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| Stabile of Drawers |
On the occasion of the 2010
Winter Olympics in Vancouver, James Nizam presents Memorandoms that continues his use of vacated domestic
interiors as the backbone of his photography, the provisional location of his
studio, and the source of materials. In this case the site is the former
Little Mountain housing project, which occupied 33rd to 37th Avenues, between
Ontario and Main Streets, the oldest public housing development in Vancouver
until it was recently demolished.
This wasn't ill conceived Modernist utopian social housing like the
complex in the South Bronx in which the windows were broken out by angry
residents, memorialized by Gordon Matta-Clark in Window Blow-Out, 1976.
No, the problem at Little Mountain wasn't tenants angry at having to
live there, they were angry at having to leave. Designed by Vancouver architects Sharp and Thompson,
Berwick, Pratt between 1953 and 1954, these low rise buildings across the street
from Queen Elizabeth Park would have been attractive housing at one time. Large windows threw light onto hardwood
floors of square, well built rooms.
But that was decades ago.
At roughly the same time as the finishing touches were being put on the
Olympic athletes village around False Creek, the last of the tenants holding
onto their apartments at Little Mountain were moved out to make way for the
development of a higher density combination of market condominiums and social
housing. The wrecking balls, steam
shovels, bulldozers, and dump trucks moved in, creating tumuli of stucco and
lumber. Shortly thereafter, even
these were gone, leaving a flat, level field. A nasty rumor has it that it's just in time to be made into
a temporary parking lot to service the Olympic curling that will take place at
a rink nearby.
One year ago, when only a
handful of tenants remained in the sprawling complex, Nizam walked up the
stairs into the shabby rooms of one of the dilapidated third floor apartments
at 5195 James Walk. With the management's
sanction, he set up a 4 x 5 camera in one corner and turned its living room
into his studio for three months.
Slowly roaming the sprawling complex, he sifted through what had been
left behind and imagined the lives that had collected there. Scattered around the abandoned
mattresses and graffiti were random assemblages of the forgotten and unwanted
possessions of the former tenants that had personalized their identical
apartments and transformed them into individual homes. Standing in the midst of these
unintentional temporary monuments, Nizam decided to concentrate on assemblages
of the standardized, impersonal units found before the shirts and underwear,
the kitchen utensils, and the individual dreams and secrets of the inhabitants
are brought in, and the ones left over after they have been taken out. He began to gather together the common
objects that held them (drawers and shelves), lit them (bulbs and light
fixtures), cooked them (stove elements), cleaned them (copper pipe), supported
them (chairs), enclosed and protected them (doors).
Similar to
each of Nizam's five previous series of photographs, Memorandoms has two dominant themes: the lost or abandoned
domicile, and that the personal is political. Without
exception, his work has as its starting point the loss or giving up of home,
and if not the structure itself, then at least its idea. As an architectural metaphor for the
body, the loss of home is the disenfranchisement of the spirit. The empty home is a dead body. Into this precondition of loss, Nizam's
work introduces the idea that through the performance of certain
transformative, memorializing gestures, whether of violence or of beauty, like
the construction of sculpture or the taking of photographs, loss can be given
some purpose and meaning. That the body can be reanimated by the
spirit. Even if only
temporarily. Because at best, a
temporariness of place is all a home can offer either the inhabitant or the
artist. It is all a monument or
memorial can offer. Lasting years
maybe, or only moments, they all follow in the same inevitable direction that
ends in tumuli of memory and materials.
That is the modern experience.
It's tempting to see a reflection of Nizam's experience of leaving so
many homes while growing up, and his acknowledgment of the contemporary Middle
East experience of eviction from home in his use of abandoned domiciles. Nizam's father is Lebanese. On a recent trip to Beirut, Nizam met
many of the close relatives he still has living in Lebanon, and visited the
family home he'd never seen. Soon
after Nizam's birth in Bedfordshire, England, the family got stationed in the
Borneo jungle in Brunei for two years.
They then lived in Muscat, Oman for ten years, moved back to
Bedfordshire for two, and finally immigrated to Canada.
Even if it is not clearly
discerned in the sculptures and photographs of Memorandoms, the context in which they are made and
photographed is crucially important to him. This is something that is internal to him, whether or not it
is internal to what we see in the work.
We don't see the strife created by the eviction of the former tenants in
the photographs, just like we don't see the cockroaches and bedbugs that
infested their apartments. Might
we somehow intuit something larger going on? Or that something larger than what is in the frame is going
on? How would we recognize
it? There are markers. The number and identical type of
objects that Nizam has collected and assembled are subtle indicators that he is
working in mass or social housing.
A context where the apartments, like the materials themselves, are
multiple and identical. The
unswept floor is another marker that something outside the sculpture and the
photograph is important. The
objects Nizam has collected have been made aesthetic by being assembled into
sculptures, and the sculptures have been further aestheticized by being crisply
photographed with a large format camera.
Yet the aesthetics of neither have been thought of exclusively enough to
make Nizam want to simply sweep the floor and remove the dirt and debris from
the picture. Like the veiled,
distorted skull in a memento mori, the unswept floor functions as a reminder of
unseen forces beyond the frame, and the aesthetic. These unseen forces are political. And because the political forces affect the personal
conditions of how and why one loses one's home, this is the entrance of the
political into the personal.
The contest for importance
between what is inside and outside of the frame is an even match-up that gives Memorandoms an insistent tension. It's like a glancing jab on the chin. The same taut balance and tension
exists between whether Nizam is a photographer who makes sculpture or a
sculptor who takes photographs. If
he is a photographer, why the increasing frequency and importance of sculpture
in his work? In Memorandoms they have grown to such prominence that they are
all we see. They start to crowd
the edges of the frame and stand their ground so firmly that getting past them
to the background is almost impossible.
The sculptures were made one after another in the same corner of the
room and photographed there, the camera never moving from its spot. Why the static camera position? When there is so much shown about the
principles of sculpture, how much is shown about photography using the one
camera position, the one lighting source, and cropping the image so closely
that almost everything but the sculpture is squeezed out? In this severely restricted use of the
medium there is the familiar ring of singularity similar to the principles of
Ad Reinhardt and Dogma cinema. To
determine the dimensions of the photographs, Nizam used a proportionately
relative scale to the sculptures they pictured. The photograph Pillar of Shelves, for instance, is proportionately larger than the
photograph Sheaf of Pipe in
the same relation as the sculpture of the pillar of shelves was larger than the
sculpture of the sheaf of pipe, and also, without losing too much consistency
of presentation, approximating the actual sizes of the sculptures
themselves. A sculptural
physicality even runs to the titles of the photographs in their assemblages of
nouns: "pillar", "stabile", "cascade",
"entanglement", "pile", "tower",
"helix", "sheaf", "crescendo",
"lattice", "cluster"; "shelves", "drawers",
"doors", "chairs", "pipe", "sconces",
"doorknobs", "oven rings", "bulbs"; they're like
lists of materials and ways of putting them together. What is he telling us about photography? Is he making the equivalence of
sculpting light and sculpting materials?
Looking at Memorandoms
it's sometimes hard to see the photography, but it's impossible to miss the
sculpture.
In the late Nineteenth and
early Twentieth centuries the sculptors Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso, and
Constantin Brancusi used photography as a new tool helping them see their own
sculpture and for disseminating it to others, and maintained strict control
over it. For the generation of
sculptors that included Gordon Matta-Clark, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria,
and Robert Smithson, a good portion of their work in the late 1960s through the
1970s was predominantly known through photographs, because it was physically
impossible to bring into the gallery or was done in inaccessible
locations. Part of this was a
conscientious attempt to avoid participating in the art market and the
consumption of art as a commodity.
Partly it was a sly acknowledgment that most art was known to most
people not through direct experience, but disseminated through photographs in
art magazines and slide lectures in art schools. Avoiding the market was a youthful, utopian idea that none
of the artists really wanted to succeed at. Because unless they were living on trust funds, all the
trips to the western United States, the earth moving machinery, the rents and
the food bills had to be paid by someone.
Eventually Smithson brought in his piles of gravel, and Matta-Clark his
cut out sections of buildings.
If Nizam is a sculptor, why
doesn't he show the sculptures? He
has removed from them all those characteristics that make sculpture what it is:
the somatic, physical presence of three dimensionality, the experience in time
of moving around it, the multiple viewpoints, and the democracy of the viewer
being able to choose how and from where to look at it. By denying access to the sculptures,
they are as lost to us in time as are the people that once touched their parts
as utilitarian objects. Just as
the sculptures are memorials to the former tenants, the photographs are
memorials to the sculptures.
More cleverly, as examples of disembodiment and loss, it's possible to
see an empty home as synonymous with a photograph of a sculpture. Having done so much to deny his
sculpture its body, is that enough to ipso facto determine Nizam a
photographer? That wouldn't be
satisfying. Trying to see Nizam
strictly as a photographer, and Memorandoms strictly as photographs, leaves a nagging
feeling. The care and quality of
the sculptures argues against it.
And there they are again, sculpture vs. photography circling around and
feeling each other, neither one being able to take a decisive decision. In a very real way he's denied both
photography and sculpture.
If you asked James Nizam if he
were a photographer or a sculptor, it wouldn't make sense to him to parse the distinction. One way or another it doesn't
matter. Nizam warmly embraces the
ambiguity, preferring its freedom, and feels no responsibility to resolve the
question. His line of thinking
reminds me of the mid-twentieth century heavyweight, American sculptor David
Smith. Until his life ended in
1965, crushed by a load of steel he was driving back to his home in upstate New
York, Smith maintained that as an artist, it was his job to make the art, not
to think about it. But looking at
art is different, and the question can't be so easily ducked. It may be a woefully old fashioned
distinction, but it frustrates me not to know. Whichever way the answer falls, it changes the work and the
approach to it.
I haven't thought about Smith
in a while, but now that I do he also reminds me of the way Nizam animates his
materials and how the sculptures of Memorandoms can be organized into two groups. First there are those with more
rational, formal arrangements of elements, like Pillar of Shelves and Tower of Drawers, which in their stability project a rigor and
seriousness; then those like the hardly stable Stabile of Drawers; the Cascade of Doors with its jaunty conga line reference to Marcel
Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2; the Entanglement of Chairs like circus acrobats; the aqueous Crescendo of
Sconces; the robotic,
vaudevillian plate spinner Arrangement of Oven Rings; and the Cluster of Bulbs like a froth of good ideas, that are animated
with a haphazard humor that belies their somber context.
http://www.jamesnizam.com/
