Some Trees

Natural Gallery-Going, Spring 2006:
Ellen Altfest, Anya Gallaccio, and Olafur Eliasson

Converted city factories and warehouses may sound remote from nature. Art, however, has long had a penchant for landscape. Three exhibitions now manage to recover some of its interest, but by dropping the genre altogether, in favor of still-life painting, appropriation, and installation. In different ways, they unsettle the border between a gallery and the natural world.

Ellen Altfest gives the illusion of art and wood together as they recompose and die, while thanks to Anya Gallaccio a majestic cherry tree seems to rise again from the dead. Should either soon need watering, Olafur Eliasson experiments with making waves. John Ashbery opens his "Some Trees," his 1956 poem, this way: "They are amazing. . . . / That their merely being there / means something." These artists are definitely after amazement.

Still lifes and still lives

Still-life has always enshrined a paradox: things in this world refuse to sit still. That implicit defiance of age itself, quite as much as the glory of illusion, accounts for its appeal in art.

It helps explains why Caravaggio allows fruit to rot, in a basket that totters so precariously over an edge, or why one counts Martin Johnson Heade's flowers among the grander scenes of the American sublime. It helps explain those animals leaping amid J.-S. Chardin's ledges. It may even suggest the ease with the modern still-life veers into found objects. The gritty, decaying "combines" of Robert Rauschenberg actually include clocks, which of course tell time as often as twice a day.

Ellen Altfest's "Still Lives" embrace decay in a big way, but growth as well. One could almost call her art a miniature ecosystem, like many an installation these days. Certainly her painting belongs squarely in the still-life tradition. She sustains a meticulous illusion, but without the harsh, dry air of Ivan Albright or Philip Pearlstein. She adopts all the hallmarks of trompe l'oeil, including subdued color, forms aligned with the picture plane except when they happen to thrust forward, and illusionistic frames within frames. The cactus plant would look just fine in a New York apartment, as would the skies that occasionally show through, and one can almost ignore that somehow cactus and tumbleweed have drifted into town from an uncertain landscape.

However, Altfest is not out either to defy time or to moralize over it. Note the unusual plural still lives, with the ambiguity of lives. She makes it hard enough to tell growth from decay, with both as a kind of accumulation. The apparent frames crack or peel outward in successive layers, with much of the work's richest color. Twigs weave tightly across the picture plane or fall to the ground beneath. Non compost mentis.

The shallow space of still-life supplies another reason for its past accommodation to Modernism. Even when it retains the naughty concept of illusion, it at least partly closes the shade on painting as window. It also has the potential for blurring the line between drawing and painting, just as fans of Jackson Pollock might wish. Sure enough, one may recognize his designs in those twigs and the dark, shallow space that they enclose. Altfest's preferred tawny colors have an appropriately autumnal rhythm. The pale, woody tones might make one think of Andrew Wyeth, I suppose, if only he understood modern art—or, for that matter, if only he drew half as realistically as reputation has it.

As a sucker for illusion, subdued light, and formalist painting, I naturally loved this show. But do not mind me: it really is good. The imagined decay could make one abandon the clean, well-preserved frames of traditional painting for good.

Losing it

Did someone say go climb a tree? If Altfest gives the illusion of watching wood peel, her gallery's previous artist, Marc Swanson, built his own New England forest. Its branches amounted to a less than natural ecosystem, concealing all sorts of occupants and their debris. A couple of biennials ago, Roxy Paine added his artificial tree to Central Park, although one in materials more suited to Joel Shapiro than the Tin Man. In his latest show, Paine even supplies the rotting landscape and "erosion machine" for an age of corporate forest depletion. Art has come a long way indeed from Asher Durand's nineteenth-century vision of nature and American culture as Kindred Spirits.

Facing the woods, must one see bare ruined choirs, with only the discipline of art to compensate for a literal rootlessness? Anya Gallaccio sure seems to think so. Perhaps a tree still grows in Brooklyn, but just across Newtown Creek, in Long Island City, she raises a weeping cherry. And I mean a real tree. Bare of leaves and cut off cleanly at the roots, it fills the main hall of SculptureCenter. Not even Marcel Duchamp's urinal or Damien Hirst's shark tank does so little to transform a found object.

Gallaccio means to evoke loss and recovery, starting with the wintry branches and a natural history of destruction. She salvaged the tree after street construction had inadvertently torn apart its root structure. She also titles the work One Art, after Elizabeth Bishop's poem of lost love. The simplicity of its appropriation echoes the poem's opening line: "the art of losing isn't hard to master." Why, a two-year-old child with a sufficiently large construction crew could do that.

One can invoke all sorts of associations. In The New York Times, Ken Johnson tosses in everything from a crucifixion to Saint Sebastian, although thankfully he leaves out the forest nymphs. Sometimes, though, a tree is only a tree. Bishop herself stands at opposite poles from the work. Where Bishop's headlong rhythms make lost love heartbreakingly inevitable, Gallaccio finds a quiet time alone, with a tree far older than any human life. Where a villanelle displays the poet's compulsive craft, the artist adds little more than the bolts and heavy wires that anchor the work to the gallery walls.

For all those reasons, I dreaded the whole affair. Simply by pruning away unneeded interpretation, however, I found a beautiful show. True to its theme, it presents something at once natural and unnatural. It recalls that Minimalist dream of a space in which art, viewer, and the gallery come together. One sees the wires, plain as day and just above eye level, and one can marvel at how perfectly the tree's symmetry conforms to its space. Its height and spread push up against the walls and skylight, while small twigs hang down to brush against one's arms.

One Art benefits from the room. Where the hush of Paula Cooper gallery's cavernous interior, pristine walls, and pointed ceiling threatens to overwhelm any art, Maya Lin's renovation allows SculptureCenter to resemble at any moment a warehouse, a factory, a cathedral, or a scrappy display space, with none of these privileged above the others. Perhaps even the contrast with Bishop projects the Scottish-born, London-based artist's understanding of loss. The work's stark, slow pace goes best with dark northern skies, and its avoidance of the American poet's confessions makes me think of a British stiff upper lip. Something still comes too cheaply, like the tree's history, which all but announces the politically correct message "no living things were destroyed to make this art." However, one may never feel one's shoulders touching the entirety of that great hall again.

Downstairs, as part of a group show another monument to loss hides behind a darker curtain, virtually in the middle of SculptureCenter's narrow passageways, and the desk clerk has to tell one to take care not to miss it. With The Editor of Misfortunes/Miseries, Monika Zarzeczena has created a small studio, where a desk lamp casts its stark shadow. Drawings in colored pencil lie across the drafting table, as if unfinished, with many more stuck up on the walls and still others crumpled in wads on the floor. The drawings show people in ambiguous postures of sleep, agony, or death. The editor of the title may have given up in frustration or died, too. Do the drawings—and the vehemence with which they lie half discarded—express the artist's inner miseries, multiply anonymous ones, or attest to the misery of not successfully expressing either one? I felt almost the need to sit at the desk, in order to bring the narrative to completion, but I feared encountering my own misfortunes in the act.

Making waves

Sometimes draws on Earth science for its ideas. And sometimes science takes a bit of art. It can help to foreground the differences, lest one provide a reductive account of art or science. One should never mistake metaphors out of science for scientific truths. One should never mistake, too, the physical components and determinants of a work of art for the art itself. It can help, however, to look at the aims, methods, and inspirations that art and science share. Comparing art and science can give one a handle on the multiple practices of each.

However, what if art really does resemble a science project? Olafur Eliasson is literally making waves. I have edited physics texts, and I only wish the publisher had illustrated them as well. As enters one installation, they ripple across the wall in a complete circle. One sees their shallow crests grow, shimmer, and dissolve. Standing waves form, move, and vanish once again, like an embodiment in light and air of Buckminster Fuller's "tensegrity" principle.

The spectacle must sound like a lecture demonstration, but that reminds me of the room's silence. I thought of unheard melodies from a gigantic guitar string, and the image seems to pull its concentrated white light physically taught. The sensual encounter extends to the circular chamber, nestled in the gallery like a Torqued Ellipse from Richard Serra. At the center of the room, what looks at first like a large, black, circular sculpture filled with light contributes its physical presence, too. It also generates waves in a different medium, for it amounts to a floating platform on an unusually well-calibrated backyard swimming pool. I got still another sensual experience when I tested this impression by dipping my hand, a little guiltily, in the water.

The light at the platform's center projects its invisible movements onto the wall. One does not have to know how wave patterns add. One does not have to know how longitudinal waves in water relate to transverse waves in light. One gets a sense nonetheless, as with some realism in painting or skilled carving, of technical knowledge translating into something else again. One may find more trickery than meaning, but any return to beauty in art runs that risk these days. I shall take the water's shallow pleasures while I can.

The other rooms, too, get one pondering how he does it, and that conceptual layer definitely plays a factor in giving his work coherence. One furthers the theme of adding patterns to produce new ones, and it again allows one to focus on the objects, the wall, or the space one occupies between them. The Danish artist projects light from several directions through three decorative, circular, rotating plates. Perhaps only a geek like me would admire how he manages to keep the disks from colliding while they complete their respective circles. While no waves appear, a physicist concerned with wave motion would recognize the mathematics of adding arcs to produce new shapes. Besides, waves underlie light, except when particles do—or art.

Actually, one work spans two rooms, but again to toy with the dichotomy of object and image, cause and effect. Behind a curtain, an arrow blinks alternately in each direction of the compass point. The light sculpture flat against the wall looks a bit like conceptual art from early Bruce Nauman, but with the coded message somehow lost in translation. On the near side of the curtain, a pinhole projects the arrow onto a curved surface, suggesting a spinning compass floating in space. Again the references to science—the pinhole out of a camera obscura or the compass out of a map of the world—refers one to the history of both science and art, but its meaning may lie in the whole notion of construction, with the viewer's movements playing a part, too. Eliasson calls the floating platform Your Negotiable Panorama, and he could be speaking of a changing Earth.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Ellen Altfest at Bellwether through January 21, 2006, Anya Gallaccio and Monika Zarzeczena at SculptureCenter through April 3, Roxy Paine at James Cohan through February 25, and Olafur Eliasson at Tanya Bonakdar through May 27.