Hordaland Kunstsenter

 

REVIEW
Bergen
aiPotu
Hordaland Art Centre
Klosteret 17
December 3rd-December 22nd

What is more abstract than the sea at night?  On a cloudy night, during a storm, in the rain, in the darkness, where it becomes hard to tell the configuration of up from down or left from right?  The rain pelts you from all directions.  The night sea journey shares much in common with abstract painting, in so much as abstraction comes at you from every angle and the orientation of the picture plane is deliberately called into question, just as one’s balance is significantly challenged when on the deck of a ship, as it travels through a storm at night.  It is no doubt incongruous to begin a review of the exhibition Leila by the artist duo aiPotu, now on view at the Hordaland Art Centre in Bergen, with a meditation on the nature of abstract painting.  After all, there is no painting there in the traditional sense of the word, nor is there “painting in the expanded field,” which has gained considerable currency, anywhere to be found either.  In fact, the exhibition is more correctly described as an installation, or a situational-performance-sculpture, if one could hazard such an unwieldy term.

Still, while it is certainly true that the work isn’t a painting, the work as sculpture is painterly, or:  it transforms the architecture of the art center into a painterly abstraction, with the multi-colored tarps draped over the facade of the art center.  Beneath the tarps and within the art center, viewers encounter something similar to a Moroccan Medina or marketplace, with five different sculptural interventions.  Each work within the overall plan could in a way be held metaphorically in one’s hand, or taken on its own terms.  At times the work seems to hearken back to an earlier art-historical moment like Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead.  It should be said that while this is true there is none of the machismo of Serra’s later Baroque period to be found, or the seemingly dispassionate Verb list.  Instead, the artists translate lived experience into a messy informe that mirrors actual lived experience.  But whose experience exactly?

One conceit of the exhibition plays on the dialectic of the visible and the invisible, as maybe suggested by the exhibition’s title, Leila, an island off the coast of Morocco, its sovereignty in heated dispute.  The contested island inhabits a strange place in the regime of visibility.  It is at once invisible—visitors cannot travel there, nor can they see it from afar without proper authorization—yet it is in plain sight from the Moroccan coast. The island appears to be unremarkable enough, save for its peculiar status as an island in exile.  The island is, in a sense, a reverse panopticon.  It is this quality of visibility to which the exhibition alludes, which may be thought of as hiding in plain sight.

It is through this allusion that one might think of the over-arching structure of the work as similar to that of a mirror.  This works with the way audience participants are asked to think about “the other” that is, in some sense, a reflection of themselves.  How do we see ourselves in Leila?  What are the limits of our own sovereignty?  This investigation is no doubt informed by the artists’ own relationship, and indeed the ideas of collaboration are operant throughout the exhibition in a very fundamental way.  Which is to say, the synergy created from the artists’ interactions becomes manifest, not as a dialogical stratagem, but more as a conversation that spreads from individual to action.

Let me then proleptically address the specter of Relational Aesthetics.  What does it mean to be Relational now in 2010?  Or, in 2011?  Or, in 2012?  Is it something that can sustain theorization, or is it simply a methodology?  Can we now assume that in one way or another nearly all artists have some aspect of their practice that is relational, although they may not name it as such?  It is hard to imagine any artist today who is able to create work without relating to another human being.  So, having identified a mode of working, as Nicolas Bourriaud did back in the nineties, we inherit a method.  A tool for thinking through relational aesthetics mutatis mutandis now we might conceive of something like an aesthetics relational: a new sense, a sense that is relational.  A sense, moreover, which is comparable to our sense of touch, taste, smell, etc.  Our sixth sense is relational.  So if we can posit that the work by aiPotu is relational, that it composes with the “relational sense” in a way that is analogous to how a music composer creates with the sense of hearing, then might it follow logically enough that the work by aiPotu is directly in conversation with Terpsichore, the muse of the Dance, the muse who sets bodies in motion?

In the case of Leila the artists have set form dancing.  Partnering the seen and the unseen in a sensorium with a frenetic twisting of associations that takes place both within and without the exhibition.  So if I might risk contradicting my earlier assertion that the work is a painterly abstract sculpture, I would offer that Leila is a dance with form across various zones of time and space.  What philosopher Jacques Rancière might term intempestive form.  All the muses may be said to be taking up residence in the exhibition, but it is Terpsichore that animates the form on display at the Hordaland Art Centre.

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Zachary Cahill is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany (ZKM) and Gallery 400, Chicago amongst other, and will have an upcoming solo-exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2011. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, the journal ReThinking Marxism, Proximity Magazine, and Artforum.com. Currently he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts and serves as the Open Practice Committee coordinator at the University of Chicago and is adjunct faculty in the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.