Cloyingly cryptic exhibition at Casino Luxembourg

Photo: Steve Eastwood

A new exhibition by Luxembourg-born artist Sophie Jung presents a collection of seemingly incoherent sculptures that both invites and rejects interpretation, resulting in a cloying and cryptic display of contemporary art.

Winner of the 2013 Edward Steichen Award, Jung's exhibition at the Casino, entitled They Might Stay the Night, is the artist's first major sculpture-only show.

A haphazard jumble of material amassed on a reflective surface lining the museum floor, Jung’s sculptures have an eerie charisma. Whether an adult-sized onesie stretched over a dentist's chair or a series of inflatable breasts stuffed into the heel of a ballet shoe, Jung's sculptures have a strange yet distinct sense of character.

While the disparate materials used in the exhibition span everything from stuffed animals to drywall, there is a sense of cohesion and continuity that is lost though just as soon as it is found.

Photo: Steve Eastwood

While the disparate materials used in the exhibition span everything from stuffed animals to drywall, there is a sense of cohesion and continuity that is lost though just as soon as it is found.

There is an approachable and playful vulgarity to seeing an inflatable breast in the heel of a ballet shoe, but what are we to make of this? If you are to go by the scatterbrain collection of sculptures and scant supplementary texts given in the exhibition, not much. However, this austerity seems to be Jung's intention.

Using a combination of industrial refuse and prop items that could have been taken from a closet reserved for playing "dress-up" or "make believe", Jung's sculptures feel like a Tim Burton-esque mashup of childish innocence and horror.

Her miniature, set-like sculptures and the nooks created as they lean against a wall or the floor, offer the viewer a sort of crawl space for the imagination. But these spaces remain obscure and abstruse.

Other than a very bizarre and cryptic text plastered to a wall in nearly illegible, silver lettering, there is little to coerce the viewer into any direct interpretation of Jung's work. Rather, visitors are merely left to meander through the weirdness of a room filled with musty mattresses, an airplane door and animal furs slung over a radiator.

Instead, Jung reserves the theoretical framework to Casino's online tour of her exhibition.

Here, she intermingles snapshots of her exhibition with a video interview of philosopher Hannah Arendt, quotes from Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, a facsimile of writer Leonora Carrington's Debutante, two standup bits by British comedian and magician Tommy Cooper, a scene from Charlie Chaplin's The Circus and several links to Wikipedia.

While all of this material gives Jung's sculptures depth in relation to the complex philosophies of Derrida, Arendt and the others, they all seem counterproductive to the original point of Jung's work, namely, to have no point.

What once was a collection of seemingly incoherent sculptures, ghost-like husks whose allure resided in their austere irreverence to conventional structures and that referred only to themselves—suddenly gains a point of reference, a structure.

Michael Reinertz is the LuxTimes' culture critic Photo: Guy Wolff

What once was a collection of seemingly incoherent sculptures, ghost-like husks whose allure resided in their austere irreverence to conventional structures and that referred only to themselves—suddenly gains a point of reference, a structure.

In going through Casino's online exhibition, you can see the extensive labour and thought that went into Jung's exhibition which, after encountering her theoretical framework, becomes a rather stunning manifesto exploring the existential strictures of definition, performativity and circumstance.

To anyone planning to visit this exhibition, I highly recommend checking out the online material before judging Jung's work. I think you will find that it's equally inspired and misdirected.

Get the Luxembourg Times delivered to your inbox twice a day. Sign up for your free newsletters here.