Tag: Alex Butterworth

Treasuring the Wreck of The Unbelievable: Envisioning a future archive of contextualised contemporary art

By Alex Butterworth.

This academic article explores Damien Hirst’s 2017 exhibition The Wreck of the Unbelievable, which mischievously purported to present treasures salvaged from the wreck of the legendary Apistos. How might we preserve, curate, and otherwise mediate such ambitious and distributed artworks, which extend in such convoluted ways through diverse social and cultural spaces, and which deliberately ambiguate their own boundaries and encounters? Where artworks both seek to capture and to intervene in their own historical moment, what obligations and affordances arise for future historians, curators, critics, and publics? Might the challenges set by The Wreck of the Unbelievable even model a new kind of digital art history including, for example, data generated incidentally and abundantly by digital processes? This article playfully mobilises new Digital Humanities methods for reading the vast and stormy seas of social media data discourse, reading between the artwork itself and the historical ‘moment’ in which it is so entangled.

Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable by Damien Hirst

Man has no harbour, time has no shore;

It flows, and we pass away!

Alphonse de Lamartine: ‘The Lake’ as quoted by Franck Goddio, ‘Discovering a Shipwreck,’ in Damien Hirst, Treasures of the Wreck of the Unbelievable

Damien Hirst’s 2017 Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable was work of ‘spreadable’ historical narrative, spun around an elaborately wrought hoax. Ten years in planning and execution, the exhibition straddled two large spaces on either side the mouth of Venice’s Grand Canal, the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana. It alleged to present treasures salvaged from the Apistos, a ship lost almost two thousand years ago, comprising the art collection of a freed slave of incalculable wealth and cupidity. Treasures wrought of marble, gold, crystal, and jade were accompanied by films of the marine archaeology in action, featuring animistic figures — some with the disconcerting features of Disney characters — gently raised from the sea bed. The authenticity of the sculptures themselves was vertiginously involuted, with some sculptures appearing in variant versions, scaled up or down, cleaned of or encrusted with coral. Captions, located inaccessibly, also played games with curatorial authority, describing the construction of the luxurious display ‘cabinets’ as often as they did the contents of the vitrines.

But the physical exhibition was only a single, ephemeral manifestation of the world of Treasures. To commit wholeheartedly to comprehending that world is to hazard one’s sense of coherence in a game of narrative disentanglement, played out within a mise-en-abyme. The layering of the Lamartine epigraph, above, illustrates this experience: it serves as a textual gesture towards mortal infinitude, extracted from its context, relocated within an essay of playful dishonesty — printed in one of three catalogues advertised as accompanying the exhibition, of which only two appear ever to have been published — that aims to ground the exhibition in a plausible fictionality. In his essay in the same catalogue, Goddio ponders parenthetically of the wrecked ship, which bore the Greek name Apistos, translated as Unbelievable: ‘Was that its original name? Or did it acquire it subsequently because of its fabulous cargo? No one knows.’ On such uncertainty, the fascination of the show pivots.

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Vector 292 Speculative Art

Vector #292Download
  • vector-292-cover
    Cover art by Fabrice Monteiro
  • Back cover: Juliana Huxtable

This special issue of Vector is all about SFF and contemporary art, guest-edited by Rhona Eve Clews. In this issue, Smin Smith explores transmedia worlding in Marine Serre’s FutureWear, while Alexander Buckley and Hannah Galbraith offer a selection some of the most exciting SFF-themed art from contemporary African artists. Declan Lloyd examines the tempestuous temporalities of the artist Neo Rauch, while Rachel Hill traces the twisting threads of Sinofuturism, cyberpunk, and AI futures in the work of artist Lawrence Lek. Frank L. Cioffi takes us on a tour through the science fictionality of conceptual art, while Alex Butterworth delves into the mysteries of Damien Hirst’s The Wreck of The Unbelievable and conducts his own speculative imaginings about the future of digital curation.

We’re also delighted to include interviews with the incredible artists Julianna Huxtable and Sensory Cartographies (Jonathan Reus and Sissel Marie Tonn). Artist and researcher Stephanie Moran discusses her art practice in ‘Eco-SciFi Art and Interspecies Technology.’

Andrew M. Butler reviews Science Fiction, edited by Dan Byrne-Smith and featuring contributions about SFF and art from Margaret Atwood, J. G. Ballard, Rosie Braidotti, Rachel Carson, Donna Haraway, Xin Wang, and many others. In Kincaid in Short, Paul Kincaid looks at Art and Science in Charles Harness’s ‘The Rose,’ and Vector Recommends brings you Fiona Moore on Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora and Eugen Bacon on The Perfect Nine.

This issue also includes information on the diversity and anti-racism motions passed at the BSFA’s 2020 AGM, and a message from the Chair Allen Stroud about current opportunities for volunteering with the BSFA. In a special editorial, guest editor Rhona Eve Clews explores this issue’s wealth of words in conversation with Stephanie Moran. It’s a bumper issue at 88 pages. To get a copy, join the BSFA.

Front cover by Fabrice Monteiro, back cover by Juliana Huxtable.