About Place: Recent Art of the Americas
Grynsztejn’s insightful catalog essay begins somewhat misleadingly with quotations from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Description Without Place”: the lines “Description is revelation. It is not / The thing described, nor false facsimile” suggest the romantic and modernist traditions, in which the artist is given free rein to invent whatever subjective landscape he wishes. The artists in this exhibit are considerably more modest. Almost all give the stuff of physical reality equal weight with the artist’s vision, painting from photographs or using purchased or found objects. These works do not create new worlds so much as engage in dialogue with the real one.
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But this is definitely not the triumphant fantasy of a heroic romantic or modernist painter. For one thing, a map on a mattress suggests the pathos or absurdity of dreaming of some other land while lying on the object one can always call home, one’s bed. For another, this particular mattress is heavily stained, its discolorations resembling the relief features of a map. Kuitca’s used mattress is far from the free, open field of a blank canvas; its surface and history deny him the freedom to reinvent the world.
Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s mysterious Atrabiliarios (Defiant) also calls on the viewer to learn more about its context. It consists of 36 wall niches each of which contains one or two women’s shoes and is covered with translucent animal skin, stitched into the wall with thick black thread. As Grynsztejn points out, the niches are “reminiscent of religious reliquaries; and indeed, Colombian cemeteries regularly contain small niches to hold the body’s cremated ashes.” We might well wonder who owns these shoes, fuzzily visible through the skin, and the helpful exhibition booklet informs us that these were the actual belongings of “the disappeared,” those “abducted and killed by paramilitary authorities in Colombia.”
The Latvian-born American Vija Celmins bases her paintings on photographs and thus also encourages comparisons with daily seeing, but her work’s inner poetry and exclusion of social reality set it apart from the rest. Her five paintings defy categorization, humble those who would describe them, and elude elucidation. Perhaps it’s that she’s by far the greatest artist in the exhibit; perhaps it’s that her subject, nature, is more rewarding, self-renewing, and suggestive of transcendence than, say, old mattresses.
