Nairy Baghramian: Class Reunion

For North America's first exposure to the art of Nairy Baghramian the  Contemporary Art Gallery has chosen Class Reunion (2008), a collection of eighteen individual sculptures made of cast rubber, metal, and epoxy resin that are witty and intelligent.  Reminiscent of early to mid-century Modernism (with a nostalgic tip of the hat to sculptors like Noguchi and Arp) it is equally reminiscent of that outdated vision of the future that tends to black and white biomorphic abstraction in design (Woody Allen's "Sleeper" for example). 

By the ensemble's title (and the titles of the individual sculptures) we are encouraged to see the gathering as a quirky cast of characters.  Baghramian succeeds in engendering her forms with personality through precise and elegant formal decisions including the elimination of almost any regularity of outline.  Bulbous upper portions of sculptures are smooth and glossy, with slender lower portions that swell and taper, terminating in feet or flat plates, some of which support or are surrounded by slabs of translucent blackish, purplish rubber that look like jello.  Other sculptures are irregularly cut and folded plate metal.

It is interesting how naturally and definitively we as sentient beings associate form with personality.  A straight line is serious; a diagonal less so; and a curving loop the loop humorous.  Considering balance, symmetry is serious, asymmetry not (Part of the joy of Laurel and Hardy).

By their distribution we are encouraged to form a narrative:  For instance, a husband, "Slacker 1" (the only piece without a rigid armature), lays drunk on the floor.  Standing nearby his wife, "Flamingo," blushes pink.  "Knucklehead Hither," the AWOL appendage from Gogol's The Nose, scurries past.  And leaning in the corner distinct from all the others by amongst other things its symmetry and enclosed volume is "Tomcat," the petulant loner.

Given her attention to detail in form, Baghramian has been surprisingly casual in fabrication and upkeep.  Cast forms are pitted and chipped, there are cracks and sags in painted surfaces, and what look like ill considered gaps at joints where sections meet.  An explanation may be in the gallery notes which say that like much of Baghramian's other work, Class Reunion comments "on current issues of materiality, manufacture and display while examining aspects of social and political relationships."  May be, but sometimes, rather than engage in conversation, it's a lot more fun to sit on the couch and make up stories about the guests.

First published in Canadian Art   http://www.canadianart.ca/reviews/2013/01/09/nairy-baghramian-cag/

James Nizam: Trace Heavens

Shard of Light

   Open are the double doors of the horizon

   Unlocked are its bolts

       Utterance 220, from the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom Egypt

  

In approximately 3200 BCE an enormous passage mound was completed in the Boyne Valley on the east coast of Ireland.  At sunrise on the winter solstice a shaft of light penetrates the mound through a light box at its entrance to illuminate a cruciform-shaped chamber 62 feet within. 

Sometime between 650 - 900 CE a cylindrical shaft was cut from the ceiling of a cave to the surface above at Xochicalco in the Mexican state of Morelos so that on the solar equinox an intense circular beam of light shines directly onto its floor.  If a screen containing a small aperture is fitted at the top of the shaft it is possible for the cave to operate as a pinhole camera obscura. 

No written records are extant to interpret these light directing constructions.  Exactly what they were for is speculation.  One thing is certain, at the moment the sun's light entered their darkened chambers a door opened between worlds.

   Open are the double doors of the horizon

   Unlocked are its bolts

       

Trace Heavens

Since the early twentieth century humanity has been held between the infinite exteriority of the cosmos described by Einstein and Hubble and it's mirror image in the infinite interiority of the psyche described by Freud.  For Nizam it is particularly the domestic architecture of the house that is the physical threshold in the world between "out there" and "in here," the site of ritualized action and liminal experience where for a moment we have a foot in both. 

Trace Heavens is an illumination of thresholds.  It is an overlapping of worlds.  It's complexity and beauty is that Nizam has drawn a picture of ancient celestial world upon perceptual world upon art world in a tangle of lines like the black chromed rebar of Interminable Structure.  The photographs and sculpture are an expression of the poetic similitude that exists along two axes of metaphor:  cosmos/architecture/mind and photographic apparatuses/architecture/eye.  Light is the vehicle of transport along these axes, but they bend into orbits like Einstein rings.  For an example, bringing light into a room is like bringing light into an ancient solar observatory, is like bringing light into a camera, or light into the skull and the vitreous chamber of the eye, which again is like bringing light into a solar observatory.  Looking at Trace Heavens inevitably leads in these circular patterns, and not only in its metaphors.  There are also internal gyrations between the works (as the image of Fan (a beam of light bounced from mirror to mirror to make the illusion of the partially opened leaves of a book) is like the image of Disc (an isolated set of ruined concrete stairs), is like the stepped mats surrounding the Illuminations) and beyond.  Follow the spectral lines of Fan and they lead to Robert Smithson's sculpture Pointless Vanishing Point, a truncated segment of perspectival lines.  By withholding the resolution of whether those lines will eventually meet at a single location or unexpectedly veer off, they could point anywhere, it might be inwards towards the self, the imaginary, and the mechanics of perception; or it might be out into the world, to the past and the architecture of stepped pyramids, or to the future and back around to Disc. 

Since antiquity the optical principles of the camera obscura have been well known.  In the decades around 1600 the optical camera obscura became the definitive model for the eye and the mechanics of sight; light from the object of the eyes' focus passes through its lens, the image is projected on the retina, and is then transmitted to the brain.  The seeming directness of the optical camera obscura's transference of visual information came to stand for the veracity of the images of human sight.   Early in the nineteenth century the objectivity of visual perception faltered; how to account for the problem of optical illusions?  What of the persistence of the afterimage of a spot of light once its been extinguished (the same way we might see light from a star that long ago ceased to exist); or the appearance of a three-dimensional object or drawing reversing perspective, as in the well known figures of the Necker Cube and Schroeder's Staircase (geometries adopted a century later by artists and seen in the paintings of Joseph Albers, the sculpture of Smithson, and now in several of Nizam's Thought Forms)?  Artists, philosophers and religious mystics had long talked of a veil separating humanity from what was real, but now a physical threshold within ourselves was being confirmed by physiological evidence.  Color and light, rather than being causes of vision, were discovered to be effects inseparable from the tissue of our nervous system.  A subjective neurological threshold, like the liquidy sheet of a waterfall at the mouth of a cave, separated us from external reality. 

Following the boom of university art departments and magazines devoted to art in the 1950’s, an analogous threshold was recognized in the way art was experienced.  Contact with art that mattered changed and was mainly restricted to university lecture halls and art magazines.  On their screens and in their pages a curious thing happened; art as different as the Mona Lisa and the pyramids could exist alongside one another of equal size, their dimensions determined by the frame that held them.  In the minds of some of the young artists looking, this novel way of perceiving art registered and contributed to a growing sense of art away from the object.  By the latter part of the 1960's new types of art emerged that concentrated either on the idea as art, or on the idea of art.  In certain cases art was being made not to be experienced directly, but to be seen through a record of its existence as a reproduction in photographs.  For some artists this included the manipulation of architecture and light as subjects to be photographed, but in the 1960's the field of sculpture was expanded to include their direct manipulation and display as sculptural materials.

Inspired by the ancient solar architecture of Europe and the Americas, as much as by the artists of the late 1960's, Nizam performed a series of architectural slicings and piercings made to channel light, and to be experienced only indirectly as photographs.  For Shard of Light Nizam cut a slit up the wall and across a section of ceiling of a house in Delta at the edge of the Fraser river.  The circular pattern of Drill Holes Through Studio Wall is what a starry sky might have looked like through the shaft at Xochicalco.  By the simplest of means Nizam has created a complex illusion. Through the arrangement of holes of different sizes, the circle bellies out into an orb and hangs there.  A beam of sunlight through a darkened window creates the glowing geometries of the Thought Forms.  In each of these, we see Nizam's manipulation of light across an architectural threshold transform nondescript rooms into containers of radiant ideal forms. 

Whereas Shard of Light and Drill Holes Through Studio Wall could be experienced directly if imperfectly in the world, the Thought Forms can only exist as photographs or ideas in the mind; they are illusions produced by a bit of photographic sleight of hand.  To make them appear Nizam had to use the magician's props of smoke and mirrors.  Smoke made the beam of light visible as Nizam bounced it from mirror to mirror.  Because the light could only be bounced three times from its source at the window before becoming too diffuse to continue, each form was composed in camera through a process of multiple exposures.  After waiting patiently, anticipating the moment the sun would finally appear through the hole in the blind, Nizam had to work quickly in sets of triads always starting at the source before the sun progressed too far; 1-2-3, 1-2-3, the rhythm of a waltz.

Given how important Nizam's experience of time, anticipation and patience were to his experiencing the light and making the photographs (as it must likewise have been to the ancient astronomers marking the passage of the sun on its yearly return) Nizam's decision to fix the light in photographs is curious, but consider its effects.  Experiencing the work as photographs encourages an engagement with the history of photography, and propels the metaphor photographic apparatuses/ architecture/eye forward.  The deeper effect is distancing the work from a specific physical location, and more importantly, from time.  What we don't see when we're looking at Shard of Light, Drill Holes Through Studio Wall, and Thought Forms is that the house in Delta was abandoned and waiting for demolition; that the holes drilled in the sheetrock wall of the studio are ragged; or that the hole in the window covering is torn and that the basement is dingy.  Standing in their presence as installations, location and detail would anchor the work, and ourselves, too firmly in the temporal world.  Draining our experience of time, and the associated conditions of anticipation and patience, the photographs push us away to a distance that allows the work to operate in a manner distinct from the ordinary; the light, and our experience of it, become eternal.

A fragment and a photograph are the same:  An architectural fragment is a piece isolated from the original totality of the architecture; a photograph is a piece isolated from the architecture of the world.  If we look for the connection between fragment and photograph in Trace Heavens besides their fundamental similarity as fragments, we find it in the effect they have on their subjects; they create distance.  Fragments of demolished homes retain a residue of their original function.  The entry stairs etched on the round copper plate of Disc still lead, the empty foundations of the Illuminations could still carry a home, but separated from their specific material destination they are freed to be thresholds to the immaterial and the imaginary.  After the general mysteriousness of references to ancient architecture, at the top of Disc's stairs I imagine one of those liquidy mirror-like portals favored by time travelers in science fiction.

Untethering these architectural elements as fragments is the equivalent of making the light eternal through photography.  The Illuminations gain additional distance from the ordinary by the strangeness of their appearance.  It's not only the difficulty of picking them out of their isolation in what looks like a landscape, but through their treatment as solarizations.  By flashing the photograph with light while it's being developed the lights and darks of the image are reversed so that it ends up looking like something in between a positive and a negative, and giving it it's silvery effect.  Released from the specifics of time and place Nizam moves light and architecture across the threshold from profane to the sacred world.  Turning full circle, when the ancients built their astronomical architectures, they did so to fix the light and make it as predictable as they could; like a photograph. 

The way Nizam has formed the light in immaterial pieces like Shard of Light and Thought Forms makes them truly liminal works on the threshold between photography and sculpture.  Firmly on the other side, the side of sculpture, are the works that Nizam lets us experience directly, Interminable Structure and Door Slab.  As fragments of architecture they share a subject with  a number of the photographs, but in many ways they're the photographs' reverse: white to black; light to the absence of light; straight to crooked; image to solid. 

The familiar diagram of the way perception works is of a pyramid leading away from its base at an object to an apex at an eye.  The diagram for the mechanics of a pinhole camera and camera obscura are the same, with the eye replaced by a small hole or lens.  The straight lines of the pyramid represent light, so it's not too much to say that perception is light.  Photography being an art of light, it is also the art of straight lines.  Interminable Structure is made of bent lines, photography's opposite, therefore sculpture.  The rebar from which it's made comes from the demolished buildings of the Little Mountain housing project, the site of Nizam's previous series Memorandoms.  In its present arrangement it resembles a ball or basket, but its individual pieces are infinitely variable.  As architectural wreckage it is similar to Disc and Illuminations. 

Door Slab is the clearest representation of a threshold or doorway.  Calling it a "slab" is a bit ironic since that usually implies a thickness.  It's a sculpture, but barely so; a thin film of Cinefoil (a matte black aluminum material used in photography and cinema) pressed into the mere imprint of a door.  With just more dimension than an image, it looks like it's working itself away from being a photograph towards an object.  Rather than reflecting light it leans against the wall, a wispy, dark shadow absorbing it.   

The awareness of existing at a threshold, whether within ourselves, in the world, or between this one and the next, is uniquely human, as is the desire to cross.  In the hubbub of the ordinary world, that awareness is often dampened.  Through photographs, sculpture, architecture, and light, especially light, Trace Heavens shows us that doorways between here and there abound, located right in front of us or deep in the primitive portion of our brains.  Through the poetry of its revolving metaphors it gives us a gentle, whispered reminder of the relationships between worlds.  By creating distance from the ordinary, Trace Heavens brings the recognition of our liminal state back to the threshold of consciousness and thereby takes its place as part of the fundamental expression of what it means to be human.

http://www.jamesnizam.com/

Memorandoms: An Assemblage of Nouns

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.

From nouns like "home", "loss", "memory", "sculpture", "photography", "drawers", "doorknobs", "pillar", and "hatch", Nizam has assembled quiet memorials that are elegant and sophisticated.  His art is an affirmation that the experiences of life can be transformed in and through art.  His lesson is to make the most of what time one is given.


http://www.jamesnizam.com/

Ann Goldberg - Still Life With Camera

A common assumption about painters called Photorealists, and this includes Ann Goldberg, is that they are obsessed with technique and getting paint to minutely reproduce visual reality.  But like most common assumptions, this one is not necessarily true.  Another name for "common assumption" is prejudice - the mistake of judging people and things by what they look like.  In visual art, prejudice is the mistake that comes from not judging things by what they look like.  That's what happens with Goldberg and her paintings.  Because of insufficient looking, assumptions have been made about what she is doing.  And I think it's been gotten all wrong.     

Goldberg isn't a Photorealist.  When you really look at her paintings she is only a tenuous Realist.  The impulse to paint in a deceptively realistic manner - today we would say in a Photorealist manner - predates the modern camera by millennia.  From the Roman naturalist and writer Pliny the Elder we receive the story of the famous Fifth century BCE contest between the painters Zeuxis of Heraclea and Parrhasius of Ephesus to determine which of the two was the greater artist.  When time came to reveal their work Zeuxis confidently drew aside the veil and showed his painting first - a picture of grapes that appeared so luscious and true that birds flew down from the trees to peck at them.  Zeuxis confidently asked Parrhasius to pull aside the curtain from his painting, only for Parrhasius to reveal that the curtain itself was the painting.  Zeuxis was forced to concede defeat, and is rumored to have said, "I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis."  That to me sounds like something that could be called Photorealism. 

Admittedly Goldberg paints from photographs, but she is neither producing a detailed representation like that of a photograph, nor representing familiar things as they actually are.  Not when you really look.  Why not then paint directly from the object?  Goldberg won't for many reasons.  There's the difficulty of controlling the conditions of light for the time necessary for her to paint a picture.  Through photography she can quickly and spontaneously compose.  She's attracted to the cropping, flatness, and shallowness of focus of photographs which she uses compositionally.  And even though painters have been using photography since its discovery, it still lends a sense of modernity.  So why doesn't Goldberg just show the photographs from which she paints?  Precisely because she is not a Photorealist.  Because that would be too precise.  Goldberg's paintings aren't so much about how much they look like the reality from which they're painted, but how they differ from it.  More proper is to simply call her a still-life painter.  The late art historian Meyer Schapiro said that the objects of still-life painting are "often associated with a style that explores patiently and minutely the appearance of nearby things - their textures, lights, reflections and shadows".  The objects of Goldberg's paintings are the everyday, but their subjects are the abiding values of light on objects, and of the capture and transformation of beauty.  What is particularly germane to seeing what Goldberg does is recognizing what Schapiro describes as the "subtle interplay of perception and artifice in representation".  In other words, how and what we see and the tricks we use to capture it, or in other words again, representation and abstraction.  Goldberg's paintings don't give the illusion of reality, it's the illusion of precision.  White Tea-Set is convincing in the painting of its sleek, white porcelain vessels - firm, modern, architectural.  Yet in the cup the swirling tea and cream are like sky or water.  Next door in the bowl the short choppy strokes of the sugar are like drapery or landscape.  A fluid abstraction in a cup.  A Cezanne in a sugar bowl.  Such a gulf separates these distinct ways of handling paint yet there they are side by side. 

There is a factualness to her paintings which is continuously slipping away.  She performs an up and back between concentrating now on representation, now on abstraction.  This isn't an unusual observation when looking at a painting.  We have learned that every painting by every artist is made up of strokes and smears which we can look at for their aesthetic qualities alone.  Representation doesn't preclude abstraction.  Goldberg however makes this oscillation a conscious part of her painting so that we can never get completely comfortable, can never relax in our looking at them.  Just when we do there is something we bump into which is jarring or even clumsy.  But if we trust Goldberg, and trust is essential in art, we will give her the credit she deserves of believing that she has blocked our way on purpose.  In Mussels With Lemon most of the shells are painted with a similar degree of verisimilitude.  They have a continuity of surface and a convincing concavity and convexity.  Look, however, at the shell just below the mid-line on the right.  Here there's no convincing continuity or illusion of surface.  Instead it's broken and daubed with as much bare as painted canvas.  With its rose highlight it's as much a miniature Impressionist painting of a sunset on water as anything else.  Like the Impressionists, her concern is with objects not resolved close up, but only at a distance, even if for her it's a near distance.  For the Impressionists that might be twelve inches, for Goldberg two.  Up close it's the marks that are important.  Her inclinations are at once to Realism and Abstraction and confirms her saying, "I like my work to take on the painterly significance of an expressionistic stroke as exemplified by De Kooning, but at the same time retain realistic and photographic qualities at a distance."  

Ann Goldberg paints as she does, not from an obsession with technique, but because this is who she is.  In an unstable, unsettling world, can trying to set it right and to fix its relationships through the arrangement and painting of its objects, be interpreted as a defensive or coping strategy?   A dreamed for wholeness and security?  Psychology is not unimportant in looking and thinking about art.  This is not to say that works of art are always mirrors of the artist's personality and character as was believed in antiquity - a belief revived in the Renaissance and since then gone in and out of fashion - but that they are always an expression of some part of it, no matter how evident or hidden.  Former mathematician, former architect, ordering the world, figuring out its equations, its sums and balances, comes naturally to Goldberg.  But just as in the real world, Goldberg's painted world doesn't resolve itself into elegant equations.  There are uncertainties and anomalies and paradoxes.  We see them in Olives in Glass Bowl where colors and shapes dissociate themselves from the objects they are supposed to describe and pull themselves out of the spatial relationships they are meant to define.  Look how the red of the pimento at the center right seems to push itself forward through the bowl and how the star shape at the lower left, that telltale mark of the pitting machine, looks misplaced and floats away from the olive it is supposed to be a part of.  In front of our eyes, Goldberg's world, and therefore our world too, pulls itself apart and is redefined not in terms of objects and spatial relationships, but in terms of Goldberg's most important value - beauty. 

"I see beauty and light as promise - a truth or hope in the darkness", says Goldberg.  And in the same moment we hear an echo of Medieval religious and philosophical thought, and also that of the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria.  Particularly the evocative story of the Breaking of the Vessels.  According to Luria, ten vessels corresponding to the ten archetypal values, the Sefirot, meant to contain the emanation of God's light, were unable to do so and six were shattered.  As their pieces fell through the void they trapped within themselves sparks of the divine light to compose the world in which we live.  In Goldberg's continuum from beauty and light through promise to truth and hope, her paintings are like little shards of light, little shards of goodness with which the world can be made whole again.  It's a beautiful, poetic thought for what can sometimes look like paintings of such a mundane collection of objects.  It were as if they were a part of a hidden combination.  That once the objects were arranged just so our troubled, gray world would unlock and we'd be flooded with light.  One can imagine this an ecstatic vision, much like the ecstasy of the Chassidim.  If we believe Luria, our world will be redeemed one small piece at a time.  And for Goldberg, one painting at a time.


http://www.anngoldberg.com/

James Nizam: Tumulus

Picking up a last cup of coffee, I boarded the 8:30 a.m. bus at gate No. 36 of New York City's Port Authority Bus Terminal headed West.  I relaxed into a window seat and let the cool flow of the air conditioner dry the sweat that had already started to dampen my shirt.  As we rumbled out of the cavernous underground parking complex, I caught a glimpse of New Jersey through a hot and hazy summer morning before descending into the Lincoln Tunnel.

On the other side, I watched as the bus passed by but not through first Passaic, then by but not through Clifton, and finally by but not through Rutherford.  While moving onward I was moving inadvertently backward through the life of Robert Smithson which left me curiously stationary, suspended.  I'd been planning a trip to Passaic to visit the monuments since first reading about them, a kind of Grand Tour of that other Eternal City, but had never gotten around to it.  They're mostly gone now - eternity doesn't last as long anymore.

Ever the dialectician, Robert Smithson said, We are lost between the abyss within us and the boundless horizons outside us, and as I look at the Tumulus photographs of James Nizam and Roger Eberhard I am reminded of how closely they are following his example.  But it's at a comfortable distance and the companionship is welcome.  It's a warm reminder, like finding a lost love.  Certain precursors are unavoidable consorts in experiencing and producing works of art.  I imagine them climbing fences side by side and walking their landscapes together - taking their photographs and talking about the inevitable crumbling of use to disuse, or the equally inevitable rising into ruins.  Beginning in antiquity, the list of artists who have recognized the appeal of ruins is a distinguished one and makes them part of a well established aesthetic.  In the Twentieth century the field was expanded to include the wreckage of industry.  Henry Miller is one of the literary fathers of the aesthetic - "Why do I talk ruins and destruction?  Because there is fascination in them.  Because, if one is sensitive and nostalgic, they make poems" - but it's J.G Ballard, inspirer of Smithson, who is it's greatest proponent - "I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels."  Besides the melancholy pleasure they give in themselves, ruins evoke a presence vanished, but also one beyond them.  They offer the opportunity for the operation of the imagination to restore them - every ruin is another opportunity.  It's not so much the work that links all these artists as it is their shared position as poets of wreckage.  As ruins, Nizam and Eberhard's tumuli are as close as it gets in Vancouver these days.  Standing in front of these large prints I am drawn in and enveloped by their lush greenness.  I can almost feel the cool dampness of a British Columbian forest.  

On a cold morning Nizam and I turned off Route 7B and continued driving East on a single lane.  We'd left the main highway some time before and the city had soon dropped away, replaced by lowlands that were planted with blueberries on both sides through which we now traveled.  The fan of the heater whirred and the voice of Khaals, the Great Transformer, told the story of the great chiefs Oe'lecten and Swaneset and how they'd made this region abundant.  Without realizing it we'd crossed over onto their traditional territory, the territory that had been granted by the Creator to their descendants - the Katzie people.  That was long in the past, but in 1846 when the British asserted sovereignty, the Katzie reasserted their own and continue to do so.  Arriving at the shore of Pitt Lake we met a one-legged fisherman who pointed out the direction where we could find the boatman to ferry us across the short expanse of Grant Narrows to our destination. 

Stepping out of the small boat on the other side we left our footprints next to countless others in the emerald green and rust colored moss that shrouded the bank of Siwash Island like the mist that was coming off the lake.  In the mid-1970s, the Katzie had leased their lands here at the mouth of the Pitt River to a developer who dreamed of creating a lakeside holiday resort.  Sixty-six small lots were created.  A-frame cabins brought in.  A restaurant was built.  When that dream vanished the Katzie offered the plots individually.  Many of the new "owners" expanded the cabins, adding decks and gardens, rooms and water collection systems.  Some had spent over two decades of weekends and vacations there with their families.  For some it was a place to retire.  Recently those leases had ended and the Katzie decided not to renew them, deciding instead to reabsorb the land into the band and give it a new use.  In the wake of this decision the owners were given the choice of removing the cabins and their contents or having them removed by the Katzie.  Some chose to burn their cabins in anger, some were abandoned.  The others had been knocked down and left in heaps.  These are what we'd come to see.  In imagination they were the original home, the archetypal hut of Adam in Paradise and of the hermit, and the little house in the woods of fairy tales and mythology distantly reflected in the suburban idyll of a cottage by a lake, and reduced to ruins.  In such abandoned sites normal rules no longer seem to apply, and there is a certain sense of abandon, a wanton freedom. 

 

As one surveys the horizon of human culture and the history of art, mounds are everywhere.  They are our ubiquitous markers.  In them we recognize an expression of the fundamental human urges to form, to organize and categorize, to move from the horizontal to verticality.  They are the child's sand castle.  They are the Tower of Babel.  They are the pyramids of Djoser and Khufu, the Stupa and the mounds in the regions of the Great Lakes and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers - strung together like beads.  Each mound takes its own characteristic shape dependent upon its materials, their quantities and distribution, while at the same time conforming to its general type so to be both random and determined.  Sand for instance, holds an angle of incline different than pennies, as in Gerald Ferguson's One Million Pennies, or the lettuce in Jeff Wall's Bad Goods, or letters in Robert Smithson's A Heap of Language.  At that point the material finds its unique angle of stability. 

In many respects mounds are an ideal symbol for simultaneity.  Simultaneously horizontal and vertical, they are simultaneously monuments to death and renewed life, loss and transformation - the one forever lurking in the other.  Because I always see the future, said Gustave Flaubert, the antithesis of everything is always before my eyes.  I have never seen a child without thinking that it would grow old, not a cradle without thinking of the grave.  Flaubert's transition from cradle to grave seems instantaneous, but looking at the mounds I also see the jerky stop action films of lava engulfing a town and army ants devouring a frog.  They are that inevitable march.  Of deterioration, but also of becoming.  A rising and falling like waves.

Before us the mounds were in the process of simultaneously deteriorating and becoming.  The materials were already beginning to rot and compress.  Soil would blow and eventually sift into the cracks, smoothing out the contours.  Moss and ferns would take root as would blackberry and alder, cedar and fir.  The mounds would be slowly swallowed by the forest and disappear.  You could already see that starting to happen with some.  In these moist forests, as in the boundlessness called time, nothing will last.  All will eventually be swamped and disappear under successive mounds of debris.  For now we're on top, but some day we'll find ourselves six feet under, then a mile.  All of our accomplishments will be compressed by time and pressure into an anomalous stratum as unusual and characteristic as the K/T boundary.  Quarries of the future will excavate slabs of concrete, blocks of asphalt.  This is the future for future builders.

Looking back at the photographs of Tumulus, their squat rectangles reinforce the pull of horizontal and vertical - an almost equal balance of forces.  We see the residue of our dreams and aspirations - to verticality, to conquest, to grandeur, to a way back home, to a cottage on a lake.  We also see the possibilities inherent in them - where disuse falls into pools of opportunity.  It's not a nostalgic lament for the past that they evoke, but also not a utopian yearning for the future.  It's a clear gazing at the present.  But one that incorporates both the depths of geologic time, and the future extinction of life as the rundown of energy is finally complete and entropy turns our sandbox a uniform gray.  

 

http://www.jamesnizam.com/

http://peperoni-books.de/tumulus_en.html

James Nizam: Anteroom

There's a problem with Vancouver photography.  It's not the photographers' fault, but Vancouver is too picturesque.  Everywhere you look it's a photograph.  It's not urban enough to be gritty, even downtown.  There's too much greenery, too many trees.  Most of all though it's the clouds.  The city of Vancouver is relatively low-built.  To its South and East is the flatness of the Fraser River flood plain.  This leaves the sky looking enormous.  To its North, Vancouver is built into the side of the North Shore Mountain range.  When clouds roll in they collide with the mountains and stack up over the city in magnificent towering formations.  This gives Vancouver its rain, but also a unique kind of light when the clouds are broken and sun shines through so that particular objects or areas are lit while their surrounding remains in darkness.  It's a particularly theatrical light - as if the whole city has been digitally enhanced.  Turning the sublime into the picturesque has always been a problem and Vancouver has a whole school whose photography ends up looking like a better Better Homes and Gardens.  One would expect that after so many average photographers have shot their rolls as practitioners of the banal, that after we've learned their lesson that the world around us as it exists is a beautiful, wonder filled place and that the least vista and object can be sublime, that they would have figured out that they'd made themselves redundant.  James Nizam is distinguishing himself as not one of those.

Anteroom (Pile of Toys in Room)

For his series Anteroom, Nizam turned the interiors of abandoned, soon to be demolished homes into room-sized camerae obscurae by fitting a makeshift lens to a hole he made in a wall, or attached to a hole in garbage bags covering a window.  Then, instead of exposing the projected image on photosensitive paper, he photographed it with a 35 mm camera.  By doing so we are able to see the character of the rooms he used and the jumbled leavings of the former occupants which become backdrops that sometimes blend with the projection, and sometimes fragment it beyond recognition.

Anteroom (Bungalow in Room)

Nizam is not alone in utilizing the camera obscura, and in this respect does fall in line with some of his contemporaries.  An example of early optical technology, the camera obscura is a precursor that led to the development of, and was supplanted by the modern multi lens camera.  As digital technologies of reproduction progressively move the multi lens camera aside, the camera obscura and the related pinhole camera, have increased in popularity with many artists for whom there seems to be a nostalgic, yet vital and necessary looking back toward the beginnings of photography.  They are a relief from technology, the antithesis of digital photography and computer manipulation. 

The mechanics of the camera obscura are the same as those for visual perception, and looking at the photographs reminds me of those illustrations of the principles of perception showing the light waves traveling through the hole of our pupil so that what's being looked at is projected upside down on the concave surface of our retina before being flipped by our brain.  The empty chamber of the camera obscura, the spherical cavity of the optical chamber, and the vacant interiors in which Nizam photographs are metaphors for the curved interior of the skull so that being in one of the rooms is like standing inside the skull and watching what comes in the small cyclopean eye. 

By trespassing into abandoned homes and changing their function from a sheltering to an aesthetic one, and by photographing the results of his trespass, Nizam approximates a subdued Gordon Matta-Clark.  But where Matta-Clark's work was sculptural and opened buildings up to themselves and to what was outside, Nizam brings the outside in in a painterly way - all color and light.  The actual view would be there if we could turn around, but we're held with our backs to reality and made to look at what Nizam has decided to compose.  So the point isn't the view beyond the wall or window, it must be the making of a photograph and how Nizam gets the picture into the room.  Standing in front of the photographs, it doesn't matter so much how or why Nizam makes them because they're compelling and evocative.  And for a moment, these discarded, and soon to be demolished shells of Vancouver homes, are given a final purpose - of beauty.

http://www.jamesnizam.com/

Robert Lobe

Imagine the sound - being in a deep forest and hearing the clink, clink, clink, of hammer on metal.  Only a hundred years ago it wouldn't have been so unfamiliar as smiths and masons did their work.  Imagine the sight - coming across a figure, bent over a rock or standing next to a tree and hammering over it a gleaming sheet of metal.  It's an image elfish and folkloric, yet the reality is neither.  The figure is Robert Lobe, the metal is aluminum, and the work he's engaged in is making sculpture.  Lobe's technique is a type of repousse, but rather than hammering thin sheets of metal into the hollow of a form, he hammers around rocks and trees.  Lobe leaves the marks of the tools and hammer to mimic the textures of bark and stone.  Even when using the percussive force of pneumatic equipment, the intensity of the time and closeness to the subject turns the labor from the power of hammer blows into the love of a caress.  In their tenderness and individuality the sculptures approach the character of portraits.  

Rocks and trees are among the small collection of landscape elements which form the bases of almost all figurative sculpture from the Greeks through the early Twentieth century when the base began to be considered old fashioned and unnecessary, and gradually disappeared in sculpture considered to be modern.  This little bit of landscape defined the territory of the figure above and declared, now you're in my world, now you're in the presence of art.  If one is familiar with this history there is enough similarity to the accustomed landscape of bases in Lobe's sculpture that an echo is produced and the absence of a figure becomes a noticeable one.  It isn't that every one of Lobe's sculptures is identifiable with another from history that has a figure.  The feeling that something is missing is more teasing and general than that.  Lobe gives a nod towards the figure in Bacchus at the Leap.  He's hammered in the god's attributes of grapes onto the rock, but where is Bacchus at Bacchus at the Leap? 

Gray, a forest of gray.  The color of winter, of leafless trees in rain, and granite.  Leaves are to a tree as color is to sculpture - distractions that interfere with the clarity of the more fundamental quality of structure, the bones of both tree and sculpture.  What gives sculpture its structure are its physical qualities, the thrust and concentration of its mass and volume.  For trees its their enduring elements of trunk and limbs.  For the most part Lobe dispenses with the distractions and leaves his work both leafless and the silver-gray of the aluminum, concentrating our attention on the light and shadow which molds and defines them.  When he does add leaves its only a small sprig.  When the sculptor Alberto Giacometti made the tree for the first production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot he placed on it a single leaf.  The effect was a tragicomic absurdity that was fitting for the play.  We know that Lobe's leaves aren't the result of hammering and they look stuck on, like a sentimental afterthought.  So full and resonant are his sculptures already, the leaves don't add anything .  Like the absence of a figure, were the leaves not included they would still be there as an absent presence.

Far from being the sublime and heroic landscape forms of art and imagination, Lobe's sculptures   have the character of memorials.  They cease to fulfill the expectations for landscape, especially those of an American landscape.  For truly no landscape has been viewed as heroically and imbued with so much of a nation's aspirations and personae as has the American, particularly that of the Northeast United States where Lobe lives and works.  This is the territory of the painters of the Hudson River School, the birth site of the vision and aesthetic of the American Landscape.  From here came not only the artists and writers of the aesthetic, but the consciousness that led to the founding of the National Park System beginning with Yellowstone in 1872 - the world's first national park.

What makes Lobe carry his sheets of aluminum out into the forest to pound over rocks and trees?

The reason for this is probably the same as for the continuing success and necessity of his sculpture even though relatively unchanged for thirty years.  "Men must retire from the world from time to time" the German author Goethe wrote, "for the world with its lewd and superficial activity interferes with the awakening of the best."  The site of that retreat and awakening is the wilderness - desert, ocean, but very often forest.  It lies deep in our arboreal ancestry, a memory of which is stirred by Lobe's sculpture. 

Brian Jungen

Alongside the towering motifs of Fetishization, Commercialism, Globalization and Transformation with which Brian Jungen's work is concerned, Loss stands off in a corner like a young child.  Call it the Loss of Splendor.  Mainly it's that of Aboriginal culture - to stereotypes, to jail, to alcoholism - but also of the natural world, and those of art and architecture.  The way loss is revealed is what makes Jungen a difficult artist - not because his work is difficult, but because it's difficult to know if it should be liked at all.  No, liked is the wrong word.  His work is impossible not to like because it's inventive, clever, well crafted and visually splendid.  The word is endorsed.   

The story of the catapult of Brian Jungen's success as an artist is becoming as well worn and as much a part of legend as the characters he represents in his series of sculptures that stand at the beginning of it.  In 1998, Jungen saw something in the colors of Nike Air Jordan shoes that probably hadn't been intended by Nike, or seen by anyone else.  Jungen took the shoes apart, and using the red, black and white of the shoes as a guide, restitched them to create Prototypes for New Understanding - remarkable representations of Northwest Coast Aboriginal masks.  Together with the Prototypes, Jungen is best known for another ongoing series of sculpture - the whale skeletons Shapeshifter, Cetology, and Vienna, the bones of magnificent creatures reduced to reproduction using plastic chairs.

The meshing of images and materials in sometimes uneasy combinations is intended as a critical comment and analysis, but it comes at a price.  In part these series are a reflection of ethnographic and natural history museums, but they also cast the disturbing shadow of trading post and souvenir shop - the trinkets and knockoffs made for a tourist market.  The shapes are right, but the materials are wrong - wrong in the sense that they demean their source.  There is something disturbing about an Aboriginal mask made of shoes and a whale skeleton made of plastic.  Are there things in this world that should be respected and left alone?  Should there be a moral imperative, a responsibility, not to act?  As laudatory as Jungen's ambition to confront difficult issues is, does his work alleviate or contribute to the problems?  Should he care?  

Being censorious are we getting it all wrong and overlooking the humor, missing the joke, that Jungen, and many writers on Jungen, call attention to?  Jungen's background is Swiss and Aboriginal, and according to Ojibwa writer Drew Hayden Taylor's new book Me Funny, permitted disrespect is characteristic of Aboriginal humor, especially teasing and self-deprecation.  Even so, the intention of making, or appearing to make, a joke can also be expressly to avoid censor, a defensive behavior to defuse criticism.  As a Jew, I understand the rules for telling racist jokes and I know self-deprecating humor - still, there are certain objects and symbols that I wouldn't disrespect.  There is a nuance here between something which is verbal and something which is physical, and it's what makes Jungen not so funny.  Jungen isn't telling jokes, he's making objects, and a verbal assault is very different than a physical one as the "sticks and stones" of children's rhyme teaches.  As a witness, the decline of a culture, like the loss of uniqueness because of globalization, is no joke.

After the thrill, these are frictions that animate Jungen's best work.  The sad irony is that the farther his work gets from the friction, the more it risks a bland conceptualism like Michael -reproductions of Air Jordan shoe boxes made in aluminum - and Modern Sculpture - silver soccer balls sewn together into biomorphic shapes and filled with lava rock.  In Guernica, Picasso could comment on the horrors of war without at the same time being complicit or even seeming to be, and still produce a  moving and provocative work of art.  Is the same possible for Jungen or is the greatest loss the impossibility of doing so?