Jennifer Bartlett’s Commissions
Jennifer Bartlett often works in series, producing a multitude of mediations on the same theme in order to throughly investigate her chosen method or motif. The result is vast bodies of work made up of individual pieces that proceed with narrative when installed together, but often settle in private or institutional collections to exist as unique parts of a historic whole. In the many commissions executed throughout her career, Bartlett spread her large, multipart works of art across specific sites to create immersive environments and durational experiences. The challenge of responding to a specific site was ideal for Bartlett, who thrives on limitations and restrictions, and often works according to a self-imposed methodological rubric.
On the occasion of Bartlett’s one-person exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, we have chosen to share three of Bartlett’s projects executed for diverse sites. These works are vast and all-encompassing, requiring the viewer to turn corners and climb stairs to recreate the whole from the parts in the mind’s eye.
In the Garden, 1980, Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia
The Institute for Scientific Information was an academic publishing service that specialized in the indexing of professional and research literature. In 1980, the Institute commissioned Bartlett to create a work on the theme of information for their new headquarters in Philadelphia, designed by Robert Venturi. At the time, Bartlett was fresh from an extended stay at a friend’s villa in the south of France, where a garden centered around an ornamental pool had become the subject of hundreds of drawings. Combining five images of the garden seen from slightly different vantage points and times of day, Bartlett designed a mural for the building’s lobby that she painted across two-hundred-and-seventy enamel plates. Bartlett responded to the information theme in a second, almost identical mural that she divided and dispersed throughout the headquarters in fifty-four fragments, each referencing the original in a manner comparable to the citations indexed by the Institute. Isolated and installed in unlikely and somewhat banal locations, the excerpts actualize the mutability asserted by the fragmentary nature of the multipart plate pieces.
The former Institute for Scientific Information headquarters is now part of Drexel University, where In the Garden remains on display.
The Garden, 1981, Saatchi Commission
The following year, Bartlett executed another garden-themed commission in the London home of Doris and Charles Saatchi. Invited to choose a room in their house in which to install a work, Bartlett selected a ground-floor dining room overlooking a garden complete with its own ornamental pool. The garden became the object and subject of the installation, which covered each of the room’s nine walls with a view of the garden depicted in a different medium. Encompassing fresco, ceramic tile, glass, mirror, and a lacquered screen, the walls are filled from floor to ceiling with strikingly unique images, each of which, if isolated, would be considered a major work. Bartlett used the commission to experiment with new materials and techniques, safe in the knowledge that the consistency of the motif and the intimacy of the space would unite the disparate parts. The Garden was both a continuation of a theme and a generative step into the unknown.
The first of Bartlett’s commissions to reproduce the very place where it was situated, the complete installation is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.
Ceiling Installation, Homan-ji Temple, Choshi-shi, Japan, 1991–1992
In 1991, Bartlett was invited to design a ceiling installation for the Homan-ji Buddhist temple in Choshi-shi, Japan. Founded in the ninth century, the temple was significantly damaged in World War II and the ceiling installation was part of a belated restoration effort by the ninth-generation temple monk. Hiroshi Kawanishi, a master printmaker who had assisted with the production and publication of Bartlett’s work, was a friend of the monk and recommended her for the commission. Before conceiving of the shape her installation would form, Bartlett travelled to Japan where Kawanishi guided her on visits to temples and the Choshi-shi fishing community. These sites influenced Bartlett’s choice to adapt her preferred organizational systems to local materials: instead of twelve-inch enamel plates she used twenty-three-inch sheets of handmade Kozo paper, onto which Kawanishi silkscreened her signature grey gridlines. The familiar structure in place, Bartlett then proceeded to paint the temple’s sequence of three-hundred-and-twenty-one paintings in seven color cycles, using Japanese mineral-based pigments. The commission continued to inspire Bartlett, who produced hundreds more individual Homan-ji works on Kozo paper, and a silkscreened edition printed by Kawanishi.
Jennifer Bartlett, Homan-Ji, Series I, 1993, silkscreen with gold, silver or platinum leaf on handmade Japanese paper, set of 3, each 19 1/4 x 19 1/4 in. (48.9 x 48.9 cm); edition of 90
Artwork captions:
In the Garden, 1980, commissioned by the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia. Collection of Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. Enamel over silkscreen on baked enamel steel plates; each: 12 x 12 in.; lobby: 270 plates, 9 x 30 plate mural, 116 x 390 in.; offices: 270 plates divided into 54 fragments of 1 to 9 plates each, dimensions variable.
The Garden, 1981, commissioned by Doris and Charles Saatchi, London. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Installation in nine parts: Plaka on paper collage mounted on canvas and Plaka on wood frame (84 ¾ x 88 ¼ in.); lacquer and enamel on six paneled wood screen (72 x 126 in., extended); charcoal on paper (73 ¼ x 81 ¼ in.); Plaka on plaster wall (96 x 171 ¾ in.); ceramic tiles on plaster wall (96 x 60 in.); baked enamel and silkscreen grid, enamel on steel plates (88 ¾ x 101 in.); oil on canvas (90 x 78 in.); enamel on glass (93 x 48 in.); oil on mirror (93 x 49 in.)
Ceiling installation, Homan-ji Temple, Choshi-shi, Japan, 1991–1992, commissioned by Homan-ji Temple. Collection of the Homan-ji Temple. Japanese mineral color on handmade Kozo paper, 316 sheets, 22 7/8" x 22 7/8" each.
Further reading:
Roberta Smith, “Flooding the Mind and Eye: Jennifer Bartlett’s Commissions,” in Jennifer Bartlett, exh. cat. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985)
Daisy Charles