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Clémentine Deliss & Oscar Tuazon | dragged down into lowercase
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dragged down into lowercase[1] is the concept devised by curator Clémentine Deliss and artist Oscar Tuazon for the 2008 Exhibition and Summer Academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. The exhibition embodies the proposition evoked by the title by presenting the works of eleven international artists below ground level. An excavated structure designed by Tuazon highlights the physical and conceptual associations of the underground. Exposing the earth, one is reminded of the functions and mythologies of archaeological digs, crypts, burrows, basements, bunkers, and illegal dumps, but also of the vast, unexplored potential that lies below the surface.
By treating the parklands of the Zentrum Paul Klee as an inverted exhibition space, dragged down into lowercase recasts the classical conception of a contemplative subject posited by garden design and landscape painting. Here there are no views outwards; nothing is framed in sequence against the horizon. In collaboration with artists Heather & Ivan Morison, the walls of this ‘underground gallery’ have been built with rough boards milled from fallen trees taken from the forests surrounding Bern. Accentuating this lowercase condition of perception, the exhibition emphasizes a fractured experience of landscape more in line with formulations of Land Art, which vacillated between aerial perspectives, on the ground exposure, and written description. As Robert Smithson wrote,
"The parks that surround some museums isolate art into objects of formal delectation. Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art. A park carries the values of the final, the absolute, and sacred. Dialectics have nothing to do with such things. I am talking about a dialectic of nature that interacts with the physical contradictions inherent in natural forces as they are – nature as both sunny and stormy. (…) Apart from the ideal gardens of the past, and their modern counterparts – national and large urban parks, there are the more infernal regions – slag heaps, strip mines, and polluted rivers. Because of the great tendency toward idealism, both pure and abstract, society is confused as to what to do with such places. (…) The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground – congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality."[2]
This year’s concept also makes reference to a recent collaboration between Deliss and Tuazon, which involved communications with Bert and Holly Davis who have lived in the woodland areas of Oregon for over thirty years constructing simple, subterranean shelters, and publishing the zine Dwelling Portably[3]. The Davis’ slim manual updates on how best to go about eating, sleeping, recycling, storing, hiding, and constructing alternative modes of living with minimal requirements. Theirs is not the life of the desperado or the hippy, but an unusual and engaging reformulation of nomadic existence that prides itself on the straight talk of structural and survivalist ingenuity. Using watertight 55-gallon drums, the entire archive of back issues of Dwelling Portably is buried throughout the forests of the Siskiyou mountains of Central
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Oregon. In this manner, a quarter century of significant underground literature is squirreled away in this dispersed subterranean library.
In contrast to the editors of Dwelling Portably, most people do not use the earth to store valuable items for posterity such as books, art works, files, or those elements of our lives that are not beyond their use-by date. Instead, undesirable chemicals, industrial waste, the results of natural or man-made catastrophes, of landslides, or of lava covering homesteads, are the more immediate connotations of humanity when it reaches underground level. We recall the vast repository of ruined cities, hidden objects, and buried human remains. When Alexej Koschkarow evokes the vestiges of baroque excess, or the relics of Russia’s imperial past, we return once again to the scientific and archaeological underpinnings of power, in anachronistic testimonials that reproduce, through their very own kitsch imitations, the foundations of European autocracies. The Gothic city of Bern with its entrenchments, medieval clock tower, 15th century Münster cathedral, arcades, promenades, and curious bear pit provides a rich context for these mythologies of heaven and hell.
The ways of living proposed by Bert and Holly Davis bear an affinity with the conditions described by Henry David Thoreau in his seminal novel and social tract, Walden.[4] Thoreau, who was a staunch critic of all but the most spartan of architecture, famously lived in a house he described as "a porch at the entrance to a burrow". Throughout Walden, Thoreau refers to underground structures, evoking a compulsion to return architecture to the earth, towards death or, as he put it, to an "architecture of the grave". Thoreau’s understanding of modes of habitation at their bare minimum is compelling not only for his impassioned commitment to self-deprivation, but also for his belief that it is solely in the most reduced circumstances that we may find release from the world around us. In writing Walden, Thoreau was effectively writing out an existence for himself and performing it as a life. In the sculptural work of Irina Korina, the blandly decorative architectural accoutrements that Thoreau despised have taken on their own strangely abstracted existence, their hermetic volumes suggesting an architecture without, or after, use. The minimalist form of Robert Stark’s massive curved wedge, rendered in heavy wood planks and stained tar black, shifts between precise abstraction and coarse materiality, a rough monument built by hand.
For the Summer Academy, Charlie Tweed proposes an alternative housing model for Bern’s citizens in the form of a safe community that lives below the ground in dugout shelters lined with disused washing machines and fridge freezers. Tweed’s Man from Below updates autochthonous mythologies of origin into an urban, new age pitch for white goods eco-homes. In contrast, Lucy Pawlak’s work refers to the feral underbelly of a "life inside the grave" that alternates between the social and the savage. Her sound installation for the Summer Academy introduces us to the ancient female figure of the Anchorite who lives an existence so internal and solitary that she metaphorically crawls into Christ’s heart-shaped wound or finds solace in the uterus of the Virgin Mary. Pawlak’s second character is the male Hermit, whose early pilgrim trails and ardent fervor led to the constitution of monasticism and the formation of Benedictine institutions. In the 19th century, the Hermit’s role takes on a somewhat absurd turn, as he becomes a feature of English pastoral follies, commissioned to perform for the gentry as a human garden ornament that inhabits a man-made cave. Michael Höpfner’s personal
and extended expeditions into the hidden valleys of Tibet and China enact a contemporary experience of hermit-like solitude, a trace of which has found its way into the grounds of the Zentrum Paul Klee in the form of a tent modeled after traditional nomadic design. The indeterminate and often performative objects of Pamela Rosenkranz, such as a door bent in half, an artwork produced for the Summer Academy, seem to elide description, acting instead as runic objects of contemplation.
Several works designed for the Summer Academy’s exhibition articulate an extreme sense of functionality through actions that are so methodical and ingenious they risk self-parody. Avigail Moss investigates the Universal Postal Union, an agency established in Bern in 1874 with egalitarian principles that appear impossibly utopian in today’s world. These united angels of communication would charge a flat rate for mail sent anywhere in the world; foreign and domestic post would receive equal treatment; and each country could retain the postage earned on its international mail. Introducing this epistolary dimension into the exhibition, Moss compliments the work of Aaron Flint Jamison whose Jammer attached to the perimeter fence of the exhibition site obstructs mobile phone usage in the parklands area, and effectively decelerates the time span of dialogues that stray in lowercase mode gently below the magnetic field.
Questioning the relationship between survival, production, visibility, and extinction, this year’s Summer Academy focuses on complex works and artistic statements that choose to abstain from a single identity or assessment of value. If there is a unifying thematic among the diverse practices of the invited artists and the faculty, it is the questioning of the conventions that structure the display and reception of artworks. This determination to imagine another context for art beyond that which Robert Smithson called the "graveyards above the ground" leaves behind the security and amenities of the gallery and opts instead for an exhibition in the lowercase condition.
In parallel, certain artworks and theoretical positions dig below the surface typologies and hierarchies of human interaction to expose the foundation for survival as the nurturing of conceptual and existential emancipation. Philippe Van Wolputte’s bunker-like cavity is perhaps the most sinister of all the contributions. As an intervention into Tuazon’s excavation, it appears to keep striving to retrieve something from where it cannot be found, pulling the observer into the rusty hole, deep into what Pamela Rosenkranz describes as the feeling of being "dungeoned".
In tune with today’s discussion of art educational models, the international guest faculty of the Summer Academy offers a unique polymathic program that elicits a number of theoretical and practical responses to the social and cultural implications of existing underground. Eric Fredericksen from Seattle presents an analysis of the Ha-Ha, the concealed trench used in 18th century English garden design and now enjoying a revival in U.S. State security planning. Joe Scanlan, known for his on-line sales of coffins, workshops the idea of Classism, low-tech economies, and survivalism as a practicing artist. Martin Kimani, the conflict analyst from Nairobi, questions the museological ramifications of genocide and memory with reference to recent warfare in Rwanda. Swiss artist Christoph Büchel and U.S. conceptual artist Adrian Piper engage with the team of international artists. Curator Giovanni Carmine leads a two-day expedition into the mountains to visit the historical Réduit and bunkers scattered in the Swiss countryside. Philippe Pirotte moderates a debate on the art market and the underground, held at the Kunsthalle Bern in association with the Zentrum Paul Klee and the University of Bern. Finally, Clémentine Deliss and Oscar Tuazon present lectures and seminars throughout the duration of the Summer Academy.
[1]Title of Summer Academy taken from Elliot Smith, Fear City in New Moon, 2007
[2]Robert Smithson, Cultural Containment, reproduced in this catalogue.
[3]The Dwelling Portably investigation was part of Future Academy at Edinburgh College of Art and resulted in a special issue of the publication Metronome for documenta 12.
[4] H.D. Thoreau, Walden, 1854.
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Excavation of Exhibition Site, Zentrum Paul Klee, July 2008. Photo Egbert Knobloch.
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Oscar Tuazon, Drawing of Excavation, Zentrum Paul Klee, 2008.
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Giovanni Carmine, Various Bunkers, Swiss Jura, Rhine Valley, Thun, 2000 – 2003.
These structures were part of the Réduit, a gigantic fortification system of about 20,000
military constructions built during and after WWI to defend the heart of Switzerland against
foreign invasion.
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Giovanni Carmine, Various Bunkers, Swiss Jura, Rhine Valley, Thun, 2000 – 2003.
These structures were part of the Réduit, a gigantic fortification system of about 20,000
military constructions built during and after WWI to defend the heart of Switzerland against
foreign invasion.
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Giovanni Carmine, Various Bunkers, Swiss Jura, Rhine Valley, Thun, 2000 – 2003.
These structures were part of the Réduit, a gigantic fortification system of about 20,000
military constructions built during and after WWI to defend the heart of Switzerland against
foreign invasion.
|
Giovanni Carmine, Various Bunkers, Swiss Jura, Rhine Valley, Thun, 2000 – 2003.
These structures were part of the Réduit, a gigantic fortification system of about 20,000
military constructions built during and after WWI to defend the heart of Switzerland against
foreign invasion.
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