Edgar Arceneaux
Edgar Arceneaux
Susanne Vielmetter Gallery
Through October 25th
More often than not in art made along the lines of science and truth there is neither spark nor fire. The partial visions of science and religion presented (artists and critics are hardly specialists in either) often seem like caricatures. In the face of the elegance and usefulness of mathematics or physics, and the poetry and social import of religion, art comes across sometimes a bit of an apothecary of dubious medicines, more a crazy street crier than an inspiration. Science and Religion offer concise, edited, well thought out theories of truth, human action, and meaning. If art has a problem with some of its theories and truths, then it certainly must do more than simply challenge their validity. Art must offer something as serious and as rigorous as those theories and truths. Art must have a point beyond just saying that the idea of “having a point” is constantly shifting.
Arceneaux’s show brought these troubles to the forefront in my mind. The same Arceneaux who generated fascinating, elegant metaphors and connections in a drawing like Four Fathers, 2002 (which offers a case about how symbols can become racialized) and in The Alchemy of Comedy . . ., 2006 (which apparently worked by locating the similarities between how comedy is developed and alchemy) seems also capable of being impossibly confusing. At times, the show had me thinking everything was completely overwrought and pushed too far, and at other times I felt like things had not been elaborated enough. Symbols and associations kept piling up and spiraling so uncontrollably that I struggled for moments of convergence. Whereas a writer like Lawrence Weschler can go from Da Vinci to Duchamp by way of Russia and leave me completely enchanted, Arceneaux’s attempt to get me from the zodiac to fossils by way of Duchamp left me just muddled and wondering why the paintings were so ugly. (Not entirely fair, I actually really thought Moon creeping through window, 2008 was lovely).
Giant fractured glass tripod, 2008 is the center of Arceneaux’s show. The piece is exactly what it says it is in its title – basically a window of broken glass sitting on a tripod, except that the window also contains a skeletal-like form that we know from another painting in the show is the “skeleton of an animal man, tortured soul.” On one side of the piece is a light high in the gallery which shines through the window to the other side, where a couple of shards of glass sit without much fanfare in the corner.
When I say that the piece is the center, I mean both the literal and symbolic center. From and through the piece, metaphors, symbols, allegories, and analogies multiply, repeat, and exhaustively accumulate in the gallery like Borges’ limitless books. I will list just some of these accumulations:
The light (shining out through a circular fixture), on the right hand side of the tripod when you walk in, corresponds to a number of light symbols in the rest of the gallery: the sun/cardboard/moon/orb sculpture in the video room, the projector in the video room, the sun/moon image in the Ophiuchus painting, the moon image in the painting Moon creeping through window, and perhaps each star in each constellation inside the Last Supper Room.
The Giant fractured glass that the tripod holds is a feast of mandarin symbols. A Giant fractured glass, in the arts, must refer to Duchamp’s Large Glass or, more appropriately, to To be looked at (from the other side of the glass) with one eye, close to, for almost an hour, 1918. I like the reference to To be looked at better because then I really start to think about that light filtering through Arceneaux’s sculpture as if it was the eye of Duchamp’s viewer. Arceneaux also must have liked that use of “Giant” in the title instead of “Large” - “Giant” as in red giants.
On the glass is the metal animal-man, which I learned from the gallerist was covered in paint and then imprinted on “skeleton of an animal man, tortured soul.” If we think about that light filtering through and that the animal man is imprinted, then glass is sort of like a camera -- light imprinting on paper. The tripod, in my mind, is then both the tripod that traditionally holds a camera or a painting easel.
So the sculpture could be considered a lens? I think Arceneux meant this to be the case. Why else would the painting on the outside wall of the room use two eyes made of fish in the sky? Fish eyes, Fish eye lens, get it? And furthermore, the fish eyes are in the sky and the fish eye lens was developed to map the night sky.
I pray that I haven’t lost the reader while I’ve tried to make sense of Arceneaux’s exhibition. I have to admit that I’m lost myself. In the midst of this tangle of meanings, looped and folding interpretations, red herrings and trap doors, I wanted to know the point of all of it – assuming that there is a point! I had fun chasing these symbols, but I need more. I want to give Arceneaux the benefit of the doubt in this show because of talent he has shown in the past, but I ultimately had problems with the show.
If I believe Arceneaux’s fans, I guess I could say that my effort to make meaning of the show was the point, and that the show did that well -- it got me involved. I became obsessed like a conspiracy theorist, mapping the gallery in Microsoft Paint and visiting the exhibition three times, obsessing over cracked glass and mutant skeletons. I could agree with Charles Gaines that Arceneaux, like Borges, shows us that “the structure of the topology reveals the structure of the mind that thinks.” Yes, the symbols are in a space and speak to it. How they are oriented in the gallery determines the direction of any attempt to understand the show. Perhaps, as some writers have noted, I could just observe Arceneaux’s studio practice playing out in front of the viewer, exposing its own biases and ideologies.
These assessments, in my mind, are just reiterations of a certain type of artworld speak that has now become cant. They seem to dance around that fact that earlier Arceneaux work seemed to have a tighter grip on its metaphors and symbols than the current show. In its meandering, the current show seems like a failure in comparison – it’s too open, too sloppy, suffering from a lack of editing. Meandering for meandering sake is not enough.
The trouble is only augmented by the show’s ambition – to literally let most of science and religion in, then to offer what amounts to a third term which proposes to reveal limitations in both the knowledge of science and religion. I think of religion: using myths and prayer to interpret physical evidence, forming theories of morality and politics that drive many people in the world to action. I think of science: fixing its Helium leak in France in an attempt to split more protons, collect more data, and learn more truths about the state of universe. And then I think of Arceneaux’s show (and much contemporary art like it): symbols and data culled loosely from both science and religion, simply praising shifting contexts and hoping that something will happen. The show at Vielmetter feels thin, not worthy of the belief (that writers on Arceneaux seem to hold) that somehow this type of art making trumps religion and science, that its “knowledge” that there are indeed no universal truths is somehow helpful. In my mind, it is enough to scare me back to truth.
Susanne Vielmetter Gallery
Through October 25th
Edgar Arceneaux’s show at Susanne Vielmetter Gallery, despite its turbid moments, wants to propose that truth in the world of art is seen differently than in science or religion. Science offers an empirical take on truth, religion offers a spiritual or revelato
ry take on truth, and art, it seems, is not concerned with truth at all. Art, instead, could be said to be about contextual meaning. Arceneaux, for instance, is “suspicious of truth claims,” as Charles Gaines put it in Issue 10 of Afterall. Science offers the big bang, Religion offers creationism, while in art, concepts like the big bang and creationism coexist and mix in a cauldron of strange meanings and convergences. As in Arceneaux’s show, where you can sift through astrological maps arranged like Da Vinci’s Last Supper, each map color coordinated like the history of stars with red giants and brown dwarfs fully present.
ry take on truth, and art, it seems, is not concerned with truth at all. Art, instead, could be said to be about contextual meaning. Arceneaux, for instance, is “suspicious of truth claims,” as Charles Gaines put it in Issue 10 of Afterall. Science offers the big bang, Religion offers creationism, while in art, concepts like the big bang and creationism coexist and mix in a cauldron of strange meanings and convergences. As in Arceneaux’s show, where you can sift through astrological maps arranged like Da Vinci’s Last Supper, each map color coordinated like the history of stars with red giants and brown dwarfs fully present. So far, I don’t think I’ve said anything with which most in the visual arts wouldn’t agree. Contextual meaning has been the unapologetic bread and butter of the arts for sometime now. A great example of what contextual meaning involves is Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Library of Babel. In the story, Borges offers an aesthetic and rhetorical (as in “no answer necessary”) unified theory of knowledge without needing to carbon date a fossil or convert someone to Christianity to explain away dinosaurs. In Borges’ library gibberish can exist alongside The Bible and The General Theory of Relativity. A contemporary art museum is Borges’ library, a place where possibilities are endless and where both rubbish and meaning struck together in the hope they start a fire.
More often than not in art made along the lines of science and truth there is neither spark nor fire. The partial visions of science and religion presented (artists and critics are hardly specialists in either) often seem like caricatures. In the face of the elegance and usefulness of mathematics or physics, and the poetry and social import of religion, art comes across sometimes a bit of an apothecary of dubious medicines, more a crazy street crier than an inspiration. Science and Religion offer concise, edited, well thought out theories of truth, human action, and meaning. If art has a problem with some of its theories and truths, then it certainly must do more than simply challenge their validity. Art must offer something as serious and as rigorous as those theories and truths. Art must have a point beyond just saying that the idea of “having a point” is constantly shifting.
Arceneaux’s show brought these troubles to the forefront in my mind. The same Arceneaux who generated fascinating, elegant metaphors and connections in a drawing like Four Fathers, 2002 (which offers a case about how symbols can become racialized) and in The Alchemy of Comedy . . ., 2006 (which apparently worked by locating the similarities between how comedy is developed and alchemy) seems also capable of being impossibly confusing. At times, the show had me thinking everything was completely overwrought and pushed too far, and at other times I felt like things had not been elaborated enough. Symbols and associations kept piling up and spiraling so uncontrollably that I struggled for moments of convergence. Whereas a writer like Lawrence Weschler can go from Da Vinci to Duchamp by way of Russia and leave me completely enchanted, Arceneaux’s attempt to get me from the zodiac to fossils by way of Duchamp left me just muddled and wondering why the paintings were so ugly. (Not entirely fair, I actually really thought Moon creeping through window, 2008 was lovely).
Let me explain further.
Giant fractured glass tripod, 2008 is the center of Arceneaux’s show. The piece is exactly what it says it is in its title – basically a window of broken glass sitting on a tripod, except that the window also contains a skeletal-like form that we know from another painting in the show is the “skeleton of an animal man, tortured soul.” On one side of the piece is a light high in the gallery which shines through the window to the other side, where a couple of shards of glass sit without much fanfare in the corner.
When I say that the piece is the center, I mean both the literal and symbolic center. From and through the piece, metaphors, symbols, allegories, and analogies multiply, repeat, and exhaustively accumulate in the gallery like Borges’ limitless books. I will list just some of these accumulations:The light (shining out through a circular fixture), on the right hand side of the tripod when you walk in, corresponds to a number of light symbols in the rest of the gallery: the sun/cardboard/moon/orb sculpture in the video room, the projector in the video room, the sun/moon image in the Ophiuchus painting, the moon image in the painting Moon creeping through window, and perhaps each star in each constellation inside the Last Supper Room.
The Giant fractured glass that the tripod holds is a feast of mandarin symbols. A Giant fractured glass, in the arts, must refer to Duchamp’s Large Glass or, more appropriately, to To be looked at (from the other side of the glass) with one eye, close to, for almost an hour, 1918. I like the reference to To be looked at better because then I really start to think about that light filtering through Arceneaux’s sculpture as if it was the eye of Duchamp’s viewer. Arceneaux also must have liked that use of “Giant” in the title instead of “Large” - “Giant” as in red giants.
On the glass is the metal animal-man, which I learned from the gallerist was covered in paint and then imprinted on “skeleton of an animal man, tortured soul.” If we think about that light filtering through and that the animal man is imprinted, then glass is sort of like a camera -- light imprinting on paper. The tripod, in my mind, is then both the tripod that traditionally holds a camera or a painting easel.
So the sculpture could be considered a lens? I think Arceneux meant this to be the case. Why else would the painting on the outside wall of the room use two eyes made of fish in the sky? Fish eyes, Fish eye lens, get it? And furthermore, the fish eyes are in the sky and the fish eye lens was developed to map the night sky.
I pray that I haven’t lost the reader while I’ve tried to make sense of Arceneaux’s exhibition. I have to admit that I’m lost myself. In the midst of this tangle of meanings, looped and folding interpretations, red herrings and trap doors, I wanted to know the point of all of it – assuming that there is a point! I had fun chasing these symbols, but I need more. I want to give Arceneaux the benefit of the doubt in this show because of talent he has shown in the past, but I ultimately had problems with the show.
If I believe Arceneaux’s fans, I guess I could say that my effort to make meaning of the show was the point, and that the show did that well -- it got me involved. I became obsessed like a conspiracy theorist, mapping the gallery in Microsoft Paint and visiting the exhibition three times, obsessing over cracked glass and mutant skeletons. I could agree with Charles Gaines that Arceneaux, like Borges, shows us that “the structure of the topology reveals the structure of the mind that thinks.” Yes, the symbols are in a space and speak to it. How they are oriented in the gallery determines the direction of any attempt to understand the show. Perhaps, as some writers have noted, I could just observe Arceneaux’s studio practice playing out in front of the viewer, exposing its own biases and ideologies.
These assessments, in my mind, are just reiterations of a certain type of artworld speak that has now become cant. They seem to dance around that fact that earlier Arceneaux work seemed to have a tighter grip on its metaphors and symbols than the current show. In its meandering, the current show seems like a failure in comparison – it’s too open, too sloppy, suffering from a lack of editing. Meandering for meandering sake is not enough.
The trouble is only augmented by the show’s ambition – to literally let most of science and religion in, then to offer what amounts to a third term which proposes to reveal limitations in both the knowledge of science and religion. I think of religion: using myths and prayer to interpret physical evidence, forming theories of morality and politics that drive many people in the world to action. I think of science: fixing its Helium leak in France in an attempt to split more protons, collect more data, and learn more truths about the state of universe. And then I think of Arceneaux’s show (and much contemporary art like it): symbols and data culled loosely from both science and religion, simply praising shifting contexts and hoping that something will happen. The show at Vielmetter feels thin, not worthy of the belief (that writers on Arceneaux seem to hold) that somehow this type of art making trumps religion and science, that its “knowledge” that there are indeed no universal truths is somehow helpful. In my mind, it is enough to scare me back to truth.
posted by Ed | 4:32 PM
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