HEIRLOOM is pleased to introduce a new format this autumn. We have invited the French-Danish visual artist Al Masson, who is based in Denmark, for a residency during which he will take over our space and use it as both a studio and a showroom. The collaboration grew out of an enquiry from the artist (included below) concerning the future care and preservation of his works Objets de voyage (1998–) and Butterflies (2006). The two works will be on display throughout the residency.

In his enquiry, Al Masson raises important questions that concern most visual artists: What should happen to our works when we are no longer able to take care of them ourselves? How can we safeguard ephemeral works for the future? We hope that the residency at HEIRLOOM will provide the time and space for us to explore these questions together with Al Masson. During the residency, HEIRLOOM will host a series of meetings with experts in the field, while Al Masson will invite audiences to a series of performances that address and further explore the questions raised.

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Dear HEIRLOOM,

I am finishing Christian Vind’s nice text in “Twilight”, the wonderful book project by Henriette Heise, about Francesca Clausen’s “clippings”, and just got into a kind of angst panic last night. There are two of my projects that I assimilate with the Clausen’s “clippings” that were found in a garbage bag after her death. 

 Perhaps you could have suggestion as you are dealing with “archive”. I am worried with my two projects the one with the recycling envelopes and with my plastic trash objects, that I have been collecting since 30 years, are going to end in a garbage container when I am gone?  

I think it could be interesting with the envelops to secure them, as we do not use them anymore, and also having no more post offices! They seem to be a receptable of another time now. The plastic “trash” objects still going on (slowly question of space) as we are still using that material and polluting the planet, unfortunately.  

I come from a generation where people were frugal (Remember and influenced by my grandfather, whom my brother and I lived with in Belleville/Paris in the early 60’s, recuperating things from the factory where he worked and creating small useful things like tables and shelves (all this in a two-room small flat where we stayed for two years without toilet and hot water and only coal heating!)  I guess I was so fascinated with his work, so when he died, I asked to have them and I still enjoy them. 

Often artists as you know have been using cheap objects to create for financial reason (I am so tired of these spectacular/huge budget production I see around, I find it indecent in our time). It was one of the things when I lived in NY that I found chocking the consumerism approach and I can see that it is all over us. I consider myself lucky to have known another period and way of thinking, a reason I had started the two projects I guess.

 Would you have an idea how these two works could be “preserved”? I really do not know how to approach this, it could be fine to find a way.

Hope you are well, too bad I did not see enough of Christian Vinds fine exhibition as I left for France few days after.

I wish you a nice summer from a suppppppppppper warm South of France!

All the best,
Al

Open Studio is part of HEIRLOOM’s programme series Unfiled, in which we make our space available to collaborators, creating a shared opportunity to explore a particular archive. With Unfiled, we seek to draw attention to the many unprocessed and unruly stories that populate the field of art history.

During Al Masson’s residency, HEIRLOOM will be open whenever Al Masson is working in the space, as well as every Friday from 1–5 pm, and by appointment.

Al Masson (FR/DK) is a visual artist working across painting, drawing, photography, installation, sculpture, video and performance. He has previously performed as a dancer with a number of dance companies in France and abroad. Across media, Masson’s practice explores identity and visual biography through a queer approach to representation and storytelling. His works and performances often incorporate fragile and inexpensive found materials, reflecting a vulnerable, embodied experience.

Objets de voyage (1998–)

Moving between waste and glamorous excess, rejection and commodity fetishism, Al Masson’s Objets de voyage explores the contrasts inherent in our culture of consumption. The work consists of plastic objects collected over three decades—remnants of packaging, empty bottles, containers and toys—here assembled into colourful, sculptural formations. Originally, each individual object was carefully designed to capture our interest as consumers, to seduce us and appeal to our desires, only to later be discarded as waste, rejected and left to accumulate.

The title Objets de voyage refers to a long-term, ongoing project spanning multiple media and disciplines, which here is further activated through a video work and an introductory performance. Since the late 1990s, the many objects have been reconfigured in a series of exhibitions, photographs, video works and performances, where they have been assembled and dismantled, shaped and reshaped in shifting constellations. As historically specific, almost archaeological objects, they bear witness to how the materials handed down to us are always transformed along the way. Focusing on reuse and cyclical processes, Masson’s work thus demonstrates how the discarded, excessive and overlooked can be reintroduced into our visual economy and collective memory.

In HEIRLOOM’s basement, a video of Objets de voyage is on display, documenting the work when it was performed as a live performance in the exhibition Lost and Found: Queerying the Archive at Nikolaj Kunsthal in 2009. The video has a running time of 55 min.

Butterflies (2000-) 

Al Masson’s Butterflies focuses on the ephemeral, spontaneous and relational aspects of artistic production. The work was originally created in 2000 as a performance at the Traneudstillingen at Gentofte Library, where visitors were invited to hand in their discarded envelopes, which the artist decorated with coloured crayons. At HEIRLOOM, the work is reactivated as a backdrop for the artist’s performances, but also as a gesture in itself:  hundreds of drawings are unpacked from a suitcase in which they are stored between exhibitions; always in transit, and made from a material that is both ephemeral and fragile.

Today, museums and collections are engaged in the extensive digitisation of historical sources, including artists’ letters—a medium that has become obsolete and is now almost extinct. Masson’s discarded envelopes are rooted in a fundamental, but also poignant, realisation: that in every correspondence, perhaps in every form of communication, there is something material left over, something omitted or momentary, that is irretrievably lost. In the work, this leftover, obsolete residue becomes an occasion for playful imagination and creative improvisation, connecting the audience to the production of the work, and the artistic material to its transmission.