All Done with Mirrors

Tricky Gallery-Going, Fall 2007:
Eileen Quinlan, Antony Gormley, and Others

People used to speak of art as a mirror of life. Sometimes, though, it looks more like smoke and mirrors. One photographer even titles her work that way.

The series title Smoke and Mirrors belongs to Eileen Quinlan, but it could stand for any number of shows this fall. For all their trickery, too, they mean it quite literally, as art's substance and subject matter. Quinlan uses both to create photographs, while Jeppe Hein scans surrounding space simply by spinning a mirror, and Antony Gormley invites one to walk right into a cloud. If any of this sounds like high-school science class, the wisps in paintings and photographs by Jaq Chartier, David Fried, and Mark Sheinkman might equally present illusion or hard evidence.

Spin and reflection

Plenty of cameras make use of mirrors along with lenses. The most powerful telescopes, called reflectors, use mirrors exclusively to collect the light. However, with Smoke and Mirrors, Eileen Quinlan alludes to objects in front of her camera. They include the crisp edges of a plane, the hazy shadows of dust, and the transparency of an image caught in both. In bringing them, their reflections, and the camera's eye together without digital manipulation, her prints from large negatives allow textures and patterns to overlay and to multiply. They also acquire warm colors and silken grays.

Quinlan starts with a metaphor for deception and makes it her subject matter. In a recent group show of women photographers, "Strange Magic," her triangles radiating out from a fixed point made me think of Mark Grotjahn, as if something other than vision had found its vanishing point. Their shimmer recalled a time when photography mimed abstraction in search of artistic respectability. Here broken symmetry makes her images still less recognizable. One could dismiss it all as an undergraduate stunt. However, it allows her to take illusion seriously.

She also takes representation seriously. The summer show helped place her mirroring in context of other quirky women photographers and a male gaze. And a badly hung photo concurrently at the Whitney at Altria gets lost behind a reflected ceiling. Quinlan is not just repeating either lecture on the social construction of reality—the museum institution or a woman's right to stare back. That would take higher-tech projections. Still, she is observing reality and its illusions, in gorgeous detail.

For a simpler magic act, Jeppe Hein simply rotates a mirror before one's eyes—or rather two mirrors. Their planes thrust out above one's head, at right angles to one another, and each almost seventeen feet long. I first mistook the construction, set in the ceiling at SculptureCenter for three planes, until the changing scale, shape, and position of the apparent central panel made me think again. That gave me plenty of time to appreciate the wing-like art object and the warehouse space. By then, the mirror caught another visitor sitting nearby and brought us all back to earth.

One could dismiss Hein's Illusion as an oversized toy. One could even ask whether "spin" so dominates politics that it stands for contemporary life. It comports, however, with the kind of machine that might once have hoisted factory materials in the same interior. In a sense he, too, reflects the social construction of art. That theme becomes more explicit in the sculpture garden. There the Danish-born artist, who works in London, imitates the familiar wood-slat bench of picnic tables, but with a few comic twists.

One does a loop-the-loop in the middle, right where one might hope to sit. Another sags to the ground like a fabric ribbon. One turns its back on the viewer, with a closed circle for conversations that can never begin. Another's back arcs forward, so that the bench itself has flipped right to the ground. Ironically, its underside thus functions quite well as a park bench, which may explain why Hein has sited that one in a nearby public space—two blocks away in Courthouse Square. Just beware of the shock of cold, white metal where one might expect warm, red wood.

A clouded glass

Wondering what happened to the reflection of Quinlan or Hein in their own mirrors? Such reticence may hint at a taxonomy of artists. They seek total control of their art, or they trust to chance. They seek total control of the experience, or they trust the viewer.

Okay, I exaggerate. All artists fall somewhere in between on both counts. Besides, the further one pushes toward one extreme, the more one invokes the other. Robert Smithson had to haul plenty of earth before tides, climate, and entropy could let it rise and fall in the Great Salt Lake. Nor can one lay the axes at right angles, as if one could firmly distinguish art and experience. Still, they could allow some charming textbook graphs in two dimensions, and now one can watch an artist hog the map.

I had thought of Antony Gormley as a craftsman in his art, the kind who can draw in space with metal rods as fluidly and precisely as a great draftsman on paper. I also thought of his art as fully in accord with Minimalism's surrender to the space and experience of the viewer. His fields become shifting but precisely defined planes or curves in space, then three-dimensional human beings. Yet if I had Gormley in the corner with art object and viewer, this time I no longer know where to place him. Now steam fills a glass chamber at as it may. Meanwhile one can hardly move a humid step without feeling short of breath and in fear of falling, like the viewer let loose in the dark by David Hammons.

Has Gormley switched positions entirely, or did I have him in the wrong corner of my graph all along? Perhaps little has changed after all, even in a candidate for most dangerous exhibition of 2007. Nothing dissolves the art object into energy as completely as empty space, and nothing can so blind a viewer. Magicians always want control of their audience, and I had almost forgotten that moment of terror when about to run up against an empty cage seemingly holding a person. A title like Blind Light could suggest a work of art—or light itself—connecting with the viewer like a blind man with an elephant. It could mean instead a viewer as blinded by the light as a Bruce Springsteen fan.

One can still roam at will, if one dares, and instead of colliding with a humanoid monster, one collides with water vapor—or perhaps a dozen friends and strangers. Nor has he given up geometry: the glass enclosure runs parallel to the gallery's white cube, and one can take its measure by circulating the narrow space between walls. Other work in the show indeed reprises his cocoon-shaped metal grids that in their interior take on human form, leaving in doubt whether they stand for a chrysalis or a cage, conducting rods or an electric field. Then, too, he may have let on to his nature all along, as less an artist than a carnival barker. When this work appeared at the Hayward in London, not even signs warning of disorientation and a £15 admission fee could stem its popularity.

I wanted back Hammons's sense of play and Gormley's old formal control of point, line, plane, volume, and medium. On the one hand, something feels too akin to pure showmanship rather than to art or science, despite the half inch of forward visibility, as if to give new relevance to Michael Fried's infamous dismissal of Minimalism as theater. On the other hand, the cool, damp cloud feels more heavy handed, more desperate for grand statements about humanity and mortality. Chris Ofili or Damien Hirst share that uniquely British paradox. I looked up at the gallery lighting filtering through the steam like a James Turrell ceiling, wondering if I could or should feel it as a release and an incarnation, but the message from heaven or from within somehow refused to arrive. Or was that formalist refusal the message all along?

Screen tests

When artists like these think that they can blend art and science, they are usually right, just not in the way they think. Sure, they can take science for subject matter, inspiration, or knowledge of materials and techniques. In fact, they can hardly help it. They also necessarily share with science an exploration of reality, external or not. They can easily fool themselves, though, into mistaking the style of scientific illustration for a greater representational truth. They are hardly producing good science—or even good art.

Then again, who can resist trying? Everyone these days has to cope with the authority of science—and not just those working in new media. When Jaq Chartier uses inks, dyes, and chemicals, she seeks correspondences between doing science, the process of art, and the unfolding of an organism. Still, her "Color Tests" would not look so appealing without the rich colors of her water-soluble media. They would not look so spooky, either, if one could not imagine one's DNA as determining one's fate, whether genetically or in a future police state.

David Fried has his own reasons to care about the scientific method. When he makes filmy photograms of filmy soap bubbles, he crosses his medium with his message. He also evokes the origins of photography as a chemical process, as if art, like a soap bubble, could find its own natural shape. The results look crisper than one might expect, no doubt because not soap but light alone makes contact with his sheets. Curiously enough, they look more painterly as well. I mistook the highlights for brushwork.

Soap film sounds too well scrubbed, but Fried looks best when his art most resembles a science experiment. Balls of light wood glide across tables, bumping into themselves and the surrounding ropes, like boxers too confident to know when to quit. The sculpture risks devolving into still another classy toy, but with a palpable mystery. What does keep them going, and where does he hide the motor? In reality, they draw their motive force from the vibrations in the room itself, including ambient sound. Art, they seem to say, differs from experiment in pressing onward when the observer's back is turned.

Mark Sheinkman's paintings, too, might pass for a parlor trick, but who knew that abstraction allowed for such trickery? As bands of white cross a black ground, they appear to twist and turn on themselves, and they threaten at any moment to tear apart or dissolve. In past shows, Sheinkman has combined the layered tracery of Abstract Expressionism, the shallow space of Brice Marden, the mathematical complexity of a Minimalist wall drawing, the erasures of Pop Art silkscreens, and hints of calligraphy in search of an anthropologist or believer to decipher them. This time he lets go of the precision of fine lines or formal symmetry.

He may be letting himself go as well, but he remains a conservative at heart, and I relate to that. As with David Reed, translucent curves give the illusion of brushstrokes. To Reed, the "painterly" relates equally to geometric abstraction and the Baroque, and I suspect Sheinkman would agree. Reed also gives the illusion of film strips, and the shiny monochrome here, too, suggests a photographic negative. Sheinkman may be growing more personal, but he may also be hinting at less high-brow processes of production. Or he may have decided that to carry on with painting after all these years, one had better consider it a science experiment.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Eileen Quinlan ran at Miguel Abreu through December 9, 2007, Jeppe Hein at SculptureCenter through November 25, Antony Gormley at Sean Kelly through December 1, Jaq Chartier at Schroeder Romero through November 24, 2007, David Fried at Sara Tecchia through October 20, and Mark Sheinkman at Von Lintel through November 24.