Theo Kaccoufa

Domestic Appliance Exhibition Catalogue

Domestic Appliance

Extract from text by Ellie Harrison-Read, Curator. Flowers East, 2008

Even though Gregor kept telling himself there was nothing peculiar going on, just a few sticks of furniture being moved around, he soon had to admit to himself that the to-ing and fro-ing of the two women, their little exhortations to one another, the scraping of the furniture on the floor, did have the effect on him of great turmoil nourished on all sides.

In a gallery inhabited by a sense of the familiar made strange, a chair lies, 'face' down, on the floor; its wooden supports assert themselves as air-beating limbs, twitching and flickering in a futile struggle against its downcast destiny. The scene recalls the literary moment par excellence of the banal terror of transformation; Kafka's protean protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes to discover he is a dung beetle, an absurd fait accompli that propels him into a similarly fraught conflict with the impossibility of his form. In this instant, Kafka foresees a spectrum of 20th century ideologies and ideological afflictions: Communism, Cold War,the degraded nature of modern existence in general, and of bourgeois life in particular. But while the scene may suggest itself as a blueprint for the existential dilemma of Everyman, by accepting the transformative image as allegory we perhaps miss the meanings that are nurtured in a space that is in all respects closer to home.

In a gallery inhabited by a sense of the strange made familiar, a chair suggests the way in to re-thinking the tools of interpretation. It is not only the mimicking of a form at odds with itself that links Kafka's cockroach to the flailing creature that confronts us. An often overlooked feature of the Metamorphosis is the significance of furniture in the progression of the narrative. Domestic objects out-perform their role as props throughout the story: there is the sofa under which Gregor lodges himself, sheltering from the morbidly fascinated glare of his family, its cool leather skin a sanctuary when he becomes 'quite hot with shame and regret' at the distress his appearance provokes. When the expanse of his body becomes too vast to be hidden by the sofa alone, he drapes a tablecloth over the entire assemblage; an act of concealment that closets the family's newly fleshed-out skeletons. There is the dinner table around which drama ceremoniously unfolds: following the transformation of his son, Gregor's father insists on dozing fully clothed in his dining chair, his feelings of helplessness manifested in a refusal to exchange his upright position at the head of the table for the surrender of sleep. Having affronted his mother by emerging from his hiding place, Gregor's self-disgust propels him to crawl up the walls before falling into the middle of the table, presenting himself like an absurd offering to his horrified parents. There is the door through which Gregor observes the continuing rituals of his family, his keyhole optic providing a tantalising slither of access to the life in which he once played a part. Most significantly, perhaps, there is Gregor's emotional response to the movement of furniture in and out of his room .When his mother and sister take it upon themselves to clear the space of obstacles in order to allow him to crawl freely, he fears that the loss of these markers of his existence, objects 'that seemed to have taken root in the floor', might cause him to 'rapidly and utterly forget his human past'. But it is not until lodgers are taken in by the family, and his room becomes a repository for the clutter and surplus furniture that once punctuated the house, providing it with its familial grammar, that he recognises he has been truly written-out of their shared narrative. There is clearly a case to be made for what furniture stands for in this story of transformation, and perhaps, taking into account the collapsed state of the chair that mimics Gregor's plight, what it does not stand for.

The chair that models itself in the image of Kafka's modern anti-hero is, by means of its appellation, also a Monument to the Isms. The author of this work, British artist Theo Kaccoufa, explains that the title acknowledges the 20th century art movements that were 'once vigorous creatures roaming the earth' and which now 'occasionally kick and struggle to regain their footing'. In manifesting this art historical critique in the ultimate image of alienation, mixed metaphors of metamorphosis abound: where Kafka begins his novella with the ridiculous but resonant proclamation that a man is now a large insect, Kaccoufa conjures the equally contentious proposal that artistic movements are an endangered species victim to the dialectical dangers of historical negation. These bold statements about modernity are brought to bear, remarkably, by a piece of furniture; that which is understood to be neither animate, nor driven by momentum, in accordance with the ascensional logic of (art-) history. Yet here is a chair that moves, and surrounding this chair in a gallery full of strangely familiar and familiarly strange objects - are other pieces of furniture that pulse and perambulate to the glitchy beat of a self-generated score. The conspicuously robotic jerking of the chair reminds us that Kaccoufa's Monument to the Isms, unlike Kafka's, is not organic, but mechanical, and in acknowledging this distinction, the final piece in the metamorphic equation comes into play. The relationship between man and machine - the pre-war utopian ideal of their harmonization and the dystopic post-historical paranoia surrounding their competing struggles for supremacy - not only provides an important context for reading Kafka, but also sets the scene for the story that we are about to tell.

Independent, Friday, 7 October 2005

It's life, but not as we know it

The Real Ideal UTOPIAN IDEALS AND DYSTOPIAN REALITIES Millennium Galleries, Sheffield. Text by Michael Glover.

Utopian ideals? Dystopian realities? This exhibition of work by 11 youngish artists at the sleekly appointed Millennium Galleries in Sheffield sounds a little pretentiously off-putting. But the idea that drives it is less intimidating, and less lofty and out-of-the-ordinary, than the title may seem to suggest.

This is what it's all about. Artists - like the rest of us - have visions of ideal worlds. Unfortunately, the real world - of compromise, shady dealings and all the grubby human baggage that we never fail to drag along behind us - always manages to come between us and our lofty visions, and all that stuff gets mixed in with the art, too. It's a simple idea - and a very ancient one. It's also a baggily accommodating notion that can be reduced to such platitudes as: art is always complicated by life, and things aren't quite what they seen.

In spite of the pseudo-academic posturing of the title, there is a lot of good work in this show, and it's well presented, too. In fact, to walk through it, passing from space to space - each partially shielded from the next by a series of false walls - across a highly polished floor that reflects light back up, is a kind of dreamily disturbing experience, and rendered all the more so by the sound track spilling out of the room that houses Pipilotti Rist’s Sip My Ocean, a video installation that is playing, over and over again, to the accompaniment of the artist singing a song in a high-pitched, girly voice. At first she sings cooingly, as if to reassure us. Then, all of a sudden, that voice is joined by another, of a girl - perhaps it's the same girl, overdubbed - screaming like a mad thing.

Some of the best work here is by Theo Kaccoufa. He has created a series of wall-mounted wire sculptures. Displayed against soft green walls that resemble billiard tables in their hue and their soft yieldingness, they look, in their gentle twistings and outflowings, like prototypes - or genetically modified prototypes - of strange plants; or perhaps, even the (gulp) skeletons of prototypes of genetically modified plants. It is all so troublingly betwixt and between. The colours with which he overpaints all those intricately convoluted, though quite pleasingly seductive, wire-works, are soft and pastel-like lemony yellows and dullish pinks, as if none of them would ever hurt a fly, let alone snap open to eat one. He calls them Cyber Flora, and that seems about right in teasy, question-begging way.

Next, we drift to some mangled silverware by Cornelia Parker, with the cooing and the screaming ever at our back. Parker has often been in the habit of suspending her work from the ceiling by thin and almost invisible wires, as if what she is offering us is only partially here at all, like any other object that might choose to levitate in front of our eyes. Here, in Thirty Pieces of Silver (Exhaled) Sugar Bowl, we see a ring of silver objects hovering six inches above the ground. They are all stationary, but they look as if they might have made a momentary pause in their giddy, spinning, lives for our benefit, like some thoughtful constellation of ever-turning stars. All those things - a jug, a tea pot, a salver – were beautiful items for adorning a table until someone chose to squash them flat. The result is that, although they may have pretty well retained their forms, they are now nothing other than images of their former selves, wholly useless. They display the reality and the simple usefulness of the object, compared with the uselessness and the almost spectral unreality of tainted art.

Michael Glover

The Guardian, October 24, 2005

The Real Ideal Millennium Galleries, Sheffield

Text by Alfred Hickling

The Real Ideal claims to be a "response to the tension between utopian visions of the world and the imperfect reality of everyday life". What the show really illustrates, however, is the depressing insularity of the contemporary art industry, where whatever goes around eventually comes around. For example, take Michael Samuels' miniature tropical islands, constructed from DIY materials laid on workmanlike wooden trestles. I last encountered these two years ago in a show in Sunderland, where they were brought in to illustrate a quote appropriated from William Blake. Then there are Pipilotti Rist's videos of herself behaving very badly, which crop up all the time in shows claiming to challenge the gender hegemony of this, that or the other. At least such catch-all concept shows can be relied upon to provide some amusement with the earnestness of the explanatory wall panels. Diana Thater's digital weather system, we are told, is a 21st-century reinterpretation of the sublime, in which "we see the beauty of the projection without thinking about the technology which openly enables its existence". Alternatively, you may ask yourself why there are DVD players and wires all over the floor, without noticing the clouds on the ceiling. You really have to work to make connections for yourself. Rist's scuba-diving film features some close-ups of a coral reef that may just - at a pinch - tie in with Theo Kaccoufa's creepy GM teddy bears, which has developed squid-like tentacles, or the dangling filaments of his Cyber-Flora. Taken on their own merits, Kaccoufa's fernlike contributions could make a coherent exhibition, which leads you to wonder: with fronds like these, who needs anemones?

Alfred Hickling

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005