Ceal Floyer
The Berlin-based artist’s playful redirections of everyday objects are engaging, disorientating, and a lot of fun
At Ceal Floyer’s first exhibition in the early 1990s in London, the artist presented a photograph of a light switch, projected onto the gallery wall at precisely the height you’d intuitively find it at home. When the penny drops, you realise what you’re looking at is an image – then you understand that, in fact, what you’re looking at is an idea.
Titled Light Switch, the work has since been restaged in different editions. As she explains, Light Switch, like pieces such as Overhead Projection, 2006, Auto Focus, 2010, and Fallen Star, 2018, presents the fulcrum of an object as ‘an essential, highly visible component of the work’. The equipment that creates the images is left out in the open, in the middle of the gallery space. ‘Nothing is hidden behind smoke and mirrors. The way each work works is on full view for all to see.’
At first, Floyer’s objects might seem like a cruel joke on the viewers (certainly, the artist is such an incisive thinker that you can’t help but feel slightly blunt next to her). Are we missing something? She insists that political interpretations are beside the point. ‘I would say that I am mainly working with nouns and verbs rather than with metaphors. I’m more interested in what the objects are and what they do,’ she tells me.
Born in Pakistan in 1968, Floyer went to Goldsmiths College, graduating in 1994 – the same year Martin Creed formed his rock band and Damien Hirst produced his lamb suspended in formaldehyde. There’s a touch of insouciance and rebellion about Floyer’s oeuvre too, but she isn’t showy about it. Subtlety and detail are her key ingredients. Take Garbage Bag, one of the works in her first show at Lisson Gallery, in 1997: a black binliner puffed up majestically with air. Floyer makes standard household stuff beguiling, the line between art and the everyday suddenly far harder to grasp. Even when we recognise what we’re seeing, we laugh in disbelief. It’s a disorienting sensation. ‘I suppose my interest in making sense of simple phenomena and reframing familiar objects and situations continues. The essence of my practice has remained consistent,’ says Floyer of the evolution of her work over time.
Now based in Berlin, she’s travelled all over the world, exhibiting across Europe, the US and in China, and is currently showing work in Denmark and Japan. ‘Of course, the perception of the work can be either sustained or subverted by the degree of familiarity one has with an object in a certain cultural context. This is also why I often “adapt” the work to the specifics of the site or country I’m showing in. Overturning a sign’s meaning can only work if the specific audience is familiar with the sign.’
Her use of everyday objects and readymades is indebted to Duchamp, but Floyer has also paved the way for other artists; Ryan Gander and Turner Prizewinning Helen Marten, for example. They share an acutely tuned and purposeful humour that is missing in much of the contemporary art world. ‘I work with the dissonance between our acquired expectations and literal juxtapositions overturning the former. There’s a degree of literalness that permeates my work and is the ground for the humour inherent to it.’
It takes painstaking attention to make things look effortlessly simple. This is clear in a work she made last year, Hotel Rooms, made up of promotional photographs of hotels around the world, mounted onto two Plexiglas panels. The pictures, as you’d expect from Floyer, are organised into a clear system. ‘It was default observation: noticing patterns, visual rhetoric,’ says Floyer. ‘Flipping through travel brochures, you see that rooms are almost always shot from the right side or from the left side. In very few cases I found images looking straight-on at the bed, and it’s interesting because these don’t look like hotel rooms, or the way that we are accustomed to “reading” images of hotel rooms.’
Floyer’s work is an invitation to notice the intricacies and absurdities of the world. An object will give her an idea – and act as a starting point to subvert its behaviour. She cites Drill, 2006, as an example of this: ‘Its title describes the name of the object, its function, and the action required to install it.’
In Hammer and Nail, 2008, Floyer similarly sought out ways to flip expectations. She collected material from the internet, ‘with the sole intention of “correcting” it. I wanted footage that demonstrated the action being carried out in the most straightforward way.’ Floyer then ‘altered the framing of the footage incrementally so that the nail stays in the same position throughout the video clip’s duration, despite appearing to be hammered flat into a plank’. What we see is the effect of the rationalisation of the composition in post-production, she explains. ‘The altered framing seemingly raises the plank containing the nail to meet the hammer’s head, to the effect that the video is not only showing the action of hammering, but rather appears to be “performing” it.’
Whether it’s a bin bag, a ladder or a plumb line, Floyer finds poetry in banal objects and familiar actions, creating a place for poetry and pause. Once you’ve entered her way of seeing the world, it’ll never look quite the same again. * lissongallery.com
Hussein Chalayan: If you were to look at the horizon for a long while, what kinds of thoughts would pass through your mind? Ceal Floyer: Would this be as good upside-down?