James Putnam is the man behind a series of gutsy exhibitions at the Freud Museum in London - he brought Sarah Lucas there first in 2004 (she dressed up the psychoanalyst's chairs in underwear and united them with neon tubes for 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'), then Ellen Gallagher had a show, and most recently Tim Noble and Sue Webster were invited along with their bawdy 'Polymorphous Perverse' exhibition. Putnam sees himself as something of 'a matchmaker' - he's all for bringing odd people together in odd places and appears to have avoided the predictable route at all costs. The words cross-disciplinary don't do him justice.
Sarah Lucas, from 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', 2004
Tim Noble & Sue Webster, from 'Polymorphous Perverse', 2006
After leaving the Courtauld where he obtained an Art History degree, he began working at the British Museum. Not trained in Egyptology, he got a job there as, you guessed it, a curator in Egyptian Antiquities. He stayed for twenty years during which time he founded the museum's Contemporary Arts and Culture Programme, bringing the modern to the ancient with a staggering number of exhibitions and artists' talks. In 1994, he initiated 'Time Machine', where contemporary artists responded to the ancient art and artefacts in the Egyptian Galleries. Andy Goldsworthy made a 30-ton sand sculpture which had to be removed after two days (the BM's rules), Marc Quinn created a transparent head that sat amongst the Gods of Resurrection and contained a hibernating frozen frog.
"All art was once contemporary" could be Putnam's tag; it's what greets you on his website, at least. I'd say it's there to remind anyone who thinks museums are merely dusty old repositories that they might just be limiting their horizons. Putnam's 2001 book 'Art and Artifact - the Museum as Medium' (one of 39 Putnam-authored publications) is a far-reaching survey of the relationship between the artist and the museum, and champions the museum as a philosophically rigorous institution: he believes it should "examine and re-examine history, art and artefacts in the light of current cultural-related issues".
Putnam has just curated a Naples-London exchange between artist Wolfe Lenkiewicz (son of painter Robert) and Neapolitan artist Maddalena Ambrosio. Lenkiewicz and Putnam were at the Mimmo Scognamiglio gallery in Naples last week for the first half of the exchange - Lenkiewicz's show, 'Emblematic Psychosis'. Scognamiglio, Antony Gormley's Italian dealer, was positively beaming on Friday because Lenkiewicz's intricate, monumental red-chalk drawings on canvas - of Adam and Eve scenes on oil rigs, of the Titanic being hurled into the World Trade Centre, of passenger jets barrelling into Noah's Ark, had gone down "exceptionally well with the locals". "I wanted to bring the sacred mixed with the profane to the most Catholic part of Italy", Lenkiewicz told me, "to see how it went down". Like a spoonful of honey, it seems; the show sold out in four days.
Wolfe Lenkiewicz, 'Apocalypse'
Wolfe Lenkiewicz, 'Oil rig'
The second half of the exchange opened on 26 January in London at Lenkiewicz's East End gallery T1+2, where Maddalena Ambrosio showed her hyper-real photoworks. 'The Myth of Reality' features huge computer-altered photos of Ambrosio's alter-ego Super Maddy, flying around Naples, having a succession of extra-terrestrial adventures as she goes about trying to save the world. There are also some gorgeously tactile see-through silicone bricks stacked up in the middle of the floor, filled with film stock. The bricks - collectively called 'Anacromie' - follow the dimensions used in Neapolitan architecture and are based on a Philip K Dick short story, 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale', which was also the inspiration behind the movie Total Recall. 'Anacromie' proposes that all sensory data associated with experience could theoretically be recorded and played back to you at a later date.
Maddalena Ambrosio, 'Anacromie'
Putnam is off to Rome on 7 February, where he's curating a drawing show called 'Body and Mind', with Antony Gormley and Oliviero Rainaldi at the Temple Gallery, part of the American University of Rome. Is it more Gormley body casts, I wondered? "Oh no, Gormley is the Mind part of the show, Olivera, the Body. Antony's moving away from the body - look at his Hayward show. It's going to be anti-perspective from now on, a denial of his figurative work."
It looks like Putnam never stops thinking about the next project, the next collaboration. I asked him what's next for the Freud Museum. "Well, I was going to ask Miroslaw Balka, but do you know what, I think I'm going to ask Mat Collishaw instead. I love his work. It's perfect for the museum, so dark."
www.jamesputnam.org.uk
www.t12artspace.com
www.mimmoscognamiglio.com
Laura K Jones
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