. . . the dialectical pair museum/world has ceased to exist as such. Our world is one which has the potentiality of becoming, in its entirety, a museum; our postmodern planet is gradually being gentrified, transformed into its own image, into a spectacle duplicating itself. And this process does not loosen the structure of opposition originated in the museum per se; on the contrary, it tightens the effects of the exclusion: the dichotomy between clean facades and dreary back alleys becomes harsher than ever. . . . the funerary economy of the museum is today going far beyond the embalming of art works and has already begun to congeal the totality of our surroundings.
Yve-Alain Bois 1
These works by Shawn Smith present us with what may seem the commonplace objects of the world. We are not within the world of the commonplace. These are not the commonplace objects they appear to be. Cakes, pies, ropes, knots, toys, even cenotaphs, surely such are among the ordinary, commonplace things of the lifeworld. 2 We encounter the things in this exhibition not in the lifeworld, but in a gallery, a space always already distinct from the lifeworld, though itself is subsumed within the lifeworld. The installation within the gallery is partly, but only partly, a cause of the viewer response that these works elicit. 3 These works are not the commonplace objects they reference, but their simulacra, situated not within the lifeworld but the artworld. This move is analogous to but is yet to be distinguished from the transposition of the ordinary objects of the lifeworld to the space of the gallery; these are not objects trouve, but representations of ordinary objects. A representation is not the thing represented; a representation of a birthday cake is not an edible pastry. We are not encountering Duchamp’s Fountain, but we are encountering the consequence of Duchamp’s Fountain: the shift to the generic from the specific. 4 Situated in the artworld, Smith’s works reference other works within the artworld, works by others, other works by Smith, and in the case of the Credits other works by Smith in this exhibition. This reflexive referentiality within the artworld is not exhaustive of the structure of these works, for they are representations of ordinary things of the lifeworld, and as such are metaphoric of the conditions of the lifeworld. The works entail operations carried out on the artifacts of a culture in order to carry out operations on the nonmaterial terms of a culture. This, as Rosalind Krauss has noted, is definitive of postmodern practice:
within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium . . . but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms . . . . 5
Malevich Weights consists of seven units; as installed, a space is left for an eighth implied unit. The four units to the left, of sections of text sliced from a book, are graduated left to right from larger and heavier to more attenuated and lighter; the three bronze units to the right of center are graduated left to right from more attenuated to more massive, heavier. Each of the weights is cruciform, of equal vertical and horizontal extension but varying in the amount of the implied square occupied by the form. The cruciform structure references Kasimir Malevich’s painting, Black Cross, 6 c. 1913, with the middle weight in the range, the third to largest of the weights, most nearly approximating the proportions of the cross structure in Malevich’s painting. A set of weights constitutes a tool, a standard by which the weight of a thing may be assessed by comparison. These weights, referencing Malevich in their form and in the title of the work, cite a seminal work in the modernist canon as a metaphorical standard of comparison. Each subsequent work repositions, however subtlety, the field defined by its antecedents. 7 This is particularly the case when a subsequent work references a particular antecedent work. Thus, while Malevich’s Black Cross informs—quite literally in-forms, gives form to—the Malevich Weights, the Malevich Weights alters viewer response to Malevich’s Black Cross: e.g., one may henceforth regard more attentively the proportion of figure and ground.
The balance in Tile Box: A History Writer’s Companion does not weigh ordinary commodities, but categories of thought. In the left pan is Fact, in the right pan may be placed varying quantities of Accuracy, Assumptions, Bias, Clarity, Continuity, and
Intent. One is reminded of M. H. Abram’s dictum on the constitutive character of analogies:
By the same token, they select and mold those ‘facts’ which a theory comprehends. For facts are facta, things made as much as things found, and made in part by the analogies through which we look at the world as through a lens. ‘I wonder,’ Coleridge once remarked, ‘why facts are ever called stubborn things? . . . Facts, you know, are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premisses, but in the nature and parts of premisses.’ 8The weights Fact, Accuracy, Assumptions, Bias, Clarity, Continuity, and Intent are composed of sections of pages of text, laminated together. Text here has become material cause, or part of the material cause, of these works. The opposition between the temporal narrativity of the textual and the spatial presentationality of the visual, instantiated in Gotthold Lessing’s Laokoön 9 and foundational for modernism, is obviated. One might compare Shawn Smith’s use of text with Mark Tansey’s. In Tansey’s 1990 paintings incorporating text, such as Reader, Derrida Queries De Man, Under Erasure, 10 and the like, the accretion of text is indexical of and a synecdoche for density. In Shawn Smith’s works, the layering of text is indexical of and a synecdoche for weight. Weight, as a function of mass and gravity, suggests punning with Latin gravitas, ‘weight, heaviness,’ and also ‘dignity, importance, seriousness,’ but also ‘rankness, offensiveness, dullness.’ Perhaps all these senses of gravitas may be predicated of the product of the writer of history, depending on the relative weight given Fact, Accuracy, Assumptions, Bias, Clarity, Continuity, and Intent.
Like Tile Box: A History Writer’s Companion, Nuremberg Weight Box is self-contained: the box, tapered in plan, opens to reveal a set of twelve weights of graduated sizes made from book pages. Eight weights are revealed when the lid of the box is open; four smaller weights are contained in the drawer at the end of the box. Nuremberg Weight Box, unlike Tile Box: A History Writer’s Companion, contains no balance apparatus. This is not a weighing in the present tense but rather in the past perfect tense, a having been weighed, the conditions of which are made available for inspection and judgment.
Rope, Rope Credit, and the severalKnots and Bends, employ shreded pages of text twisted to form cordage, as does the Father Francisco Lana Flying Boat Credit in an ancillary capacity. Twisting fibers to form cordage is of unrecoverably ancient origin. Here, twisting the fibers comprising book pages, forms a poignant metaphor. Twisting the tale obviates narrativity as it enhances a physical characteristic presupposed as essential and consequently given precedence. Twisting strips of pages of text together results in increased tensile strength as counter to weight, an increase attained at the price of rendering the text unreadable. The strength of the text as a readable entity (however that strength is determined, by invoking literary merit as an aesthetic quality, or utility as reference material, or the percentage of monosyllabic words) is subverted by the shifting of strength as criterion from the domain of readability to the domain of physical integrity.
With cake made of book pages, and acrylic icing and candles with wicks of twisted shreds of book pages, Birthday Cake provides the strongest trompe l’oeil illusion of the works in the exhibition, an illusion enhanced by its presentation on an ornate metal cake stand, atop a doily made from book pages, and the removal of a slice to an adjacent porcelain plate. Similarly in Pie, crust and filling, and a topping rather like toasted shredded coconut, are made of baked book pages. The illusion obtains notwithstanding the installation of the work on the gallery floor, an uncommon location in which to encounter a cake or a pie. Installing Birthday Cake and Pie on the floor constitutes more of a debasement than does the floor installation of Nuremberg Box and Tile Box: A History Writer’s Companion. While the referents of the latter works might be encountered on the floor within the lifeworld, placing the three-dimensional representation of food—ordinarily encountered on the horizontal surface of a table—on the floor is analogous to the transposition of the site of painting from the vertical plane of the easel to the horizontal plane of the floor. The move from vertical to horizontal is a move from cultural form to the formless; this is not to invoke the oppositional pair culture / nature, but rather culture / bassesse, base. 11
The ten Credits in the exhibition are ‘meta-works,’ works referencing without replicating the other works in the exhibition or other works from the artist’s oeuvre. Thus Cake Credit quotes Birthday Cake, Hiroshima Credit quotes Father Kleinsorge in the Hiroshima series, Malevich Credit quotes Malevich Weights (and indeed seems to have appropriated one of the elements of that series). The Credit as quotation entails a shift of scale, and a shift from the condition of installation of the quoted work to the uniform mode of presentation in the quoting Credit: Birthday Cake is installed on the floor, while the cake of Cake Credit sets on a spring above a fabricated wood bracket screwed to the wall.
A final observation is necessary. Shawn Smith’s works are manifestly labor-intensive, the product of lavishing time and meticulous attention disguised as casual manufacture. This condition of the works’ facture and the reciprocally related condition of contemplation which is its correlative are the constitutive condition of facture of “those thought-things we call works of art” 12 at once entailing a vita activa and a vita contemplativa. It is a condition which yet obtains after the end of art, in the post-history of art, when everything is possible. 13 One possibility is the revenge of the visual on the textual. 14
Shawn Smith is an alumnus of Brookhaven College, completing the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Washington University, St. Louis, where he was an Eliot Honors Scholar, and received the John H. Milikin Fellowship and the Paris Cité residency. Smith received the DeGolyer Fellowship from the Dallas Museum of Art in 1996, and a Kala Art Foundation Artist Fellowship in 1997. He
lives and works in Oakland, California.
| 1 | Malevich Weights | |
| 2 | Corset | |
| 3 | Hiroshima | |
| Dr. Fugii | ||
| Mrs. Nakamura | ||
| Father Kleinsorge | ||
| Mr. Tanimoto | ||
| Dr. Sasaki | ||
| Miss Sasaki | ||
| 4 | Tape Measure, Large Book Nails, Small Book Nails, Tape Dispenser, Needle and Thread | |
| 5 | Nuremberg Box | |
| 6 | Book Pie | |
| 7 | Ten Credits | |
| Scooter | ||
| Hiroshima | ||
| Cake | ||
| Malevich Weight | ||
| Flying Boat | ||
| Rope | ||
| Le Bris | ||
| Book Weight | ||
| Tank | ||
| Roof | ||
| 8 | Tile Box: A History Writer's Companion | |
| 9 | Rope | |
| 10 | Knots and Bends | |
| Rigger’s Bend | ||
| Figure of Eight Bend | ||
| Square Knot | ||
| Thief’s Knot | ||
| Prussic Knot | ||
| Monk’s Knot | ||
| 11 | Birthday Cake | |
With postmodernism, the gallery space is no longer “neutral.” The wall becomes a membrane through which esthetic and commercial values osmotically exchange. . . . The white wall’s apparent neutrality is an illusion. It stands for a community with common ideas and assumptions. . . . The development of the pristine, placeless white cube is one of modernism’s triumphs—a development commercial, esthetic, and technological. . . . The spotless gallery wall, though a fragile evolutionary product of a highly specialized nature, is impure. It subsumes commerce and esthetics, artist and audience, ethics and expediency. It is the image of the society that supports it, so it is a perfect surface off which to bounce our paranoias.Return
The museum effect, I want to argue, is a way of seeing. And rather than trying to overcome it, one might as well try to work with it. It is very possible that it is only when, or insofar as, an object has been made with conscious attention to crafted visibility that museum exhibition is culturally informing: in short, when the cultural aspects of an object are amenable to what museums are best at encouraging.Return
what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that proceeded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; . . .Return