In 2018, after almost forty years of living and working there, Marc Camille Chaimowicz moved out of his south London flat. Set on the top floor of Hayes Court, it was decorated in his own wallpapers, with lamps, room dividers, and curtains made or adapted in the same way that Chaimowicz built up environments in his work. With Chaimowicz’s penchant for sun-faded colors, pastels, and saccharine pinks, the flat seemed to have been caught in a moment in the 1970s, but rather than being cordoned off like a museum piece, Chaimowicz’s home—like his work—continually insisted on letting life in.
When Chaimowicz rented his first studio after graduating from the Slade, he prioritized setting the space up to host, developing his interest in the applied arts by making and collecting things that would contribute to conviviality. He wanted to have a good time, and he sought out or made objects, furniture, and decor to do just that. His studio mates saw it as a distraction, or a lack of dedication to art making, but it was here that his sense of work as an evolution of life began to emerge.
Chaimowicz first installed Celebration? Realife at Gallery House in east London in 1972. He filled a former ballroom with objects, including disco balls, statues, candles, lace knickers, fairy lights, inflatable beach toys, flowers in vases, and flowers scattered on the floor. The installation sat on the precipice of activity, evoking a recently departed after-after party that could potentially be reignited. In a review of the original installation in the show catalog Past Imperfect, 1972–1982, Jean Fisher wrote: “The sentimental nature of many of the objects provoked a sense of the residue of an attachment—discarded or half-remembered feelings—their scattered arrangement on the floor suggested the residue of pleasure.”
Chaimowicz was continually present in the space, sleeping in the gallery and inviting visitors for coffee, taking on the role neither of performer nor strictly author, but rather host, guide, or in his own words, “housewife.” A few weeks later, he staged an altered version of Celebration? Realife at the Serpentine Gallery under the title Enough Tiranny, with an added fish tank and rented television in keeping with the more polished environment.
Restaging became a continual practice in Chaimowicz’s work, with Celebration? Realife returning to Gallery House (now known as Raven Row) in 2017. Presented as ‘belated opening’, a sociable space with Lola and Adrien, the piece included a series of floor lamps with photographs of the original environment attached to the shades, as well as a scattering of silver shoes and a film showing the original iteration of Celebration? Realife. As with the first outing, Chaimowicz played host, offering free-poured gin and tonics and playing records. ‘belated opening’ enacted his preference for time-based, discursive work that is hard to capture in a fixed state and slips through our fingers like a mist. This distaste for permanence—or the understanding of its impossibility—carries through much of his work, whether through the activation of installations or Chaimowicz’s reverence for nostalgia and memorial.
After moving out of his flat in Hayes Court, he restaged part of the living room for an exhibition in Brussels. The Hayes Court Sitting Room was “a theatrical evocation of a room in which Chaimowicz dreamed, worked, conversed, corresponded (and more),” an environment featuring tabletop assemblages of sentimental items and furniture designed by the artist. But rather than presenting a perfectly preserved relic, the Sitting Room proposed “a fragmented experience,” with a nod to its performativity. If Chaimowicz was going to have his furniture take the stage, it was going to do so in a way that has a closer relationship to the animated domestic objects of Beauty and the Beast than to an austere museum display with a labored sense of objectivity.
While the work, and the space of a living room, was inviting, it deflected intimacy through the flair of the setup—being a room designed to show its best side. There was a sense of theater in the objects, in the setup, and in the cases of Celebration? Realife, and ‘belated opening’, in the parties that brought the work to life. The depth of feeling comes through once everyone has left the dance floor.
The Hayes Court Sitting Room is a memorial to Chaimowicz’s life in his long-term home, the temporary nature of the installation emphasizing the contradiction of our sense of connection to and control over our environments. Cataloguing, reenacting, and memorializing something past may seem like an attempt at making it permanent, but in setting up his living room in the museum, Chaimowicz realized the ghost.
Related Stories
