I’m attracted to the enormous, important matters of life that take place on a small, everyday scale. . . . I want making art objects to be closer to giving gifts. . . . I want to make a piece that is so subtle that there’s an intimacy for the person who sees it, they will feel that I’m doing it just for them.
Barbara Bloom, interview with Kiki Smith, “Barbara Bloom,” BOMB, no. 54 (Winter 1996): 38.
Growing up in Los Angeles, conceptual artist Barbara Bloom loved when her parents drove by the “Open 24 Hours, When It’s Tomorrow, It’s Today” sign at Denny’s restaurant.1 Even as a young girl, Bloom was drawn to this casual folding of space and time, a philosophy embodied in her quiet, or unassuming, yet intricately designed installation practice that builds fictive worlds within worlds within worlds. The artist describes her often domestic-feeling interior spaces “like a movie set,”2 in which objects with assorted histories and styles evoke specific anecdotes. However, she teases out their eccentricities and poetry to build layered meaning. Bloom never tells a complete or straightforward story. Rather, her works imply potential narratives to be completed by the viewer.
Barbara Bloom, in a discussion with Simon Critchley, Robert Storr, and Jörg Heiser, “Scenes from a Marriage: Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart?,” Frieze Talks, Frieze Art Fair, London, October 16, 2009, audio, 1:28:15 hours, available at frieze.com/fair-programme/listen-scenes-marriage. ↩︎
Margot Mifflin, “Barbara Bloom,” ARTnews 92 (February 1993): 103. ↩︎
Esprit de l’escalier, which literally translates to “spirit of the stairs,” describes the moment when you realize what you should have said too late—you’ve left and are halfway down the stairs. Borrowing this expression for the title, Barbara Bloom’s 1988 installation captures a sense of the unknown. The end is visible from the entrance of its four successive rooms, but their enigmatic contents, framed and reframed as one moves through the spaces, suggest the limits of visibility.1 Framed Braille texts and words too small to read hang on the walls; a saucer-shaped dish holds a hologram of a pearl; a table setting with six porcelain plates is decorated with images of a Victorian séance; barely visible watermarks on sheets of backlit paper depict UFO sightings; and an eerie circle of white hats levitate in a blue room. Examining the relationship between perception, sensation, and physical experience, Bloom’s work questions the idea that seeing is believing.2 Her installation is a kind of innuendo, one in which the framework is clear but the content is obscure, inviting us to fill in the blanks—perhaps on the way down the stairs.
Barbara Bloom is drawn to fragile materials like glass and porcelain. Their breakability implies absence.1 They are temporal and melancholic, reminding us of our own mortality. After the artist fell out of a third-story window in 1995 and broke many bones in her body, including her vertebrae, she became interested in the Japanese tradition of repairing broken ceramics with gold lacquer. Known as kintsugi, this technique highlights an object’s history and flaws rather than concealing its scars.2 Anchored in this practice, Bloom developed a deeply personal series called “Broken” (2001) of purposefully broken and repaired ceramics and photographic works, including X-ray images of the repaired pots, paper gift boxes printed with X-ray images of the artist’s reconstructed vertebrae, and a found photograph of an acrobat balancing a stack of teapots—the precarious image framed under a sheet of shattered glass.
Barbara Bloom finds inspiration for her conceptual practice in ordinary things. She is a collector of household objects, attuned to the often hidden or unseen meanings embedded within visual culture. Her installation The Bedroom (2017), for example, began at a flea market in Paris, where she discovered a set of handpainted watercolors of domestic interiors from the 1960s with colorings and décor so opulent that they struck her as ridiculous. Upon removing the frame and mat of one, she was intrigued to discover that the margin of the paper was dense with exploratory brushwork. The juxtaposition of the expressive gesture and tight, even fussy, decorative interior can be seen in the carpet Bloom custom designed for The Bedroom. Bloom likes the double entendre inherent to objects with both utilitarian and decorative values, like carpet, which slip between the usable and ornamental, the everyday and high art.
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