An unpublished essay written by Georgia in 2016.
Superficiality Is A Place I Go
Prologue
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My grandmother Shirley was survived by her third husband Sam by nearly four years, and when he finally died, it was the last time to empty the house. Though prior to her death she had attempted to give my sister and I everything, this proved difficult in the distance between Boston and South Florida (picture airport security ripping open a mysterious and meticulously packed box of crystal Ralph Lauren rocks glasses, or a carry-on tote filled awkwardly with high-heeled shoes and leather Falci purses.) Understandably, the large items never made it on the plane, you know, furniture, mirrors, rugs, things like that. Anyways several months later it was last call;
was there anything I wanted from the house, before the estate sale began, or before the trucks hauled everything off to Goodwill? I have a happy memory of the sunroom off that house, a long, shining, white-tiled room surrounded by glass at the edge of a golf-course; in the center was a kind of perfect still life; a white wicker chaise with white cushions, a stack of magazines probably on top of a white garden seat, and the flat black and white Zebra rug, adding a little Chinoiserie drama to the stark white room; it was beautiful, and profoundly Palm Beach. Of course I wanted the rug.
Some time later I opened a badly-handled cardboard box to find a large, floppy and incomprehensible thing in my hands. Holding it up in front of me, I had no idea what it was. It could have been moments or hours before I realized it was my rug, from the sunroom, from the sunroom by the chaise. Up close and tactile, removed from my mind and put into my hands, its Palm Beach glamor faded; and then as I laid it on the floor it returned. This thing in my mind called rug was hardly a rug at all; it was a painting, that we walked on. In a way there aren’t really words to describe what this means to me. After all these years I’ve become an artist, and a decorator of sorts, too, unable to give up either. I miss everyone and everything from that time.
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Picture an office in a basement somewhere; gritty drop-ceiling, leak stained and brown-ish; half-burned out fluorescents behind that thick textured plastic effecting a dull, unflattering light; and a deep, hollow silence, like pressing your ear to the opening of a seashell. What’s weird, or unique, about seashells is that they sound like the ocean, which is where they came from; as displaced objects they embody not just the physical trace of their origins, but the aural one, too; for me it’s the sound inside the shell that becomes transportive, and in this sense I think of it as a memory. The space we’re standing in is A402, a CalArts campus gallery that defies logic in its non-conventionality, at least for institutional purposes. There’s no track lighting, the ceilings are low and distracting, and there’s that half-ocean half-ghost sound, whistling and gently rattling through different shapes of pipes and other ventilation, all out of sight. I’m trying to say you can’t stand in this place and really be here. Everything about it is completely unstable. It resists gallery-ness, office-ness, art-ness, grounded-ness generally. To me it is a space that remakes itself in every incarnation, and I have never entered it twice and seen it in the same way. By nature of its architecture, its disrepair, its noisiness, it is in a constant state of re-imagination. It reminds me of a kind of thought space I could only inhabit when I was a child, when tin foil and toilet paper tubes could be a rocket-ship, and a boiler room could be outer space.
Ibai’s show begins by a semi-obstruction of the gallery doors, where a towering triangular particle board and black vinyl object stands on casters. Exceeding the height of A402 itself, this object isn’t inside the gallery, and it never can be. It has the potential for mobility, the potential for un-obstruction; but in its unfamiliarity as an object it becomes scary, almost uncanny, and no one wants to touch it. It’s on the verge of fitting into an art vocabulary, but I can hardly describe it to you. It’s almost like a giant particle board bookshelf on wheels, only it has no back or sides, and there is a long piece of vinyl which has been painted black and stretched over the object, which must be nine feet high. Impressed or painted onto the vinyl are two crosses, barely visible depending on the light. Seriously, this object is barely comprehensible, a kind of sculptural rabbit-duck illusion. Here are my first impressions: sound bouncer/blocker; light bouncer/blocker; apparatus for stretching/painting rolls of clear vinyl; sex toy/object; religious object; ritual object.
The rest of the show is not possible to describe in detail. Ibai has designed a stage that juts out into the gallery; made of particle board, it is many-sided, and has a few things sticking up out of it–a mic stand, a drum, a giant speaker made of the same particle board, a white LED stick–the stage has no sides, we can see everything underneath it, including a pile of wires. Though the space beneath the stage is dark, the pile of wires is lit by the white LED. A flat-screen monitor placed perpendicularly to the stage sits on the floor in the corner, playing a 7 minute video loop. The video is of a staged-looking rehearsal, where a few different performers sing the nonsense phrase “I laugh if I doodle dah day” in varied styles; the camera pans across the bunched-up fabric of a piano cover, and zooms into a few of the performers’ clothes. As the video loop ends, audio begins from the giant speaker tower; the sound is something between the score for a dramatic movie and a drum circle, increasing in intensity as the music plays on. Lastly a few of the clear ceiling light tiles have been replaced with red plastic and the rest of the lights removed; this washes the space in an eerie red light; the back of the gallery is the darkest light, the middle the redist light, and back the whitest light. Outside the show is the regular institutional light, along with the giant incomprehensible object.
Picture another office-ish looking room, same drop ceiling, but cleaner, same lighting, but more of it; this room is big, it’s carpeted with a system of tiles in something black-speckled and resilient, utterly replaceable; it’s filled with chairs, more chairs than you could need, never stacked, just rearranged, pushed out of the way, or pulled closer. They dictate the space by making it less navigable, sometimes treacherous, you’re surrounded by a disarray of empty chairs. The walls here are white and fairly smooth, mainly because they’re concrete, and nearly impossible to nail into, though some do try, and succeed. There are two entrance doors diagonally across from each other, and one closet which looks so much like an exit that a sign above it reads “not an exit”; this has the effect of making the room feel like it’s floating in the middle of the school, since one could exit from nearly any wall. This is F200, a CalArts classroom with the odd ability to mean nothing to no one, despite years of famous teachers and lecturers, countless critiques and arguments, and the endless numbers of student artworks hauled through its doors and hung with tape from its impermeable walls.
If A402 is like a seashell, then F200 is like a church basement. As an art-space it’s a visual conundrum, as an institutional space it’s like a prison for toddlers. Almost no artwork can escape the room’s psychological drain. Has an artwork ever looked good, let alone felt good, in this room? No, but in this sense it asks us to use our imagination, and we always do; the room has this magic, for sure, but it is a dark magic.
My drawing is a triptych, pen and pencil on stonehenge, 30”x40”. From left to right, the first is a horizontal pen and pencil drawing of a messy bed in a large bedroom. It could be a hotel room, but it’s probably not, because of some framed pictures on the nightstand, and a few other personal items that would be out of place in a hotel room. There are lots of pillows in this drawing, and some of the things are only halfway drawn, and other things have a lot of pencil lines around them, with a lot of smudging and eraser marks. The style is mainly contour, very graphic looking, with no shading to speak of; there is the occasional all-inked surface of the paper where an object’s shadow might be, or an invented shadow. The middle drawing is vertical and contains, in about 1.5 inch letters drawn and shaded in with pencil, the following thought:
Start with really earnest writings and then go back and edit them to be less embarrassing. The more you write about your family the more your whole art practice turns to mush. People say you should bring sex back into your work. Therapists say sometimes people want sex as a substitute for something else, probably attention. Either way the desire for it represents something else, and this thought can make sex undesirable and disappointing.
The registration lines on this are faint but visible, and the words are almost level across the page, but start to angle slightly up toward the end. The last drawing in the triptych is hung horizontally again, and is also a pen and pencil drawing of a messy bedroom. The perspective indicates that either we’re closer to the bed, or the room is much smaller. Overall this drawing is stylistically similar to the first one, but even less finished looking.
The scale of the triptych is impressive, and the drawing style works to blur the line of what may be considered finished, or complete. There is a transparency to these drawings, which are unconcerned with showing eraser marks or pencil smudges, or revealing the process of their making. In some ways they are a total mess, and in some ways, to some, this might give them a subtle beauty.
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Art is made up of much of the same language as objects. Traditionally, different artistic disciplines have been concerned with different problems. For example, painting is concerned with surface. Sculpture is concerned with volume. Later in history they converge, but it’s not difficult to look around and find them separated again, if not literally, than in the passive seedbeds of our minds. In post-modernity, arguably, painting isn’t a higher art than sculpture; abstraction is not more avante-garde than illustration. But language permeates our bones, and the hierarchy is present in the language. Ibai’s show, in A402, with the hollow seashell sound, its premise is depth, different kinds of depth. The stage bifurcates the space by reminding us that there is an above and a below, not just of his stage but of the very ground we stand on. There is darkness and lightness, redness and whiteness, logic and illogic, inside of sound and outside of sound, comprehensibility, and incomprehensibility. Ibai’s show is the kind of immersive experience that has such a precise balance of factors that it goes beyond depth and into drowning. I will think of it often.
I can’t be a passive observer of my own artwork. Even if I think I can, nobody would believe me. Back in F200, with buzzing fluorescent lights and the sea of chairs, I want to talk about the meaning of superficial. The paper, the lines, the materials, the immediacy of words, of sentence structure, of stating thoughts, of something as basic as “pen” or “pencil”; a clear line for the eye to follow, and a familiar image, in the form of a letter, or a pillow, or a shoe. When you make a drawing, in the most conventional sense, it hangs flat against the wall, or it lays flat in a drawer, or on a table. Flatness is one of its inherent qualities. Chances are you can’t touch or hear the drawing, or interact with it in any way, except with your eyes. For me, this creates a kind of stare down between myself and the artwork, and the inability to touch or taste or have a multi-sensual experience lends such flat things, like drawings, a superficial quality. In a spatial-metaphorical way, flatness echoes flatness, volume echoes volume, depth echoes depth. The abstract expressionist painters, among others, were fixated on this, too. Think of Rothko, with a giant canvas whose colors recede in both directions at the same time, and also, not at all.
If Ibai’s artwork drowned me, in that moment, in that space, then in this moment, in this space, my artwork was pushing me away. When I first had this thought, it had a negative feeling. There was depth, and then there was superficiality; in art discourse, and at least in the English language, depth is a measurement, but it is also associated with thought or emotion. To have depth is to be meaningful, serious, maybe poignant. Ibai’s show had all kinds of depth, especially in the metaphysical sense. But if depth is a concept but also, a place, shouldn’t superficiality be a place, too? A place with its own value system, its own possibilities, its own version of depth, not an inverse, but an alternative, next door, not across the hall? I think our minds have been playing a visual and linguistic trick on us. We think of superficiality as a concept, as opposed to a space of inquiry, a space that lies intentionally along a surface, I think of it more like looking at the ocean than swimming, the experiences are different but related, there is mobility between them, and potential, and changes in temperature.
In my life, space has always been important; the way a room gets laid out, what goes inside of it, if those things can fit through the door, if they’ll look the same in this light or that. In Style By Saladino, Saladino writes:
Every home should be a sanctuary: entering it you should immediately feel physically and emotionally protected. Inside there should ideally be two different, but equally important, kinds of space that metaphorically might be described as a cocoon and a cathedral. We all need space that offers comfort and security, and shelter from the cold, noise or darkness outside. But, paradoxically, we also need space that liberates us from terra firma, allowing our spirits to soar and our imaginations to take flight.
Of course, Saladino was a decorator, and decorating his artform; his style was characterized in his concept of conflating what space meant and what it looked like. His approach to decorating was to have two different, one could say opposite, types of physio-emotional spaces existing simultaneously. And though those spaces had opposite qualities, none was desired more than the other, but both were understood as vital. If this is not a personal philosophy of artistic production, I don’t know what is. What made Saladino a great decorator had little to do with taste and everything to do with belief and passion for a concept; though not every room could achieve this ideal concept, his decorating was aspirational, and for all these reasons, I cannot see it as something separate from art.
There are a lot of reasons why Ibai’s artwork had depth, and I had superficiality. Partly it’s the medium, partly the location, partly the different types of labor used in the production of each artwork. I think you could argue that to a different audience, on a different day, Ibai’s piece could have had superficiality, and mine could have had depth; and on another day, they would have had a different place entirely, and so on. For me, there’s no exact science, no single set or group of parameters, or juxtapositions, to create the perfect space. Sometimes it’s about arrangements, creating the illusion of depth in a small space, or making a huge space feel intimate, or making a huge space feel huge, for that matter. In the 18th century, Chinoiserie was considered by some to be morally ambiguous; in the 21st century, it can be as ambiguous as a rug, or a painting.
-Georgia Lassner, 2016