July 10, 2007
Let's Not Go There: A Review of "Space Is The Place"
Things Bright And Beautifull. © 2003 King & du Bois. 4' x 5'. Indigo velvet glued with thousands of unique, distinct photographic cutouts of 'light beings,' pixelated evidence of alien presences. (Definitely not in the show "Space Is The Place.")
by Jerome du Bois & Catherine King
The last time we intersected digitally with art curator Toby Kamps was back in June of 2003, when Catherine took him to the woodshed for his lazy and vapid curating of the Arizona Biennial 2003. At the time he was in San Diego. In the four years since, we just found out, Kamps quit San Diego and took a curatorial job in Maine; left after a year or so to take a curatorial job in Cincinnati; left after six months to take a curatorial job in Houston, where he is today, as far as we know, but don't hold us to it. Sometime during all his peripatetic packing and unpacking he and fellow curator Alex Baker of Philadelphia cobbled together (with Independent Curators International, iCI) this pinched, whining, anemic, claustrophobic, and hectoring exhibition supposedly about our most enduring mysteries: the awesome universe, its shivering affiliations with both death and immortality, our need to know its immensity despite our fears, and the mind-bending lengths to which we will go for that knowledge.
But "we" doesn't seem to include Kamps and Baker. What a couple of weenies. (Oh, hell, let's extend that to all the decision-makers at iCI as well. Spineless wimps and schadenfreuders.) You will find no images of planets in this exhibition; nor a single star, much less a sky full of them. Galaxies, such as the one above? No. All those faraway twinkling fires we've been looking at since we've been looking up? Nope. Nada. Not one. Spaceships? Two jokey tokens, one about as long as your arm, the other about half that length. Astronauts? One suspended mannikin of a cosmonaut clown from the Russian Oleg Kulik, and Lia Halloran's stylized spacesuit woman --no helmet-- floating against a white no-space like an ad for competition motorcycle wear.
It's as if the curators are afraid of space: let's not go there. So that in the two galleries of "Space Is The Place" (a meaningless bumper-sticker title) at SMoCA you will find plenty of examples aimed at extinguishing anything and everything noble, uplifting, worthwhile, awe-inspiring, bone-chilling, or spiritual about this specific manifestation of the human need to explore. It's an exhibition of whiny brats disappointed and resentful that it's not a perfect world, and dammit the rocket packs are late late late.
Arizona Republic stenographer Richard Nilsen presumably spoke to Kamps and Baker for this limp announcement of the show opening at SMoCA. Nilsen mentions one artist and no works of art. But we're grateful for those revealing quotes, depressing as they might be. ("It's about all the hopes and dreams and aspirations of the Cold War space race and how things have changed and fallen asunder," Baker said.) Unlike Nilsen --don't get up, Nillie, we're used to the heavy lifting-- we'll be discussing most of the artworks and artists; we'll criticize the curatorial decisions (and glaring omissions) of the exhibition, and bring in a few suggestions of our own. Why? Because someone's got to stand up for actual human heroes against the cowards who attack their vitals.
How do these exhibitions come about, anyway? we wondered. We imagined going back to some time between 2003 and early 2005 and picturing Baker and Kamps sitting in a bar somewhere --considering gallivanting Kamps, probably an airport bar-- sipping their fancytinis and floating exhibition ideas back and forth in mental badminton; it's not hard work, the ideas are so light. Since the art world legitimizes cretins, it shouldn't be surprising that it bestows credentials on dilettantes as well.
Both Baker and Kamps --the two are just past forty-- have obviously absorbed the irony and deconstruction and antihumanism spooned out in academia for the last thirty years. Their task, given the worldview they had adopted, was to shrink the universe into a ball, and cut glory and ambition off at the knees. It shows in their choices, which we'll get to shortly, after we conclude our speculation. Kamps and Baker probably pitched their notion --artists's depictions of the Space Race-- to someone at iCI, who liked it and helped develop it. These days most connected art people will do anything to trash what shows the best within us.
From the brave words on the iCI website, you would expect a lot from this exhibition shaper:
Collaborating with a wide range of eminent curators, iCI develops innovative traveling exhibitions, accompanied by catalogues and other educational materials, to introduce and document challenging new work in all mediums by younger as well as more established artists from the United States and abroad.
Acting as a laboratory of ideas and innovative curatorial approaches, iCI exhibitions feature a thought-provoking mix of subjects and artists.
Not this one. Everything innovative and significant has been left out. It's also lazy: there isn't a single commissioned piece. They just picked and chose from what was available out there within the time-and-budget limits of the show. And there are zero educational materials or exhibits at SMoCA. (There is some overpriced jewelry in the gift shop, though; flying saucer brooches and robot purse danglies.)
After you tour the show and stand there thinking Space? Is this all there is? you begin to understand iCI hedging its bets in writing:
While these works are united by the primary theme of outer space, the open-ended parameters of the subject also invite consideration of issues relating to the technological, environmental, and sociopolitical forces affecting life on earth.
In other words, anything goes.
Nina Katchadourian's sound piece stands as an appropriate first synecdoche for the exhibition. Her own words:
Indecision on the Moon is a re-edit of the Apollo 11 moon walk, where all the coherent language has been taken out to leave only the sentences that trail off, the bits of language like "uh," "um" and "er," the sounds of radio static, and so on. The viewer enters a pitch black room to hear the soundtrack, a disorienting experience in and of itself that corresponds to the disorientation that the voices in the soundtrack seem to be experiencing as well.
And that's exactly what you get: a whole dark room, grumbling, rumbling, and mumbling. It's as if she wants to erase everything about the Moon walk except the electronic lint. Here's a suggestion: replay the heartbeats of the astronauts as they approach the Moon, overlaying all the dialogue in real time. Wonder if she thought of that; wonder if she's even capable; after all, we're talking about a real live beating human heart here. Now think of Ms. K. in her sound lab, carefully, deliberately erasing an astounding moment of history, her thin greasy substitute for a soul nodding in grim satisfaction.
But there was no "indecision" on the Moon. They knew what they were doing, including correction parameters, and they succeeded with efficiency, humility, and grace. Which went in one of Ms. K.'s ears, through her brain disturbing nothing, and out the other ear.
Then there's Julian LaVerdiere, a blowhard impresario who promotes piss-elegant pomposity (industrial felt?!) with self-confessed insincerity. He talks big--
I am searching for guidance from heroic and haunting technological developments in the history of invention and exploration. My projects and efforts have focused on the passage of time and humanity’s attempts to comprehend, control and harness it. It has been my interest to bring public attention to uncelebrated technological discoveries, recontexualizing them as representative of our Promethean accomplishments and hubris.
This manner of historical hyper-texting is not intended as didactic, critical commentary or as cautionary tale-telling, but rather as inspirational, romantic propaganda to help continue the march of progress that has brought our civilization from the Industrial to the Information Age.
--but don't believe a word he says. With his production design company partners in BigRoom, he's an old hand at messing with minds. In the piece at SMoCA he presents the case for an elaborate hoax in four distinct media --video, sculpture, photography, text-- but all showing the same thing: a submerged Nazi V2 rocket. The hoax is, we think, that Wehrner von Braun somehow stuck a pilot into a V2 during wartime, with disastrous results. (Part of the title --FAMSF-- stands for First Attempted Manned Space Flight.) La Verdiere whomped up the whole thing in miniature in his studio in 1999-2000, and to us it looks like he's ripped off the style of the beginning of the movie Titanic (1997).
The nudge-wink backstory here, we think, is that as WWII ended United States intelligence made sure to snap up Wehrner von Braun and other German scientists who worked for the Nazis to work for the US, and that they contributed to the space program. (This is common knowledge, by the way. The world has moved on.) In other words, what he and Baker and Kamps want us to have as a "take-away" (a loathsome term) from the whole space exploration program is that there's an evil Nazi seed at the heart of our noble efforts. But la-de-da La Verdiere likes elliptical headslaps, so you won't hear that from him.
Kamps and Baker and iCI made sure this room-filling piece was available for their exhibition idea, and its central image, repeated several ways, is the exact opposite of the upward glance into endless space: we are staring at a dead machine, created by an evil empire, at the bottom of the ocean. But it's all make-believe.
Thanks for the inspiration, Julian, Alex, Toby, you twits.
So far, we've got a dark mumbling room and the bottom of the ocean, in a show about space exploration. Next in the spotlight of irrelevance will be gender inequity. No matter what the ostensible theme of any art exhibition, you can't lose by somehow squeezing in gender inequity. You can always make it seem relevant. Back in 1999 Aleksandra Mir made fun of the moon landing a month after its 30th anniversary by videotaping some female friends "re-enacting" it on a Dutch beach, running around with American flags. That idiocy, in this exhibition, is called "First Woman On The Moon." And the implication is that there's still a ceiling --a cloud ceiling?-- for female astronauts. But Sally Ride, Shannon Lucid, Eileen Collins, plenty of others, and the ghost of Christa McAuliffe, might want to have a discussion about the subject with the pretentious artist.
Then right behind gender, still obediently shuffling like Stepin Fetchit, is race. Here comes Collette Gaiter (from 2000, but it would have been stale whenever it was made), who is --hey, double whack!-- both female and black. Her contribution is called SPACE | R A C E, 2000 and consists of four prints with text printed on the glass, and a computer hookup with a bunch of ranting collages on it:
SPACE | R A C E (2000) explores the 1960s as the zenith of mass-mediated events in the U.S. [!] The work looks at the U.S. space program and the civil rights movement from 1961––when John Kennedy declared the initiative to go to the moon––to 1969 when astronauts planted the U.S. flag on the moon. Holding up concurrent events in the two parallel, but divergent, initiatives provides an opportunity to examine alternative beliefs and values around shared public experiences. We did not all understand these events in exactly the same way, even though that is what historians tells us.
Gaiter believes that a persistent mythological idea of U.S. society was born during these years, as a result of these two missions. She is interested in how these two huge societal events were motivated by existing mythology about our national character and how they subsequently changed "the master narrative" of U.S. culture.
Her objective is to create environments (the computer piece and text) that allow for paradox and ambiguity. Media representations have separated the civil rights movement and space program along racial lines, and condensed them into simplistic images and sound bites, ignoring the symbiotic and complex relationship between these stories.
Two problems here. She never defines the "mythological idea of US society" she claims to have identified, nor "the master narrative." It's all ground down into ambiguity. And then there's the ridiculous sentence
Media representations have separated the civil rights movement and space program along racial lines, and condensed them into simplistic images and sound bites, ignoring the symbiotic and complex relationship between these stories.
Consider that first phrase again for a moment:
Media representations have separated the civil rights movement and space program along racial lines. . . .
No, not along racial lines, but along the lines that they are different subjects in distinct categories, you nitwit.
Then notice that she's not talking about what's really going on --whether the blast you feel is from a fire hose or from rocket-fuel exhaust-- but about what the media did with these two Sixties phenomena. Believe me, for those in the thick of a million countdown checks, or in the middle of a marching crowd in the hearing of snarling dogs straining at their leashes, how the media saw them was probably the last thing on their minds, and had nothing to do with their actions and decisions. That media-savvy boomerang perspective is something that came later; Gaiter is projecting backwards to better fit her agenda.
But Catherine said it best, riffing on the Zen saying:
When I point my finger at the moon, it doesn't matter the color of the finger, or whether the person at the end of the arm is a man or woman. Look at the moon!
Once again, as with the other artists above, Gaiter's piece is not about space exploration; it's sociological mau-mauing designed to make us all feel small, to distract us from real achievements, and to avoid any exposure to awe.
By the way, there is at least one person who belies the "parallel but divergent" argument Gaiter puts forth about civil rights and the space race. He stands in history as a symbol for both. She even mentions him.
Like Ms. K., Steve Roden heartlessly reduces a harrowing and intense and history-making experience --Yuri Gagarin's space trip-- to absurdity: he plays a scratchy recording of Gagarin broadcasting from space through tiny speakers embedded in the bottoms of 80 bottles. Enraging. Of course we didn't kneel to hear the tiny tinny talking. [But Jerome heard a tune in his head: "80 insulting bottles on the floor, 80 insulting bottles, pick one up and smash it on the wall, 79 insulting bottles on the floor . . ."]
Also on the floor we find Damián Ortega's Voyage To The Moon from 1994, which looks like this.
iCI describes the piece this way:
A gently satiric spirit permeates the work of Mexican artist Damián Ortega, whose Aterrizaje en la luna (Voyage to the Moon), named after a French Tin Tin comic, is a galvanized metal shelter that appears to be part imaginary space capsule and part dwelling for the homeless, highlighting both the inequalities that divide and the dreams that unite affluent and developing nations.
It may "highlight," but it isn't an insight; it's just the historical human condition. This piece is just another easy-answer assemblage that trashes every hard-won engineering victory of the space program. Recall the scene in Apollo 13 when the engineers were confronted with a tabletop covered with stuff and told that they had to use only that stuff to make something else that none of it was designed for. And they did it, and their kludge saved three lives.
Ortega's cutesy campout scene lacks even its essential element: darkness, with the billions of inspirational stars blazing above.
Ronald Jones contributes probably the most irritatingly irrelevant piece in the whole show. It's a black wooden table about two feet by four feet, on a pedestal. On the table is a teal-colored plastic shape that is supposed to be a crucial valve like the kind used by Neil Armstrong to keep his air supplied on the mission. But the table . . . the table supposedly comes from an Andy Warhol electric chair print, and is allegedly a table lots of post-execution autopsies were performed on. All of this explained in his hundreds-of-words title, which is also the description of the piece. Asshole.
Aside from the fact that the table is too short for autopsies of anyone dead but dwarfs, you naturally wonder what it has to do with space exploration. Oh, but the valve, you see, the valve! Yes, yes . . . it's all clear now.
Katy Schimert contributed some smooth shiny grey ceramic forms she titled "Moon Rocks," which perch on their plinth like coffee-table conversation pieces, oversized mood stones. Far from looking like they arrived from far-off space, they resemble student work from the local craft fair, and have nothing to do with space exploration.
Jane and Louise Wilson went to the defunct Soviet "Star City" and took some photos of training module interiors. Then, to make sure we knew these were art and not just deadpan documentary, they printed them really big. A sure sign of significance, if you're gullible enough to fall for it. Remember, all the devices and instruments in the photos --the very sizes and shapes of handles and dials and levers-- represent thousands of problems solved by engineers dedicated to preserving human lives in unprecedented conditions. The Wilsons had nothing to do with any of that, and any pleasure the viewer derives from studying these strange environments [as Jerome did] traces itself back to the engineers, not the photographers. They didn't create a thing. They never do. They take. And again, where is the space in this pretentious presentation?
****
From Catherine. Let me try to describe for you some of my experience at Space is the Place. I did a little time, if not space, traveling. Standing before all that blank white paper and solid-colored canvas in the dozen or so Lia Halloran, Adam Ross, and Jason Rogenes pieces, I was visually triggered.
Suddenly I was transported back to grade school again and the kids around me were drawing blue clouds on white sky. I recognized their lazy artistic strategy. Why explore with Deep Blue or struggle with rendering dozens of types of clouds up there illuminated in countless ways by heavenly bodies and atmospheric conditions? Just leave the sky white, chump.
Time travel forward. I'm all grown up and I'm an art teacher myself. And I witness the very special lazy little brats smugly coloring blue clouds on white skies . . . But, if I want to keep my job, I only encourage and never criticize their false and lazy image of reality.
And then I get out there in the shrunken world of Contemporary Art, and looking at the work of so-called artists like Lia Halloran, Adam Ross, and Jason Rogenes and realize that I, the viewer, am supposed to perceptually pretend and agree that all that naked ground and field is supposed to represent space. Yeah, that's it. The (so-called) artist was spared the challenge of depicting the vast awesome mystery out there. Lia Halloran and the other guys very economically got to leave all that out as if the viewer would fill it in for them.
Because it's easier than coloring the sky. Therefore the mediocre masses in preschool save themselves time, the trouble of imagining, and the challenge of depicting their visions. It's too hard to really grapple with and behold. Just do the easy thing. Toby Kamps will accept it and you'll be on your way to a stellar art career, sans the efforting, because it fits in with his baby picture frame around reality.
And "Space is the Place" is the vision of the Great Unknown that you get when these spoiled, self-indulgent brats grow up and get their art degrees and hookups. And they still get credit for rendering institutionally-sanctioned pieces "about" the very subject they are evading.
So when we read the following from Nilsen's piece--
Space is still the strongest source of the sublime in our lives, the one place we can all regard as the well of the greatest mystery.
"If that could be the take-away from the show," he [Kamps] said. "Whatever we do in the 'final frontier,' it should include artists. They will help us orient ourselves in deep space."
--we have to laugh. We wouldn't entrust any of these flatheads with directions to finding their own butts, much less ask their help to orient ourselves in deep space. Obviously they wouldn't know deep space if they fell into a black hole. Our heroes deserve better than these tiny minds.
Posted by Jerome at July 10, 2007 07:00 PM | TrackBack