by Jerome du Bois
In Kerry Lengel's recent review of Melissa Martinez and Mary Shindell's "installation art" now up at Mesa Contemporary Arts, he/she writes:
Installation art means no constraints, other than the shape of the room. The work can be two- or three-dimensional, made of any material, including video, sound or anything else the artist can imagine. There are no rules, which, in an ironic twist, means the artists go outside the metaphorical box by being inside a literal one.
What's ironic is that neither artist does any such thing. The Dr. Ruth Tan Lim Project Room at MCA is set up for multimedia --video, film, sound, digital, and web-based work. (There are outlets in the ceiling.) The sculptures and drawings Martinez and Shindell created use none of these resources, and could have been set up in any room at MCA, or any gallery anywhere. Despite the title of the exhibition --"Out There: Unconventional Landscapes"-- they are completely conventional. (In the Coda, in an imaginary proposal, I'll describe how Catherine and I would have used the room.)
From Lengel's article, which is titled "Artists Blend Talents to Reimagine Desert:"
When the artists looked at the space, they brainstormed ways of working with it. Perhaps one would take the walls, the other the floor. In the end, though, they decided to divide the room in half, collaborating on the concept but not the physical art -- "Not that they would end up being one piece," Martinez says, "but that they would somehow . . . meet up in the middle."
They may have brainstormed, but not very much or for very long. In her half of the room, Shindell positioned three of the same kind of Lucite columns (with her drawings curled inside) she has exhibited elsewhere, and which you can see on her website. On the wall, high above the viewer's head, there's a giant red desert sunset photo, mostly obscured by more of her drawings, but it doesn't matter because we've seen the real thing hundreds of times.
The theme of the installation was supposed to be the two artists responding to the desert. But the desert is nowhere to be found here. Shindell's busily detailed drawings flatten all her vegetative subjects, embedding them in one-dimensional suffocation. And the Lucite tubes belong in a mall.
Lengel's description of Martinez's contribution is misleading:
On the Martinez half, a giant fiberglass tree rises from artificial turf. It is smooth, sleek white and bare, but on the wall behind it seems to cast a shadow of twisted black branches.
First, that's not the effect at all. It's just black paint on a white wall. And the white thing doesn't resemble a tree. It doesn't branch like a tree, and its extensions are thick as tusks. It looks like an enlarged section from a set of antlers. It's smooth (with no hint of bark) and shiny, and totally cartoony. It looks like playground equipment. (In fact, when Catherine and I were viewing the room on the day of the opening, it wasn't really open yet, but the guy at the desk let us wander around. He told us the setup was complete, except "They're going to put a long table up in front of the tree so kids won't be crawling all over it.")
And it's completely alien to the desert. But then, according to Martinez herself, the desert wasn't her inspiration, even though it was supposed to be.
"One of my favorite movies is Edward Scissorhands, and I love the really surreal, totally artificial, just freaky landscape that happens there," Martinez says. "When I first moved to Arizona, I was driving through downtown Tempe, and there was a pink house next to a blue house next to a white house with these perfectly manicured green-square lawns with these citrus tree balls. And I was like, 'Wow, that's totally Edward Scissorhands,' in that surreal, kind of creepy but beautiful, overly perfect way. So this isn't a desert landscape, but it relates to how I feel living here, in that it's kind of artificial."
Back in 1999 Catherine was living up in the North Valley, near a desert mountain preserve. She would take long walks, and sometimes she would draw or paint what she saw afterward. Here is one of the gouaches she did back then, which she calls "The Ironwood In My Mind." That is what a desert tree looks like --like it's had a life, not been extruded from a tube.
But it was so much easier for Martinez to fashion her smooth, simplistic, reductive "tree" than try to capture the challenges and sufferings of real living things in the real harsh desert. It's not her surroundings which are artificial, it's Martinez herself; she's got a fiberglas soul. In a follow-up article by Srianthi Perera, Martinez describes her piece in the most simplistic fashion imaginable:
Martinez works mainly in sculpture and her installation features the tree of life, a large, black tree with a raven symbolizing the darker side in the background and a white and smooth sculpted tree symbolizing "the face you put to the world" in the foreground.
"If you live knowing that this is who you are, good and bad, you embrace all of your qualities, and it doesn't come out when it's least expected, like road rage."
Perera doesn't mention the clunky white doves suspended from the ceiling, their wings thick as brick. They might as well be rubber duckies.
Shindell, who is a lot older, should know better, but she does no better than Martinez, either in "reimagining the desert" or explaining her piece:
"In the desert, two things are overwhelming --space and detail. There is huge vast space from one end of the spectrum and then you have the little tiny detail in the cactus. I'm trying to play off of both those things at the same time," she explained.
"Landscape artists give a kind of emotional response. I'm also going for the physicality of having the scene around you in a sensory way," Shindell said.
Emotional response? The whole setup, by both artists, is cold, astringent, and clichéd. As for "physicality" and "sensory," there is nothing natural in the entire exhibition, from the Lucite tubes to the digital prints to the fiberglas tree to the artificial turf. The desert is far from here.
And what was Mike Goodwin, the preparator, thinking? Was he just catering to a couple of fellow artists from the 515 Gallery / MADE Arts / eyelounge menagerie downtown, where he exhibits? He had to know, based on their earlier work, that these two were not really multimedia artists, and that they wouldn't be using the Project Room the way it was designed. His explanation is as thin as theirs:
"When our work is together, it has this resonance that I can't explain," Shindell says. "Melissa did some boxes with soil in them that were hung very meticulously from cables. And I had done this drawing in pen and ink, a real loose drawing of a (prickly) pear cactus. And her piece and my piece worked so well together, but I can't really describe why."
Mike Goodwin, a preparator at Mesa Contemporary Arts, also saw the connection and invited them to take over the installation gallery.
"It's kind of hard to explain because they're so different in their approach and in their materials," he says. "(It's) the respect they have for natural history and beauty, and they're doing it in an innovative and interesting way. . . . It's not your typical landscape or sculpture of an animal or a tree."
Respect? Innovative? Interesting? Oh, please. All three elements were missing out there.
Coda: Let The Spirits Move You
We saw this piece on the day it opened, and it's depressed me ever since; but I held off criticizing the "installation" because Catherine and I got excited about the Project Room, and were considering submitting a proposal. Then we found out that Goodwin was hooked up with the downtown people, so he probably wouldn't be favorably disposed towards us; and that the MCA is not currently considering proposals anyway. Ah, the closed loop again. That's how things stay boring in this Valley.
So we'll console ourselves by describing our imaginary proposal --Let The Spirits Move You-- here on our blog.
The Project Room is a cube open on opposite sides. From above it looks like this: [ ]. So we would install heavy black curtains over both openings. Inside, in the darkened cube, six DVD projectors suspended from the ceiling would be playing, on all six walls, coordinated slide shows of our spirit photography. There will be a couple of rows of folding chairs, back-to-back, and floor cushions as well. One half of the cube will feature the back yard, as in the banner collage "The Good Neighbors" above, and the other half will feature the little brick house itself. In the beginning, the backyard is bare of orbs and other phenomena, but as the DVD spins they gradually fade in, one by one, here, there, here, there, until all three walls are filled and overlapping. Slow, sad, instrumental music --violin, bowed-saw, and theremin intermingled-- plays throughout. On the other half, the panorama starts in the sky above the roof and gradually descends to the house itself and moves around its perimeter, catching cats and showing the transformations of doors and windows. All this would take hours.
(There would also be, in alcoves just outside both sets of curtains, computer and headpiece setups for users to browse a special website of the spirit photo archives and Catherine's narrative of her spirit photography journey.)
What's the point of the piece? To make you sad. To restart your heart. We are convinced that American culture is shot through with schadenfreude --casual cruelty, the enjoyment of the suffering of others-- and reflecting on the dead and their longing for embodiment will remind the viewers of their own fragile mortality, their tenuous contingency, their very human vulnerability. There, on those walls, but for the grace of this brief life, go all of us.
Posted by Jerome at November 21, 2006 01:00 PM | TrackBack