Rebecca Cummins and Rosemary Laing: Envisioned
In many respects Geoff Kleem takes up where Minimalism left off. His installation, Industrial Division, of dysfunctional display furniture, punches a conceptual hole through the intersection of form and function, still traced within the territorial precincts of Minimalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Kleem squeezes the formalist paradigm for humorous effect and creates a kind of theatre of the mutant object.
His characters occupy an imaginary world; they are the base genetic code, adaptable for display in any circumstances, equally at home in the supermarket, trade fair, shopping mall, museum or factory. In the art gallery they conjure up their own histories; performing as dadaesque characters, they become parodies of the high Minimalism of the monumental '60s, and at the same time they retain the wit associated with the hybrid Minimalism of Robert Morris. It is the mocking, irreverent edge that gives Kleem's work a performative aspect.
The idea of the expressive artist, the great stalwart of modernism, is hijacked by Kleem. The 'author' here is truly a bricoleur, operating as an ideas man, plotting out the display options on a computer screen, planning an event or exhibition which never quite arrives. Instead we are surrounded by the plinths, platforms, shelves, cabinets and trolleys which move, crate and display things. For the visual art enthusiast there are also art historical references. Joseph Beuys's autobiographically significant, existential lump of fat is lampooned by Kleem. Here it becomes an unfinished industrial wedge, mounted on wheels. The metaphysical pretensions of its earlier representation are undone as mini-mechanics do conceptual business with existential anxiety. Kleem's plywood tableaux also mimic great moments of modernist art history. The broom resting on the wall injects a