Still Points of the Turning World
9 July 2006 – 7 January 2007
www.sitesantafe.org
Much has been made of the power shift from galleries and museums to the mega fairs and maxed-out auctions of the last decade. The metastructure of large international showcases for art has been over-examined (Venice), derided (Documenta), and reflected upon (Sharjah) to such a degree that the ‘biennial problem’ looks like the accusations against the biennials: a bit trite, sometimes rhetorical, and possibly irrelevant. Of course, the weight of the biennial structure has become an onerous burden for curators and institutions. That said, Klaus Ottmann’s approach to this year’s SITE Santa Fe Biennial, the sixth in the institution’s history, seems to effortlessly take up the unstated and ever-present challenge of the biennial in an age of persistent reproach.
Ottmann’s curation is diligent and quiet. By staging an exhibition comprised of 13 solo projects, he deftly undoes some of the issues inherent in group shows. The number of artists was derived by dividing SITE’s floor plan into a, more or less, democratic scheme. The result, ‘Still Points of the Turning World’, is a production of installations that feel fluid and demarcated. For example, installation artist Wangechi Mutu’s quixotic video, wall drawings and refuse mobiles hold steadily against Jennifer Bartlett’s restrained pixilated word paintings. Both are politically charged, but neither is defused by the other; just one example of the consistency found throughout the exhibition. Ottmann described this process as personal, meaning that each artist was allowed to create a personal means of interacting with the curator and, ultimately, with the viewer. This interchange creates a perceptible shift between public and private that is evident in much of the work. Sometimes it is an investigation of the degree of one (public or private) for the sake of the other. At other times, the move between the two is felt as a subtle metaphor or gesture. That many of the artists are mid-career and that there is a noticeable representation of all mediums is neither forced nor obligatory. In turn, the presence of work influenced by SITE’s location – ironically site-specific – sits comfortably alongside work previously shown in other venues.
Despite Ottmann’s insistence that ‘Still Points’ was not conceived by context, with a titled theme taken haphazardly from T. S. Eliot, there are many loose connections between the projects. Some occur due to placement, like that of Robert Grosvenor’s four-part steel and aluminum free-standing minimalist sculptures, Quadrum (2005–6), which are abutted by Cristina Iglesias’ ceramic composite maze Santa Fe (Celosias II) (2006). Their pieces serve as the practical and metaphorical entrance and exit, respectively, into the exhibition. Grosvenor invites the viewer to move between each of its defined components as a closure to the confinement of the more delineated spaces within the rest of the exhibition. This thread is picked up again in the centre of the exhibition space by Wolfgang Laib’s ascending lacquered wood sculptures, Ziggurat (2003) and Staircases (2003), while Iglesias’ maze mimics the logic of Ottmann’s curatorial mantra of creating a personal relationship by taking turns enclosing the viewer and allowing fragmented peeks onto the exhibition through the maze’s lattice walls.
The performative interaction of Iglesias’ maze and the viewer, who must walk through it, alludes to an integral component in the Biennial: performance. Theatre-based performance art, like that of Jonathan Meese, is well represented. There is also a less prescribed performative strand running through work like that of the Norwegian collective, Thorns Ltd (Finn Olav Holthe, Snorre Ruch and Jon Wesseltoft), musicians and sound artists whose site-specific sound installation will play continuously for the entirety of the Biennial. Enclosed within a small, dark built-environment, a contradiction of padded walls and a high ceiling, their sound installation places the viewer into the most personal/private relationship in ‘Still Points’. Their aural chamber is equal parts comforting and constricting due to the grating and jarring sounds and the plush texture of the interior. It is strangely reminiscent of both a mineshaft and a womb. The continuity of the sound only adds to the sense of containment, it is engaged not only with each viewer, but also with the temporality of the exhibition. If this premise seems lightweight, the experience of the space is not. It is laden with the sonic depth of heavy metal music, a scene in which Thorns Ltd is an active practitioner, and it agitates the viewer/listener as if it were a soundscape for an unrecognisable film noir scene: compelling and disorienting.
Equally experiential is Carsten Nicolai’s Spray (2005), a dynamic two-way video projection and sound, accompanied by large-scale paintings made from tape running along the floor and walls. These paintings are barely visible in the dark room. They aid in the sense of disorientation, which is regulated by the intermittent light emitted from the video’s composition of spastic tesserae light pulses against a black screen. Bouncing and bobbing, each pulsation combines to form a shape-shifting grid. The video is accompanied by a low rumbling sound suite, whose vibration can be felt from beneath the foam bleachers on either side of the projection. Unlike that of the Thorns Ltd sound space, Nicolai’s is invested in the public sphere. For him it is an open forum, without physical restrictions.
Patty Chang’s awareness of multiple publics saturates the eerie performativity of her video. It charts her study with a conflict resolution spiritualist outside Santa Fe. Posited against the tragic encounter of a submarine’s collision with an undersea mountain in 2005, the dynamism of the spiritual practice of oneness as a method of overcoming the tension of duality is made through the construction (and systematic deconstruction) of a colossal scaffolding in the desert. The video implicates the political tensions of our times, over-development in Santa Fe, and the project of modernism via the scaffolding, which is a gigantic grid in a constant state of undoing. When Chang alights the top of the scaffolding, it is as if the rhetoric of all three issues has been surmounted, at least between Chang and her audience. Chang’s exercise is perfectly met by Stephen Dean’s dual-sided projection Grand Prix (2006). Placed imposingly at an angle in a tight room, one side of the installation is a looped video of a demolition derby, with splattering mud piles and automotive wreckage. The other side is a clean grid of circular shapes, literally spinning wheels, which replicate the motion of the video in still, drawn form. Like the rest of ‘Still Points’, the charge between these two is evocative, yet each has a distinct showcase for its purpose.
Courtney J. Martin