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| Mapping New Territory - writing (back) |
Spirit Catcher Terry R. Myers
Candida Alvarez defines the work that she produced for this exhibition as an intervention rather than an installation: “I was not installing anything. I was creating and thinking through to a response.”(1) Her response was largely directed at the particular situation of the exhibition space that she turned into a temporary satellite studio where, often in the middle of the night, she conceptualized and ultimately produced the work with the assistance of a team of art students that came together during what was a constantly evolving process. Even more importantly, however, Alvarez used the opportunity to directly respond to Sol LeWitt and his influential work, “speaking” in very personal ways as much to the man as to several specific drawings that he had made on postcards and sent to her and her family. Most artists make work “for” others, and LeWitt was well-known for his tremendous generosity with other artists, but the open-ended nature of such an exchange is particularly strong in LeWitt’s overall body of work, especially in his wall drawings and the straightforward manner in which they will always remain of the moment as they are produced again and again in the future by others who will continue to follow and interpret his instructions. In her intervention, Alvarez captured her own acute sense of timelessness, incorporating a particular set of powerful memories into a seductive layering of painting and drawing that can be called visual poetry. With LeWitt’s passing in April 2007, the stunning and deeply moving result of Alvarez’s multivalent activities could no longer continue a direct conversation between two artists of different generations who had similar intentions and goals, but the visually layered nature of her project clearly intensified her relationship with the never ending “spirit” of his work, which then allowed her to extend the parameters of the project into other equally personal territories—involving, for example, pennies and fireflies—that activated abstract yet associative details of her history and memories in a perpetually present tense. In a letter about this project that she wrote to LeWitt seven months after his death, Alvarez shares an impressive amount of detail as to how the work took shape in the space over time, ending with “Let me know what you think.” What LeWitt, of all artists, would think about Alvarez’s intervention—or, for that matter, any work of art—is of tremendous consequence. After all, his early claim that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” not only provides a resolutely agile framework for Alvarez’s procedures, but also poignantly reminds us of the extent to which that “machine” remains a fundamentally human presence, especially in those moments in which a work of art is able to hold that presence by directly engaging absence.(2) It’s now clear that Alvarez’s decision to start with the four postcard drawings that LeWitt sent her family between 2000 and 2004 guaranteed that he would stay in the “picture” of her project, not in order to somehow put him in his place (as if that were even possible), but to enable both of their “machines” to work together. Despite the trial-and-error that she went through while working in the space—for example, using several old-school overhead projectors to move blown-up images of the drawings all around the space—in the early morning moment when she aimed her version of one of his black rectangles in the upper left corner of the room she found a place for LeWitt where, of course, he could watch over her. But far less dramatically and much more to the point, she would be able to morph the structure of his drawing to tap into her own visual vocabulary, one that arguably has provided her with the necessary agility to move away from even the tremendous gravitational pull of the well-established category of conceptual art. That means, of course, that Alvarez is not a “conceptual” artist in the art historical sense of the term. Rather she is conceptual in her approach to her work, as she has made clear in a recent statement: “Over the last 30 years, painting has evolved into evidence of an active search for me. [. . .] When I enter the studio, I notice my mind first.” With this in mind, it is telling that the first component of Alvarez’s intervention that a viewer encounters is a glass front wall that has been almost completely covered with yellow paper—leaving four narrow vertical slits that would allow us to peek into the space. Upon closer examination, a subtle arrangement of yellow circles on the yellow paper emerges as a kind of blank slate, setting up the beginnings of a pattern that will assert itself when we actually enter into the “open mind” of this gallery-turned-studio. Inside the space, the yellow circles are anything but blank. Connected by thin black lines, they have been transformed into constellations as well as molecular structures, celestial and cellular all at once and also uniquely symbolic, as if each of them are holding small and perfectly formed details from a more complete memory or possibly even a narrative—they are, in fact, connected to Alvarez’s memories of “tossing pennies” with her father, as well as the re-emergence of those memories when she was introduced to Mel Bochner’s use of pennies in his work. By playing with what is “front” and what is “back,” Alvarez, of course, is emphasizing the distinction between the inside and the outside of the space (not to mention those pennies), enabling us to pass beyond her interior constellational/molecular structure into an even deeper cabinet of wonders where shifts of scale, space, and time take on even more associations. As mentioned before, her reworking of LeWitt’s black rectangle, hovering in the upper left hand corner, anchors the space without dominating it, intensifying the energy of LeWitt’s presence with its surprising penumbra of fluorescent yellow paint. For some time now, Alvarez has been a daring colorist: her ability to use bright hues to move our eyes around her paintings puts her in the warm company of Elizabeth Murray and Mary Heilmann. Case in point: in the right hand corner of the space, five highly suggestive hot pink shapes look as if they are at the very least dancing or maybe about to spin around the perimeter of the room. The dialogue between the macro and the micro that Alvarez initiated on the glass facade of the space is augmented by an equally intense interplay between movement and stillness throughout her intervention, which helps her achieve—as she articulated in her title—the mapping of new territories. Nine small drawings derived from LeWitt have been framed and installed in a grid on one wall. Despite the intensity of their colors, the arrangement functions as a testimony not only to LeWitt, but also to the “conceptual” framework of the grid itself as a system of objective classification. A pair of framed drawings on the opposite wall present side-by-side “lifelines,” one rendered graphically in pencil, the other in full bands of color. Hung “off the grid” across from the others, they interact with a touching arrangement of small painting “moments” outlined in pencil and done directly on the wall as if they were carefully marking time, literally “moving” while staying in place. It’s quiet remarkable that such quiet gestures hold their own against the more aggressive aspects of the intervention, for example the bold arrangement of black-on-black squares that contain texts that remain relatively invisible in the dark. This, of course, brings us to what may be the most potent interplay that takes place in Alvarez’s intervention: that between darkness and lightness. With that in mind, her final decision to incorporate a moving projection of green light as an approximation of fireflies in an open field ties everything together beautifully, catching a multitude of spirits and providing each and every one of them what they need to remain ever present in the open field of her intervention. Notes: 2. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992, p. 834. First published in Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 79-83. |
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