L ST and FOOUND Shaun Caton

Shaun Caton made L ST and FOOUND (video) for the Ineligible exhibition at the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in Portugal. The work is short film loop (included below) that incorporates porcelain figurines called Frozen Charlottes, made in Germany in the mid-19th century. Caton has superimposed vintage photographs of children from the same era to give it a feeling of authenticity. The animation functions like an eruption with its profusion of rich and varied images: the artist uses many of his drawings, paintings, and collages of the same artifacts and presents them in a mesmeric flow at great speed. Successive viewings reveal more intricate details, such as negatives of line drawings of heads, photographs of ex-votos, images of flowers and growth, and amputee doll parts. Caton is fascinated with grottesco, a renaissance mannerist movement, in which the grotesque in art is celebrated in a whole variety of different visual approaches. He calls his animated films “strata that are exposed to the naked eye.” The speed with which the film is edited epitomizes a concern with mass consumption in society in the digital, onscreen age. We are literally overloaded and bombarded with imagery that is profound, disquieting, and yet strangely beautiful.

Shaun has written about his Ineligible process:

“The Ineligible objects I received through the post from San Francisco, are all Victorian figurine parts and fragments, called Frozen Charlottes (c.1850-1900): heads, arms, legs, a torso, a gaping mouth, a dog-person, a booted foot. At first, I photographed them in formal compositions, then bound together with colored rubber bands. I drew and painted them on paper over 30 times. I made a large collage of them. Finally, I created an endless film loop.”

“The film, L ST and FOOUND, is a sort of embryonic dreamscape that switches from subject to object, and language to gesture. There are other mysterious components, such as Romano-Celtic ex-votos found at the source of the Seine, amidst a great, seething flurry of images of drawings and notebook entries. I want the film to look like it has been discovered by some future archaeologist, complete with imperfections, glitches and jumps. I made it on my phone  with a studied disregard for technology and a hallucinogenic quality. I prefer to see the film as the collective dream of all the shattered figurines I received for the Ineligible project.”

“My art is about reinvigorating and articulating lost ancient cultures, by utilizing multiple fragments within a multi-dimensional possibility. I regularly employ finds as powerful talismans, that evince their own personality, albeit in a disembodied happening or image.”

Shaun Caton is an influential British performance artist, painter, collagist, and cultural lobotomist. Since the early 1980's, he has presented over 500 performances globally, including the 58th Venice Biennale at the Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, where he performed 'il giardino grottesco'. All his art work, draws inspiration from archaeology and ancient art. He is fascinated by prehistoric art and has studied Palaeolithic cave art in France, and the culture of Romano-Celtic ex votos, at the Archaeological Museum in Dijon, France (2018) and the Archaeological Museum Milan, Italy (2019).

Caton's performances are deeply immersive  events that use live/pre-recorded sound, color shadowplay, archaeological artifacts, masks, acetate drawing projections, and paintings which serve as backdrops. He often collaborates with people who have no previous experience of art, forming partnership performances of great psychological intensity. His paintings, films, collages, and graphic work, all depict the specific objects in his performances, characterized by a highly original expressive style. Here is how he sees it:

“I am an animist performer and a maker of ancient images for the modern age. People give me bizarre objects all the time, such as ossified tree fungi, or a pig's skull, to wear on top of my own masked head. I transform these  objects into something else by regeneration, through ritual performance, or in paintings, where there is a type of  metamorphosis engendered by willed intuition, into the inner sanctum of the croaking image, full of misshapen personages that have hobbled out of history as supernatural  souvenirs. An artist is a sort of medium that can bridge many different realities.”

For more information about Shaun’s work check out these links:

http://www.shauncaton.co.uk/

Subscribe to his RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShaunCaton

The Ineligible exhibition at MIEC that was one part of the Creative (un)makings: Disruptions in Art/archaeology show co-curated by Doug Bailey and Sara Navarro. For more information about Creative (un)makings, follow these links:

Museum exhibition description

Portuguese TV spot about opening of Ineligible

Other Featured Work from Ineligible that have been featured on www.artarchaeologies.com include the following:

Door Knob (hand held) (Ilana Crispi)

José Pedro’s Toolbox (Rui Gomes Coelho)

Remember Wounded Knee (Laurent Oliver)

Omission: Sterile Landscape (Tiago Costa)

Decadence (Jéssica Burrinha)

The catalogue from the Creative (un)makings: Disruptions in Art/Archaeology exhibition in which Ineligible was installed is available as a free pdf download through the following link:

Bailey, D.W., Navarro, S. and Moreira, A. 2020. Creative (un)makings: Disruptions in Art/Archaeology. Santo Tirso: International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture.

One part of the Creative (un)makings exhibition was a conference addressing the issues of the installation. Free pdfs are available of the conference book through the following link:

Bailey, D.W., Navarro, S. and Moreira. A (eds). 2020. Art/Archaeology: Beyond the Archaeology of Art. Santo Tirso: International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture.

If you are interested in participating in the Ineligible Project and using disarticulated (former) archaeological materials to create original work that has disruptive social and political impact, then email dwbailey@sfsu.edu with the subject line Ineligible Contributor Request.