Interruption
The strategy set forth in this exhibition, and in some sense
in every work featured in it, involves an
interruption: of protocol, of space, of place, of context.
When asked to select two gallerists, each to be featured with
a choice of artists, I decided to integrate this Summer
Exhibition into an ongoing discussion
I have been developing with two gallerists on opposite coasts.
One seemed to talk a lot about
a need to relocate and expand his gallery space, while the
other seemed to question whether to maintain a designated space
at all. One seemed to focus mostly on representing a specific
group of
individual artists by organizing exhibitions in the gallery,
while the other seemed to demand a more fluid, open format.
Each seemed to be searching for a new identity, given the limitations
of making a profitablecommercial gallery the place for interesting
artistic interventions.
As the world of art continues to assume many values characteristic
of the world of business, both artists and gallerists embrace
the branding practices of corporations by developing an image
or look to sell, clone, and
distribute widely. All this has taken place without much
resistance. Times have radically changed since the 1970s,
when the influential
art dealer, Seth Siegelaub, played a significant role in
the conceptual art movement by
pioneering innovative techniques for marketing and advertising
his stable of artists and their work. In the spirit of Siegelaub's
Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and
Sale Agreement
(a document designed to limit the disproportionate control
of art by museums, galleries, and collectors, and to support
individual artists' rights), one gallerist represented in
this exhibition has been reevaluating the practice of organizing
exhibitions and selling art. Specifically, he has been trying
to develop a protocol for transferring the ownership of works
to
museums, and has traveled internationally to support projects
and discussions with artists which challenge the cultural
tourism of artists' identities and the
branding of culture.
If I have been more involved in the curatorial
process than former Summer Exhibition organizers,
one can assume that
this, too, is a necessary result of both the larger, global
art world
and the particular group of participants in this show, who
constitute a smaller, but representative art community. New
forms of collaboration
are demanded, by
both the art world at large and the specific one defined
here by myself, Brian Butler, and Henry Urbach, and the artists
Paul de Guzman, Wade Guyton, Liliana Moro, and Efrat Shvily.
apexart provides a space for interrupting the normal course
of a commercial gallerist's activity. But I have interrupted
the normal course of activity for the Summer Exhibition by
failing to merely receive four artists' names. I considered
each gallerist's situation, and encouraged them to choose
artists who might nurture their reexamination of their professional
practice. I suggested art works which would resist the trend
towards simplifying the exchange of ideas. I also wanted
to
discourage the easy translation of a theme into a selection
criterion. The result seems to be a group of works with a
uniÄed appearance, but with radically distinctive concerns.
Each is
elusive about its identity — an antidote to the commodiÄcation
of an idea.
Wade Guyton appropriates modernist and minimalist shapes
and products which he then reiterates, reconfigures, rescales,
or
redesigns. In the gallery these sculptures, made in wood,
steel, or aluminum, are presented as if to be completely
new. Though even in its most unlikely configuration a Breuer
chair may always contain
the
memory of its signiÄcance, in the exhibition it appears too
absurd to be endorsed by any company or installed in any
home. This erratic steel drawing, made from an apparently
rejected
source,
balances haphazardly on the edge of another formal object
frequently used by Guyton, the isosceles triangle, and communicates
with
his work U Sculpture, resting more comfortably on
an opposite side. A literal translation of Guyton's appropriation
would
wrongly limit the critical potential of his project, which
thrives on being unresolved — especially about how
to make a place where sculpture can convey meaning.
Paul de
Guzman inserts himself into the canonical works of contemporary
design and criticism by cutting
sections from architecture books and anthologies which have
become authorities on meaning and interpretation. While many
a theory in the books appropriated and altered by de Guzman
may in fact be disputable, the artist does not seem to be
enacting his apparently irreverent attack on the books' published
content.
As much as one might expect the book-object's design to be
linked to ideas professed within its once legible pages,
it seems that a work's design is subject to the artist's
whim
and has little to do with the source material's subject.
A release from the impulse to interpret visual artistic
practice through the automatic appeal to a few books of philosophy
or architecture, Study for Wenn Berlin Biarritz wäre... and
Proposed Double Layout for T. F. seem a
declaration of de Guzman's right to be an artist and not
merely an interpreter of theories in books.
The dichotomy inherent in Paul de Guzman's oeuvre is more
complex than any literal translation of dissection into a
meaningful
gesture. The result can be likened to the complex logic of
Efrat Shvily's photographs, described by Ariella Azoulay
as being distinct from any photograph on the wall. A photograph
usually is "dangling between two modes — between
what's depicted on the photographic paper and traces of the
photographic act, between the two-dimensional image and the
chaos of reality out of which it was forged, between being
a silent picture on the wall and being (the traces of) a
scrap of the world teeming with life."1 Upon closer
examination, Shvily's images of buildings that look like
architectural models
do not communicate definitively. A repeated gaze, an analysis
of the conditions surrounding each encounter, a serious study
of the history of the occupied territories — even such
genuine and conscious considerations of the work’s
intention will end in a lack of resolution. No meaning can
be predicated
upon this photograph's information; no translation can
be enacted on its symbolic
presentation. In Shvily's work Untitled, I-92-1,
the place is occupied yet barren, devoid of human spirit.
Rows
of half-built poured concrete foundations and box structures
on a hillside in Untitled, A-94-2, seem both in
process and interrupted, both invested with hope for a new
beginning
and abandoned as a hopeless cause, both a utopia in the making
and one long since failed.
Likewise Liliana Moro's Un Mondo senza testa (A
World Without a Head) appears to be a stage set for ideal
communication,
but as an autonomous situation in the exhibition space, it
confounds. The work's uncanny power lies not merely
in the inconsonant materials and scale of the chairs, table,
and paper guillotine, nor in the sound of cheering crowds
surrounding an otherwise mute (or as yet unexpressed) configuration.
More
importantly, it originates in the work's confounding of the
viewer's activity. Moro demands that the spectator become
an active participant but decidedly only feigns to deliver
an
understanding.
Each of the works in this show somehow interrupts convention,
leaving unfulfilled the expectation that form can be decisively
linked to meaning. At first glance, these
works
seem formally rigid, minimal, reduced, and controlled. This
makes them even more interesting as a group of works for
communicating the failure of art to communicate.
It becomes a celebration of the poetic, and of the possibility
to look right but be wrong. Wade Guyton's installation strategy
makes a mess of our understanding the minimalist forms he
has borrowed. In Shvily's disturbingly quiet scenes of extreme
violation there remains no division between what the work
is
about and how it communicates. De Guzman intimates that his
engagement is an interruption of published ideas, but then
demands that his cutting be otherwise evaluated. As the crowd
cheers and viewers take a seat at one of the discordant chairs
surrounding Liliana Moro's elongated coffee table, it seems
implausible that the paper guillotine has been borrowed from
a children's book. Given the complacency of most spectators,
in exhibitions and in the world, it seems justiÄable to interrupt,
just once, the expectation that all will present itself as
planned.
Cay Sophie Rabinowitz
© 2004
1. Ariella Azoulay, "Photography as a Barrier to the
Euphemistic Gesture" in
New Homes in Israel and the Occupied Territories, Rotterdam, WITTE DE WITH
Center for Contemporary Art, 2003, p. 83.
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