Joel Ross
Ross has completely covered the floor of the gallery with low plywood boxes of various sizes and shapes: only an area large enough for the front door to swing open remains bare. Each of the 180 boxes has a person’s name printed on it, because each has been tailor-made to contain the head, torso, arm, or leg of 30 of the artist’s friends and relatives. All of the boxes for the torsos are in the front of the space, then come the ones for the arms, the heads, and finally the legs at the rear. At the opening, people walked all over the boxes, which form an uneven but serviceable floor.
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Formally the work resembles the minimalist sculpture of Carl Andre, who was covering gallery floors with wooden blocks and metal plates back in the 70s. But Andre and his peers were focused on formal issues, to the exclusion of any discussion of content; there was certainly no discussion of his works containing human remains. In the early 80s Andre was acquitted of murdering his wife after she plunged from a window, though her final condition evokes interesting connections to his work. On a similar note, Richard Serra, a major minimalist, has had at least one workman accidentally crushed to death while installing his massive Kor-10 steel-plate structures. So Ross’s suggestion that what underlies the formal structures of minimalist sculpture is dismembered human bodies starts to sound less unfounded and scurrilous than one may have at first imagined. Following this line of reasoning, a revisionist historian might claim that the true father of minimalist sculpture was not Constantin Brancusi (the orthodox choice) but the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, who murders and dismembers an old man and hides his remains under the floorboards. His work completed, he has an opening and invites the police to come in, sit down, and chat in chairs placed immediately over the old man’s remains.
The ambiguous Capacity subverts the modern legalistic mind because the people actually present at the opening were treading across boxes purportedly containing their own trunks, arms, heads, and legs. Far from being a morbid case of serial-killer envy, Capacity is a metaphor for the workings of the “primitive” mind. The crucial problem for oral cultures is forming a permanent totality out of bodies that are not permanent, not by trying to defeat mortality but by succumbing to it prematurely and then incorporating it into the culture. In order to effectively play this shell game with death, primitive society had to revoke the potential for individuality. Though their bodies were reassembled after their “deaths” so that they could carry on with their lives, the reality of the bones in the underworld always superseded the weaker reality of the visible world.
