4.30.2009

ART REVIEW: 11 th S t ree t


Nothing yet. None of it will disclose itself in a series. Or if it did the terms are still discrete, not even a shadow between them. And after all this waiting. As for the painting, mauve dunes, power lines above a black road, silver where the night wears thin, sinuous little else. What next? More sculptures, more installations. Discontinuous to the end.

The month of April, a tunnel on 11th street, a nearby gallery. No way to bring them together.

Beneath the streets they pass, back and forth on bikes. Lights dangle from the cement roof. Silver to the tungsten coil like to the seams of the grass, gone by the moon. They pass back and forth. A state-sanctioned tunnel where the invisible collect their thoughts. Too weak to cast a shadow, the light merely vibrates, creating a field like to the empyrean. But this is underground. Water unravels like a tapestry, coiling in ripples on the ground.

There is a wind outside the tunnel, moving past the city. So much space. There will only be more.

The motives were less clear at the gallery. They created a landscape from parts of Scotland and England, a deer to wander in the twilight. The forest only shimmered. Green, blue, and gray, then antlers poached the frame. A luminescent deer strays in a phosphorescent forest. He’s still there, grazing.

Waves wash on the shore. Paul Klee disembarks. He has been at sea. He finds the tunnel, sees the deer. They displace his dreams of ghostly pyramids, shimmering fish, haunted fathers and the tables they set. He starts from the tunnel like a doe. He walks west, soon to join the Theatre of Oklahoma.

Who else will bring us together? He sets the table. Just walking through the desert, dream-figures, dream-fathers. Moses in the desert figures every pilgrimage. Still nothing but himself, he nonetheless embodies all that is to come. There was never anything but wandering.

The paintings, the film, and the installation figure something as well. They must. We have no idea what it is. This is the best place to be. Paul Klee takes it with him to his tomb. Another artist walks up a mountain, arranging stones in a line behind him, Nazca-like.

Only a dream-father can unite the disparate. We walk with him, and he with us. At last the paintings come together. A series, however unsatisfying. Still it is unstable, impossible to deduce anything solid. Art-prophets wander the desert. They might scatter the tribe, or unite the remnant. Max Ernst picks through the glacial scree, seeking in stone the marks of a different sculpture.

Such a topic is old, everyone’s favorite: no father to bring us together, forgotten in the desert, discontinuous, without future or memory, alas! we say, quietly rejoicing in our penance, its marvelous open-endedness. If the wailing was sincere we would have our tablet. Instead we have a philosopher’s stone. Passing it back and forth through memory.

http://www.pluralmedium.com/QE_JC_small.mov

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