ruins of yesterday/tomorrow

Leonardo Drew at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Sept 6 - Oct. 12, 2012

Here is a man who loves making things. So much so that he created an entire world out of them. And this must be what people mean when they say art has the potential to envision an alternate reality: Leonardo Drew, at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., has paved a window into a strange civilization that bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.

I use the word civilization because his massive constructions (both standing or wall-mounted) manifest undeniable traces of human industry and skill. A quick glance might suggest an impression of an arbitrary assemblage of found material (especially the charred and painted barricade), but a second look definitively rejects this initial impression to one’s embarrassment: his work is the result of such careful and painstaking labor that it appears almost neurotically obsessive. One can imagine Drew’s eyes burning up in pain as he sits in his studio for weeks, months, years, diligently cutting plywood into hundreds of perfectly two-by-two squares or one-inch-long splinters, then placing each piece, anointed with a dash of glue, into their own spot part of one giant, densely packed sculpture. I think of Yayoi Kusama hypnotically carving out circles on her canvases for days, or your grandma sewing away at another one of her quilts.

The installations also exude a kind of ghostly grandeur of ancient ruins. The striking element is the work’s pastness: this extinct community no longer exists, but there is no doubt that they did. One can perceive their mark not only through the pure scale of the remnants (the space of the gallery barely provides adequate room to contemplate the entirety of a given work from a distance), but also through the confident assertion of their power: imposing barricades tower over the viewer, phallic forms raise their manes and roar at the passerby, the intricacy of the work indicate discipline and pride of the maker’s own craft. The viewer navigates the space of the gallery with the fascination of exploring The Natural History Museum and their display of artifacts, perhaps from our own lineage. The wall sculptures’ intrusions into our space excite us like an encounter with the (fake) giant whale or a shark’s head: their presence is awe-inspiring but we constantly affirm that the immobile structures pose no actual threat. We can still regard them from the safety of our own positions.

But it is our imagination that causes the most tension: who were these people and what happened to them? They had a magnificent respect for the natural world—barely altered tree trunks and roots twist and turn out of their fixed spots, the man-made splinter pieces assume pulsating organic forms—yet it was a time after plywood’s invention and the sure signs of industry, such as the bolted pieces constructed from exact measurements (Number 159, 2012 is starkly aluminum). Some wall pieces, made mostly of flat rectangular or square cuts of plywood, read like blueprints of a city to be built or reconstructions of existed sites. In Number 162, 2012, for example, pieces of thick, hand-made paper provide a base for a gridded city bordered by a monstrous black forest; outside of the human habitation lie suggestions of water (smeared blue paint) and hills, along with neat groupings of rusted cotton and solidified mud. The city grid is a tactic employed to maximize space for a large population; yet these people leave untouched the gnarling forest—clawing its way into the viewer’s space—that seems capable of swallowing up the city itself.

Drew’s work is full of such strange juxtapositions: the dichotomies of our contemporary world—nature vs. industry—exist side by side, a condition that is increasingly difficult for us to imagine. In purely formal elements, too: from a distance, his large splinter pieces give the illusion of being plush and even inviting (starfish/flower-like Number 160, 2012), but an examination of the actual materials proves otherwise, not to mention the violently perpendicular eruptions of longer pieces from the wall. We live in an age of the modern globalized city, where nature is clearly marked off (parks, gardens, potted plants) from central human activity. Dichotomies exist almost like a necessity.

But there is another layer of strangeness. This civilization seems to have been built using remnants of a people that have existed prior to it; the materials could have been the discarded or destroyed materials of another begone age. For example, a substantial portion of Number 161, 2012 utilizes visibly broken wood that have not been cut into perfect measurements like many of his other works. Yet this site, too, is what remains as an evidence of its own past, abandoned in middle of construction. At the end of its trajectory into the inner gallery space, the structure seeks the support of a wall while the large beams that might have provided that role lean against another. The result is a double removal of time: we see both a corpse and the ghost that haunted it. But that ghost—could it have been from somewhere in our time? The attempt to assign Drew’s people to a specific point in our known history consistently fails us; ultimately, we only end up in exhaustion after fruitlessly spinning around and around, chasing our own tails.

But there is a way to accept this world: by rejecting a linear history. Drew allows us to escape the rigid structure of cause and effect—where we know all that’s been said and done—into a floating concept of time, where anything could be said and done, and perhaps has been already.

ontology

Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield

at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY

on permanent display

Home is not a physical fact but a feeling. It can have strong ties to an actual location—where one retreats after a day of work or one’s childhood hometown, for example—but not necessarily. Because home has to do with feeling welcome, protected, comfortable. It is a point of origin where we feel we belong; it is a reference point for all that lies outside of it. That’s why we always “return” home: it is where we all started.

Some leave home and never go back. But denial does not erase an existence, not even in one’s consciousness. That is why an unexpected brush with home is more powerful—even violent—than a premeditated meeting: home unarms us.

Speaking of Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield, 2009 as manifestation of an “Asian aesthetic” may sound reductive, essentialist, and exclusive, none of which I endorse. However, I find it important to do so as a starting point because I could not (still cannot) fend off images of the Korean countryside upon my first encounter with Lin’s work.

I spent most of my childhood in Seoul, Korea, a small country inconspicuously wedged between the massive mainland China and the floating islands of Japan. It is a modest-sized country with oversized ambitions: its people suffer from an overflow of American capitalist consumerism, trying to compensate for thousands of years built upon Confucius values of balance, respect, and acceptance of what is given them. Living immersed in that culture, it’s easy to believe the in the unity of those ambitions and their realizations. But when I beheld an American mountain for the first time in my life, I realized how small Korean mountains were. Indeed the sublime is everywhere to be found in the United States; the Korean landscape in my memory shrinks into humility in comparison.

As a child, I had few occasions to travel outside the city, so the home in Lin’s piece is not so much my identification with the greens (my childhood is full of concrete grays), but with a disposition. Korean aesthetic in particular must be an inevitable result of a history of oppression (colonization) and limited resources. The way in which Confucianism was able to take hold of the culture was because, in a sense, reality would otherwise be unbearable. Just as Nietzsche speaks of concepts of morality (piety, mercy, forgiveness) as names given to societal gestures that had wholly different origins, Confucius’ teachings of respect (for elders, for nature) became a Korean way of life, not for its own sake, but as a way to tame the infinitely expanding ambitions of any human being that might otherwise roam freely (as in the United States or China). Hence Korean landscape architects build around what already exists at a site (a tree, a boulder) and rarely remove anything entirely. Their artificial modifications call for a minimalist approach; they even seem to have the same respect for the sky, as even palaces are more horizontal than vertical. Like living in a rented house, one may alter the space as long as one retains respect for the overall structure: the artist is nature’s tenant.

Of course, art manifesting a respect for nature is not particular to Korean culture alone. Lin has cited as an influence the Native American burial mounds she grew up seeing in Ohio. Like Korean burial mounds, they too are swellings of the earth, both protective and monumental. Human hands sculpt them to mark a past existence but the earth appears to have done the swelling to welcome the body back to its birthplace. Our place during the dormant state before birth and after death is in the womb.

Lin’s Wavefield, however, are not tombs, but fluctuating waves; if they house the dead, the dead are free to wander under each wave. The swellings are a universality rather than particularities; human identities give way to a natural ontology that no longer distinguishes between human, animal, or landscape but unites them as a single being called spirit, both living and dead.

The site exudes a generosity and warmth of an old sage who also happens to be your own grandfather. I approach the Wavefield with respect but without fear. It does not judge me but I am careful with how I take my first step; I get the sense that the place has seen it all and I want to do it the right way. There perpetually lingers in me an awareness that it knows what I do not know. It is wise—like the old master himself, not like Confucianism as coping mechanism—it rises up as if to match the American sublime darkly looming in the distance but is indifferent to it. It is gentle, yet confident: it does not shrink back with embarrassment like the Korean mountains in my memory. It beckons me to meet it while I hesitate in caution: I don’t want to disturb you..., I say, but it keeps telling me with a smile, no, no you are not disturbing me, come and sit.

The Wavefield invites us to communicate with it but the mode is not entirely human (verbal language) or even animal (body language): performatives are not compatible. But this method of exchange does resemble the moment when two animals meet for the first time: they sniff each other out. And the sniffing is not just a physical act; it’s a feeling out before making a judgment about the other (hostile or friendly?). A feeling out for vibes: in this state, one must suspend all judgments or presumptions in order to conduct a proper assessment. An encounter with the Wavefield is not a one-sided affair (bestower/receiver) but a mutual investigation, which is only possible when we return to a point of origin. But the work is all the more generous because it unconditionally welcomes us. It takes the first step to bring us home, somewhere before birth and after death, where we have all been. We begin, then, by feeling the waves breathe and accepting its invitation.

the it in the photo

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective
Guggenheim Museum
June 29 - October 8, 2012

My first encounter with this artist’s work: I fell in love, it moved me to tears.

Here I must inform the reader of how unusual this reaction is, that I am one of the most negative, scathing, hateful of skeptics (never really with bad intentions), especially regarding photographic portraiture. I have seen too many pity-evoking photojournalistic propaganda—“Oh, look at this poor girl bloodied and crying over her dead mother’s corpse, isn’t this a horrible war, what terrible things are happening on the other side of the world”—that so many people equate with artistic insight and thereby talent. But Dijkstra does something different: she strips her photographs down to their barest; she rejects the popular props for superficial empathy (or just props in general to add layers of “symbolism”) and focuses on her job as a portrait photographer. It is she and her subject, not much else—and the result that we get to see is simply beautiful. It is beyond words because what makes them beautiful is that indescribable thing that we can’t attribute to a single visual element in the photograph.

I know what I feel as a result of seeing that thing—love, pain, awe...—though not a single one of these adjectives can fully describe the powerful emotion that sweeps through my entire body upon recognizing it. Maybe that thing—You know, it! It!—can never really have a name, but only be conveyed by an abstract game of charades with no right-answer card. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, tries to put a name to something like this in a single “true,” “just” photo of his mother: the photo possesses her “air,” as he calls it. That’s not quite it with Dijkstra’s work; I don’t personally know the people she has photographed, let alone for an entire lifetime. But it is kind of similar; it’s a combination of what is inside the viewer (history? recognition? memory?) and what is inside the photograph—when you can’t separate the two to describe the it. It’s a miracle of two gears—each found in unexpected places, maybe at the opposite ends of the world—clicking together to make an entire machine come to life.

It, that thing, is there in the photograph. The thing that moved me to tears. And can it be—really?—just the artist’s love for her subjects that I felt through the portraits? Because I don’t know these people, I can’t judge how true or just these portraits are to them, how well Dijkstra captured their air. All I can feel is the artist’s will, her aching desire to do so, to capture something of these people’s essence in a single frame.

We catch a bit of that heart-wrenching investment fueling her artistic process in the five-channel film installation, The Krazyhouse, 2009. Each person dances in front of a white background for the entirety of a song (house/dance music, which tends to be a bit longer than other genres) and their movements—no matter how much they try to vary it for the camera in the beginning—become fairly repetitive. It’s easy to get bored. But eventually, after much patient voyeurism, the particular mannerisms of each person peek through. I say “peek,” because they’re all through very small gestures—Nicky reaching down slightly to pull down her dress without breaking her rhythm, or Philip softening the hardness of his eyes for a split second when he wipes the sweat from his brow—that we probably wouldn’t recognize as their particularities when we watch them for short amount of time in a club, or if Dijkstra had edited out any awkward moments. But once you catch them, you know this is theirs. It is the aha! moment for the artist, and through the installation, we, for ourselves, are privileged to witness that moment of recognition, when the artist sees who her subjects might be in their essence.

And beyond the artist’s devotion, it is probably her generosity to us, the viewers, that moved me. I cannot separate the raw insides of the person behind the camera from the resulting photograph in front—Dijkstra is necessarily present and exposed in her work. It is the combination of her love, respect for her subjects and in turn their trust for her (it’s easy to feel like a mere test tube bacteria for an artistic experiment, as opposed to an actual human being with thoughts and feelings), their willingness to let their guard down even for the smallest fraction of a second so she could capture it on camera. They, too, seem to feel her love and see that she may have this ability, at least an immense and genuine desire to recognize their essence. This is because Dijkstra doesn’t hide behind her camera; she uses it as a magical device that somehow captures that mutual trust and respect.

And I am the third component of her art: I am a witness as well as a grateful participant. I am the more grateful because the artist doesn’t try to take advantage of me either. I am moved not because of her manipulation of me and her subjects but because of her good grace. Dijkstra is an honest photographer, a truly rare specimen in the art world today.

haters will hate

 

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Nets

Whitney Museum
July 12 - September 30, 2012

To reduce Kusama’s work as a symptom of her mental illness is another extension of the long familiar, bitter response to modern art, “my two year old can do that.” The dismissive commentary essentially contests the very notion of authorship of a particular form that does not appear to result from extensive “artistic” training. The urge is a powerful one, especially when the motif is so common and the artist herself has admitted that she has had hallucinations of dots and flowers ever since she was a child. Other people have testified that they, too, see dots. But the difference: while one hallucinating 15-year-old is screaming for her mother in terror because the “dots are going to get her,” Kusama uses her dots to communicate more than her own fears and obsessions.

The dismissal ultimately has in part to do with the source of her dots; but to focus only on the source is to deny the significance of any kind of art, which is how the artist uses her sources. Kusama’s use of her dots indicate the artist’s awareness of how they have functioned for her and their potential for others: as an “obliterating net.” The complexity in the these dots arises from their role as a screen that simultaneously protects and provides a view of the other side. Even if hallucinating infinite dots is a defense to all that is fearsome in the world outside the sick patient, manipulating the visual phenomenon so that it is no longer clear what is being protected from what (inside/outside ambiguity: Kusama’s nets sometimes seem to catch the world, not withhold her from it) while simultaneously giving a view of this world (a cat is still recognizable as a cat even if Kusama has covered it with dots) is clearly an artistic gesture that reaches beyond the psychological erasure of trauma. Kusama does not erase; she marks in order to see and confront. And this she generously shares with the rest of the world.

Her dangerously decorative paintings from 2009 to 2010 and recent collaboration with Louis Vuitton that brands her dots make our job more difficult. But the critic must always be generous and see, first and foremost, what is in front, then weigh the relevance of information that lies outside of the object.