It’s curious how almost every article written about Martin Kersels gives, or attempts to give, his measurements. And that they are all different. He is variously described as being six foot five inches, six foot six inches, six foot seven inches, almost six foot eight inches tall, and as weighing over 300 pounds, over 350 pounds, and even 26 stone (which my calculator tells me is 364 pounds). I wonder how they know? These wild guesstimates at girth and heft expose the undeniable burden placed on the writer, which is to give a sense of the scale, the mass, the gravity and balance of this work – and to connect that sense of scale to the body and psyche of the artist.
Martin Kersels is a man-mountain. I am not
petite – in fact I’m a large, tall woman – but he makes me feel diminutive.
He is like the Rock of Gibraltar, you feel you can lean on him, that he
would shelter you. He is as big as a barn door, he is like a Mack truck, he
is as big as a house. His photographs show him tripping and falling in the
street – a minor catastrophe – or leaning to the point of falling,
mountainous, out in an empty landscape. They show him throwing his
(delighted) friends up in the air, or spinning them by the ankles (as you
might swing a two year old, turning in circles). As a kid, he was so much
bigger than his friends, he could become a funfair ride for them. As a young
man, once, he picked up his father in the kitchen, and cradled him in his
arms. He’s big.
Beginning in performance, as a member of the group SHRIMPS from 1984–93,
Kersels went on to make a series of what he called ‘performative objects’,
machines or sculptural devices which move and/or generate sounds, taking
over the gallery, and functioning as awkward stand-ins for the artist
himself. In Twist (1993) a found prosthetic leg (complete with sock and
shoe) hangs from a thick skein of rubber bands that is turned, slowly and
relentlessly, by a simple motor. At a certain point, the twisted rubber
bands cause the leg to thrash around pointlessly, hurling itself into the
wall. In Piano Drag (1995) an electric winch pulls a baby grand piano across
the gallery floor, its halting movements registered by microphones buried in
the innards of the piano. Eventually the dragged piano pulls its own
electric cord out of the opposite wall, and everything stops, silent. These
pieces are both funny and painful, proposing a circuit of reaction in the
viewer, which comes full circle, from laughter to tears.
More recently, Kersels built Tumble Room (2001), inspired by the scene in Stanley Donen’s film Royal Wedding (1951) in which Fred Astaire dances up walls and across a ceiling. This project required the construction and realisation of Kersels’ most enormous ‘performative object’, a room which could turn (full circle), with a video camera attached. Because the camera turns as the room turns, the illusion is created that the people (and in one happy moment, the dog) are actually lying, standing and dancing on the ceiling. Kersels chose to construct the room as an adolescent Southern Californian girl’s bedroom, complete with pink décor, single four-poster bed, and popstar posters on the walls. His friend, the dancer and choreographer Melinda Ring, who happens to be tiny, performs in the video: lounging around, her languorous movements recall the repressed (sexual) intensity of teenage ennui, all those endless hours of doing nothing at all, alone in your room. It’s dreamy, watching her moves from bed to wall to ceiling, as if the power of lassitude itself, the power of reverie, could extend the limits of what is possible, defying gravity. The dream dimension moves into a more disturbing mode, a darker fairy tale, as she’s replaced by Kersels, a giant in zebra-print pants, altogether much too much for the pink bedroom to hold. Enclosed within this young girl’s world, they’re both unexpectedly sexy, in different ways. As her world turns upside down, differentiation blurs, certainties melt, and the orientations (north/south, up/down, masculine/feminine) wherein we locate ourselves come apart, like a machine, some kind of inner mechanism, shuddering to a halt. It’s hilarious, and horrifying, and true, as the location of fantasy (who’s imagining this, the tiny girl, or the fat man?) becomes mobile and fluid. At the end of the tape, the furniture, unbolted at last, crashes around the room, chasing Kersels into corners, piling up in heaps, smashing itself to bits. He collapses under the bed frame, defeated by the logic of his own construction.
There’s humour and compassion in this work, and there’s violence and loss as well. The artist’s identifications are all over the shop: the fluid dance moves of the extra-small woman, the nuanced jiggling and falls of the extra-large man, and the whole structure, the tumble room itself, are all stand-ins for Kersels. They inhabit him, and it’s as if he finds ways to bring them out and set them going. What’s striking is the way in which Kersels succeeds in connecting his bulky physical present with his childish past, big and little, as if there’s an innocence that’s being invoked, even as its impossibility is marked and acknowledged. That innocence is about being a kid, it’s about playing, and the sexuality and violence and fantasy of play, but it may also have something to do with being American, something to do with L.A.
Recently Kersels has made non-kinetic sculpture which retains a connection to the ideas of scale (mass, weight) and pathos (automatism, failure) that run through his other work. Fat Man (2002) is a life-sized model of the atomic bomb, nicknamed ‘Fat Man’, which was dropped by the American military on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. The bomb looks like a cartoon drawing, it’s elliptical, with a silver tail in the form of a curved cube. Most particularly, it sags where it rests against the floor, as if it were made of too too flaccid flesh, as if it were really tired, weary, after all these years. It’s tuckered out. The bomb is entirely covered by mirror mosaic, not unlike a classic 1970s disco ball, and these mirrors explode the light, and the viewer’s reflection, breaking you up into uncountable fragments. It’s tired, this bomb, and the explosion is only metaphorical, the only thing it can destroy is the coherence of your reflection. Maybe that’s everything, I can’t say.
Yet Fat Man was actually a more powerful bomb than Little Boy – the bomb that devastated Hiroshima three days earlier – and therefore it stands alone in history as the most powerful technological device ever actually put to use. Geography amplified the effects of Little Boy: the winds generated by the bomb flattened everything within a one and a half mile radius, then the winds met the mountains surrounding Hiroshima and bounced back, hitting the city a second time. The power of Fat Man, by contrast, was dispersed, spreading outward unchecked by natural barriers, until it reached its point of entropy and the energy stopped. As a result, paradoxically, the larger bomb killed approximately half the number of people killed at Hiroshima.
What can you do with this information? What does it mean to be American, when this kind of destruction, that is, destruction on an immeasurable scale, is the outcome of such technological triumph? The mirror fragments propose the question, how do you put yourself together in this context? Is America both the ‘fat man’, too big, too strong, out of control, and the ‘little boy’, who cannot be held responsible, beyond the reach of right and wrong? The physicists who worked at Los Alamos day and night for months and months all through the war, to build the atomic bomb, never called it a bomb. Following J. Robert Oppenheimer’s suggestion, they referred to it throughout as the ‘gadget’.
In 2003, Kersels made Sleeper’s Dream for the Yankee Remix show at MASS MoCA. A number of artists were asked to make work in response to the large and varied collections belonging to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. Kersels was inspired by a house in Gloucester, Massachusetts, called Beauport, created by interior designer Henry Davis Sleeper from 1907 onwards. Beauport has 56 rooms, with turrets and towers, five dining rooms in different styles, and Sleeper’s own idiosyncratic collections, including rooms devoted to George Washington and Horatio Nelson memorabilia, as well as collections of lowly objects like hooked rugs and amber glass (130 pieces, bottles, vases, candlesticks). In material terms, through his devotion to Beauport, Sleeper proposed a whole new area of investigation and research: Americana, high and low. The quirky, eccentric, and excessive aspects of Beauport are crucial, as is the extraordinary preservation work he did, transposing doors, panels, floorboards and whole interiors from derelict and soon to be demolished early New England houses. Sleeper’s (more or less inaccurate) ideas about Colonial paint colours (sage green, robin’s egg blue, pumpkin, gold brown) persist, to be encountered today in the pages of Martha Stewart’s magazine. Meanwhile, Beauport, situated by the sea, is slowly falling apart, as the conservators of SPNEA struggle to stem the tide of damp destruction.
Kersels’ construction uses shingles, wallpaper, wooden roof tiles, a weathervane, to build a giant boot, 14 feet high, something like the one we all remember from the old woman who lived in a shoe. Its toe is glass, and inside we see earth, a busted up grandfather clock, half-buried, coffin-like, and bits of broken furniture and crockery. Through the glass springs a cherry tree, covered in pink blossom, as out of death comes life, like the perpetual, repeated return to innocence America so proudly parades. But the cherry tree is artificial, it’s silk, and due to be chopped down, according to national myth. (George Washington as a child declared, when confronted, ‘I cannot tell a lie. It was I who chopped down the cherry tree.’) In the heel of the giant boot, there is a beautiful arched window, and inside a wallpapered interior, where a crystal chandelier illuminates a little secret garden of pot plants (also silk). A small porcelain boot sits on a mirror in the centre of this orderly garden, as if arbitrarily preserved, temporarily rescued from the cycle of destruction. On the outside of the boot, a felt banner hangs, announcing ‘We Appeal to Nature’. This statement remains enigmatic: we appeal to Nature to do what – save us? To retrieve, to preserve something from the inevitable undoing of collections, categories and hierarchies? It’s fairytale stuff, the giant boot and the mysterious tree. Like dream-work, Kersels has put together elements taken from everyday life, from Sleeper’s dream house, to make something else, a building that resonates with meaning without ever quite settling down to being one thing or the other.
Kersels’ work is articulated around his own ‘being in the world’ – so big, so flawed, so vulnerable, so ridiculous, so strong. Lately he’s been examining a further dimension of that reality, the dimension that acknowledges nationality, America, where strength can mean potential for violence, where vulnerability requires retaliation. If his work has explored the sometimes fraught, always absurd relations between bodies and things, specifically bodies and machines, then part of what interests me is the automatism, the aspect of being human that’s outside our control. It’s the id, having a ball, compulsive, unstoppable, going on and on until it pulls its own plug out of the wall.
Martin Kersels’ work is profoundly anti-authoritarian, proposing the artist as bricoleur, as autodidact, pursuing idiosyncratic, individual research to find out what he needs for his specific purposes. The Wright Brothers, knocking together an aeroplane in the barn out of bits of bicycles, are the model here. Mastery requires knowing a great deal about one thing; Kersels knows just enough about all sorts of things to work his way through the next project. His felt banners derive in part from participating in projects at his son’s Waldorf school – this year they’re making a yurt, from scratch. But they swing both ways, like all his work, they’re moving in both directions, towards art discourse (Joseph Beuys, Robert Morris) and at the same time, towards everyday life. The work is wide open: the welcome mat is out to any and all interpretations. Hierarchies of knowledge come apart, as Kersels’ home-made versions of science, architecture and weapons of mass destruction expose their built-in flaws, their secrets. There’s dope in the heel of the boot, the atom bomb’s sagging, and no one knows the final, authoritative answer to anything.
Leslie Dick is a writer and co-Director of the Art Program at CalArts