ON a clear afternoon in mid-October I found
myself in the reception area of a Napa Valley construction firm with the
artist Michael Somoroff. He was holding a small white object. ‘It’s broken,’
he said, as he placed the model before me. It was the size and shape of an
intricately pleated napkin. The resin was chipped and grey pencil lines
traced the grooves.
The model was a pint-sized version of his monumental sculpture Illumination
I (2006), installed in the grounds of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.
Somoroff is the first artist to be invited to exhibit a work there since the
chapel’s dedication in 1971. He and his team spent the better part of a year
constructing the 20 x 37-foot sculpture, moulded in fiberglass and finished
in traditional Italian stucco.
At 50 Somoroff has an intense, almost hypnotic presence. He has a shaved
head and the heavy eyelids of someone who works 18-hour days – in addition
to his work as an artist he also runs a thriving commercial film studio. He
is passionate about his art to the point of proselytising: ‘to be an artist
is my way of being a teacher.’ He can hold forth for hours on subjects as
diverse as Kabala, consulting and Cy Twombly. The Rothko Chapel commission
is a turning point for Somoroff, a high-profile testing ground for his ideas
about the intersection of art and spirituality: ‘the Rothko chapel is the
height of the modernist attempt to reach the divine. My project is a way to
pick up the gauntlet.’
Somoroff’s starting point for the sculpture was not the chapel itself, but
the diffused light that filters through its skylight. Light has always been
associated with the presence of the divine, from the burning bush to Zeus’s
thunderbolt. Somoroff went to Houston to film the light inside the chapel,
then applied the results to a computer programme that could simulate the
light on any given day. He played around with significant dates from his
baby boomer past – the US pullout from Vietnam, the turn of the new
millennium, the start of the war in Iraq. But there was something too
literal in this approach, so Somoroff began collecting and digitally
manipulating images of sacred spaces around the world, including ruined
mosques in Afghanistan and Iraq. Using the original floor plan of the Rothko
chapel he created a new sacred space – a composite mosque. The finished
sculpture is a frozen ray of light, captured as it falls through the window
of that virtual space.
This composite mosque could be the most facile form of Orientalism – a
romantic ideal as condescending in its beauty as Ingres’ Le Grande Odalisque
(1814). But through digital tools Somoroff’s photography has evolved towards
a fictional, even aspirational, medium. ‘If you can create a photograph that
is convincing but unreal you are at a very different place in storytelling.’
His mosque is not one culture through the lens of another, but a prism of
thousands of fragmented views, with which he constructs another, more supple
reality.
The most surprising thing about Illumination I is not how it was made, but
that it was made at all. So much of new media practice takes us into a
meta-state – virtual worlds, online communities, reflections of ourselves
through the lens of technology – that it is surprising to find an artist
assimilating these skills in the service of a traditional sculptural object.
In conversation Somoroff has a tendency to dismiss the object: ‘I don’t want
people to call this a sculpture. It’s an installation, an event, a
provocation.’ But it is a sculpture: it’s 24,000 lbs in seven pieces and
engineered to survive a twister. The leap from the virtual to the monumental
is a brave one. Contemporary art, and particularly new media art, have moved
so far from the object that to be invested, as an artist, and as a
community, in its creation is a bold gesture in itself.
The making of Illumination I was an old-fashioned studio process, in the
Renaissance sense of the term, highlighting the artist as manager: Somoroff
created the intellectual scaffolding (and paid the bills for the real one)
on which others would climb. He is influenced by Joseph Beuys’ conception of
‘social sculpture’: ‘To assert for one moment that this sculpture is “mine”
is simply ridiculous.’ Hundreds of people contributed to its conception and
construction, and the work became a point of departure as soon as it was
installed. People slept in it, sang in it, took photos, wrote poetry.
Someone put out a cigarette on the pristine white surface of the stucco, and
from the first night a neighbourhood cat stood guard.
Illumination I was enriched by the leaps of imagination made possible by the
manipulation of space, time, colour and light on a computer screen, and was
brought to life by the gestures of hundreds of individual hands. But it is
in the searching space between the ideal world of the computer and the
chipping plaster of the final sculpture that the most universal sentiment is
expressed. It is brave to make a work like this, with the errors, problem
solving and human relations it implies. It is an admittance of the
interconnectedness that defines Somoroff’s view of the sacred.
ELIZABETH BARD IS THE MEDIA EDITOR FOR
CONTEMPORARY
ILLUMINATION I WILL BE AT THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM, RIDGEFIELD,
CONNECTICUT, FROM 24 JUNE. A SHOW OF ASSOCIATED VIDEO WORKS OPENS AT
BRAVINLEE PROGRAMS, NEW YORK, 21 JUNE