Looking Back at the Life Room. Interview with Naomi Salaman

British artist Naomi Salaman has worked in Fine Art Sculpture at the University of Brighton since 1996. In her work Salaman documents a vanishing model of art education for UCL Art Collections, one of the three public museums at University College London. Salaman has spent many years photographing European art school studios where drawing is taught, charting the remnants of a pedagogical system now suspended. Salaman’s current exhibition Looking Back at the Life Room exhibition brings together historical prints, photographs and extracts from the artist’s research archive.

Clare Heath talks to Naomi about her work:

CH: In your article, 'The Taxonomic Effect', which describes a precursor project, 'Everything is Hidden' which you worked on with Hermione Wiltshire, you describe your visit to the Museo Nazionale in Naples in June 1999 where you experience La Raccolta Pornografica  as an empty room awaiting renovation. This room, once home to erotic objects from ancient history (which had been censored from general spectatorship), seems to have initiated a new way of looking in your work. Somehow, you found meaning in the emptiness, of the space itself. Was it this experience of witnessing a space which betrayed traces of its history and function which informed your present photographic project 'Looking Back at the Life Room?'

NS: Yes absolutely. My interest in Nothing is Hidden was exactly that – we were recording museum spaces that had housed the objects secluded from the general collections of antiquities. It was exactly these architectural/institutional spaces which I wanted to make apparent, and to think about. And this did lead my into the life room project. There is an obvious parallel here. From art history we know the results of the life room, we know the painted nude and the figure, just as in pornography we know the obscene representation of the body. Nothing is Hiddenpictured the locked cabinets of museums and Looking Back at the Life Room, it is the space where life drawing takes place, the institutional space. And beyond that parallel the research for NIH started to carve out my research into the art academy, as the collections of antiquities in Europe that had a locked cabinet also had a canonical collection of marbles used by art academies for drawing, and/or for producing reproduction casts for the study of art.

CH: This interest you have with the spaces of artistic production has taken you on trips across Europe: You have visited numerous art schools, photographing the studio spaces used for drawing the figure, but this investigative research seems as much theoretical as it is empirical. You seem to have a curiosity with what is not there, as much as a desire to depict what is. Indeed, your early career started out with the question 'Why are there no Female Pornographers?' (1994), and more latterly, 'Changed Press Marks of the Private Case' (2001), contains images of British library cards that archivists have used to declassify books containing erotica deemed inappropriate for public consumption. Do you think it is possible to view your work in this way? To see 'Looking Back at the Life Room' as a continuation with your inquisition into the overlooked, unsaid or repressed?

NS: Not really, I don’t see it like that - for me its about setting the record straight! Documenting things that are about to be forgotten - not because, as in the traditional documentary mode - I think it is a terrible shame that they are disappearing, - but rather because I think their function is very revealing. I remember some years back an American book came out of photographs of lynchings, Without Sanctuary. I was so shocked by it, I could not even pick it up, and at first I just thought it was a sensational obscenity. Then I realised it was a really important publication. Not that we would forget the history of slavery, but might forget that lynching was a regular ritual event in American society until really very recently as recently as the 1950s, and participants photographed the event like a trophy.
I know my work is not any thing like as charged as that, and does not deal with such a barbarous history, but I feel that as education and access to information becomes more liberal we forget ...... In this way the travelling to art schools, as you say, is both a record keeping practice and a theoretical proposal. You cannot document contemporary forgetting.

CH: Freedom of access to information and the democratisation of knowledge are obviously important to you – so too it seems is remembering or memorialising the past. Do you see your projects as investigations into unpacking crypts of knowledge? Marrying the documentary visual ‘evidence’ (of the spaces, pressmarks, etc) with the researched ‘facts’?

NS: No. It’s more the other way around. I would say those historical narratives emerge in the process of researching the work, as usual there is a large amount of self education that takes place in the projects. As far as facts are concerned, I come from a generation of artists educated in postmodernism, in the critique of the very idea of fact, or evidence, so my compilation of documents or records is a complex/comic dimension for me. Why my work ends up looking so learned I really wonder about, as my starting point is usually my own sense of being underinformed.

CH: Now that the hang of Looking Back at the Life Room is complete – is the exhibition how you imagined it? Have you found new connections in the juxtapositions between your photographs and the research material?

NS: It has been a terrific opportunity for my project. I was able to unpack the work it in a way I cannot imagine doing anywhere else, not even in a publication format. With the help of curator at the Strang, I was able to push the photographs to work on their own as a series of pedagogical spaces, while the cases and boxes let me tinker away with all the details and the accumulation of visual material, and to organise seven accounts of, or essays on the spaces of the traditional art curriculum.

The Strang Print Room, home to UCL Art Collections, is a space for teaching, research and exhibition. Curated by Nina Pearlman. Founded in 1847 with the Denman gift of John Flaxman’s plaster models, the collections now hold more than 10,000 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures dating from the 1490s to the present day.

More information about the project and the exhibition can be found at www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/uclart.