During a period like ours in which most of what is thought to be interesting and of value in culture – visual or otherwise – takes full advantage of the physical, conceptual and ideological characteristics of translucency and transparency, it is more than a little weird to come across the provocatively dense work of Paul Sietsema. Appropriately included in a rather diverse peer group of Los Angeles-based sculptors who emerged from art school at the end of the 1990s, Sietsema has productively kept himself off to one side (sometimes literally in group exhibitions) largely because his sculptures are in fact films. If his work was something other than what it is, such a deliberate media shift on his part would surely be little more than a typical duck-and-cover, bait-and-switch move in what has become a well-rehearsed post-conceptual blur of filmy thinness, the surface of which isolates art from meaning like oil from water.
While it is true that Sietsema does take
full advantage of another kind of polarity in his work – the positive and
negative that make photographic reproduction possible – in his films he is
able to make such a division into something rock solid. Yet they remain
opaque not only as a visual phenomenon but also, and more importantly, as a
vital conceptual problem. In other words, one of the most refreshing aspects
of Sietsema’s work is that it can be satisfying precisely because the very
last thing you really want to do is figure it all out.
This unique state of affairs has led me to think of Sietsema himself as if
he were an opaque projector, an artist-as-machine in the spirit (not to
mention the form) of Warhol. Sietsema has very quickly been able to figure
out how to take something solid, put it on film, and have it hit the wall on
the other side of the room as something quite different, as some kind of
obviously intangible material that has been transformed into something
hypersolid. Of course, identifying Sietsema as being like such a rudimentary
teaching machine has the additional benefit of conjuring up fuzzy childhood
memories. Not only of all those faded pictures in well-worn textbooks that I
remember being put on the flatbed of an opaque projector so that the whole
class could see them (unfortunately in the late 1960s I didn't have a clue
about Rauschenberg and – as Leo Steinberg named it – his ‘flatbed picture
plane’), but also the dusty filmstrips and especially the noisy film
projectors that were just like the ones that Sietsema favours today. And
while the two short 16mm films that he has produced to date – the 19-minute
Untitled (Beautiful Place) (1998), and the recently completed 24-minute
Empire (2002) – owe a reasonable debt to Fashions (1996), a 12 minute 16mm
film by Charles Ray (who was one of Sietsema’s professors at UCLA), due to
their similar physical and structural circumstances, I found myself struck
during my first viewing of Empire by how much more it made me think of Ray’s
boxes, especially Ink Box (1986), 32x33x35=34x33x35 (1989), and 7 1/2-ton
Cube (1990).
Given the laundry list of imagery in Sietsema’s Empire – an almost invisible grasshopper on a leaf, a hollow wasps nest-like form rather obliquely (as opposed to opaquely) derived from a work of Louise Bourgeois and a little-known sculpture by Jackson Pollock, a tessellated crystalline formation, an out-of-focus spindly geometric structure, a rococo interior from the Hôtel de Soubise in Paris and (most conspicuously) Clement Greenberg’s well-stocked living room as presented in a 1964 issue of Vogue – in the end it is a complete surprise that the cumulative effect of Sietsema’s film is more like that of Ray’s boxes: a real thing that holds our attention with its presence rather than its referents. It may be nothing more than a 24-minute block of projected light on a wall, but it sure is heavy in both senses of the word (even when compared with the 24-hour film of the same name by Warhol).
All of which brings to mind Clement Greenberg, particularly the last paragraph of an essay he wrote in 1958 called ‘Sculpture in Our Time’: ‘It is its physical independence, above all, that contributes to the new sculpture’s status as the representative visual art of modernism. A work of sculpture, unlike a building, does not have to carry more than its own weight, nor does it have to be on something else, like a picture; it exists for and by itself literally as well as conceptually. And in this self-sufficiency of sculpture, wherein every conceivable as well as perceptible element belongs altogether to the work of art, the positivist aspect of the modernist "aesthetic" finds itself most fully realised. It is for a like self-sufficiency that both painting and architecture seem to strive.’
At first, such a declaration seems utterly to invalidate any notion of Sietsema’s practice as sculpture, given that both of his films have in fact been created from elaborate models made by the artist (the ‘subjects’ of Untitled (Beautiful Place) are flowers and plants made from foam, paper, and paint). With Empire, Sietsema’s models have become even more elaborate (even outrageous), and while they are not meant to be shown, one can get a sense of their complexity from the numerous drawings and notebook pages that Sietsema does make public. If we were to remain merely focused on these models, then the film would be in trouble, a simple set of trickster pictures set in a rather tedious suspended animation. However, Sietsema’s decision to film and project his work in the negative significantly changes the terms of both the picturing and the projecting: no longer are the images merely on something else (the film itself). Rather they are ultimately substantiated as ‘positivist’ precisely because of their negative status, an added benefit of which is a completely seductive and otherworldly glow. In a telling companion work to the film, Untitled (flat space) (2001), Sietsema presents two photographs of the Greenberg apartment side by side in a presentation case. Each photograph was made by collaging the negative space of the positive photograph into the negative photograph, and vice versa, effectively making the bland description of the title anything but.
In the end, it is important to realise that even though Sietsema’s film stubbornly adheres to its own self-sufficiency in terms of its literal and figurative opaqueness, it maintains what I want to call its humanity by acknowledging the critical, even natural, outcome of such opacity: the reflection. Two statements from the artist are germane here, the first from an interview with Raymond Pettibon from 2000: ‘I’m interested in applying Darwinist ideas to cultural evolution. Greenberg’s environment is a reflection of him, and the grasshopper evolved to match the leaves so the birds wouldn’t come along and eat it. It’s a reflection of its environment. The direction of aesthetic flow is the opposite.’ More recently, in an artist book called Construction of Vision that documented Sietsema’s participation in Sonsbeek 9 in 2001, a dialogue presumably written by the artist invoked the memory of Gauguin’s black mirror, a common tool of artists from the late nineteenth century, and subsequently provided an appropriate summation of the experience of Empire: ‘I don’t quite understand. What did they use them for? To refresh their vision. Renew their reaction to colour, the tonal variations. After a spell of work, their eyes fatigued, they rested themselves by gazing into these dark mirrors.... It’s soothing. Soothing, and also disquieting. The blackness, the longer one gazes into it, ceases to be black, but becomes a queer silver-blue, the threshold to secret visions; like Alice, I feel on the edge of a voyage through a looking glass, one I’m hesitant to take.’
Terry R. Myers is a critic and independent curator who lives in Los Angeles