In Series: China Cupboard
The artist said his China Cupboard series is representative of his practice because of its emphasis on "inventory." Huey's Library, Study, and Music Room, all 2005, were based on inventory albums from the early 1910s and 1930s. "Even when I am reusing images or handling objects that are not so specifically connected to the idea of inventory, my practice in general revolves around the (related) issues of loss, legacy, and what remains." Huey's Address Book, with its crossed-out names, similarly featured comings and goings. "Porcelain is especially pertinent, because, like us, it is at once resilient and fragile, so eminently damageable," the artist said of the present series.
– Michael Huey, 2011
Images courtesy of Newman Popiashvili Gallery and the artist.
Artist's Pick
Huey chose two disparate examples of other artists' works to complement his own: a late-19th century colorized stereo photograph a dead fish ("For the way it documents an unspectacular personal event, the day’s catch, a seemingly ‘banal’ still life that is nevertheless oddly compelling") and a photo of a boy from around 1910 ("for the damage"). The artist often goes to early photography for inspiration – "and I am often drawn to things that are, on some level, damaged."
– Michael Huey, 2011
In the artist's words: On color reversal
"In real life, China cupboards are jumbled masses of color and familiar shapes – so deeply familiar that they can offer little to hold the viewer’s attention. In a way, [color reversal] calms the images down, it's what makes them ‘still,'" the artist said, likening the final images to "meditative spaces that can be entered and lingered in."
– Michael Huey, 2011
Related Work: Family photographs
Huey was born in 1964 in Traverse City, Michigan and studied German at Amherst College before moving to Austria in 1989, where he’s lived ever since. Heritage plays a substantial role in the artist's practice: "researching his lineage, Huey discovered that his German-speaking roots go back to Switzerland, Germany and Austria-Hungary. After amassing a cache of 1,500 photographs as well as associated interviews and archival materials, Huey self-published a book of his genealogical findings, The Place of Beginning: On the Huey, Mautz, Lebzelter, McGowan Families and Their Kin (Vienna, 2001)."
Meanwhile his Betsy and I Killed the Bear series was "derived exclusively from Huey-family photographs – 35mm Kodachrome and Ektachrome transparencies – taken in the American Midwest in the 1940s and ’50s by
his grandfather and great-grandfather."
Looking at these two bodies of work, Huey said, "I was unprepared for what my reaction to the material would be. In many cases the most unexpected things were commonplace items I didn’t know how to categorize (or whether to save). I definitely have an archivist’s nature and it bothered me when things would appear that I
couldn’t file away for the simple reason that they didn’t fit into my categories. Interestingly, precisely those things that I couldn’t make ‘go away’ are very often the ones I use for my work."
– Michael Huey, 2011
Ossian Ward. "Michael Huey." Art In America. December 31, 2009.
Image courtesy of Newman Popiashvili Gallery and the artist.
In a broader sense
“All her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened, and things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her little wishes and ways will all be as nothing.”
- Thomas Hardy, (1848 - 1928)
Canon: Roland Barthes
In his Camera Lucida, Barthes often refers to the punctum, the effect of "piercing" a subjective viewer in a way that transcends the content of imagery.
"By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred.
Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. This punctum, more or less blurred beneath the abundance and the disparity of contemporary photographs, is vividly legible in historical photographs: there is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die."
Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida. 1980.
Canon: William Henry Fox Talbot
Other works from Glass Cupboard demonstrate the artist's interest in the history of photography. Art historian Jennie Hirsh likens No. 2 to the eerie images of William Henry Fox Talbot, the pioneer of photographic technology who similarly organized photographs labeled "Articles of China" and “Articles of Glass” in his book The Pencil of Nature, 1884-86. "Talbot believed that photographic images could provide as much information as written inventories, perhaps surpassing them in their capacity to do so at once," Hirsh said.
Jennie Hirsh. "Cabinets of Curiosity: Domestic Archives in Recent Work by Michael Huey." China Cupboard/Houseguests. Vienna: Schlebrugge, 2009. 16-19.
