: : : below is a sampling of text from published articles written by Julie Nelson : : :
: : : for a complete listing of all publications, see resume : : :
this review of "Searchlight: Consciousness at the Millenium" at California College of Arts and Crafts (on view Sep 25 - Dec 11, 1999) appeared in Art Papers, Jan/Feb 2000, p. 56
According to media coverage of the turn of the millennium, it would seem that Y2K readiness has been the only major issue. The need for a less technocentric angle on the big event has not been lost on Lawrence Rinder, Director of the California College of Arts and Crafts Institute in San Francisco. He assembled an exhibition of 30 international artists entitled “Searchlight: Consciousness at the Millennium”. Rinder chose over 50 works from the past four decades in video, installation, film, sculpture, and painting, for their “extraordinary capacity to make us more aware of the shape and sensations of our own consciousness.”
Today, because so many artists focus on issues of identity, the word “consciousness”
is automatically paired with other adjectives – feminist consciousness,
gay consciousness, etc. For the most part, however, Rinder has chosen to leave
off the adjectival determinants of consciousness and examine it from a phemomenological
point of view rather than a socially-constructed one. He has selected artists
who explore our most fundamental and common experience, “the sensation
of being alive.”
A mini-survey, the show reached back to the 1960s when transcendental abstract
painting probed states of spiritual consciousness. Works by Agnes Martin and
Ad Reinhardt shared walls with Conceptual text pieces by Robert Barry and
Yoko Ono from the ‘60s. Barry’s All the Things I Know But
of Which I Am Not at the Moment Thinking – 1:36 pm; June 15, 1969 represents
the revolutionary dematerialization that shifted art into the realm of language
and pure cognition, freeing it from a reliance on the visual and coming closer
to dealing with the bare mechanisms of knowledge, thought, and awareness.
Rinder skips the ‘70s to focus on video and installation of the ‘80s
and ‘90s. Stan Douglas’s installation, Overture, 1986,
combines 19th-century film footage of a train journey though the Candadian
Rockies with voice-over excerpts from the first few pages of Proust’s
The Remembrance of Things Past. The text, at times rearranged and
spliced by Douglas, recounts the narrator’s experience of falling asleep
at night and suddenly jolting awake in the dark, unable to remember who or
where he is. The train passes often into dark tunnels and these visual blackouts
coincide with pauses in the narrator’s reading – moments of lost
consciousness. Douglas exposes the membrane between sleeping and waking consciousness,
explores the moments of transition between them, and questions the nature
of the abyss into which we “fall” asleep.
Another liminal zone – between life and death – concerns Douglas
Gordon in 30 Seconds Text, 1996. In a small room, printed on the
wall was a text that recounts a doctor’s experience with the severed
head of a freshly-guillotined criminal. The doctor believes he detects a glimmer
of continuing consciousness in the victim’s eyes for 30 seconds after
the decapitation. In a clever parallel, Gordon ends the text by telling us
that the time it takes to read the text is, on average, 30 seconds. After
the allotted time, the light goes out and we are left in darkness to muse
on the mechanics of the soul’s departure from the body.
Melancholia crops up fairly often in the show, but nowhere as elegantly as
in Kristin Oppenheim’s installation, Hey Joe, 1996. In a small
dark room, two blue spotlight beams pan across the floor, while a woman’s
mesmerizing voice sings lilting variations on the title of the piece. Joe’s
name is intoned over and over, in a mournful chant, suggesting the irreplaceable
loss of a deeply-felt personal relationship. The Voice of the American
Gray Fox, 1984, from The Museum of Jurassic Technology, sounded an equally
troubled, but more agitated note. The tiny image of a man barking and whining,
imitating the voice of the gray fox, was projected onto a stuffed fox head.
His plaintive voice both mimicked the slain animal and suggested that human
speech is just a disguised existential yelp, every bit as animal as the gray
fox’s.
A cure for melancholia was offered by Inigo Manglano-Ovalle’s installation
SAD Light, 1999. Two white vinyl chaise longues were placed under
a bank of full-spectrum lights used to combat seasonal affective disorder
(SAD). Viewers could lie down and listen to an audio track of soothing white
noise. On the surface, SAD Light mimics a seaside experience – basking
in pseudo-sunlight listening to pseudo-surf noise. But these waves are actually
data collected in the search for extraterrestrial life, radio waves converted
to an audible frequency. Reminded of the likelihood of forms of consciousness
other than our own, we might find solace in a bigger perspective on the universe.
Perhaps this is one of the frontiers at which Rinder hints when he proposes
in conclusion “that we seize upon our millennial imagination as a tool
to develop heightened mindfulness for the future.”
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
this review of "The Measure of All Things" at the Great Hall, San Francisco (on view Feb 18 - Aug 22, 1999) appeared in Art Papers Sept/Oct 1999, p. 62
Independent exhibitions organized by artists are prone to be overly inclusive of marginal work, or presented in a venue that does little to show off the work. “The Measure of All Things” suffered from neither pitfall and went miles further to offer a holistic experience impossible in the pristine confines of a conventional gallery space. Twenty-three artists collaborated to produce an installation of plumb bobs suspended from the 70-foot ceiling of The Great Hall, which is currently used as a theater space, but was built in the 1920s as a Methodist Neo-Gothic church. Its interior is pockmarked from a temporary drop ceiling installed when, at one point, it housed government offices. The scars lend a poignant pathos to the atmosphere reminiscent of European cathedrals damaged during WWII bombing.
Inspired by the form of the plumb bob, an ancient building instrument, curator
Lalo Cervantes invited artists to explore the concept of measurement in conjunction
with the famous dictum, “Man is the measure of all things.” The
resulting human-scale works are based loosely on the form of “a conical
piece of metal attached to a line,” and offer “a poetic measure
of a thing or concern.” Each piece stakes out its own issues, using
various media and stylistic vocabulary, but the site by nature unifies them
by emphasizing their metaphysical, rather than just physical, concerns.
Haunting music and ambient sounds sampled from the site echoed gently through
the enormous, murky space. Alison Kibbey’s g’s pull drew
immediate attention. A thin vertical white line of light drawn in the air
with fiber optic cord, terminating just above the floor in a fist-sized piece
of blown glass, it accentuated the height of the space, strikingly connecting
heaven and earth. An untitled piece by Ilasahai Prouty uses similarly minimal
means to create a virtual 70-foot space beneath the floor. Inches below the
point of an hollow cone cast from resin, a small circular mirror is set into
the floor, effectively puncturing a hole in the floor and opening a window
into a parallel universe below. Kirsten Cole’s Spine is also
stylistically bare-bones, challenging the pull of gravity by constructing
a nearly weightless skeletal plumb bob of wire and hair. Almost invisible,
it hovers and glints in the low light, quietly suggesting that its thin skeletal
structure supports the air around it.
Eternal Redolence, by Ruth Marblestone, is a sumptuous, red velvet
bob with drooping tentacles that emit the sound of falling water, a heartbeat,
and a voice. Seductive because it walks a line between animate and inanimate,
its blood red fabric connotes both the robes of cardinals and the cheap dress
of a call girl. Kara Spellman’s untitled piece is an impenetrable vessel,
a conical, hollow pewter capsule with lenses inset into its surface, allowing
an oblique peek at the lamb heart suspended inside. The vessel, like a suit
of armor or a bomb shelter, simultaneously protects and traps its occupant
inside.
Lalo Cervantes’s Each Day Dies With Sleep is a musty mattress
bound with thick hemp rope. Like T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who
measured out his days with coffee spoons, Cervantes measures our days with
the return to lie in a bed tailored to the human body. This bed is a container
of human lives, a sacrificial altar on which the death of a day is ritualized.
Moreover, the mattress also “dies,” strung up with a noose-like
rope, intimating by proxy the death of its human occupants.
Given the building’s history, the premise of man as the measure of all
things is particularly provocative. As a house of worship, the site originally
suggested man is not the measure of all things. Deconsecration of the church
in the name of bureaucracy, mid-century, reflects a secularizing tendency
that collapses the transcendental realm into the mundane. Physical restructuring
followed suit: the cathedral ceiling was covered by a drop ceiling, bringing
its height down to the level of the human. However, when the space was acquired
by George Coates Performance Works, a theater company, the drop ceiling was
removed and the space reverted to being able to “acknowledge a sacred
verticality,” as Cervantes puts it. It can be argued that now, as a
site for theatrical productions, it walks the line between the sacred and
the secular as a setting for dramatic interpretation of human mythology. Not
worship of the divine, perhaps, but a respect for the mysteries inherent in
being human.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
this review of "Neural Notations" at the San Francisco Arts Commission (on view Jan 12 - Mar 4, 2000) appeared in new art examiner, Jun 2000, p. 43
Ever since Descartes split the world into mind versus matter, we have been trying to mend the seemingly irreconcilable separation between the two. “Neural Notations” bridged this gap by presenting the work of nine artists whose works probe the link between consciousness and chemistry during times of illness, pain, trauma and dysfunction.
Gail Wight conflated the pain experiences of two species -- snail and human
-- in her 1999 mixed media piece, The First Evolutionary Occurrence of
Pain. She explored how the neural machinery of pain translates into the
subjective experience of pain. She introduced a twist, however, by reversing
the sizes of her two specimens -- presenting eight-foot diagrams of a snail's
nervous system alongside snail-sized dioramas of human tragedy. Copper wiring
connected the snail's nervous system with the tiny human drama next to it
(e.g., a bloody car accident) underscoring their shared capacity to experience
pain. By switching the sizes of snail and human, Wight exposed our bias toward
exaggerating the significance our own species' pain. She elevates the "primitive"
nervous system of a snail to a size on par with our own, while simultaneously
demoting human pain to the stature of a snail's.
Jennifer Gwirtz transformed the graphic record of her own epileptic seizure
into a haunting musical composition in Electroencephalograph/Mental Notes
(a piece of my mind), 1999. She enlarged seven channels of brain waves
recorded by an EEG and mounted this graph on the wall. She also translated
three of these graphed lines into a musical score performed by two voices
and a soprano recorder. The most angst-ridden musical line was sung by the
artist herself, alternately spiking and dropping in a chaotic pattern of dynamic
lyricism akin to monophonic medieval chant. By transforming the objective
record of electrical activity into the more expressive medium of musical sound,
Gwirtz gives us a visceral, temporal and unexpectedly poeticized understanding
of what it's like to endure an epileptic seizure.
Curator Donna Leigh Schumacher included in the show a set of her own crudely-
fashioned fabric dolls whose internal organs are visible on the surface of
their velveteen bodies. Stuck into the various organs were long pins. Pills
of various shapes and sizes were glued onto the pinheads, such as Amitriptyline
(an antipsychotic) and Eskalith-CR (for manic-depression). By putting Brain
Doll 1, 1999, on six medications simultaneously, Schumacher questions
the prevalence of interventions used to “normalize” brain and
body chemistry. Led by the perspective of the pharmaceutical industry, we
are learning to see ourselves as machines that can be chemically tweaked in
search of designer moods and optimal performance. Whatever happened to "mind
over matter?"
"Neural Notations" provided a focused framework that launched complex
questions about the mind/brain connection. The exhibition blended the perspectives
of art and science in such a way that their boundaries blurred. To its credit,
the resulting hybrid discipline (scientific artistry or artistic science?)
retained the best intentions at the root of both art and science: to pursue
a deeper and more resonant understanding of the complexities of the world.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
this review of Samuel Yates' exhibition "e4" at Refusalon in San Francisco (on view May 7 - July 10, 1999) appeared in new art examiner, Oct 1999, pp. 49-50
Samuel Yates goes to great lengths to transform unlikely materials into art—not
only lengths, but heights and depths as well. The title of his solo debut,
“e4”, refers to the most difficult opening move a chess player
can make. In the game of conceptually-based art, the pieces he advanced in
this show guarantee his status as a formidable opponent.
Minuet in MG is a three-story stack of black filing cabinets with
an entire 1974 MG Midget sports car, steamrolled and shredded into 1,622 pieces,
filed inside. The pieces are filed by weight, punnily reducing an MG to mgs,
conflating word and form. The piece mocks our Aristotelian urge to order the
world by transforming this car into nonfunctional scraps of metal classified
in a useless way. Our normal conception of a car as the sum of its functional
parts (tailpipe, fender, etc.) is subverted; instead, the car is reduced to
more or less equivalent hunks of metal. Difference has given way to similarity
as the parts revert back into the elemental raw material out of which they
arose, completing the life cycle of the car.
While Minuet deconstructs, RowB, Plot 33 reconstructs. Yates
bought a cemetery plot in Mount Shasta, California, excavated its six tons
of dirt and replaced the sacred ground with fill dirt. He hauled the plot
to San Francisco and piled it on the gallery floor next to a concrete coffin
liner. Over a number of weeks, Yates molded the dirt into 144 cubes (one cubic
foot each) and stacked them in rows on top of the coffin liner. A small photograph
of the empty grave site hung nearby. Together, photo and sculpture enact a
complementary dynamic of presence and absence, making the void solid, transforming
the abyss of death into a concrete object. This piece is a sobering foretaste
of being six feet (or, more precisely, 144 cubic feet) under and a six-ton
manifestation of the psychological weight of death.
Taking his artistic investigation of death to the extreme, Yates advertised
in a local newspaper: “Donate your ashes to art.” Surprisingly,
someone responded. Yates created Vern, a “portrait” of
Mr. Vernon Koski using the man’s cremated remains on canvas. This project
commemorates the life of Koski (himself a painter), but also puts death radically
on display by bringing into the gallery context someone who is already on
the other side, adding a whole new twist to the discourse on body art. Here
we come full circle back to Minuet. Vern and Minuet
both explore the reduction of complex entities (man and car) back to their
original materials: ashes to ashes, metal to metal. For Yates, it seems no
materials are too mundane—or too sacred—to be enlisted in the
service of art.
