Excavating The Future
The following essay was written by Amy Kitchingman. Amy is a graduate of English Literature from King’s College Cambridge. She currently lives in Leeds and is about to take up an MA in Museum & Gallery Studies at the University of Leeds. Amy has volunteered her services at BasementArtsProject and is assisting us with many jobs including interpretation, marketing and even installation, as a technician on the recent show by Chloe Harris at Blank_ Gallery.
BasementArtsProject by its very nature takes its visitors into a subterranean world. Every trip involves clambering down to a dimly lit cellar, and inhaling the wet, metallic scent of the underground. In Jeffery Knopf’s exhibition, The Metaphorical Museum and a Return to the Underworld, this eerie atmosphere is utilised to the max, as visitors find themselves surrounded by a series of objects that at once feel familiar and disconcerting. Jeffrey Knopf, a Manchester-based sculptor and vigilante digital archaeologist, has created an exhibition which evokes a temple. Here, visitors can worship the dissembling of museum spaces and embrace the disorder that often emerges from untangling the mysteries of the past.
The sculptures included in the Metaphorical Museum are primarily 3D prints taken from scans, which Knopf collected hastily under the nose of invigilators. His quick and deliberately slapdash scanning methods often leave gaps for the computer to fill in, which produce sculptures with unusual textures or slightly malformed sections that AI couldn’t quite puzzle out. Plastic works mimic the look of silver and gold, whereas others are cast in pewter, aluminium and jesmonite. Only on close examination do grooves of the plastic reveal a work’s material. There are no labels or exhibition guides in sight, although each piece has been named. Sculptures hide away in a spider webbed corner or are snugly tucked into a gap in the brick, almost as though they’ve taken up a cosy position of their own accord. The exhibition is playful yet demanding on the viewer, by pushing them to look purposefully.
Interestingly, Knopf’s use of classical references doesn’t feel like a campy reappropriation, like the peek of a David replica at the back of Frank-n-Furter’s laboratory in Rocky Horror Picture Show, for instance. That was my point of reference for repurposed Greco-Roman works at least, the shoddy replicas of Venus de Milo parked in the corner of a nightclub or gay bath house, in an ironic attempt at adding elegance to proceedings. Knopf opts for an altogether more disconcerting angle. He imparts familiar objects of cultural memory with a sense of the uncanny, of a remembrance just out of reach.
Knopf refers to this process of making and looking as ‘refamiliarisation.’ Rather than the alienation suggested by defamiliarisation, he aims for both a cheeky subversion and serious refutation of notions of classical grandeur. Knopf infuses these solemnly regarded artworks with the potential for mischievous innovation.
This may be regarded as a socially radical message. After all, a familiarity with Greco-Roman cultural output is often the result of an elite education in Britain, with Classics, Latin and Greek notably absent from the average state school curriculum. Knopf, though, shrugs off any implication that he has deliberately infused his work with a political agenda. His challenge to elitism is a natural product of his creative process, in which he confidently follows his gut instincts and a connection to artefacts that defies academic categorisation. His self-taught creativity breaks rules simply by being unbound by conventionality. Significantly, Knopf invites visitors to feel similarly assured in their organic responses to his work.
Likewise, Knopf’s approach suggests a liberating response to the unavoidable issues within archaeology. He acknowledges the key questions - can we really discern the history of an object when so much detail is inevitably lost to time? Can we ever truly know the past? - and suggests instead that looking for clear answers is essentially foolish. We should focus on our organic responses to an object, and pursue a creative dialogue. In this sense, Knopf encourages a humble attitude to historical questions. Civilisations are built and will crumble -humanity is destroyed and humanity rebuilds. Imposing order in museums ignores the inevitability of this cycle.
Knopf suggests the debate surrounding the Benin Bronzes as a useful example of how this approach may look in other museums, in this case the very ‘literal’ and looming British Museum rather than his malleable metaphorical space. He posits that Bronzes should be returned to Nigeria, where Benin City, the former capital of the medieval kingdom which produced the Bronzes, is currently located, should this be requested. Currently, the British Museum is in talks with the royal palace of Benin and the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments, but the Bronzes, which were captured during a brutal and violent occupation of Benin by British forces in the late 1890s, haven’t been returned.
Knopf suggests that the justification that is often cited, that the objects may be put at risk if returned and won’t be cared for properly, is misguided. Even if their return led to the bronze being eventually melted and reused for new works, this is not to be resisted. Cultures should be allowed to interact with their objects in the manner that is most truthful to their creative/cultural practise, rather than colonising countries imposing preservation at all costs as the ‘proper’ way of attending to significant items. I was intrigued by this idea, which seems to go back to Knopf’s prevailing view that objects and the people who interact with them are, to borrow Gloria Steinem’s catchphrase, linked not ranked. Death and the emergence of new life is the most natural cycle in human history, so why strive to defeat death by resisting processes of renewal in our studies and making? Instead, we can accept that we are only temporary caretakers of objects.
But Knopf’s work isn’t too bogged down by these big ideas. Perhaps the campy sensibility I referred to earlier isn’t as distant as it might seem, as he infuses a touch of MAD-magazine-esque humour to proceedings. One of the sculptures in his Underworld is entitled ‘Once Was Hermes Now is Evri’, in a wry comment on how the name of the messenger god has become synonymous with an unreliable courier. Knopf sees classical themes in the maddeningly annoying aspects of everyday life, such as Sisyphean tasks like endlessly making and unmaking our beds. And everyone who’s passed through Call Lane in Leeds on a Friday night has seen that plenty of people pluck out their livers on a weekly basis, so he makes a good point there. Knopf remarked in our conversation that his work is built around a refusal to fear death, which was influenced by a painful loss in his personal life. Knopf’s humour then serves a dual purpose. He invites his viewers to relax, and makes a poignant remark on life after devastating loss. Without a laugh, his examination of human history would be fundamentally incomplete.
So, after a dive into the profound and the ridiculous, what can a visitor take from Knopf’s vision of the museum? Maybe that postcolonial reappraisals of custodianship and questions about the evolution of humanity are a universal conversation, rather than the concern of a privileged few. But more surprisingly, a comforting chaos emerges. Each visitor contemplating the charmingly warped sculptures of The Metaphorical Museum is reminded that we are all caretakers of history.
Amy Kitchingman | July 2023