Dan Havel and Dean Ruck: Inversion
Art League Houston
- Diana Lyn Roberts -
There’s always something interesting to see on Montrose, but Art League Houston recently upped the ante with Dan Havel and Dean Ruck’s latest installation. Inversion transformed an old education facility—two connected, circa 1920s houses—into a vortexlike spectacle, paradoxically undermining and reinforcing every logical assumption about architectural space in a compelling, visually arresting and thoughtful work of art.
Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, Inversion, 2005
Site specific installation
Installation view, Art League Houston
Photos by Gloria Mashayekhi
Inversion utilizes two existing Art League houses at Montrose Boulevard and Willard Street, both slated for demolition in early June to make way for an improved facility. Havel and Ruck began working in late April to transform the old buildings into a traffic-stopping installation, which was completed in 300 man-hours over a four-week period. The artists, who both collaborated with Kate Petley on a similar project some ten years ago, have a penchant for exploring and exploiting architectural ideas to sculptural and conceptual ends.
Looking at first glance like a strange explosion, the external skin of the building (planks of pine siding) becomes an internal structure, a gently undulating vortex that winds its way through the house to a narrow opening at the back end. Once it catches your eye, you are visually and conceptually sucked in through the mouth of the structure, and carried about sixty feet to a narrow, approximately 24-inch opening at the other end, which visually encircles an exposed pipe on the corrugated metal building just beyond. While your eyes adjust to the light, the corrugations dance around; your brain tries to make sense of the capped-off pipe elbow in the distance, which doesn’t have any apparent function. It feels suspiciously like a Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam-style construct.
Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, Inversion, 2005
Site specific installation
Installation view, Art League Houston
Photos by Gloria Mashayekhi
All of this would seem gimmicky and self-conscious were it not for the thoughtfully conceived, carefully constructed and fully realized sculptural integrity of the piece. One common problem with installation work in general is the reliance on a thin shred of concept—interesting ideas typically undermined by short-changing the physical quality of the work. Inversion is firmly grounded in its physical character. It has all the appeal of a charming old house, with its weather-worn paint and sturdy wood—a construction made more interesting by a decontextualized existence. From inside one of the houses, you can see the external construction of the vortex—the structural buttresses around the coiling form—made from cannibalized materials. Again, there is a sense of inside/out and outside/in: a conceptual idea reinforced by the physical construction itself.
There’s also a small exhibition inside the house: preparatory drawings of the project along with independent works by both artists. This allows the viewer a sense of the working and thought processes that inform the work; it also fits the installation, both logically and aesthetically, into the larger body of both artists’ creative output.
Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, Inversion, 2005
Site specific installation
Installation view, Art League Houston
Photos by Gloria Mashayekhi
For more than thirty years, these two old houses served as classroom and gallery spaces for the Art League. The structures were joined by a central corridor, along which the present vortex follows the path of innumerable footsteps and energies. Ultimately, Inversion pays homage to the original structure, its history and its relevance to the League’s legacy of bringing art into the community. That’s asking a lot, and the fact that Havel and Ruck made it successful—and, in so doing, brought more attention to the organization’s past and future—is quite remarkable. At a basic level, it is also, quite simply, intriguing. It’s not just the art community that stops to examine the inner workings and conceptual subtleties of the Inversion. Pretty much everybody who sees it stops to take a look; most also take photos. For many, the impulse to climb through as far as one can go is too strong, despite discretely placed signs requesting viewers not to enter. It’s fitting that an old classroom is literally funneling the community at large into an art context—an aesthetic experience they can’t quite articulate but are, nevertheless, compelled to engage in.