dis/integration

main page.artist abstract.artist statement.image gallery.information.
close portfolio (and return to SMP index)

My work is both the desire to actively construct a personal history and the realization of the ultimate impossibility of this task. It has come to be situated in the space between the disorder of memory and the order of a history or system, such as language, that aims to describe, communicate, and connect present with past. The work I produce is thus the manifestation of a process of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing; because the present continually becomes the past, this process is also one of continual reconstitution.

I use a variety of media to communicate this process to the viewer, yet I ultimately work to engage a three-dimensional space that surrounds the viewer, using elements of the sculptural, both the photographic and filmic image, and sometimes text. These serve me as devices and tools to create an installation involving relational parts that enact a whole. Using a variety of media allows me to integrate the tactile and visual immediacy of sculpture with the temporality inherent in both the photographic image and filmic image as evidence of memory and mutability. Further, the combination of these media facilitates the creation of a situation that emotionally and physically involves the viewer in my own subjective experience. As such, I want to manipulate the sensory experience of the viewer by confronting them with an intense awareness of their own body and of time. The intersection of physical and emotional experience coincides with my desire to identify with the viewer and to communicate the sensation of the extricative process of recollection and the physical struggle to deal with it.

In order to involve the viewer in the creation of a subjective experience, I employ the qualities of form, texture, repetition, and endurance drawn from the influences of minimalist forms and ideas of theatricality, and from artists working since the mid- to late- 1960’s who were thinking to some degree in response to Minimalism. These responses are specifically those that concern a relationship to awareness of the body and an emphasis on sensory experience.

I first looked at the constitution of self-history through a combination of photographic image and language. In one of the first pieces I made in the fall, Five Self-Portraits (2001), I present together five different self-portraits that I consider to be varying aspects of my own sense of self. These images are each paired with a word that either describes, contradicts, or questions the image, and the image in turn may do the same for the word. Neither word nor image is fully explicative of the meaning each pairing contains. For example, the photograph labeled “subsume” directly references the reaction to the somewhat sexualized representation of myself that occurs in the photograph. The relationship of one singular photograph to others in the series also becomes important in trying to contradict or comment upon the others. “Extricate” communicates vulnerability as opposed to “subsume” which is paired with an image that poses some degree of confidence in a gaze directed at the viewer.

From this piece, I moved on to use text in a different manner: to tell the many possible stories of the absent figure in Missing Persons. In this case, the text aims to support, subvert, and/or contradict from within by providing a basis for the life that possibly inhabited the empty dress depicted in the series of photographs. The text in this piece exists typed in separate piles of white paper within the installation, which the viewer is asked to read and take with them if they desire. The images and writings must each stand on their own as descriptive and engaging. In totality, they do not depend upon one another but are meant to interact to enhance meaning for the viewer both separately and as a whole. Photographer Duane Michals uses the juxtaposition of text and image in his work; the text perhaps enlightens what is happening or being seen in a particular photograph or enhances a narrative, while the photograph similarly gives information that the text may not include. They enhance one another and create meaning that neither text nor image can communicate independently. <1>

Providing the text to create the character(s) that are intimated by the empty dress was in some ways a means of filling the space of the absent figure. Absence and presence have become important concepts for me in creating the sensory experience of memory. Memory is inherently about absence and presence. If absence is evident, as the empty dress evidences the absence of a person, then in looking we become aware that something was present and that it is presently gone. Though something is not physically present, the awareness of absence signifies that that thing is still present in either immediate consciousness or memory. Absence is therefore not a void but a lack of whole, physical presence. In Conceptual Art, Tony Godfrey says of Victor Burgin's photographs, "The gate was a symbol of German reunification that then seemed far distant—like the woman, it was an object of desire. Desire is always desire for the past, for the lost infantile sense of completeness. Desire is always about our sense of lack." (my italics) (Godfrey 331) Similar to Burgin I want to make the viewer aware of the sensation of the absence that is indicative of a lack, inciting a desire to know and understand the past.

Filmmaker Luis Bunuel (1900-83) stated in his memoirs, “you have to begin to lose your memory if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all…our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing…I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s…” (qtd. in Sacks 23) <2> I identify with Bunuel’s experiences concerning his mother; I became highly aware of the importance of memory in the coherence and reason of a person as I witnessed my grandmother’s memory disintegrate as her mind was overtaken by Alzheimer’s disease. Her body remained for many years, while her mind slowly erased the past. Memory of the past, whether that of fifteen years or fifteen minutes ago, is imperative to our self-constitution. However, we can derive both pleasure and pain from the act of remembering. Louise Bourgeouis (b. 1911), an artist who has highly influenced me as an artist, once explained, “Everyday you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it you become a sculptor.” (qtd. in Acocella 75) Bourgeouis’ memories and experiences shape her work, as they do for me. The elements of my work are present because they are relics of an experience or memory. For example, the idea of collecting in Collection/dissemination/dissemination/collection (2002) comes from my brothers and I collecting bottles and junk in the woods as children. It very is important to me that I identify the source of my material as I work through the process of creating. However, it is not about re-creation or simply recollection/remembering. Collection is an integrated part of the work, which on the whole is not necessarily a true, complete, or verifiable historical construction. I am re-looking at the act of collection and shifting it from the past to the present. Thus Collection/ dissemination... is not by any means about this specific memory, rather the emotions, objects and actions encompassed by the memory. The digging becomes the process of uncovering not only the bottles but also emotions and physical experiences of the past, while the collection and dissemination of the bottles can be likened to a physical means of an emotional restructuring. Like Bruce Nauman (b. 1941), a contemporary artist who has worked in a variety of media including video, I reference a specific task (Godfrey 339) and am, as art historian Andrew Causey describes his work, “interested in relics, fragments that are isolated and removed from [specific] time.” (Causey 157) In Collection/dissemination... the video was a tool for me to address the element of time involved in a process and documents places the act of digging as something that did happen. The use of video became an exciting tool for me as I desired to somehow build upon my love of creating the photographic image.

A fascination with photography is that which led me to pursue art because photographs act as physical relics of my subjective experiences. Time is elemental in the photographic and filmic images; therefore they are significant as devices to reference time. Photographs mark the inevitable passing of life and the inevitability of death. Photographic and filmic images physically manifest the concepts of memory and personal history. Susan Sontag states of photography:

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. (Sontag)

The in-progress video piece currently entitled deferment (2002) is shot in real-time, thus it documents the passing of time and the patience of the viewer, or for that matter of anyone watching drops of rain. It attempts to make visible the physical experience of time as waiting, patience, and contemplating or remembering through the action of something (water, rain) that has its own ordered and predictable yet chaotic movement.

I take the temporal and mutable characteristics of the photographic image and appropriate them to elements of sculpture, creating the sensation of time through surface and texture. The contemporary sculptor Leonardo Drew deals with similar connotations in the nature of material objects and textures. <3> Drew makes what could be called relief combines of old junk, rusted metal and degenerating wood. His use of these materials dictates the viewer’s sense of place in time and their physical relationship to their surroundings. Though Drew’s work generally exists in a single plane, the size surrounds us and becomes an overwhelming amount of sensory input. I have also used materials in order to reference time and memory, though I generally fabricate these sensations through the manipulation of materials rather than using the found object as Drew does. In several cases I have utilized clay slip over sculptural objects because it cracks and falls away. This signifies not only time and memory but also degeneration, concealing, and the possibility of revealing. The process of building layers with plaster, paint, paper, and other such materials, and finally the clay is imperative although all the layers may never be revealed. The importance of the process lies in the fact that they exist, if only for that reason. In this process I create a history—of replication, layering, or duplication—that relates to the idea of a narrative or story. This particular process of layering described above occurs in dys/functional (2002) and attack/resist (2002) through the layering of materials over plaster spherical forms, ending with the clay slip. When the clay begins to peel away, crack and fall off in certain places, the process of revealing and of remembering, creating, or learning a history begins as the successive layer is revealed. It is usually at this point where the work leaves my hands and is given over to the viewer.

Similar to the process of building layers and stripping is that of reproduction or repetition. In Missing Persons (2001), the photographic prints that are part of the final piece come from a series of reproduced images and are themselves presented in a collaged, gridded series composed of multiples of four or five slightly different poses or contortions of the photographed dress. For a given final print that became collaged, the original negative was printed. This positive print was photocopied and then used as a negative to contact print, thus the final print was a negative image wherein the dress appears white, ghostlike and abstracted against the dark wall. The reproduction and repetition of the image abstracts the dress and separate from the viewer both the original image and the figure implied by the dress.

By puncturing objects of containment, as in the wire entangled and woven through Red Box (2001), the transparency of the vinyl on which the photographs in Missing Persons are mounted, or the disjuncture of the pieces in dys/functional, I want to assert that there exists an interface between two places, whether physical or conceptual, and that separation creates an order: a structure upon which to remember, to construct a history, to create or understand a story. Looking at the fluidity of these moments or places simultaneously relates to the embodiment of language that creates a similar order in attempting to signify using words. These things may fall to pieces: the box may be punctured, the forms disconnected or seemingly broken, the figure alluded to by the dress begins to float, losing particular identity and place. However, they still hold together. The box is entangled yet functional as are the forms in dys/functional and attack/resist. In Green Room (2001), a sculptural installation, the main sculptural elements read as a figure, perhaps as a spine. It seems to be falling apart, cracking and decaying, and yet it remains upright and connected. This is exemplary of why I tend to use serial parts to create a whole: through their connectedness I can articulate their strength as well as their fragility to time and wear. Similarly, in the in-progress work, the spherical objects are organized in a gridded order much as they are in Eva Hesse’s (1936-70) Schema (1969) <4>. The spheres retain most of their geometric form, despite being dented and the surface falling away in some places. I see them as working to hold together while resisting damage that is being incurred.

Falling apart and holding together are important because between them I see the creation of a personal history as a means of holding together oneself while time slowly wears the immediacy of past experiences, emotions, and the body. Between these two ideas, the tension of time exists. I try to articulate a presence or force that is attempting to break apart that which holds together, whether it is the mind through memory, the body, or a personal history. In Green Room the dangling light bulb invades the small space and reaches down to the figure in the chair. The green color of Green Room is an old institutional green or the green of old kitchen appliances and refers to both institutional spaces of enclosure and the home as such. The figure is meant to be forced in and out of the space (the figure extends beyond the square of the room into the space of the viewer or gallery) by the harsh light and the close walls. I imagine the figure both cowering from and holding up to the imposition of the harsh light.

Green Room, Missing Persons, and Collection/dissemination... exemplify my intention to place the viewer in a site of a theatrical occurrence, which places them in a position between two opposing ideas, such as absence/presence or fragility/strength, holding together/falling apart. A physical means of addressing that which can be identified by neither one pole of ideological binary pair nor the other is an emphasis on surface, as it is the interface between two places. Red Box (2001), a very early work, deals directly with this issue in terms of inside/outside and perhaps can be seen as an embodiment of many of the ideas that have continued to be a part of my work. The cubic structure of the box also speaks to my minimalist and post-minimalist influences. Minimalist artists such as Robert Morris (b. 1931) working in the 1960’s were concerned with attention to surface rather than interior, symmetrical forms (such as the cube or box), and positioning the viewer so as to emphasize the relationship, and the space, between the viewer and the artwork. (Causey 120) Like much Minimalist work, Red Box emphasizes surface because it is a sealed cube, yet the interior of the box is also emphasized because other elements pierce and actively seal the surface: wire weaves and tangles through the wood of the box, suggesting that there is an interior that cannot be seen, and protruding nails hammered in the top (where there presumably could by a way to open the box) signal that the interior is inaccessible. Unlike Minimalist artists, I do not wish to de-emphasize the interior but to utilize the manipulation of the surface with the wire, referencing containment and encouraging the viewer to think about the relationship between inside and outside. The duality between inside and outside is an attempt to draw the viewer’s attention to the relationship between their body and the box as an object of containment, separating inside from outside by a penetrable yet resistant surface, such as the skin of the body.

Though the employment of the symmetrical and serial is decidedly of Minimalist origin, I align myself closely with artists working in the 1960’s and 1970’s in dialogue with and in response to Minimalism, such as the German-born American artist Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeouis <5>. Both Hesse and Bourgeouis differ from Minimalist artists in their use of softer, more malleable and transformable materials. Both incorporated references to the bodily in the formal aspects of their work and deal, though in differing respects, with the issue of connection. Hesse transforms materials by layering, binding, and entangling. Causey describes that “the kind of clarity Hesse achieved was…reached from the revelation of process.” (137-8) Similarly, in Red Box, I pierce, weave, and entangle the wire to transform the surface of the box. Causey further explains that “Hesse’s layering, wrapping and binding…” were “the acknowledgement of mortality combined with fear of loss and the urge to preserve.” (139) My processes relate as I deal physically with the emotional fears of losing memory, death, and the struggle to create a history, a means of preserving as Hesse does. In a different manner of connecting, Bourgeouis connects her work to the past and memories as previously discussed. The work of both artists contain strong elements of the theatrical: Hesse in a Minimalist sense of relationship to the viewer through the creation of visceral, weighty, body-related sculpture, and Bourgeouis in the use of a space imbued with objects that appear aged, dramatic light, and figural references (though the full human figure is never present).

In his 1967 essay 'Art and Objecthood', writer/critic Michael Fried asserted that Minimalist, or Literal, art is theatrical because the experience of such is of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder. (Harrison 822-34) Although Fried argued against the theatrical in art, artists working in many different media have continued to emphasize and push the relationship between artwork and the viewer since the debate over theatricality in art in the 1960’s. Fried’s definition of the theatrical is valid for me: creating a situation in which the viewer is included and becomes simultaneously subject and object. Theatricality is important in the work that I do because it places the viewer directly in interaction with the work and engages the emotional, invoking sensations of texture, time, age, personal history, and memory.

While language, memory, time, and the constructive process of creating a history have been present to some degree in all of my work, they were not interwoven either conceptually or manifest as a whole for a long time. The past eight months of working have brought me to many different media and through each of these I have gradually gathered together ways of working with materials, language, and memories that existed discretely in each piece. I now look critically at the construction of a personal history. In critically examining both my struggle to articulate ideas and the physical processes that have been the physical act of this struggle, I have begun to imbue works with precisely that critique; I want to make evident the process of attempting to cohere as a self and simultaneously look closely at the functionality of the structures (language, history, memory). dys/functional and attack/resist (somewhat ironically) speaks to the functionality of the structure of language and the physical structure of a body. The binaries that I have always worked with become integrated in this piece visually through the sculpture and I am able at the same time to look critically at language. The text involved in dys/functional is that of a cut-up dictionary. The words seem to lose independent meaning and become objects, the text and writing is an already existing language that itself fails to describe or give information about what is going on in the relationship between the two spherical forms. attack/resist (described on page 7) contain a layer of pages from the dictionary covering smaller spheres, and then covered in clay. It is my desire to create images, objects or spaces that communicate without language; perhaps for this reason I involved language in the first place: as a way to work through that relationship. I have pushed myself to articulate that which is incommunicable through language by creating theatrical spaces because my work must incite emotion and a connection with the viewer to be successful. These spaces must articulate the tension that exists within the process of constructing a personal history through the ordering of memory and language, and most importantly, involve the viewer in that experience.

Notes

<1> For both images and further discussion of Michals’ work, see Kozloff’s Duane Michals Now Becoming Then.

<2> Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat also gives interesting non-fictive accounts, written by the author, of persons with extreme memory loss.

<3> I first encountered Leonardo Drew’s work at a New York gallery in Chelsea in February 2001. Images of his work can be found at http://userpages.chorus.net/mac/drew/drew.htm
I am aware of but have been unable to acquire a book by Sara Krajewski concerning his work, published by the Madison Art Center, 1999.

<4> An image of Hesse’s Schema, works of other images, and a collection of essays regarding her work can be found in Baier, Eva Hesse: a retrospective.

<5> A comprehensive collection of discussion and images of Bourgeouis’ work can be found in Bernadac, Louise Bourgeouis.

<6> Michael Fried and Robert Morris were in dialogue over the subject of minimal or literal art that included discussion of theatricality and other disparities between minimalism and modernism. The two wrote critically in response to Morris’ essay “Notes on Sculpture” (1967), part of which may be found in Stiles, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, pp. 588-593.

Bibliography

Acocella, Joan. “The Spider’s Web.” The New Yorker. Feb 4, 02: 75.

Bernadac, Marie-Laure. Louise Bourgeouis. New York: Flammarion, 1996.

Causey, Andrew. Sculpture Since 1945. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Godfrey, Tony. Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon, 1998.

Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood, ed. Art in Theory 1900-1990. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992.

Kozloff, Max. Duane Michals, Now Becoming Then. Altadena, CA: Twin Palms Publishers, 1990.

Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Touchstone, 1998.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1973.