We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot 1
Bart Shigeru Uchida's Turf is a site conditioned/determined installation, a sculptural response to a site: "an extended (phenomenal) art activity, which becomes a process of reasoning between our mediated culture (being) and our immediate presence (circumstance)." 2 The installation is sited within a gallery space which its form references, a cultural mediation of its reference to a natural area of the campus. This mediation is signaled by the vines climbing along the front wall, a dark line over the white wall reiterating the glass curtain wall of the north façade of the gallery as a plane separating exterior and interior. Running along and rising up the exterior-facing side of the north gallery wall, the vines descend to lead one into the interior space. Beyond the entry wall mediating the transition from exterior and interior, the interior walls of the gallery are empty.
Turf is cruciform in plan, a quadrature of space, but rotated forty five degrees to the gallery walls rather than to the cardinal points. The work cannot be apprehended at once, from a single position relative to the work, from outside of the work. One must move through the work. More precisely, one's movement as mediated by the structure of Turf is in itself the work.One moves along a path. The path in Turf is defined by and constrained to eight 1 x 12 planks twelve feet long, three pairs of which are connected by four feet long planks at their lower ends, with two short stretches of gravel and an absence of a connecting plank marking the entrance and exit. Sand fills the spaces surrounding the path. The path turns, doubles back, again, and again, and again. The turns are marked by patches of light, and surrounded by areas of clay. The path is a labyrinth within which one's movement is prescribed, determined by what pre-exists one's presence.
One moves along a path: things appear, one after another, one beside another. At the foci of the turnings of the path of Turf, and at its central focus, spots of light mark the center and extensions of the path. The light, warm and dim, enables things to appear, but subtly and softly. At both the center and at the turnings of the path, sounds appear: water, cicadas and birds, children, glass breaking, footprints. These audile appearings, like their visual counterparts, are subtle and subdued. These introduced sounds are intermittent. The sounds of one's footsteps is similarly intermittent, contingent on the cadence of one's steps. The sound of one's footsteps is an assertion of one's presence, one's circumstance in engaging the work, of one's embodiedness. One's footsteps, and the weight of one's embodied presence, are made particularly evident by the flexing of the planks as one walks. That one is embodied, and that one's embodiedness is reflexively referenced by the work, is to obviate one's being a disembodied consciousness, an eye that does not see itself seeing. 3 All appearings appear within the field of space and time, the Kantian pure a priori synthetic intuitions. 4 We temporalize the experience of space, and spatialize the experience of time. The spacing, becoming-space of time, and temporization, the becoming-time of space, is the arche-trace of différance, "(simultaneously) spacing (and) temporization." 5 Space is not simply a void. Rather:Space now is not just where things happen: things make space happen. Space was clarified not only in the place where the picture hangs-the gallery, which, with postmodernism, joins the picture plane as a unit of discourse. The fragment from the real world plunked on the picture's surface is the imprimatur of an unstoppable generative energy. Do we not, through an odd reversal, as we stand in the gallery space, end up inside the picture, looking out at an opaque picture plane that protects us from a void? 6
In moving through Turf, it is oneself, or one's self, that is as it were the picture.
One moves along a path, forth and back. 'Forth' and 'back' are always already relative to a fixed locus. Moving forth and back, one draws near to, and departs from, a center. In Uchida's Turf, the center is elevated; approaching it entails moving upward, expending effort against gravity. Within the central square elevation, a pool of water bubbles. The pool is lined with limestone rocks, and illuminated from above. Vines, rattan vine or supplejack, Berchemia scandens, and greenbriar or zarzaparrilla, Smilax bona-nox, hang from above the central elevated area of the pool and extend between the parallel planks of the path. Pool and vines, sand and clay, limestone rocks and gravel, reference the natural area of Farmers Branch Creek, running along the north edge of the Brookhaven College campus. The natural is the ur-ground origin, the earth on which the world of culture (and which includes the concept of nature qua concept) rests. 7 Water is central to the emergence of culture from nature. It is oneself that moves along a path, a self always already a body and a consciousness, biological ground and presence-to-being. 8 The relationships entailed can be represented diagrammatically:
| Kant's noumenon (what is available in thought) the invisible depth |
|||
| interior res intensa one's awareness subject-side |
the intelligible: abstract, universal presence-to-being, reference to the whole understanding |
||
| Merleau-Ponty's chiasmus of 'the flesh' |
intentionality (filledness of consciousness) |
— interpreting → culture nature
knowledge |
|
| object-side
everything other than one's awareness |
biological ground, embodied sensa
perception what appears: concrete, particular |
||
| exterior res extensa | surface
the visible Kant's phenomenon (what appears through the sensa) |
One moves along a path. One's circumstance in moving along a path is not simply a moving through an exterior space, a prereflective inhabitance. It is also an indwelling within a world, and within one's self as being-in-the-world. The path turns, doubles back, again, and again, and again. One returns to where one began, perhaps knowing the beginning, the place of origin, for the first time.
Bart Shigeru Uchida was born in Vancouver, Canada. Current works include: A Community Backyard, Elmhurst Neighborhood Park, Boston; Embedded History, Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia. Uchida's recent exhibitions and performance works include: Root, Water - Bird, Nest, Boston-Macedonia Cultural Exchange, Boston, 2000; Remembering is Not Enough, Centre for Cultural Information, Skopje, Kicevo, Ohrid, Macedonia, 1999; Making Friends With Demon, collaborative performance with Jo Ha Kyu Dance Company, Winona State University, 1999; Dhrala Spots, collaborative performance installation with Jo Ha Kyo Dance Company, Nantucket, 1999; Thomas Hucker, The Landscape in Furniture, Pritam and Eames, East Hampton, New York, 1999. Uchida has taught at Monserrat College of Art, Beverly, Massachusetts, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, University of Massachusetts, Boston, DeCordova Museum School, Lincoln, Massachusetts, Vermont Carving Studio, Vermont, and Dundas Valley School of Art, Canada. He lives in Boston.