Peter Rostovsky
Hudson (Show)Room, Artpace San Antonio
- Kelly Baum -
This summer the Hudson (Show)Room at Artpace San Antonio was home to a solo exhibition by Russian-born, New York-based artist Peter Rostovsky. At one end of the gallery hung a series of paintings based on photographs the artist took during a recent trip to Nice, France. Each one depicted a swimmer or cluster of swimmers floating in a vast expanse of turquoise-blue water. The swimmers’ faces registered neither joy nor delight. Indeed, with no horizon line to orient themselves and no shoreline to swim towards for safety, the men and women looked less like tourists enjoying a pleasant afternoon at the beach than the victims of a shipwreck.
Most appealing about this series was its unsettling melancholy. Lacking, however, was the intellectual rigor of the two paintings that hung at the opposite end of the gallery: Eclipse (2000) and Epiphany Model 4: Meteor Shower (2004). These were by far the most captivating works in the exhibition precisely because they prompted viewers to think critically about the experience of “captivation” as it pertains to art as well as nature.
Rostovsky has described his work as an investigation into the sublime, and captivation is one of the many sensations triggered by contact with the sublime. In his 1757 text A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke characterizes the sublime as “[w]hatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, whatever is in any sort terrible.” When encountered in nature—a primary source of the sublime, according to Burke—the sublime evokes “astonishment” tinged “with some degree of horror.” Upon first glance, Rostovsky’s work seems to dovetail with Burke’s concept of the sublime. The painting Eclipse, for instance, depicts just that—the moon as it passes in front of the sun. Rostovsky heightens the already considerable psychological impact of the eclipse by magnifying its scale several thousand times over, thereby transforming the small black disc familiar to most viewers into a gaping (and altogether ominous) black hole.
What Eclipse seems to confirm, however, Epiphany Model 4 disputes—that is, the ability of nature to elicit feelings either of pain or danger, astonishment or horror. Epiphany Model 4 is a hybrid of painting and sculpture. The painting depicts a pristine landscape: tall mountains recede into the distance while meteors streak across the night sky, their paths marked by trails of vapor and dust. Placed two feet in front of the painting is a pedestal supporting a small sculpture of two figures resting at the summit of a rocky, moss-covered hillside. With their backs to the viewer, the figures appear to gaze at the landscape directly before them.
Peter Rostovsky, Eclipse, 2000
Acrylic on canvas
108 x 72 inches
We might imagine, following Burke, that the figures’ faces register something akin to astonishment or horror, but that is not the case at all. The woman seems distracted, perhaps even a little perturbed (almost as if she were suffering from a headache or worrying about a bill she forgot to pay before leaving on vacation). The man’s expression is more difficult to read. He neither smiles, nor frowns; neither weeps, nor cringes. No matter what he is experiencing, however, it is most certainly not the sublime. Here it becomes apparent why Rostovsky chose to separate the figures from the canvas. Their position relative to the painting was intended to act as a metaphor for their psychological estrangement from the landscape and from nature.
If Epiphany Model 4 evokes the sublime at all, it is the sublime as portrayed in Hollywood cinema—what we might call the mediated or de-realized sublime. While the landscape scene, enveloped as it is in the purple-blue haze of a camera filter, recalls painted backdrops from movies, commercials and television shows, the work as a whole evokes an equally mundane experience—sitting in a movie theater staring at the people in front of you staring at the screen in front of them.
Epiphany Model 4 addresses the mechanics of spectatorship in other respects as well. For instance, it is impossible not to recognize something of ourselves as viewers in the two figures resting atop the pedestal. Just as they gaze at the landscape scene, we too gaze at Epiphany Model 4. To put it another way, when we look at the figures looking at the landscape, we are also looking at ourselves looking at Epiphany Model 4. This holds true, however, only if we are standing behind the pedestal. Upon moving between the painting and the pedestal, we see, in addition to the sculpture, other viewers—some wander around the gallery, others examine the works described earlier. In this way, Epiphany Model 4 activates the gallery, transforming it into a kind of theater for the performance and contemplation of spectatorship.