"Ornament
: any decoration that has no referent outside of the object
on which it is found." - OLEG GRABAR
"The landscape thinks
itself in me." - CÉZANNE
"...with what intensity
nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all
beauty lies something inhuman, and
these hills, the softness of the sky,
the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning
with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than
a lost paradise." -
CAMUS "A
landscape as depicted by an artist is a manifestation -- such a work of the
intellect assumes a higher rank than the mere natural landscape.
For everything spiritual is better than anything natural." -HEGEL "Like
money, landscape is a social hieroglyph that conceals the actual basis
of its value. It does so by naturalizing
its conventions and conventionalizing its nature." - W. J.
T. MITCHELL
The work assembled here prompts the distinction,
which is nonetheless obvious, between ornaments and landscapes. Yet these
works
not only sustain but also dissolve that distinction. The
dissolution of that
distinction is an event occurring between the works as
well as a force residing within
individual ones. In short, the exhibition enacts the continuity between
the made and the made-to-resemble-nature. Landscape is less a thing and more an event, regardless
whether it comes to appearance as vista, genre of depiction,
or simply within the imagination alone. Landscape takes place
as the act of fashioning nature into
an expanded, as well as an expansive, thing. It was Cézanne
who most fully recognized at what cost these expansions were
fabricated. Cézanne recoiled from landscape's
expansive projection of space precisely because the trajectory
of that project tended only outward and away from the body
of the beholder. Space was thus eviscerated by the very technique
invented to evoke and to maintain its boundaries. In his
rich writings on Cézanne, the phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty presents the painter’s solution as a
turn toward space and landscape depicted as inhabited rather
than projected. Cézanne thus paints the experience
of being within space rather than
looking out upon it. His paintings embody space without disavowing
it, by finding the internal complement to an externalizing
projection.
Ornaments are equally just such internal complements.
So too do they take up space, however modestly, as well as
taking up the project of space. Indeed,
it is precisely in their modesty that their wealth resides, for ornaments are
products, like Cézanne's landscapes, of a turn inward and away
from projected space. Ornaments do not so much reject spatialization as they
rather introject the production of space.
They are thus at once both critiques as well as enhancements of the primary
tradition according to which space has been produced (a tradition that might
also be likened to the vision of real estate). Hence the space of ornament
-- of an object
which "has no referent outside" itself
-- is unrecognizable yet homey. Ornaments look like nothing we’'ve seen,
indeed they even withhold asserting that they resemble anything at all.
The
techniques enacted by the works here, according to which the introjecting
and inhabiting of space take place, are those of adornment
and decoration. Since
ornamentation consists first and foremost not in the display of an object
or a space but rather in the gesture of referring back only
toward itself, ornaments
are produced by the technique of an endless inward pointing. In this regard
ornaments -- and especially those placed upon our bodies -- always move only
toward us, perhaps as if they even begin already within us. Since ornaments
inexorably point and refer only to themselves, it seems extremely odd that
they point or refer at all. What impulse gives rise to ornament -- to ornament's
insistent self-referencing -- and more particularly, what gives rise to the
ornamenting of landscape?
Ornament itself provides an answer to these questions:
the impulse arises from the absent experience of space. Rather than thing-like,
let alone a mere
thing, space is, like landscape, an event which requires conjuring up.
The ornamental aspects of the work in this exhibition are
not simply decorative
appropriations of the genre of landscape. Unlike appropriation, an artistic
technique which is but an ironic version of shopping, ornaments are instead
hieroglyphic upon the body of landscape. These ornaments would have that
body turn aside from all gestures away from itself, in order to return
more directly to itself. Space without expanse, breadth without
vision, ornament
promises the inhabitation of a space we haven’t yet glimpsed. Ornaments
look -- or rather feel -- like the return of pleasure.
Tom Huhn ©1997 |
