Brian Karl Against Rigour in Art A Review of Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, October 24, 2014–January 25, 2015

“A lady visited Matisse in his studio. Inspecting one of his latest works, she unwisely said, ‘But surely the arm of this woman is much too long.’ ‘Madame,’ the artist politely replied, ‘You are mistaken. This is not a woman, this is a picture.’” –Stelarc, “Prosthetic Head: Intelligence, Awareness and Agency,” interview with the Prosthetic Head, an artificial linguistic entity1

n the paragraph-long story “On Rigor in Science,” Jorge Luis Borges takes up a conceit from Lewis Carroll’s fnal novel, Sylvie and Bruno, Ifrst published in 1889: The proposal to expand the scale of map- making to align one-to-one to the areas that each map is meant to represent. In Carroll’s telling, some closer-to-the-earth farmers scuttle the project when they point out how such a map would kill all crops by blocking out the sun. In Borges’s telling, however, the fanciful notion went forward as the ne plus ultra or ad absurdum of representation, only to be abandoned after completion, left to decay through exposure, open to the elements by those next generations “not so fond of the study of Cartography” and who realized that the all-encompassing maps were “Useless” and “not without some Pitilessness.”2

The exhibition Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, featured work by a group of twenty-one artists working in a broad assortment of approaches and media and engaging with different thematics of representation, hovering around a focus—or, rather, foci—on different ideas of landscape, nature, and environment. Occupying conceptual terrain somewhere between the engaged pragmatics of Carroll’s farmers and the taken-to-the-extreme undertaking/undoing in Borges’s tale, the mostly contemporary works by the artists in the show illustrated, interrogated, and undermined a range of notions related to representation.

“Interrogate” and “undermine” would be the adjectives most compelling, it would seem, for the three curators of the exhibition—Betti-Sue Hertz (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Ruijun Shen (Guangdong Times Museum,), and Xiaoyu Weng (Kadist Art Foundation)—who come from overlapping milieus in both the U.S. and China. This ambitious group show—drawing on somewhat divergent sources pivoting around the private collection of the Paris/San Francisco-based Kadist Art Foundation—aimed deep and landed

Vol. 14 No. 2 95 wide. The array of work exhibited, following a slightly different installation earlier last year in China, at the Guangdong Times Museum (May 27 to July 27, 2015), spread far in many directions conceptually but refused to cohere around any singular theme, much less resolve itself with any defnitive conclusion. In many ways, the installation of the show’s various artworks demonstrated, in its dense layout, the unruliness of the too many concepts that can be tracked through issues in representing landscape, as well as some of the challenges in using the limited physical environment of a gallery space in attempting to unfold the countervailing logics of expansiveness that can be associated with ideas of landscape.

One set of concerns stated by the curators involved those differences between Western versus Chinese precepts for both creating and relating to landscape representation. Another foregrounded interest pointed to questions that newer technologies imply for perception and cognition in contemporary understandings of landscape. Both these thematics remained elusive and mostly oblique, however, across the play of different pieces in the exhibition.

Special attention was also given in the curators’ statement to characteristics of the locations of and China’s Pearl River Delta—for example, their relationship to technology: for Silicon Valley as a technology innovator/producer, and for the Pearl River Delta as a technology manufacturer/supplier. Attention was also given to the more historical utopian and romantic cultural ideologies that might characterize these locations’ relationship to nature, in contrast to their various urban and suburban development actualities. Such themes were not found explicitly addressed in the various artworks of the exhibition itself, however.

In their statement, the curators pointed to the notion of a new “Era of the Anthropocene” as an additional theoretical premise for the exhibition, with its unavoidable signs of the changes to actual landscapes that have been wrought by humans in the post-industrial era. This is the theme that perhaps allowed exhibition viewers the most traction with respect to some of the works themselves.

For instance, in Simone Pyle’s As Above So Below (2011), a small video monitor was half-buried in a low pile of dark earth on the gallery floor, and on its screen was footage of another monitor half-buried in a forest setting, itself playing images of nature. This work was the most direct, literalist evocation of a new Anthropocene era. Rather differently, Robert Zhao Renhui’s photographs Changi, Singapore (2010–12) and Expedition #46 (2012), each from a larger series, illustrate some of the effects of and responses to interventions resonant with the Anthropocene, including documentation of individual humans in the context of environmental science expeditions to the Arctic Circle and documentation of signs of a massive importation of soil to Singapore from abroad. More tangentially, Paul Kos’s conceptual piece Sound of Ice Melting from 1970—multiple twenty-five-pound blocks of ice, attended by audio gear from the same

96 Vol. 14 No. 2 Simon Pyle, As Above, period, that recalibrate awareness of the subliminal by “marking” in some So Below, 2011, video installation, dimensions way the sound of melting—though not originally intended to address variable. Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy of the artist and such issues, borrowed some value from the exhibition’s setting to imply Yerba Buena Center for the questions about the effects on landscape caused by global warming. Arts, San Francisco.

That part of the curators’ afore-mentioned theses that gave credit to Paul Kos, The Sound of Ice shifting technological bases for Melting, 1970, mixed media installation of two 25-pound perceiving landscapes that have blocks of ice, eight standing boom microphones, been implied by the “micro- amplifier, and speaker, dimensions variable. Photo: screens” of recent framing devices by Tommy Lau. Courtesy of such as smartphones and other the artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San computer screens—with all the Francisco. distortions, fractures, flattening, and hyper-accessibility that the digital basis can offer—is a tantalizing notion to consider. But that notion points beyond the almost entirely earlier-generation media technologies featured in the exhibition—that is, flat-screen video monitors, large-scale projection, an old-school film projector, and vintage, commercially manufactured audio gear. The actual technologies in the exhibition did not feature any of the newer technologies—such as satellite views, GPS, or small-screen personal devices—nor did it follow up in any direct way on a reference in the curators’ statement to The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Anne Friedberg’s 2009 book on changing perspectives on the landscape that arise from the proliferation, new framings, and fragmentation of images offered through the mediation of computers and their monitors.3

At the broadest conceptual scale, any connection to Félix Guattari’s theoretical framework of four ontologies—the virtual, the actual, the possible, the real—from which the exhibition’s subtitle, the virtual, the actual, the possible?, is derived were left for viewers/readers to determine on their own (as well as why one of those four terms of Guattari is absent from the exhibition title). Other theoretical explications of representation

Vol. 14 No. 2 97 in art practice that might have been invoked—from Plato and Aristotle’s Robert Zhao Renhui, Expedition #46, from the perspectives on the mimetic faculty of art through John Ruskin’s praxis of series The Glacier Study Group, 2012, digital pigment the sublime in landscape painting, and, especially, Walter Benjamin’s “The print, 120.6 x 85 cm. Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Jean Baudrillard’s Courtesy of the artist and Kadist Art Foundation. “Simulacra and Simulation”—were not mentioned.

Other cultural reads on the landscape that might have been productively deployed include David Gissen’s recent articulation of sub-nature; that is, those manifestations of “nature” found in humanly developed spaces, such as weeds growing through the cracks in sidewalks, or brush on the edge of a railroad bed. There is also Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which complicate ideas of “nature” beyond a simple false dichotomy of “natural” versus man-made and thus might have been particularly relevant to how many of the actual works in the show function.

The contention put forward in the show’s curatorial statement and catalogue essays suggesting something fundamentally “Chinese” as a value system that avoids imposing order on nature versus some implicitly singular and hegemonic “Western way” of approaching “nature” denotes a culturalist starting point that was not especially generative in relation to the works exhibited. In particular, the contention that Western art has put forward a praxis of presenting isolated objects—and, further, isolating humans from nature, even while depicting it—seemed an under-examined theme in the exhibition itself, as well as the curatorial statement attached to it.

Even brief recognition of Western attempts that do not align with the notion of simply objectifying nature insulated from human existence (for example, Impressionism or Fauvism) might have been productive in noting more nuanced divergence, as well as in recalling some prior reckonings of the malleability of perception and representation of landscape(s). Also

98 Vol. 14 No. 2 Robert Zhao Renhui, Changi, ignored even as passing references were more surreal and/or political Singapore, from the series As We Walked on Water, exercises (for instance, the body/land works of or Hélio 2010–12, digital pigment print, 120.6 x 85 cm. Oiticica, coming out of Latin America, or the long-term project of the Courtesy of the artist and Center for Land Use Interpretation in the northern hemisphere), or Kadist Art Foundation. monumental works in recent generations that have quite deliberately repositioned humans in relation to landscapes ( from Michael Heizer to James Turrell; ecologically based work by the Harrisons, Patricia Johansen, and Future Farmers), and critical photographic approaches to representing landscape that are too diverse and numerous to mention (one thinks of Louis Baltz, John Chiara, Michael Light, David Maisel, Sean McFarland, Richard Misrach, and Christina Seely, just for starters).

Landscape: the virtual, Back in the physical realm of the the actual, the possible?, installation view, Yerba exhibition itself, the design of Buena Center for the Arts, 2014. Photo: Phocasso. the installation by Kyu Che was Courtesy of the artist and innovative and effective, a built Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. presence that shaped the experience of the show overall. One was faced even before entering the open doorway of the gallery with a portion of a large, somewhat imposing circular wall that was part of a broken ring with both entryways and visual slits creating a pavilion-like environment within the space of the larger conventional gallery (and with some reference to the walled-off setting of a Chinese scholars’ contemplative garden).

Vol. 14 No. 2 99 This design created not just multiple Top: Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible?, spaces but multiple types of spaces: installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, typical flat walls for exhibition— 2014. Photo: Phocasso. some well-lit, others darkened Courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San and subdued—faced, on multiple Francisco. Left: Landscape: the virtual, sides, the exterior of the ceiling-less the actual, the possible?, pavilion building-within-a-building, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, along with a small group of 2014. Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy of Yerba Buena darkened alcove spaces in and around the pavilion, where most of the media Center for the Arts, San Francisco. work was installed. Around the first large curve of the built wall in an outer, lit area, an open cutout window provided a foretaste of a video piece by Chen Xiaoyun, which was installed on the far side of another wall extension in the curvilinear space, at what was ostensibly the “end” of the exhibition’s larger installation trajectory.

On the near side of this cutout Zheng Guogu, Teleportation as Landscape, 2014, was a small, platform-like deck performance, installation. Photo: Tommy Lau. Courtesy on which sat two small cushions of the artist and Yerba and a tea set—the residue from Buena Center for the Arts. Teleportation as Landscape (2014), a performance piece commissioned for the exhibition from artist Zheng Guogu. Above the window cutout were a couple of pencil sketches depicting that same performance, a meta-piece in which a discussion between the artist and an interlocutor—in the context of the exhibition opening—verbally

100 Vol. 14 No. 2 Zheng Guogu, Teleportation transmitted “images” that were then as Landscape, 2014, performance, installation. interpreted by two visual artists. Photo: by Tommy Lau. Courtesy of the artist and The resulting paintings were then Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. hung in proximity to the round pavilion gallery, odd extensions to the core representation of the exhibition itself.

Large glass fragments in Marcelo Cidade’s Adição por subtração—4 (2010) created a perpendicular frame for a rectangular field (in landscape orientation) and neatly played on lineages of both gallery-based two- dimensional visual art and conceptually based outdoor land art. Cidade’s use of the sharp-edged shards of glass—creating an ambiguous border of solid matter while remaining visually semi-transparent—also evoked the use of broken glass as an aggressive urban marker while acting as a prophylactic measure against would-be trespassers upon private property.

Marcelo Cidade, Adição por subtração—4, 2010, installation, broken glass on wall. 150.8 x 300.2 cm. Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy of the artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

A highlight of the show was Chen Xiaoyun’s Vanishing Point (2014), an understated tour-de-force that played out across five medium-scale video monitors laid out horizontally in a cul-de-sac space sandwiched between the darkened end of the last curve outside the circular pavilion and the gallery’s “regular” perpendicular wall. The piece presents a series of narrative and/or contemplative text fragments projected as supertitles across the images that pop up across the five screens. The pace and overlapping of the texts occur slightly too fast for one to completely take in, and the imagery that plays out on each screen creates an odd disjunctive continuum, from quasi-still-life portraits of lonely interior chairs with dust blown over them to evoke air pollution in Beijing to “ready-mades” of urban flotsam (a sand-bag, an abandoned backpack, a rubbish bin) found within a fifty-meter ring of the artist’s studio. There is also a sort of late noir cartrip along a post-midnight city highway that is illustrated entirely through the glare of refracted artificial streetlights and shadows. The text that accompanies this abstracted imagery speculates—sometimes morbidly,

Vol. 14 No. 2 101 sometimes sensually, sometimes amusingly—about what might go on inside those other sealed metal and glass capsules of strangers’ cars driving in parallel or passing nearby.

The implication of a sort of perverse figure-ground relationship is suggested in a section of the video in which the camera pans slowly and circularly (echoing the varied angles of the various still-life and outdoor moments in other “episodes” of the video) around the upper part of five individual bodies lying prone, each seemingly straddling a liminal state of dreaming and waking with phrases like “Then she cried” superimposed over the bodies.

The notion of human figures immersed in landscape and nature in Chen Xiaoyun, Vanishing Point, 2014, five-channel traditional Chinese painting could have been seen as newly updated here, video. Photo: Phocasso. courtesy of the artist and though its form and manifestation in this work might actually seem drawn Yerba Buena Center for the more from the Western lineage of video work by artists such as , Arts, San Francisco. , and even Jean-Luc Godard. Variations on super-titles such as “Viva video art!” flash more than once as punctuation between and among episodes, perhaps speaking all the more to the medium of video in a self- conscious mode than to the regeneration of any traditionalist gestures.

Charlotte Moth, Absent Forms, 2010, black-and- white film, 10 mins., 42 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Kadist Art Foundation.

Charlotte Moth’s black-and-white film Absent Forms (2010) played on an interesting conceit in relation to the curators’ notion of complicated contemporary landscapes. In its depiction of a series of humble commercial potted plants found in the urban setting of Paris, the chain of modernist connections it takes off from—an historical text by art critic Francesco Pedraglio responding to a building by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens and a related film by artist Man Ray—threatens to snap the already tentative connection to the landscape theme in this exhibition, and the oddball

102 Vol. 14 No. 2 appearance of Paris diverges from the show’s stated focus on California and the Pearl River Delta River as sites that represent new perspectives on landscape and nature.

A nice visual-conceptual echo occurred between a whorling layout of provocative vinyl-lettered texts—for example, “Blaming them for depressed wages and lack of jobs accusing them of being morally corrupted and $pying on you”—on floor and walls in We Must Draw the Line Somewhere, You Know (2014), by Tsang Kin-Wah, and Field Work (2010), a large- scale painting on cotton by Lois Weinberger. Tsang Kin-Wah’s enveloping “mindscape” sets up an immersive field for viewers, implicating them through his texts in the critique of political and moral realities (and in some ways re-registering that notion of integration into the landscape attributed to traditionalist Chinese visual representation), while Weinberger’s large- scale work placed more elliptical poetic texts phrases onto, and as the topography of, a large-scale, blown-out, rudimentary map.

Left: Tsang Kin-Wah, Another lovely juxtaposition in the installation of the exhibition was We Must Draw the Line Somewhere, You Know, produced between the large-scale video wall projection, After Reality (2013), 2014, cut vinyl lettering. Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy by Zhou Tao, and, beneath it, to one side, the old-school boxy industrial of the artist and Yerba video monitor resting on the floor and featuring Anthony McCall’s 1972 Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. film/performance Landscape for Fire. McCall’s work records an enactment Right: Lois Weinberger, Field Work (detail), 2010, by half a dozen or so white coverall-suited men determinedly lighting oil-based paint marker on fiery lamps. They evoke a ritual with murky purpose in the twilight, and impregnated cotton, 305.8 x 560 cm. Photo: Phocasso. the close-miked sound of each explosively lighted firepot, along with the Courtesy and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San irregular counterpoint of sporadically wailing air-horn careening in the Francisco. near distance, combine to not only intensely define the environs of the landscape but auditorily claim much of the exhibition space itself.

The schematic of McCall’s accompanying drawings suggests some of that imposition upon the landscape the curators imply as Western “values,” while the ephemerality of tagging the landscape gives the impression of

Vol. 14 No. 2 103 either serving as a symbolic prototype of the greater interventions of Left: Zhou Tao, After Reality, 2013, video, the Anthropocene, or just, in contrast, the puniness of human cultural 14 mins., 21 secs. Right: Anthony McCall, gestures. The piece itself, of course, harks back to a period in Western art Landscape for Fire, 1972, practice when land and performance-based work converged intensely with 16 mm film converted to DVD, 7 mins., 5 secs. a conceptual basis seldom seen before or since, and recalls the utopian/ Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy of the artists and Yerba dystopian dreamscapes of back-to-the-landers, communal farmers, and Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. other scions of alternative living in the 1960s and 70s—a California context the curatorial statement points toward (though McCall’s piece was actually shot in England).

A similarly casual sprawl across the stated borders of interest for the exhibition is found in Zhou Tao’s piece, which presents views of the rural edges of both Guangzhou and Paris—an oddly roundabout way to “connect the two distinct geographical and cultural contexts” of California and the Pearl River Delta, one of the defined aims of the exhibition. Intriguing and somewhat ironic in this video work is that it features a series of waterways that define and show how unstable landscapes themselves are, while also tracking a set of human movements around and adjacent to them. As with the human figures in McCall’s work, the half-mysterious, half-industrious gestures of workers, in Zhao Tao’s case maneuvering through and harvesting lush green growth in a highly rural and otherwise seemingly uncultivated setting of both land and water, offers another sense of embodiment within the landscape (the piece’s large rectangular projection itself seems to be floating).

The idea of demonstrating a Chinese approach to representing landscape and its relationship to contemporary attitudes in Western art-making, however, remains a bit of a ghost argument in this exhibition overall. And if those phantom traces of the exhibition’s purported overarching concepts aren’t entirely forced willfully through the busy sprawl of the show, it is a bit faint to be readily detected.

Similarly elusive in relation to another stated theme of the show: there were moments in some of the videos where the effects of technology are more apparent than in the majority of works: a brief freeze frame, a sped-up time lapse, etc., although the more radical shifts attributed to re-framings by

104 Vol. 14 No. 2 Tacita Dean, Baobab, 2001, “micro-screens” are less evident. In one of the most direct confrontations 16 mm film, 10 mins. Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy of Yerba for the viewer with physical and perceptual limits, the small pedestal and Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. projector cordoned off with a small, low rope in one of the handful of cul- de-sac spaces, Tacita Dean’s 16 mm film loop Baobab (2001) set a tangibly awkward limit on spectators’ viewing of the small projected black-and- white image. The apparatus of the projector was a particularly unavoidable presence, putting technology physically in a place that obstructed any viewer attempting to see the images of Dean’s lonely landscape on the island of Madagascar, populated most prominently by the plant species also known as Adansonia, or the monkey bread tree. The desolation of the setting and darkened obscurity of some of the images in Dean’s film itself played against conventional “types” of illuminating clarity in landscape art, although the four-meter distance that viewers were required to maintain added an even more contrary or ironic relationship to the landscape portrayed, whether intentionally or not.

As with so many moments throughout Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible?, the confrontation of such physical obstacles to the viewing of often dim, somewhat distant images of an even more distant place embody a fundamental complexity of representation in the contemporary spaces of art viewing themselves. This set of circumstances in many ways overwhelmed those more nuanced, intricate questions of representation embedded in everything from painterly techniques through deployment of newer technologies, in addition to current global ecological and ideological concerns. The collection of work in the exhibition certainly puts into play and highlights larger questions about the representation of landscape, while hinting at some of the particular intricacies of seeing and sharing the world at the present moment.

Notes 1. Stelarc, "Prosthetic Head: Intelligence, Awareness, and Agency," in 1,000 Days of Theory, October 19, 2005, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=490/. 2. Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas de Giovanni (London: Penguin Books, 1975). 3. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

Vol. 14 No. 2 105