Fabrication and Encounter
When Content is a Verb
- Paula Owen -
A few years ago, as I approached the rural home/studio of sculptor Mara Adamitz Scrupe, I spied her small figure digging a trench high in the riverbank along her property. Her intention was to create a solar-powered illuminated work incised in the contour of the surrounding wooded hillside, which would glow for those crossing the bridge below. For her, the phenomenal and conceptual dimensions of this enterprise were profoundly intertwined with the process of manually digging the trench, much as they were for Chris Burden's Honest Labor (1979).
How do we understand a trench dug by handor, for that matter, an effusively beaded environment by Liza Lou or the miniature clothes of Charles Le Dray? And what of the private obsessive performances of Linda Hutchins' typed patterns or the grueling labor of a Janine Antoni performance/sculpture1 For these artists, the process of fabrication is inextricable from the final result and, I would argue, springs from an impulse curiously similar to such artists as Rirkrit Tiravanija or Felix Gonzalez-Torres and others for whom the final result is dependent upon viewer participation. In either case, the art object per se is subsidiary to the activity that surrounds it.
The de-emphasis of the object is intriguing to consider from a variety of perspectives, not least because it concerns such disparate artists employing such diverse forms and processes but also because it calls into question centuries of general agreement about how art is perceived. De-emphasizing the object also subverts the logic on which much of society is based and challenges our assumptions about what constitutes an aesthetic experience. And, while many artists turn fabrication over to others, negating the process in favor of the conceptual, others consider the actual methods of construction to be vital to a work's content. In many cases, fabrication is the content or the most important aspect of it.
Dave Cole, The Knitting Machine, 2005
Twenty-five metric ton excavators, red, white and blue acrylic felt, aluminum utility poles, carved wood tips
Dimensions variable
Courtesy MASS MoCA
Conversely, artists like Tiravanija are not creating objects at all; instead, they create the conditions for content to occur. With little or no emphasis on formal properties, their art still depends on the activity of production, though it is performed not by the artist but by the spectator: detached contemplation is replaced by physical engagement and the unfamiliar, unpredictable and visceral response that accompanies it.
While viewer participation has long been understood as a part of contemporary art practice, thoughts on the role and valence of such work are constantly surfacing, many of which extend from Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics (1998). Bourriaud addresses the art of the nineties, saying that [Modern] art was intended to prepare and announce a future world: today it is modeling possible universesThe role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist. Bourriaud cites works that provide opportunities for everyday activities to occur within artworks that are not about merely looking but about interactivity and the displacement of public and private realms.
Spectator participation in art today extends the practice of participatory completion into dizzyingly hybridized realms. Take Vectorial Elevation, a project first produced by Raphael Lozano-Hemmer to celebrate the coming of the New Year in Mexico City's Zócalo Square (1999/2000). In expanded versions of the project conceived in Spain (2002), France (2003) and Ireland (2004), Lozano-Hemmer erected eighteen robotic searchlights controlled by a 3-D interface. Not only could their luminescence be observed in the night sky, their movement could be watched and controlled by individuals all over the world via the Internet. What does a project like this say about process, observation, participation and interconnectedness? It is an anomaly, at once physically and metaphorically attached and detachedinterconnected, physical and virtual, public and privateor does this project reflect the inherent hybridity of contemporary art process and practice?
Linda Hutchins, Reiteration (Right Now), 2003
Typewriting on tracing paper
8 x 98 inches
Courtesy the artist
In contrast to collective public experiences, critic Suzanne Ramljak, former editor of Sculpture and current editor of Metalsmith, emphasizes private interactivity in her theories on the power of the intimate encounter to generate a heightened sense of self-awareness. In her essay Intimate Matters, 2 she cites the work of Alyssa Dee Krauss, who is also propelled by an interactive impulse but on a scale quite different from Lozano-Hemmer's epic lightshow. Krauss creates wearable works that can be perceived only by the wearer and are usually hidden from sight. Some are fur-lined, meant to be worn against the skin; others integrate secret messages in Braille and Morse code. 3 The relationship between the object and the viewer (or wearer in this case) is built around what Bourriaud calls the transivity, or the tangible properties of objects that introduce into the aesthetic arena that formal disorder which is inherent to dialogue. The concept of formal disorder, which suggests that art is not fixed but evolving erratically, conveys the relational, conditional and overlapping intentions inherent in such works.
While Bourriaud concentrates on art that involves spectator participation, his general thesis applies also to works in which the process of labor-intensive fabrication is as important as the object. In these works, the content is not wholly fixed but occursat least in partduring production. Bourriaud says that the setting is widening for the object or the artistic thing. The form of a work cannot be reduced to the simple effects of a composition, as the formalistic aesthetic would like to advancebut is a linking element, a principle of dynamic agglutinization. An artwork is a dot on a line.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation, Relational Architecture 4, 1999-2004
Interactive installation/performace at the Zócalo Square in Mexico City and on http://www.alzado.net
Photos by Martin Vargas
I contend that the content and meaning of the object emerges from the activity on either side of Bourriaud's dot on a line. It precedes, occurring in the activity of fabrication, or follows in the activity of the encounter, greatly expanding the viewer's opportunities for involvement, reflection, reaction and discourse. This defies the conceit of the object and the suggestion that meaning is timeless and permanent. Content and meaning that is derived from interactivity or process is quite the oppositealways in flux, non-linear and non-hierarchic. It is what Chicago-based critic Polly Ullrich calls an aesthetic of immersion. In her essay Workmanship: The Hand and Body As Perceptual Tools, she says that these works reflect
immersion in an event of the body or in lifethe juxtaposition of our embodied selves and our corporeal world within a technological and scientific worldview that relies on decoherence and cybernization to explain and depict the material environment and human relationships.
Janine Antoni, Caryatid, 2003
C-print and broken vessel
Egg pot with brown oxide over clay with black glazed interior, brown tea jar
Photo: 31 1/4 x 87 3/4 inches
Vessel: 13 x 14 x 16 inches
collection of the Blanton Museum, Austin
Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
The aesthetic of immersion is well known among craft artists, who have long maintained that much of any object's content and meaning emerges during use, as well as from the materials themselves and from the process of fabrication, with their related traditions and history. The feminist narratives of Shari Urquhart, for instance, are authoritative and compelling because they are produced as massive hooked rugsa technique both laborious and anachronistic. Similarly, a sinuous ceramic cup by Sam Chung cannot be thoroughly understood until it is held in the hands and touched to the lips.
This, in many ways, helps explain why in the 1980s a remarkable number of artists adopted techniques and materials associated with the craft arts. In response to a cultural environment flush with feminist and multicultural influences and a material environment teeming with consumer debris, all within an increasingly desensitized, disconnected and disembodied backdrop, artists returned to the metaphorical and literal use of handwrought processes. Elaine Reichek, for example, was one of the first conceptual artists to use knitting and embroidery as a means of examining beliefs and preconceptions about aesthetics and culture, while many young artists began using the materials and processes from the craft arts because they yearned to make things or for ironic purposes.
Whether expressed through an engagement with the process or an engagement with the audience, in cyber-productions, everyday activities or private encounters, this work is contrary to Western dualism because it accepts the totality of human perception and sensation as a rich and embodied way of being in the world. In her essay on workmanship, Ullrich observes that scholars and artistseven those in media that seem most dematerializedare now working out a kind of integration of the visceral body and the cerebral mind that centuries of Western thought have attempted to deny. The old internal, Cartesian model is slipping, giving way to an understanding that consciousness emerges from a network of cognitive, experiential and perceptual functions. This tendency, discernible in a wide variety of art forms produced by a wide variety of artists, suggests that the locus for aesthetic experiencesor, more to the point, our understanding of themis not only expanding but shifting radically.
Notes
1 Antoni, whose primary tool for making art has always been her own body, reports that performance wasn't something I intended to do. I was doing work that was about process, about the meaning of making, trying to have a love-hate relationship with the object. I always feel safer if I can bring the viewer back to the making of it.
2 M. Anna Fariello and Paula Owen, eds., Objects and Meaning: New Perspectives on Art and Craft, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004).
3 Alyssa Dee Krauss says that what excites her is the relationship that can exist between a piece and its wearer, an object and its holder; the idea that people develop personal, sentimental, or intellectual affinities with objects.