Aftercast

Moulding and casting are widely used techniques in modern and contemporary art making. Their use and application can be found in many other areas of production and material transformation not immediately associated with art practices, and in times before casting became an acceptable form of sculptural production in its own right. Plaster as a material remains the same: its inherent properties and qualities don’t change. Moulding and casting are ancient techniques of giving and taking form and shape to objects and sculptures, and they continue to do so. And yet the way casts are symbolised, the way meaning and values are attributed to these works cast in plaster, has often shifte

The humility of plaster

Staged as a series of interventions amongst the Museum’s collection of plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture, Florian Roithmayr’s work explores the inheritances of mould-making and cast-collecting in an installation of newly-commissioned sculptures, on show for the first time in the Museum of Classical Archaeology’s cast gallery. Roithmayr’s work takes inspiration not only from the widespread application of casting processes beyond the artistic canon, but also from the moulds which make up the very fabric of cast production themselves: “When I started to explore all the different collections across Europe, housing the plaster moulds that have been used for centuries to make cast copies, I was drawn to the very sculptural character both these moulds displayed themselves but also the vast storage collections housing them. They were sculptures in their own right, stacked, piled, accumulated, arranged, forgotten, re-discovered. It is almost as if these places, the activities and the materials collected there are sculpturally far more interesting than the objects they bring forth.

ALTAMIRALTAMIRALTAMIRA

In 1962, the Deutsche Museum in Munich opened a 1:1 replica of a segment of the Altamira ceiling, intended to demonstrate the very first human application of paint as chemical knowledge. Taking more than five years of planning, the replica cast was heralded as a technical revolution at the time. ALTAMIRALTAMIRALTAMIRA is based on the complex relationship between the organisation and transmission of knowledge as it is administered in hierarchical and institutional structures. It is an attempt to chart a historical lineage of disputes around forgeries and the subsequent heurism and inevitability of the technical virtuosities and availability of replicas. It is a look at a specific economy of representations and their translations within the context of the managing and exhibiting of materiality of documents and narratives

Altamiraltamiraltamira

One specific manifestation in a series of long-term engagements with exchanges between materials, between materials and bodies, and between bodies. In 1879 Spanish landowner Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola was searching for prehistoric artifact on the floor of a cave in northern Spain when his young daughter interrupted, calling out “Look, Papa, oxen” as she looked up at the cave’s ceiling and “saw vivid yet delicate paintings of bison, almost fully life-sized, that appear to be tum- bling across the sky.” The cave of Altamira has since become famous for its Upper Paleolithic art, featuring drawings and polychrome rock paintings of wild mammals and human hands. Its special relevance comes from the fact that it was the first cave in which prehistoric cave paintings were discovered. The initial dating of the paintings led to a major controversy during the late nineteenth century: in uenced by the publication of Darwin’s theories and the earlier “Academy dispute” about the beginning of human kind, many people and scientists dismissed the cave paint- ings as forgeries because they did not believe prehistoric man had the intellectual capacity to produce any kind of artistic expression. It wasn’t until 1902 that the paintings were accepted as being more than 15,000 years old. Scientists still continue to evaluate the age of the cave artwork: in 2008, a new evaluation estimated parts of the artworks are as old as 25,000 and 35,000 years. In 1962, the Deutsches Museum in Munich opened a new cen- tral presentation in the chemical sciences wing: it was a 1:1 replica of a segment of the Altamira ceiling, intended to demonstrate the very rst human application of paint as chemical knowledge. The replica cast was heralded as a technical revolution at the time — it was more than ve years in the planning, the ceiling was measured using ste- reogrammetric processes. Based on these images, a positive plaster model was sculpted, registering every detail found in the original cave ceiling. The positive plaster was molded in silicon rubber, in which an especially developed concrete ceiling was cast, with the mineral components of the concrete cement exactly duplicating the original mineral combination at Altamira. The chemical science department of the Museum has since moved into another wing of the museum, leaving its central pres- entation behind, because it couldn’t be taken out of the room into which it had been cast. By arrangement with the Spanish government at the time, the Deutsches Museum agreed to produce one other copy of the cave ceiling using the same silicon mould, this time in the Archaeological Museum in Madrid. Afterwards, the mould had to be destroyed to prevent further proliferation. During the 1960s and 1970s, the original paintings began to be damaged by the carbon dioxide in the breath of the large number of visitors. Altamira was completely closed to the public in 1977. Another replica cave and museum were built nearby and completed in 2001, reproducing the cave and its art

Service

This exhibition project investigates the various materials involved in artistic production through a focus on chance and contingency in the procedures of the realisation and presentation of sculpture. Contributing to the discussion of contemporary sculpture, this project offers significant new ways of presenting chance and contingency as results of formations and processes of material transformations that cannot be named, but have instead the potential to accumulate and become sculpture. The project also de-stabilises the central and autonomous role of the artist and the single and distinct artwork through implicating museum and gallery staff as active participants in the economy of artistic production, and dispersing artworks across sites and exhibitions, repositioning and extending questions of authorship, trust, care and responsibility in relation to the production and display of sculpture, and stressing the importance of sprawling, collaborative networks for current artistic work