomes an overseeing eye, making the hand of the writer Vladimir Nabokov—featured in a 1966 photograph taken by Irving Penn for a spread in Vogue—appear to gesture in response, perhaps offering up the chequered blue butterfly as a form of homage. As a group, the objects resist interpretation, despite their resemblance to a selection of scientific specimens arrayed for scrutiny. Bove purposefully cultivates such open-endedness, leaving it up to the viewer to make meaning or to let things remain unresolved.
Rachael Z. DeLue, Christopher Binyon Sarofim ’86 Professor in American Art, Department of Art & Archaeology and Effron Center for the Study of America
More Context
Handbook Entry
Carol Bove is known for elegant sculptures and installations that double as highly subjective archives of both the 1960s and the history of twentieth-century art. Arrangement, juxtaposition, and scenography are Bove’s primary methods. For her, as for artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Rachel Harrison, "display" is end, means, and subject. In <em>Not Yet Titled</em>, various objects rest on a low-lying platform, including shells, a silver chain, a piece of driftwood suspended from a brass plinth, a peacock feather mounted to a custom-made steel stand, an abstract steel sculpture attached to a small wooden pedestal, and a page from the book <em>People Are Talking About: People and Things in Vogue </em>(1969), which Bove came to know through Philip Johnson’s library. The page features an Irving Penn photograph of a male hand cradling a small butterfly. The collision of these different objects creates a rich symbolic field. Considered as a whole, they evoke a maritime landscape — more specifically, a beachfront stretch of sand embellished by ocean refuse and ripples of salt water. More broadly, <em>Not Yet Titled</em> explores the mediation of nature by art and artifice.
Information
2010
