The
five artists here come from widely diverse countriesAyse
Erkmen is from Turkey, Karin Sander from Germany, Roman
Signer from Switzerland, Mikolaj Smoczynski from Poland,
and Ken
Unsworth from Australia. They also represent quite
different generations, and their work itself, which
traverses several
media, is likewise considerably diverse. One thing
they do share, however, is the way they work between
genres,
in flexible
interstices between categories, for instance between
painting, architecture and sculpture (Smoczynski);
between video
and sculpture (Erkmen), although others of her projects
have
been equally combinatory but in very different ways;
between sculpture, architectural interventions and
the conceptual
(Sander); between performance and sculpture (Signer);
and between sculpture and installation (Unsworth).
Mixing genres
self-consciously, as a theme in and of itself, is not
what they're about. Instead, their combinations seem
effortless
and understated, lyrical and necessary, and the works
that result have a patient ability to dazzle gradually
(a term,
by the way, shamelessly pilfered from Emily Dickinson.)
In each cases, their work opens outward (and deepens
and enlarges)
to include all sorts of other things, like sensuality,
suppleness, and humor; a palpable sense of beauty and,
at times, a sharp,
crisp note of near-absurdity; an acute, if pared down
and austere, attention to materials and an ability
to evoke
a mesh of associations and metaphors.
Karin Sander is represented by a polished chicken egg
set on a pedestal. Using sandpaper, she polished the
egg by
hand, turning its fragile surface into a highly
reflective field that responds to everything in its vicinity. This piece
is related to others of Sander's works, which in some
manner
reveal and clarify, alter and
display, the site where they are located, for instance a semi-translucent
room made of canvas installed in a museums exhibition hall, or a red painted
circle atop a concrete cylinder that marked the exact geographical center of
Münster, Germany (this piece was for the recent Sculpture Projects in Münster
exhibition, to which Ayse Erkmen and Roman Signer also contributed important
pieces. It is especially related to her wall-polishings, in which she sands and
polishes a section of a wall, to elicit fantastically smooth surfaces that also
reflect their surroundings. Both wall-polishings and polished egg have a pronounced
painterly aspect, but instead of an artist's subjective imagery and invented
forms, what you see are the surroundingsthe daily reality of the space,
in other wordsas a kind of shimmering and ephemeral projection.
A polished egg, however, takes things in unusual and surprising directions.
For one thing, there are all these connotations, to primal origins, for
instance, and to primal femininity. For another, there's the way this
humdrum object
gets
transformed into what seems like a rare, exotic thinga 19th century
Fabergé egg,
perhaps, or a bejeweled, heirloom; even a devotional object with spiritual
significance. At the same time this piece is an excessive, and in many
ways hilarious, take on anti-monumental sculpture. While all sorts of "soft",
temporary, or fragile materials have entered into sculpture during the
past couple of decades, you just can't get more fragile than an egg. Then
there's all that hands-on touching, rubbing, and preparing, which seems
at once sensual and precariousone
false move, or the application of a bit too much pressure, and the piece
would be,
well, ruined. That's the kind of overlay with which Sander is dealing,
and it's why her work, which can be austere and reductive, is also richly
evocative
and
packed with multiple resonances.
Mikolaj Smoczynski is known for his architectural interventions and transformations.
He typically works at and on specific architectural sites, with the kind of non-art
materials (like walls, floors, and plaster) that already belong to the site in
question. In various works, he has torn up floor tiles to form a pyramidal sculpture,
made an entire installation out of stacked up building materials, and excised
sections of the outer surface of wall to uncover its underlying structures and
its hidden visual forms. There can be something very rough about Smoczynski's
work, with all that cutting and that scraping, gouging and excavating, which
in part responds to the distressed urban architecture (and the rickety history
it represents) that you find pretty much everywhere in Poland. But this roughness
hardly occurs in a way that's muscular, brawny, or heroic. On the contrary, Smoczynski's
deconstructions, or partial demolitions, of a site can be supremely delicate,
with a great deal of subtle beauty that is also painterly. Moreover, how the
slowly changing forms of sunlight in a space interact with his interventions
is as much part of the project as anything else. What emerges are potent juxtapositions:
destruction and entropy side by side with regeneration and renewal.
Photographs have long figured prominently in Smoczynski's oeuvre, although
he does not conceive of himself as a photographer per se. Instead, he
uses photographs
to explore various of his sculptural ideas, and at times as trace evidence
of sculptures that were meant to be temporary. Here, his photo installation
on the
wall consists of two related clusters. One is of a rock in ocean waterhour-long
exposures that wind up looking very sculptural and in many ways artificial. While
taken outside, these photographs seem like interior shots of made or invented
objects. The other photographs are the reverse. They're really of a made thing,
of a mass of tar and paper arranged in his studio, but they nevertheless assume
a burgeoning organicism, as well as elements of geology and landscapea
fictive or alien landscape that you can't exactly place.
This exhibition is the first time that Ayse Erkmen's work has been shown
in New York. Six video monitors reveal green, digitally rendered land
minesanimated,
rubbery, vaguely anthropomorphic shapes endlessly proceeding in their own weird
pageant. There is something at once stately and comical about the way they hop,
gyrate, and then spring off into the distance. In the process, a lethal thing,
and one of the fiercest symbols of the 20th century, becomes hilarious, becomes
whimsical, becomes frisky and exuberant. Please note: you'll find the same shape
repeated, non-digitally, on floor tiles in an off-the-beaten-track section of
the gallery's office floor (as I wrote at the beginning, these artists are very
interested in conflating genres.) One part of the work is meant to be seen, and
the other to be usedit's absorbed into the daily life of the gallery.
While this is her first appearance in New York, Erkmen has of late been
exhibiting a great deal in Europe. For the recent Sculpture Projects
in M¸nster exhibition
(a very good exhibition, to which Karin Sander and Roman Signer also contributed
important pieces) a work by Erkmen featured a helicopter that appeared in the
sky lugging a dangling figurative sculpture in a harness, 15th and 16th century
sculptures taken from storage in Münster's main museum, the Westfälisches
Landesmuseum. Coming into view, it circled several times above the steeple
of a neighboring
cathedral and eventually set the sculpture down on top of the museum's
roof, all the while blasting hats off the heads of onlookers, shaking the
trees,
and causing a windy commotion. Reminders of flying angels and miraculous
ascensions combined with references to the famous helicopter scene at the
beginning of
Fellini's
La Dolce Vita, in this piece which was at once absurdist and poetic.
Roman Signer is represented by videos of selected actions/performances
accomplished during the past couple of years. Signer's actions are typically
staged before
small audiences, or at times before no audiences at all. He works with
elemental things, like fires and explosions, smoke and water, and with
everyday objects
like hats, bicycles, and canes. Signer's deadpan, willfully non-theatrical
actions are events occurring in time, but they also result in sculpturesjust exceedingly
provisional ones which sometimes only last for a few seconds. I recall one very
well, from the first time I encountered Signer's actions (also in videos) at
Galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris. A helium balloon ascended near the vertical
torrent of a waterfall. As it rose and fluttered, it drifted toward the wateran
inquisitive, tentative, and much-desiring thing. Finally, the balloon touched
the water (and you really feared for its survival) only to be blasted back into
the air, where it hovered for awhile, as if shaken and bewildered. This spare
combination of a balloon and rushing waterand all the inhuman physics that
it dramatizednevertheless evoked deeply human things, like need and
longing, fear and curiosity, eroticism and hesitation. This happens throughout
Signer's
actions/sculptures, as well as his with his more durable sculptures in
which inanimate objects often leap into spasmodic life.
Ken Unsworth has long been acclaimed as one of Australia's foremost artists.
I first encountered his work several years ago at an exhibition in Poland,
a mixed-media piece involving haystacks, dollhouses, a large mirror,
and in an
adjacent room more hay piled atop a piano. This piece was inspired, in
part, by Unsworth's encounter with the music of the Polish composer Gracyna
Bacewicz.
Barely visible on the piano was a charred composition by her, and a constructed
female figure (presumably referring to Bacewicz) blasted upwards, taking
with it the top of the piano. Both elementsthe installational and the sculpturalwere
exceptionally pronounced in this quirky meditation on music and home, safety
and mortality. For this exhibition, Unsworth will be showing a reprise
of a 1992 piece, appropriately titled Rapture. Aerial figures with imperturbable
expressions
are headlocked in steel vises. They're simultaneously caught and ecstatic.
They're in the grip of a dazzle that just won't let go.
Gregory Volk ©1997
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