Peter Liversidge’s exhibition an echo, explores a theme that has concerned his work for nearly 20 years.
It’s an idea that is currently under the spotlight in The Double, an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, which includes Liversidge’s work alongside a roll call of artists (including Albers, Celmins, Duchamp, Rauschenberg and Warhol) for whom the double image has provided a means of understanding and exploring themes of identity and difference.
As the exhibition’s curator James Meyer describes in the accompanying book: “The art of doubling splays and divides vision. Looking at doubled images or shapes, we are able to see ourselves seeing…. Works of doubling explore questions of identity – how we distinguish one form, or object, or person from another: how we perceive likeness and unlikeness, resemblance, and difference.”
Inevitably, shadows and reflections loom large in the iconography of doubling – symbols of the divided self in a post-psychoanalytical world. As Meyer notes, the invention of photography, and in particular the widening access to photography that came with the handheld camera in the 1880s, opened the possibilities for ordinary folk to ‘see’ that metaphor for themselves. Filmmakers (including Warhol) have also played with doubling across the format of two screens and Liversidge does so too, using an iPhone (the present-day equivalent of the 19th century’s new photographic technologies) to film, and then replicate, a ghostly sequence of a plastic bag in the wind on the streets of London. The first film was made in mid-winter, the second, in exactly the same place, in late summer, the bag transposed from one film to the other seemingly suspended across the intervening months.
| The materials of film and photography provide Liversidge with a very immediate means and method of inviting us to look harder at everyday things, but so too does the possibility of the found object and its fabricated twin. This is rich territory for Liversidge, following Duchamp’s lead in the direction of the readymade and the remake. Among the sculptures exhibited here are pairs of found stones and terracotta tiles in which the artist is at pains to ensure that the lovingly made second version is not an exact copy of the first – as if to suggest that the double can never be a true and a perfect replica of the original, and nor is the original any more unique than the re-make. https://www.inglebygallery.com/viewing-room/68/ |
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
