The name from which this series takes its title comes from the place where the photographs were shot, Maggs Bros Ltd, one of the oldest and most prestigious antiquarian booksellers in London which, having been established in this city in the mid-nineteenth century, naturally owns books and manuscripts with missing pages, covers, and incomplete collections.

These documents are archived in a room designated by the institution as the Oddments Room, a place that functions as stage setting and gives its title to the group of images. The subtitles, Camping Amongst Cannibals and My Life in Four Continents, are the titles of books in the room represented in both images.*

This series was inspired by a work that Jane and Louise Wilson were doing at the time, entitled Unfolding the Aryan Papers (2009), based on the archive of film director Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), which delved into the research material for a film that would be titled The Aryan Papers, planned to be shot in 1993 but, in spite of the vast research and planning work, never even begun.

This project, that remained only in the author’s imaginary, is archived in shelves and image boxes, revisited by the artists. One can claim that it resembles a book which, in order to be understood, needs its missing pages – one that could rightfully belong to the Oddments Room.

In this series of photographs, the Wilson twins confront the spectator with an immense collection of incomplete works – in one of the images the character wanders around the shelves but does not look actively for any book. The photograph of the characters’ back invokes a certain distress, mystery, in some way an absence, or rather an almost phantasmagorical presence of a character that, not being from this time, almost seems as if recreated from one of the works in the shelves, and who is already gone in the following image.

Taken indeed from the imaginary of the film Kubrick never made, the action of which was set during the Second World War, the character became the central element recovered by Jane and Louise Wilson in Unfolding the Aryan Papers, by recreating the settings with Johanna ter Steege, the actress that Kubrick had chosen for the main role fifteen years before, but who, in the Oddments Room, is represented by Louise Wilson,** as her double. In the photograph in which the character is absent, the yardstick that can be seen in the background is of the same kind that Kubrick used to have an idea of the scale in his archival images and references for the film.

One is then left with the feeling that the Wilson twins were recreating Kubrick’s process whilst researching it, to create an archive and later on, eventually, to make a film.

Hence, a labyrinth of fictions in multiple dimensions is generated. These dimensions, wavering between project and realisation, settle on the sense of the word “odd” (peculiar, singular, strange) to legitimize the gap and the fragment as symptom of contemporaneity and as possibility of artistic creation.

 

JO
May 2012

 

* Camping Amongst Cannibals was written by Alfred Saint Johnston in 1883. The book is located in the shelf on which the character’s hand rests. My Life in Four Continents was written by Charles Chaillé-Long in 1912 (London: Hutchinson and Co.), located in the shelves of the bottom left corner in this image.

** See CARLOS, Isabel (2010). “Tempo Suspenso”, in Jane & Louise Wilson – Tempo Suspenso [cat.], Lisboa: CAM – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, p. 20.

 

Note: Oddments Room is a series of six images. Two of them belong to the CAM collection and were exhibited in Jane and Louise Wilson’s solo show at CAM in 2010.