Helmut Lueckenhausen

Adoration

Adoration – Sideboard Tableaux
In the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria

The cabinet presents as a ‘cluster’ or tableau of forms – a ‘mid-century’ type teak cabinet with a white cube half inset, half protruding, on the left.

Abutting that further to the left is a cluster of three teraphim-type, zoomorphic cabinet forms presented in a continuum. Two facing forwards and the end cabinet facing in at 45 degrees. Two (internally connected) Teraphim have doors and one has drawers.

That is, a tableau of interrelated shapes representing a continuum of three categories:

1. a primary, white, cube
2. a secondary ‘moderne’ focus,
3. a tertiary cluster of three zoomorphic craft/design-based cabinets in adoration.

On one level the work references the privileging of primary minimalism through the tongue-in-cheek key components of an Adoration of the Magi metaphor.

Adoration is intended to work in at least four categories and at two levels of salience:

So, our categories at the first of the two levels of salience are:

1. furniture/functional object/applied design (furniture, woodwork, craft, materiality, minimisation, reductivism), primary forms, essence, modernism, modernity);
2. sculpture/artistic object (theatre, tableau, stillness/animation, story);

At the second level of salience:

1. myth, metaphor – a kind of historical conceptualism;
2. synthesis - operating on the level of iconographic personal style (high ceremony: adoration/veneration) and low ceremony: including personal and domestic memory).