It’s rare when an artist sees a 33 ft-tall, 1100 square ft gallery and imagines it as a place to fill with “the stuff of his life.” But Scott Kip is no ordinary artist, and “Perpetual Inventory,” Kip’s extraordinary piece at Arcadia University Art Gallery is no U-Haul storage locker. Far from the jumble you might be conjuring, the piece, with its central space filled with his accumulations, is highly organized. From ceiling to floor objects large and small are carefully placed in stacks, on tables, on the floor, on scaffolding near the ceiling, all contributing to the sense of a curation. Kip made an inventory of the objects, including a stack of skateboards, a roll top desk, photographs, bird feathers, ladders, bookshelves, books, tools, a cheese grater, clockmaking tools, signs, a hand-written log of events and much more. The objects are individually worth looking at, but it is the totality of the lot that is show stopping.
“Perpetual Inventory” is a spectacle. Not the Jeff Koons or Richard Serra type of spectacle which presses in on you with its machismo, but spectacle like a stage set for a play. One that welcomes you in (metaphorically). You are welcome to look but not touch (although there are two touch pieces that interact with you). Literally you cannot get in to the heart of this piece, which is walled in, contained by walls around it. Your view of it is partial, impeded, directed, through windows placed along the barrier walls in a dark corridor involving steps going up and down, left and right.
Things that might cross your mind about now are ‘How did he do this? How long did it take to do this? Where does he store this stuff? Did he have any help?’ Ryan and I took our trip through this piece several weeks ago. One thing we did not question during our 30-minute voyage through the maze was its rightness as an installation. It feels right. There is a “doneness” as if the pieces fell into place like pieces in a puzzle.
And even though it might remind you of a stage set, it’s not a place for people. You are the person — the actor or director — and you put yourself into the scene (or not) as you move through, perusing through the windows.
The path through the installation leads you deeper and deeper into the heart of what this is about – back to “Object Zero” the first accumulated object – a little hand-made stuffed animal given to the artist at his birth by a relative. To see this object through its window you must kneel or squat in a space with what seemed like a 3-ft ceiling. You are almost doing obeisance before this object. At a certain point, you may be struck by a lightning bolt of empathy. You might realize that this path, these accumulated objects are like your life, or maybe like someone’s life you love. This realization may make you aware of your own mortality.
In its ability to conjure a game or a challenge, the piece reminds us of Alice’s Wonderland rabbit hole of walkways with doors large and small – look up, look down, touch this, don’t touch that. As with Alice’s play space “Perpetual Inventory” is a game that is not a game.
Ryan and I went through the piece together, talking, exclaiming, puzzling as we followed the dark corridors punctuated with bright light shining through the windows. Kip spent a summer’s worth of 12-hour days, 7 days a week – and then some. He designed and built and filled up the gallery with this Kafka-esque theatrical installation that calls the mind to wander through layers of tactile, colorful, and mostly humanly touched and used things accumulated over a 50-year lifetime.
This “nature morte” does what all still lifes are supposed to do – raise an awareness of life and death, the passage of time, and the vulnerability of a person in the world of hard (and a few soft) objects. We recommend you catch this opportunity to view, ruminate and marvel at life. But go this weekend, go tomorrow or Sunday! Sunday, Dec. 22 is its last day. Appointment needed – see below for how to schedule.
“Perpetual Inventory: A Ruminative Installation by Scott Kip”
September 3 – December 15, 2024 NOTE: EXTENDED THROUGH DEC. 22, BY APPOINTMENT ONLY
FOR AN APPOINTMENT, CONTACT BorgenM@arcadia.edu
Spruance Gallery, Arcadia University, Glenside
https://scottkip.com/
Read an Artblog review of Scott Kip’s 2014-15 installation at Marginal Utility, “Transitional Objects”
