Semblances Re-Assembled
By Jen Caruso
Introduction:
Semblance [Schein] that must be explained (for example, error):
that must be eschewed (for example, Sirens); that should be ignored (for example, will-o’-the-wisps).
Another classification of semblance:
Semblance behind which something is concealed [….].
Semblance behind which nothing lies concealed […].
– Walter Benjamin, “On Semblance.”
The first time I see the Semblances show, it is in the context of a gallery walk-through with Chris Atkins, the coordinator of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. To prepare, my students and I have just read selections from Douglas Crimp’s On the Museum’s Ruins, and readings suggested by Natasha Pestich. In the context of the walk-through, Chris suggests that these installations are “light-handed riffs” on questions posed by institutional critique. He muses, in conversation with my class, whether a museum can too easily absorb any critique, and the irony of leaving the door open, so that artists might make the critique. These questions are raised again, in other formulations, during the artist’s talk on November 17th: In a series of exchanges, directed towards the artists, they struggled to articulate responses.
For some reason, I think of the opening of Through the Looking-Glass, when Alice, frustrated with the reality with which she is presented, wants to find a way out, to play “let’s pretend,” but no one will play with her. Pressed up against the mirror, she says:
“if you leave the door…wide open; and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it.”
Can institutional critique take the form of a gentle nudge, be slight or subtle, a play with forms and shapes, and the form of an invitation, not a demand, to come and play?
Jennifer Danos: curious, without judgement
There is a scene in A.S. Byatt’s Still Life in which a character, listening to a lecture on Mallarmé, feels “actually afraid,” to see the world of “color, lights, solidity” disappear, now only “inhabited by the ghosts of these things.” During our class visit, Chris Atkins notes that visitors comment that they feel uneasy, as if they have arrived either too early or too late, to view Jennifer Danos’s installation.
The forms resemble what you might make if you played a memory game, if you walked through the previous exhibition space (now featuring a retrospective of editions from Highpoint) and were then asked to make an image of what you remember. The memory trigger might be when you see the didactic material from the previous room presented in reverse-image black-and white and in mirror-image, but also much simplified, form without content, iconic. Two large empty vitrines lean uneasily against a temporary wall, mute ciphers or placeholders for a smaller pair of framed prints that hang more purposely in the previous space. I play the game, surprised at how long it takes me to spot the differences. As in Alice in Wonderland, the scale is off. The empty center vitrine in Danos’s version is enormously high, the blank surface like a white-iced sheet cake. Santiago Cucullu’s prints are telescoped down and appear on a flat-screen television. But, approaching any screen, we adjust to virtual reality, automatically, turn screen images back to “size,” and the image swells to actual size, not miniaturized at all. The screen image is on a feedback loop, another Alice image, down the rabbit hole. I find that less than space, this installation plays with memory, with the objects taking the form of afterimages with all subjective distortions of scale.
At the artist’s talk, Danos notes that she does not want her critique to be heavy-handed. Her investigation of institutional cues is motivated, she says, solely by curiosity. Holding up to critique even her own concern about her initial resistance to working within institutions, she calls this an exploration of the way space might be reworked to trigger a repeat experience. “Is it too subtle?” someone asks her, directly. It is a genuine question.
Perhaps anything that troubles the reality with which we are presented, any slight disturbance, is powerful. For like the looking-glass world, it will appear in the semblance of what we have been given, but demonstrate the potential for being “quite different.”
Marcus Young: the art object
It is Friday, November 25th, and I am in Chicago. The AIC is crowded, and because he is very tall, and because he is wearing the same thing he wore before, layers of baggy khaki, I recognize the man and the mustache. It is The Man with the Mustache. But it is crowded, and I watch him move away from me, a full head above the surge, without following him. All weekend, I vacillate between being sure it is him and not being sure, and about the confrontation that impressed this man’s image upon me.
It would not have been so unusual if it were him. We so clearly resemble each other, a type who goes to artists’ talks in the major art institutions of the cities where we live and visit, that I wonder at the vehemence of his reaction to Marcus Young’s artist’s talk the previous week. “When I first saw you, I wanted to hit you, because you embody all the arrogance of the art world…” to which Young had responded, “First, thank you for not hitting me….”
Young’s performance evolved from an objective of conviviality, a way to infuse the space of the gallery with the energy of life (“Maybe I can find a boyfriend”), to a more melancholy meditation on the vulnerability of art objects. For ten days, he turned himself into an art object, on loan. He wanted to live in the company of an Ad Reinhardt painting, a piece so damaged that it could not be put on display. In “Valery-Proust-Museum,” Adorno says that all objects in museums take on the process of dying. It is this dying to which Young surrendered, for ten days. And when he breaks his silence at the artist’s talk his message is so simple as to be banal, “You are all beautiful.” With ten days in the museum, he tells us, he did not look at the objects but at the people. I believe he was sincere in his claim that our vivacity was experienced by him as beautiful. Benjamin tells us, that “Every living thing that is beautiful has semblance.” But also, “Every artistic thing that is beautiful has semblance because it is alive in one sense or another.” What Young has experienced then is the space between, the living thing that becomes a work of art resembles life only in the way that “artistic things” take on the “semblance” of life. It is for this reason he cannot decide on the status of his own gesture when confronted with such hostility. “Was I the art?” “No, I think, you are the art.” No, we are not. We are alive, with all the violence that living things can inflict on objects. I am left still wondering about the experience of vulnerability. How we care appropriately for art objects, to do justice to things, to sustain them? And protect them from harm in a time in which the art object is an object of wrath?
Dissatisfied, I return to the MAEP gallery a week later. The performance costumes are bagged, and hang on their hooks. Beside the mat and cushion are collected random objects: a pencil, a penny, a broken shell, bits of origami, a paper airplane made from a receipt, a postcard of the Maxfield Parish mural in the other wing, notebooks, a cup, a potted orchid. I think how, cleaning the gallery, I might look for such abandoned small things, like a beachcomber. I drift off to look again at Jennifer Danos’s work. When I turn back to enter the room, Marcus Young is there with his mother and another young woman. Sister? He takes the orchid off for watering. The site is tended. I linger a little, as he shows the space to them, whispering, “There’s not much to see…” They peer behind the curtain that is sewn to resemble the wall, but only in the way that fabric can resemble a solid thing, with a little shabby Oldenberg sag. They stand. And then, he takes off his shoes and reenacts the performance for about ten minutes.
Natasha Petisch: a modicum of truth
Michael Winterbottom’s film, 24 Hour Party People, describes the difference in scale between the actual event and its afterlife in the context of music scenes. “The smaller the attendance, the bigger the history.” It is in this way that I first approach “The Exhibition Posters of Jan Xylander.” What these posters evoke are the layered mythologies around a person who immediately becomes fiction by creating an open field of possibility that Natasha Pestich calls an “invitation” to play. Let’s pretend there was an artist, and his name was Jan Xylander.
The exhibition posters make references to handmade local communities who were Jan Xylander’s strongest supporters. They reference the real existence of the grassroots art community, its networks of communication and temporary spaces, forming only to dissolve, leaving just such archives as the posters on display here. Using Google Street View, I find 2742 Central Avenue, just a few streets away. The Oh, Maker Gallery is a graveyard. 298 Clinton Avenue, Detroit, is a parking lot in Greektown. Because I grew up and spent my formative times in rust belt cities, I understand the porosity and fragmentary nature of urban space. It is perfectly plausible that these galleries might once have existed. Idly, I google, “The Palace at 4 Am” to see what became of a tiny art space in London, Ontario (it is gone), and find the online archive for the Cornershop in Buffalo, New York, a multi-use space that existed between 1997-2000, noting that the archive came into existence almost immediately after the gallery closed.
And while I want to play with her, I feel unable to play within this fiction and feel strangely saddened. By the time the posters appear here, in this space, it is already over (so soon?) and, like all events in which we were never present, we regret missing the conviviality promised by those ephemeral “communities,” in the museum, in the archive, devoid now of life.
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