Review: "Sleeper", MCA, San Diego
Richard Gleaves
I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically
interconnected. You don't notice that they're not logically connected until you ask yourself, "What
made me think of that?" and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember...
-- Richard Feynman
Sleep, its dreams and living nightmares, its ties to death and memory -- these are the ideas
explored in "Sleeper", the current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. While
"Sleeper" is presented as a group show by the artists Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Guillermo
Kuitca, and Doris Salcedo, the curators have done such a skillful job of selecting the works on
display that the result feels more like a collaborative installation. Everything coheres.
The museum's large downstairs gallery dominates Guillermo Kuitca's installation of twenty small
children's beds arranged in hospital-like rows across the gallery floor. Each bed mattress has been
unevenly stained with a charcoal gray wash to evoke age and use. It is upon these old, tired
mattresses that the dream begins: on each bed has been painted a map of a part of a place like
Europe, with vein-like routes connecting the dots of cities, the larger of which are marked --
naturally, surprisingly -- by upholstery buttons. Walking among these bed/maps is like overflying
the Continent; yet you can't escape the feeling of seeing someone in bed, asleep. This theme returns
throughout the show: things merging with people, and people with things.
A potential problem with Kuitca's installation -- the incongruity of tiny beds in such a large space
-- metamorphs into a conscious strategy with his painting "Children's Corner", which is displayed in
the second floor gallery. Here, an enormous abstract painting contains small, crudely-painted images
of beds (here with chairs alongside). The effect of this miniature furniture on the overall
composition is to transform an abstract color field into the pictorial representation of a huge,
cavernous space: a precise schematic of the installation downstairs, but with the difference that,
in Alice-like fashion, the viewer has now become very large. Only then does one realize that Kuitca
has upped the ante by painting the apparently abstract background in a subtle pattern which gradually
emerges as... wallpaper! It's this uncanny ability to simultaneously depict big and small that gives
Guillermo Kuitca's work the visual kick it decidedly has.
Next to Kuitca's beds, Robert Gober's skewed renderings of children's cribs and playpens offer more
modest rewards. "Slanted Playpen" and "Open Playpen" are painted-wood replicas of children's
playpens: one slants at an alarming 45 degree angle; the other is missing a wall. Together they
evoke complementary aspects of maternal fear: entrapment amidst collapse, versus loss via escape.
Gober subtly and ingeniously introduces additional layers of meaning by the use of color: each
playpen is painted in a faint fleshtone. The penned merge with their pens, and these simple objects
leave childhood behind to become gentle metaphors for death and spiritual transcendence.
Also noteworthy is Gober's "X Crib", a children's crib, but not quite: its normally rectangular floor
plan has been squeezed at the center (perhaps by some unseen girdle) into two separate triangular
spaces. The result is an object of great formal beauty, with the additional effect of reminding us
that cribs are, at bottom, cages: something we tend to forget as adults. Moving from life to art,
it's hard not to view "X-Crib" as a response to Minimalist art; in particular, to Sol LeWitt's cubic
lattice structures. One might even consider "X Crib" in light of the Solomonic wisdom of Biblical
times... but only Robert Gober could say for sure.
The strongest work in this show, by Doris Salcedo, wakes us from art history right into a living
nightmare. Salcedo lives and works in Colombia, a country whose standard currency of political
exchange seems to be the rending of flesh rather than the raising of voices. Salcedo has thus chosen
torture and murder as her subjects. The result is quietly horrifying.
Two of her works are titled "Untitled" for the evident reason that they are beyond words. One
consists of four metal bed frames meticulously bound up with thin, translucent, skin-like tape.
(Once again the show's theme returns... but now it's metal and flesh.) Two of the frames lean upright
against the gallery wall; the other two lie flat on the floor below. The upright frames have
additional materials bound to their metal grids: twisted shirts, a touch of bloody gauze, and
instruments of torture wrapped in cloth. These latter objects are not at all obvious; only by close
inspection was I able to identify forceps, a saw blade, and various gouging tools. Much of the power
of this work comes from its apparent quietness; seen from more than fifteen feet away, it easily
passes as post-Minimalist sculpture.
It's instructive to compare Salcedo's work with that seen in the current Bruce Nauman retrospective.
Nauman's work reflects the kind of loud, mordant humor afforded by the relatively symbolic nature of
everyday violence in the United States. Doris Salcedo's work, by comparison, is quiet and lethal: it
lets most of the air out of Nauman's clown jokes.
Katharina Fritsch is represented in this show by a single work: "Ghost and Pool of Blood".
Materially, it consists of the archetypal figure of a sheeted ghost (rendered in what appears to be
carved white plaster), before which lies on the floor a highly stylized "pool of blood" (translucent
red casting resin). This work has obvious potential for radiating a spirituality beyond its material
construction; but two things limit this from happening here. First, Fritsch's art suffers mild
discomfort in its juxtaposition with Salcedo's: while Salcedo gains by Fritsch's presence (as a
spiritual complement to her mortal anguish), Fritsch seems dessicated by Salcedo's gritty realism.
For instance, Fritsch's "pool of blood" may well appear powerful in a more neutral setting, but here
it acquires the unfortunate sheen of a Finish Fetish floor sculpture.
The other thing working against Fritsch is the museum setting itself; the curators were unable to
completely transform what is normally a classic light-and-space gallery into the somber environment
necessary for the work in question. The room's odd geometry overpowers the spot lighting, and the
incessant roar of an overhead ventilation system is all too omnipresent. Spirituality needs quiet.
Other than this, "Sleeper" is a dream show.
Sleeper: Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober,
Guillermo Kuitca, Doris Salcedo
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Downtown Gallery
Through August 6, 1995
Richard Gleaves is a San Diego artist and software developer.
Richard Gleaves
I won't
do it
again
!
Itza Joqual
or at least do a test post to one of the testing sites and
learn how to edit so that your lines break where they
should if you want people to take time reading what
you went to all the trouble to write. I didn't read your long
article for the very reason stated--not because of what
it says.
--
********************* 1845 - 1995 ****************************
*** From Deep in the Heart of Texas where we're celebrating ***
*** 150 Years of Mexicanization. Itza Joqual. ***
**************************************************************************