Drew Dominick

Drew Dominick: Snake Box

Sandroni Rey

Through August 30th

Let me tell you about Drew Dominick’s installation Snake Box. You walk into Sandroni Rey’s Project space, a large rectangular storage bin, and face two stacks of old televisions with images of snakes, snakelike objects or grainy screens of fuzz projecting in black and white. Next to the televisions, an aquarium with a motor emanates low, sustained hums into the dark space. You turn left then walk down the hot space of the project room (Everyone knows that the space is hot, very hot in the summer, but in this case, it adds to the work) until you get to a sort of vitrine/terrarium full of objects.

By the time you approach the box, you are prepared to see snakes whether or not you understand why. Probably depending on who you are, you may mistake bungee cords, hoses, and fake wooden snakes for real serpents and the real serpents (actually living in the box) are not revealed as themselves until they move. When they move, it is not only creepy but intense -- you feel as if something has happened to you, that you were tricked, that your handle on the world was short circuited just long enough that you doubt you had it to begin with. Great sculpture and installation is supposed to do something to you – Dominick’s installation is a great piece.

What happens in that moment of misrecognition, when real objects have uncertain or shifting meanings, when hoses appear live snakes? Certainly, the moment is a product of perception, the play between real objects and your senses, and certainly, the artist is at the reins producing the moment. Like a James Turrell piece where you slowly encounter a dissolving wall or light that has unlikely solid properties, Dominick’s piece shifts places, delays a full understanding of an environment, and interacts directly with a viewer.

However the effect of Dominick’s piece, in comparison to someone like Turrell, is a different exercise in object relations, something that plays not on the scientific adjustment of perception but the use of more intangible things like memory. Dominick is not grandiose like Turrell -- he plays with local things, familiar things. Furthermore, there is that creepy feeling, the feeling of being in the presence of something hidden and perhaps slightly unsafe. I, for one, found this moment very complicated to sort out and I still don’t have a handle on it. All I know is that what I thought it was wasn’t and what I think it might be is just as improbable.

My first stop was Mike Kelley’s text on the uncanny in art because the great essay has a passage that might apply to Dominick’s work. In the text, Kelley delineates situations where one might apply the word “uncanny,” which Freud described as “a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it.” One such moment, for Kelley, is the strange animation that movie props have when you encounter them in souvenir shops, a moment where they are “more” than objects, a moment where you get the sense that an object stares back. Kelley writes, “This hidden nature is part of their appeal as objects, for a lingering sense of their filmic reality lies behind their shabby or provisional appearance, soliciting our investment in the belief that they were once convincingly alive.”

What a wonderful description and one that works well with Dominick’s piece, pointing out how moving images can map onto the objects contained in their lens, how the objects, subsequently removed from the context of film or video, can retain the strange animation. The title of the exhibition Snake Box, coupled with the animated images on the screen, intensified by the sounds of the aquarium, then dramatized by knowledge that a terrarium may contain living creatures, leads and manipulates the viewer into the full expectation that they are going to see real snakes -- the expectation is so intense that the viewer not only expects to see snakes but they actually see snakes in the form of inanimate objects, they create the fantasy of the snake. I also love Kelley’s phrase “shabby or provisional appearance.” Living things and inanimate objects have full presence or weighty, non-provisional status in the world. The state in between living and inanimate is created by us and somehow less real, it is a “shabby and provisional appearance.” I have a feeling that the “shabby or provisional appearance” has to be art itself.

But with Dominick’s piece, is it the “uncanny” or something else we are experiencing, and if it is something else, what is it? To be honest, I have trouble applying the word uncanny to Dominick’s piece without many qualifications. For one thing, Dominick’s props (the wooden snakes and bungee cords) do not retain their creepy charge – unlike a doll or a movie props which do sustain the charge. A hose does not have a “hidden nature” and the hidden nature is not part of its appeal as an object. When you understand what is going on with Dominick’s piece (depending on your fear level of snakes) all is right in the world -- like the Turrell, you get it.

Second, when real snakes are involved in the piece, there are elements which are not something repressed coming to the surface but instead animated in real time. The hidden nature of the snakes does not come forward out of your memory but out of the real darkness, the snakes are actually in the room. Dominick’s is not a fear out view and hidden but a real situation intensified and exploited.

Finally, among the many terms in the arts that need retooling, the word “uncanny” is one of the most desperately wanting – Freud does not have the market cornered on the uncanny and has been revised to death, splintered into a thousand pieces, and is not to be trusted at best and just plain wrong at worst. Why do we still use the term and then justify it only according to Freud’s vision of the human self?

So though Kelley’s description helps me discover some of the conditions of Dominick’s piece, we probably need to go into something like theater or the construction of haunted houses to understand where the effects are coming from. That said, I immediately turn to artists that depended on theater for effect, artists like Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden. There is a taste of Nauman’s corridor works in Dominick’s installation and also a little of Burden’s Shout Piece, 1971. Dominick’s installation takes a stance in relation to the viewer that is not unlike these works, a bit aggressive and a bit shocking, like you’d imagine the Theater of Cruelty to have been (thank God I never actually experienced it).

However, these direct comparisons fail ultimately because we have not explained that creepy feeling – Dominick is not directly confrontational, the installation is creepy not scary. So, in my mind, there must be some nostalgic, memory induced object relations going on here, though we can only use the word uncanny shakily and cautiously.

I bet the creepy feeling has something to do with the nostalgia effect of technology and empty menageries. Old televisions give off the troubled vibe of an old prophet, they show the present and sometimes projections of the future while being firmly in the past as an object (think of the dead talking head in 1001 Arabian Nights, it’s dead but it concerns itself with things no longer its own). Empty cages and houses are also creepy because they retain the touches and lived in feel of their inhabitants. The inhabitants still exist there partially, the space somehow their concern though they are gone. Dominick’s aquarium and old televisions impose these creepy conditions onto a situation of theater to guide the viewer into a moment of confusion and then recognition. Dominick’s props can invent snakes before they exist and then show you the real thing all in real time.

As for me, I looked at the little garden snake in the box and said, “That little thing, that little thing scared me!” Then, I immediately didn’t believe it.