Peter Deckers
The National, (3-27 September, 2025).
There’s peculiar materials listed in Peter Deckers’ jewelry. Simulated opal. Simulated rose quartz. Odd materials. Odd signifiers. It doesn’t seem quite right. When did rose quartz need to be simulated. Fake diamonds sure. But what about fool’s gold. Even fake diamonds carry a slur association. What of simulated rose quartz? What import is getting carried across? Doesn’t quartz do something. Isn’t it used in transmission. Timing signals. The quartz can refract in specific ways. They’re used in watches for instance. Think too of those crystal shops. That’s a volatile medium. Just different vectors. Different outcomes. Blinkered. Another direction taken. What happens when you fake it? When you simulate it?
It's not really the point I suppose. Faking rose quartz. It’s simulated. Like in Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise.It’s a simulation. It’s not the real event but it’s still blurred. When you can call the fire brigade before you set off the alarm it’s called a notified event. Simulated gets at something else. There’s a making-do ethic at play. It’s simulated. We don’t need the real thing. It’s acquiescence to an age of obsolescence, to an age of excess. There’s too much of everything it’s hard to source the original. It’s like a Dan Arps’ exhibition. There’s a malfeasance of overabundance. The medium is the material. The confusion of semblance. Simulation in this sense is definitely making-do. Or actually, it’s an everyday banality. The quotidian not as sullied realism but bountiful resource. We become keen and acquisitive. Stimulated.
Take the centerpiece of the show. A painted, ragged washed, blue wall. Does it not look like that infamous photograph of earth as the blue marble. That speckled utopian incandescence. It’s reinforced by the framing of the wall. There’s l-e-d lights tucked into the frame granting a fluorescence to the spectacle. From the frame hang a sequence of necklaces, each bobbing down only to be greeted by rings embedded into little orb-like structures. It’s a setup reminiscent of a cave, stalactites, stalagmites. One goes up one goes down. Drip, drip, drip. Slowly things accrete. This isn’t a discovery of meteors and planets, of sudden arrivals and departures, of high impact, maximum velocity. No! It’s a slow accretion, a slow creep of making do. Simulated rose quartz.
There’s another telling material Deckers is using. The hard disk. He’s stripped it out of the machine. Rendered it clean. It’s just a small circular material. Perfect for hosting. Like its original intent. It’s still a carrier of information. Just different formats. Actually, it’s been formatted. Ultimately. It still carries ideations. In Deckers’ hands the hard drive makes the perfect base for a brooch, a circular wreath speckled in mnemonic stones. This tracing of memory and material is there also in the necklaces, with their kumihimo braiding. They’re patiently weaved together but this weaving also allows them to be ensnared with costume jewelry. The jewelry is bound in. It’s an overt act of storytelling, only we don’t have the code. Just the welt. Like a colonial landscape. We can see the story but we don’t know it. Deckers is keenly overlaying this form of absent story telling, reinforcing the dictums of this galaxy of encounter. For that is what we are dealing with here. Encounter.
Deckers’ exhibition is grouped into constellations. Each item is titled and numbered as a distinct zone. Zone 33 is the hard drive brooch. Zone one through ten is reserved for the necklaces. Each is buckled by its own unique hoard of costume jewelry rings. These rings are rouched together, clumped into a semblance of order. They’re bound in. There’s an odd economy of scale here. Cheap costume jewelry that looks expensive. Braiding that looks cheap but is time expensive (“more love hours than can ever be repaid”). These are the maxims though of the bricoleur. Take, manifest, transform. It takes a difference in kind to magnify any hybridizing arrangement. These necklaces are totemic devices. They trace an account of a world in the making. Like Wu Tsang and Fred Moten’s mnemonic ropes, whose twisted and gnarled forms hung down from the ceiling adding such a lucid tactile heft to their story-telling, Decker’s necklaces similarly function as a kind of road-map. They account for a zone of interest, of an investment in time and energy. Not just a healing of, but an accounting for the diffusion of life in its many narrative forms.
Stock take seems to be the name of the game. But it’s an odd stock-take. As I’ve said, it’s interested in different materials. Simulated materials. Rose quartz, simulated pearls. And yet there’s also obsidian. One of the oldest materials. The first blade. The first tool. Obsidian is a kind of constant throughout the show. Like in David Mitchel’s Cloud Atlas, how the song weaves through the time genres of the novel, each to their own, but functioning as a constant fugue. This omnipresent object, the song, the obsidian. That in, itself is a kind of mapping. What changes, what stays the same. There is also a utilitarian purpose. To take what is near. That principle of abuse. Obsidian sticks around purely because it is so useful. Like a flint. Why not repurpose a hard drive. How obsolescent even now they seem. Aren’t we solid state, cloud based. And yet obsidian is still here. The other day we learnt to light a fire with a pencil sharpener. Who knew they were made of magnesium. I don’t think everyone is. It’s not standard. Not like obsidian. Does diamond figure the same. The only time I think of a diamond I think of a record needle or those very rare times when I need to cut class. There’s a utilitarian function to these resources. It transforms them from currency to medium. Think of the way gold operates. How useful would that be. Is that why Deckers bypasses it for obsidian. Who would want gold in a post-apocalyptic world. Would you want a currency that nobody wants or a tool? Would obsidian ever be a currency.
Remember that funny scene in DeLillo’s novel about the currency of the rat. How it devolves. How it outpaces itself. How it becomes a health scare. The hoarding of rats. “The stockpiling of dead rats”. “Pregnant Russian rats”. Recall too how that billionaire also deliberately slowed down his elevator. Time becomes a new currency. And now in the news there is talk of off-line houses, people switching off their smart fridges, buying dumb-phones. There’s real purpose to this movement. Not a fashion, but an acquiescence. It’s a realisation that it’s all too much. That it’s all too far removed. Simulated rose quartz is trapped in the same cycle. It’s not a refusal its adaptation. The smartest kind. What did Darwin say. Evolve!
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