Still Life

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Apartamento
21 May 2015
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24 Jun 2015

We’ve all enjoyed the childish game of making a stack out of seemingly inappropriate materials, and though it might more for kids, it’s nevertheless a lot of fun. For most of us it’s an occasional pastime, but for the men at Apartamento it’s a duty, involving serious research, lengthy shopping trips and a studio photo shoot. I’ve heard of people who spend a lot of time stacking things, but they mostly do it to achieve outrageous acts of balance and don’t pay too much attention to the articles in the stack. The Apartamento stackers on the other hand will only stack things which share a typological identity. Loaves of bread, rolls of tape, terracotta bricks, blocks of ice, lumps of clay, to name a few examples, are all subjected to an arrangement which stands precariously on a small platform between conceptual logic, absurdity, good taste and bad taste. They ask to be taken seriously and they try to win our sympathy by being ridiculous. Salvador Dalí, Irving Penn, Claes Oldenburg, Fischli Weiss and Ettore Sottsass have each made guest appearances here and it all holds together by careful arrangement. Normally there’s a financial motivation for making a display, an urge to have a thing noticed and then sell it, but in this case, at the luxury end of the display business, the only motivation is to please us.

Jasper Morrison