Really Real Exhibition
February 7- March 22, 2003
Forum Post from Othergroup:
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received: Mon Feb 17 21:41:46 CST 2003
From Stephen Crane in response to recent postings to other group:
Re: "Really Real," Gallery 312, Feb. 2003
I understand that some folks who attended the opening of "Really Real" complained that the show is incoherent. This strikes me as a curious-and acutely symptomatic-response in several different registers. To begin with, I'm not sure I understand the longing for coherence (let us call it the desire named "coherence") in the art world of our time. Surely, what one longs for in an exhibit of new art is not coherence so much as a new set of questions. We should be asking "what do these objects and images, arranged in this manner, ask?" "What do they ask of me?" "What do they want from me?" The desire named "coherence" is the desire satisfied by the familiar, the already known. The productive exhibit commits itself instead to a striving to provoke new knowledge.
How does the desire named "coherence" exist in the everyday? The great semiotician, C. S. Peirce, thought of habit as "the only bridge that can span the chance-medley of chaos and the cosmos of order and law." To the degree that the practice and exhibition of art interrupts habit, it can disclose something of that chaos (even as it invokes the cosmological enterprise). The forgotten aesthetician, George Santayana, explained that poetry (by which he meant art) forces us to "plunge for a moment into that torrent of sensation and imagery over which the bridge of prosaic association habitually carries us safe and dry to some conventional act. How slight that bridge commonly is, how much an affair of trestles and wires, we can hardly conceive." All of which is to say (again) that the desire named "coherence" will find its greatest satisfaction in habit, in prose, in convention. All of which is to say, moreover, that insofar as "Really Real" means to give access to "reality" it would be compromised by attaining coherence. Isn't it more likely that "coherence" (and not "incoherence") would come in the form of an accusation?
That said, I would nonetheless want to pursue the question of the "coherence" of "Really Real" but to do so through the simple Latin derivation of the word. That is: how does this exhibit "stick together." The structural coherence of the exhibit was perhaps invisible during the opening, in the midst of the very large crowd; it is nonetheless unmistakable when one wanders through the gallery alone (or almost alone, as I was able to do by arriving at the opening very early). Structural coherence is a far more ambitious kind of coherence to strive for (more ambitious say, than thematic coherence, or topical coherence, or the coherence of media or mode), but it is the kind of coherence that transforms the exhibit as such into an experience (in the strong sense-in John Dewey's sense) and into art (art being that which brings the experience of experience into our proximity). Moreover and most important, structural coherence is precisely what holds the phenomenal "real world" together, what makes reality perceptible as reality. Despite the vicissitudes of the weather, every day is in fact another day (the sun rises even if we can't see it); for all the randomness of the everyday there are still unchanging laws (e.g., physical laws). All told, then, what one unfortunately has to call the aesthetic principles of the installation (the principles by which the installation attains the status of art) are also the principles by which it seems most profoundly to make good on its title. The really real is the almost imperceptible principles of structuration within which we experience randomness.
But where in the show are those principles? Where do we begin to find this structural coherence? One might begin with the exhibit's most dramatic object, its dramatic edifice, the hollow column of hay. (You will have to forgive me for writing without titles-I never took the trouble to look at more than a few.) This hollow column, legible though it is as a kind of temple (one would hasten to say, following a thematic trajectory, that this is the temple through which we honor the god of the stars, those stars distributed across the black night of the far wall, those stars that remain in their place thanks to the potency of the god), is foremost a hollow column. Across the room, at the other end of what one experiences as one line of the exhibition's fundamental axis, hang a pair of boots, which is to say two hollow columns. (Both the boots-which one presumes to have been fictitiously "identified" as "Bill Brown's Boots"--and the column can be read as bisexual symbols, both phallic and vaginal, and one can thus experience entering the hay column as the act of entering one boot in its symbolic dimension. But such symbolic coherence, like any kind of thematic coherence, remains a secondary consideration. Evacuated boots are hollow columns, and they thus stick to the hay column while being distant from it, establishing the other point of the axis line through which nothing in the exhibition intrudes (except the people at a crowded opening.)
The other grand line that forms the fundamental grid of exhibition is not in fact a line: it is a field, constituted by the rock wall, on the one hand, and on the other, the simple yet elaborate sequence of paintings on the facing wall. (Of course the field is constituted by the many lines one could draw between particular rocks and particular brush marks.) The white rocks are stuck on a vertical black ground in clusters generated not formally, but biographically (through the heights of famous people displayed in alphabetical order), and yet achieving the form of a line, despite the unevenness. In this case the paper wall on which a physicist's rendition of the early cosmos is being projected draws the rock wall into legibility as, say, the milky way. But the sequence of brownish paintings on the brown wall pull the stars back into their mere formal coherence as dots that constitute a line, or, better, a bar. Symbolically: what one has to call the earth tones of these paintings brings one's vision of the stars back down to earth. But, formally, we are here confronted with the deviation within repetition exhibited by these carefully painted marks on square grids, just as we are confronted by the sameness in color of any two proximate paintings that nonetheless, in concert with the full line (band) of paintings, adds up to a striking change from pale green to brown. Magnified, the meticulously repeated brush strokes would exhibit the same kind of variety in size and shape as the rocks on the wall; their principle of structuration though, unlike the rock wall, is fully disclosed.
Of course, within the exhibit, there are many structural autocitations: e.g., the architecture of the hay column is repeated in the architecture of the stack of soap in the gift shop, and again in the stack of books in the far corner of the gift shop; the band of rocks reappears as the band of rubber ducks lined up along the top of the shelves in the library. Such repeated forms are obviously meant to work-and to work perhaps subliminally-to remind us how form as such asserts itself in the midst of apparent disparity.
But let me return to the great exhibitionary grid. The axis is comprised of line and field. The field, beyond the line, is full. It is full of objects and images that respond to the generative themes of the show but that importantly intrude upon-or irrupt within--the magnificent clarity of the overarching structure. I can hardy begin to attend to these intrusions, these irruptions, in any satisfactory way, except to say that, like the projected cosmos (the slide show projected on the paper screen), they each in their way threaten to collapse the structural clarity of the exhibition into a thematic reading, and it is this threat-call it now the fragile bridge between the order of structure and the disorder of theme-that energizes "Really Real" at every moment. Will you allow yourself to be assaulted and interpellated by the narrative possibilities of these robots staring at stars? Will you stare at the curiously confined fish and begin to ask whether-in the time line painting, as in the haystack, as in the vials of pituitary gland-this show isn't about the cultural transformations of nature (perhaps the most trenchant sign of danger to the environment)? Once one leaves this central field (the dominant exhibition space), a host of other possibilities assert themselves. The intensely pink envelope of a room rewrites the show as an exhibition of spaces habitable and inhabitable (spaces that now include the projection room, the hay house, the models of cave and house, the library, the universe, the far recesses of the gallery, the residue from the room with yellow wallpaper where Charlotte Perkins Gilman's protagonist endured her confinement, the shallow fish bowl, the set of costumes).
Of course, the children's costumes themselves provoke the inevitable question about the really real. Real costumes, really worn, and worn as an effort to disguise the self, an effort which nonetheless expresses the self in the form of an artistic creation. If there is any thematic coherence worthy of the structural coherence achieved by this exhibition, it is of course summoned by the title of the show and the light in which it casts all the objects and images: real rocks, real hay, real clocks, real fish, real glands-all of which lose (or do they attain) their realness within the grid of exhibition? Some of this could be called found art, and the show certainly insists on the artistic values that inhere within the everyday. Other contributions-the band of paintings that become a time line and express a temporality somewhere between that expressed by the physicist's slides and the stack of clocks, the slow and all but endless time of the universe, and the conflicting paces of daily postmodern life-derive their inspiration (and their form and color) from phenomena (the fading hydrangea flower) that, as a part of nature, might be called the realm beyond art, or beyond art-as-usual, while at once disintegrating and temporalizing the flower as object of traditional, fetishizing still-life. The curatorial achievement should be measured not least by its insistence on refusing irony, a refusal that allows it to make claim to a kind of proto-post-postmodernism. Seriality (the band of the rock wall, the band of the painted time line) has no Warhol-effect; the library (a kind of period room locatable in time [now] but not in space [the Midwest?]), functions seriously as a library; the gift shop sells stuff; the haystack is a legitimate temple, even functioning as a Heideggerian temple that strives to bring the conflict of the earth and the world into the Open. There is here nothing of Bataille's informe in its many contemporary manifestations (most importantly its political manifestations--Zhu Yu's almost unbearable "Pocket-Size Theology" of 1999, the severed arm clutching one end of a rope). There are pituitary glands, but their vialed display is meant to be artistic, if nonetheless challenging. There are no used condoms. Though the show represents some nostalgia (the library, the hay understood as the rearranged remnants of the field through which the peasant woman walked home before Van Gogh painted her shoes), it is by no means nostalgic. One might say, however, that it is utopian. Which to register only one complaint-not about what is in the show, but about what is absent: some German pitcher through which to re-imagine Bloch's experience of re-imagining the utopian in a time out of joint.
With thanks to the curatorial collective and to Gallery 312 for producing such a challenging and moving exhibit, Stephen Crane