Carnegie Museum of Art
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Installation View of Where From Here? (αμψιβοι), 2002, Latex paint and graphite on wall, Dimensions Variable.
Installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Destroyed).
Interview With Elizabeth Thomas
ET: This project was conceived quite specifically for the Carnegie Museum of Art, as a result of an invitation to come to the museum, look around, and see what you could make of our curious juxtaposition with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. How did you initially approach this multi-pronged institution and this material?
JB: I spent two days wandering around the museum collecting images that I felt had the generative capacity to operate in a drawing, and that also were tied back into the zones of meaning that I've been playing with for the last four or five years. I'm very interested in marginalized historical perspectives, or historical timelines that aren't the dominant read. As examples, the alchemical traditions and heretical religious systems are relevant as an outgrowth of my interest in belief systems, and I'm attracted to themes of the occult or new age-y pseudo-science that is in argument with scientific materialist reasoning.
ET: Your work in the past has typically dealt with, as you said, marginalized belief systems, and yet here we asked you to look at a museum, which arguably perpetuates the dominant strands of knowledge-making in the late 20th century.
JB: Well, I think I was looking for rough edges in the Carnegie as a collection. And of course, the proximity of science and art is kind of amazing. One of the first things I wrote to myself when I realized that I had this opportunity to work with a cultural institution was "do not get obsessed with the environment, there is too much history there for you to digest." And I should say, since this is extremely covered territory artistically, that not only am I not critiquing the institution, I'm not critiquing the critique of the institution. When I walked through the museum the experience was much more based on my lateral movements from object to object. -thinking through the cloud of associations that a given object had been presented in, and then sifting and redefining what that cloud meant. So in that sense, it immediately became about a distillation process that relies on a more symbolic logic, rather than a didactic function.
ET: You obviously can't synthesize the whole museum, but with so much raw material to work with, how did you distill the field of images for the final drawing?
JB: I tried to scramble things, to pick and choose images that existed on the edges of the institutional narratives. So I approached making the piece by looking for as many narrative functions that an object could conjure, especially objects that were atopos, or out of the normal field of the interpretive material. These objects altered the gestalt thrust of display and revealed that behind the crystallizing didactic presentation of an object there is a dynamic, ever-evolving, ever-changing historical record for that object that is continually being reinterpreted. In some cases I sort of knew the back-story about certain objects, but in other cases objects resonated in my head even though I was not familiar with them. The John White Alexander mural was something I didn't know anything about, for example, but with the newt I immediately knew what my attraction to it was. And I started with a combination of those two elements--the proportional study of the columns in which the White Alexander piece resides and the newt figure. I sought out the newt based on a quote from the Neo-platonic philosopher Plotinus, who uses the most dense, polyvalent kind of language that I've ever encountered. Each word, since it's translated from ancient Greek, has about twelve different meanings, and the quote I'm referring to employs the Greek word for "amphibious," a word that also means "of two worlds." I also think, through a dialectic method, Plotinus was trying to extract some kind of option related to this idea of the one that is many, and that whole mystical idea of multiplicity and unity. That idea is very old, and I think it is present throughout stages in the museum itself. So the salamander, in that way, was a stand-in for the Plotinian idea of the human condition and I built the piece from that original idea once I woke up and had that realization.
Installation View of Where From Here? (αμψιβοι), 2002, Latex paint and graphite on wall, Dimensions Variable.
Installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Destroyed).
Mechanical of Where From Here? (αμψιβοι), 2002, Latex paint and graphite on wall, Dimensions Variable.
Installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Destroyed).
ET: And once you set up that pivotal relationship, how did the compositional process develop?
JB: I prioritized the field of images in terms of very brief narrative constructions, and with this piece in particular I was thinking about civilization arcs. I'm very obsessed with the rise-ascendance-fall of cultural arcs, and that was in the background when I was relating these images. Once I'd determined the set of images I pulled them all into the computer, where I worked with a master file of the architectural layout and started placing these things in, taking them out, pushing them, pulling them, it goes on forever, essentially. In terms of composition, I very rarely cut something once I put it in there. The relationships are set but then it becomes about making them seductive to the viewer. You have to seduce the viewer into taking the next step from looking to experiencing the drawing. It should work to lodge an image in the viewer's head so that either they have an associative experience with that image, and are able to hold or reincorporate it, or alternately actually go and seek it out in the museum.
ET: And the digital treatment of the images functions to equalize them and to flatten them out. Are you seeking out a quality of image that abstracts the original object, makes it emblematic?
JB: Well, flatness is a byproduct of the digital process I use, which schematizes images. In that way I try to put the focus on the content of the image, presenting an essence of the object rather than trying to literally represent it. The diagrammatic presentation becomes more about the thought content of the image as a symbol or as an emblem.
ET: With this computer-generated schematic, you produce a blueprint for the final wall drawing done on site. How does the architecture and the scale of the site-specific context figure into the resulting viewer experience?
JB: This question of why I have the impulse to draw on the wall always comes up. It always comes back to this idea of a total experience, rather than something that can be contained within your field of vision. In its finished form, this work is going to surround your peripheral vision, it will be all over, everywhere. And I'm still very attached to the idea that the viewer sees the hand of the artist in the work as it is transferred to the wall in paint. Perfection would be a lie, and I want the viewer to recognize that there is a subjectivity attached to the work. It prevents the piece from making a bid for a totally objective position.
ET: Situating the viewer in the midst of the work, you are encouraging them to approach the composition as a field of associated images rather than a narrative construction. In that regard is the specific content more important than the evocative potential of the images, or vice versa?
Installation Views of Where From Here? (αμψιβοι), 2002, Latex paint and graphite on wall, Dimensions Variable.
Installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Destroyed).
JB: Well, the point of access or entry to the piece is always something I'm battling with. You want there to be a mysterious quality to it so that the viewer has an experience that is progressive, in that the more time they spend with it the more they're going to be able to cull from it. But again, this introduces the problem of how much information they are able to associate with the object, which brings up the idea of the general and the specific, which is something I always have in mind... there's always going to be a dual function in my head. I rely on the viewer's subjectivity, in that they might pull into the work ideas that they don't necessarily recognize, and there's that moment of dislocation or disorientation, that hopefully keeps them trekking back and forth across the compositional elements. For example, they're going to recognize "The Destoying Angel" for what it is-a mushroom. I also think, in the context of the other objects in the environment, it begs for a surrogate meaning, but that surrogate meaning is open. The mushroom is actually a pretty good example, because I spent a lot of time meditating on what I thought that meant. The name alone brings me back to this idea of boys and boy fascination because it's a cool name. But also the didactic text for the mushroom explains how this plant produces the most lethal toxin known to man. Then I thought to myself that it looks like a lot of the hallucinogenic class of mushrooms, which piqued my curiosity to the point of doing more research in that direction. As it turns out, it's only one genus or one species over. By tracking it down and figuring out what it was, it introduces more associative qualities-from Alice in Wonderland to the whole mushroom cloud/fantasy aspect. The entire sweep of the drawing has a fantasy element to it where it's like, dream space/waking space, and I'm trying to balance that a little bit. But again, it starts with, this is a mushroom and then ...
ET: And then the viewer is supposed to riff off the proposed relationships you set forward. Which reintroduces the polyvalent text, because I think it is analogous to the kind of symbolic play you hope comes from the viewer's experience of the drawing.
JB: Yes. When I make these drawings I feel like they are in a dispersed ether that we as bodies can pass through. It's a symbolic universe rather than a narrative universe, and although I recognize that combining these emblems creates a situation of reading a series of relationships, they're just a series of relationships, not a constructed narrative per se. To be honest, it's something I grapple with, because I could knit together a story--"at the beginning of time, the crystal formed and the emanations from the crystal begat the salamander, also known as mankind, that was of two worlds, part spiritual, part material, and therein lay the problem, and that problem became history." And that would be one way to explain the piece, but it's tricky. It is one of the ways that I've thought about the piece, but in the end it shouldn't be about me telling my story, or telling you my mythology. That would give the piece a certain closure that I don't think is of value to the viewer. Looking at one of these drawings should be much more about formulating propositions than drawing conclusions.
Idea Map of Where From Here? (αμψιβοι), 2002, Latex paint and graphite on wall, Dimensions Variable.
Installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Destroyed).
Initial Thoughts submitted to Elizabeth Thomas
Note: the following was a text submitted to Elizabeth Thomas following a weekend visit/orientation to the Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History.
Thoughts for the Carnegie 01-19-02
The Amphibian:
"... Souls, then, become, one might say, amphibians, compelled to live by turns the life There, and the life here: those which are able to be more in the company of Intellect live the life There more, but those whose normal condition is, by nature or chance, the opposite, live more the life here below."
- Plotinus, Ennead IV. 8 (Loeb Library Edition)
The Museum As the World (Orbis Terrarum):
The museum as an accurate representation of the world (think about it like a Borges story) - I think one of the reasons this idea seemed so compelling and strangely viable (I realize we debunked that idea of the museum ages ago) is how small the world is starting to feel - a kind of post-internet-utopia bubble bursting. The idea is the consistent fib of the modern institution (the modern material philosophy I would also argue), that the viewer is truly objective in regard to the subject/object of observation.
I slowly started a visual archive of points of fascination (usually seeming paradoxes - see below). Working intuitively, I realized I was collecting images for their symbolic value rather than their 'information' value, completely ignoring the specific heuristic model each section of the museum was creating. Hallways became of keen interest, particularly ones with supposed 'transition material'. So then the fungi, delightfully known as "The Destroying Angel" becomes ecstatic death/an engine of rebirth, rather than a lively example of a particular kind of plant. I was thinking symbolically, in the most 'Foucault' of ways. I was getting medieval - it was the natural way to proceed once I had dispensed with the museum's categories and treated my subjective experience as the generator of categories.
Installation Views of Where From Here? (αμψιβοι), 2002, Latex paint and graphite on wall, Dimensions Variable.
Installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Destroyed).
(Looking For) Balance/Equilibrium:
Sophrosyny: moral/ethical balance. Are we allowed to think of this as a natural state? Can there be moral/ethical equilibrium? Is there a moral point to be made by redistributing the hierarchies of the museum? Perhaps the re-evaluation of the existing narratives enable the internal contradictions of our 'histories' to be more visible: that knowing there is not a position of righteousness is the most righteous one available (a passive übermensch [?!]).
Ecology always holds a perilous position in these places: deep ecology states that material is in constant transformation, that the cycle is where the continuity is. The museum and the sciences attached are a crystallizing engine, a forced interruption of the cycle, without which we would not have recognized the cycle (!?!)
The collection in history - J. W. Alexander's mural depicts an ideology that is no longer operative in the institution - it's function is no longer didactic, it is a historical document only.
Can multiple reads be voiced in a language without the implicit structure of time? (Joyce, Stein, Burroughs - they tried) How do you present multiple narratives without flattening them? Not a relativity built out of the objective state, but out of empathy/sympathy.
The Viewer:
The viewer is not being given a narrative per se, nor is s/he expected to construct a new world in the space. The viewer needs only to follow along the various routes being constructed: the literal connections of the design in the installation space; the paths they might take from the image of the object in the piece and the literal object on display in the museum itself. Those connections give the viewer new views between the objects in the museum and the symbolic function they serve within the ideology of the museum.
Subject Analysis:
Red Spotted Newt - living in two worlds, the first thought of 'boundary jumping' between departments of the museum.
Isometric Crystalline Structure (Diamond) - Plotinus's ideal, the One in multiplicity. The quintessence... the philosopher's stone (out of reach, but conceptualized).
The Destroying Angel (of the Aminita family) - the most poisonous plant, new age thought identifies the mushroom as the 'forbidden fruit' that spawned human consciousness (we mean mushrooms that contain psilocybin and other psychoactive chemicals - 'magic mushrooms' - see Terrence McKenna, P.K. dick, etc.). The poisonous version awaiting the curious 'astral traveler', the antithesis of this new age notion, but in terms familiar to them.
The Pallas Gustianni Athena - Patron of art and war... In her 'Pallas' form she is the protector and guardian.
The Scientist (actually from the first Star Trek movie) - the ideal steward of the museum, the philosopher/scientist/humanist, or the bureaucrat/servant who tends to the mausoleum of a dying culture (I keep thinking of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy and always Borges).
John White Alexander's "The Triumph of Labor" - the death of labor? Crowned and rising into the clouds supported by the 'working man' - all tropes we are familiar with, but only as a historical idea - America no longer venerates labor (did it ever?) Notice too the design attempts to defy the very architecture it seeks to venerate. The strange paradox of monuments - to make the concrete ideal and visa versa...
Elihu Vedder's "The Keeper of the Threshold' - again thinking of the collection in a continuum, where do pieces like this fit in? The piece shows a weird moment at the turn of the 20th century where magic and mysticism enter the materialist world. Strange things happen and result in among other things, what they called modernism... How can there be a promise of transcendence that preserves the material now (more paradox)?
Industrial Pittsburgh - smokestacks doubling in history as symbols of prosperity and of malaise. Now they seem more of a pastiche than anything else. Alexander uses them to stunning effect, reminding me of Blade Runner of all things...
Glacken's "La Villette" - bridge of genteel objectivity into brutal materialism, with parasols in hand!
Diplodicus Carnegii and Apatosarus Louisa - Triumph of science and the materialist philosophy, with vanity as the Achilles heel. The Old Testament "Power of Naming" = humanity's dominion over the natural world.
Axial Framework used in crystallography - corner projected, this will bend the corner, warping the space it occupies.
African Wild Dog - nature looking back: complete in its lack of comprehension. What are you doing and why? Seeing them in the wild provokes a similar reaction, they look at the car for a moment, look perplexed and then proceed to go about their business. We are out of phase with their world...
Installation Views of Where From Here? (αμψιβοι), 2002, Latex paint and graphite on wall, Dimensions Variable.
Installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Destroyed).
