Kaari Upson at Kunstverein Hannover

The house as metaphor for the relationship between a female inner world and a male outer one – written into art history by Louise Bourgeois’s drawing Femme Maison (1946–47) – is a leitmotif of Kaari Upson’s survey Door, Open, Shut. The first sculpture encountered is the Californian artist’s Balcony (2011), a latex cast of balcony railings from her longstanding thematic fixation, the burned-down house of a man called ‘Larry’. Larry – notice the phonetic similarity to Kaari – is a fictional character based on a deceased neighbour of her parents’ in San Bernardino, a person Upson never met. Her multipart series The Larry Project (2007–12) explores her interest in Larry’s life and sexual preferences. Employing an approach conceptually neighbouring that of Sophie Calle, Upson laces her research with fiction and filters it through various media. Here, her imagination has been captured by a dead person, reminiscent of the spectral Madeleine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). 

The next room shows the film In Search of the Perfect Double (2016–17), in which Upson, changing tack a little, traces her own biography. She’s trying to reconstruct her friend Kristine’s long-gone childhood home as meticulously as possible. Since the house was mass-produced, she searches for houses of the same type and compares them to the ‘original’ house; she does so, in this oppressive proposal, by passing through the rooms, touching the walls with her hands in a manner reminiscent of Bruce Nauman’s videos – and frequently bumping her head on the ceiling, recalling through sheer physicality a place of early childhood memories and impressions. She nevertheless fails to find the ‘perfect double’. 

The kunstverein’s main space shows the pair of 2012 sculptures Mirrored Staircase Inversion (San Bernardino). To create these, Upson dug a hole on Larry’s property in the shape of her memory of his stairs, in order to build a cast negative imprint using a mixture of dirt and latex. The work is reminiscent of Land art – its title like one of Robert Smithson’s, though its use of sculptural negative space again looks back to Nauman – and at the same time part of her preoccupation with Larry, whose original house is interesting to Upson since it was modelled, by its owner, on Hugh Hefner’s legendary Playboy mansion and thus enables her to question collective male fantasies. (The stairs were a copy of the ones leading up to Hefner’s private rooms.)

The show closes with House Worry (2019), a version of which was also shown at this year’s Venice Biennale. The video alludes to the psycho-trashy aesthetics of Paul McCarthy, a known idol of Upson’s, but charges his aesthetic with her own unique narration. Here the artist and her aforementioned friend Kristine act as each other, appearing identical and different at the same time. Their roleplay, which hints at so-called family constellation therapy, is staged in a lifesize puppet house they played with as children. One of them crawls out of the fireplace, the other one sits on the table; together they sit on a rocking chair, dressed in sexy- nurse costumes, discussing (among other things) their experiences of puberty. 

In Upson’s psychonarrations, modified appropriation and her own invention lose their ostensible contrariety, comparable to the relationship between a collective cultural memory and individual perception. The narratives in Door, Open, Shut present a bold yet sensitive mix of psychology and fiction, research and acting out: a psychotic tour de force in which the sometimes-deserted, other times lively spaces and the people performing in them are charged with an emotional strength that repels and fascinates. Here the doors of reception, as it were, are continually and excitingly being open and shut.

Translated from the German by Liam Tickner

Kaari Upson: Door, Open, Shut at Kunstverein Hannover, 7 September – 17 November

From the December 2019 issue of ArtReview