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Staring at Ruins
John Haberin New York City
Lydia Ourahmane
Literally Means Collapse: In Practice 2022
Andy Coolquitt and Michael Mahalchick
"He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back. / He thought they was old friends."
I have never seen a cave painting, but I know what it must be like. Entering, I would find the cave dark and forbidding but also sheltering from a hard world, just as it must have been for others in ages past. And then the art would appear in all its splendor and mystery. To this day people dispute its purpose in rituals or myth, but there is no getting around the images—horses in all their power, reindeer in a moment of affection, humans in a struggle to the death. To ask Lydia Ourahmane, though, I have it all wrong. With Tassili, she insists on cave art's place in the politics and geography of the present. 
I began by quoting John Berryman, who could not help facing ruin. He ended in suicide. Ourahmane, too, takes ruins as a friend. Her video and installation evoke humanity's earliest art and the now desolate African land where it stood. Downstairs in the the basement tunnels, the latest edition of "In Practice" takes ruins as a given, too, but they need mean anything but collapse. Not that everyone would find them beautiful or desolate, but they stare back all the same.
Some art puts you on the hot seat, and some offers creature comforts after a day on one's feet with too much or too little art. Downstairs at SculptureCenter, Cherisse Gray manages both. For "In Practice," she sets out a massive concrete bench, based on Brutalist architecture under the brutal Marcos regime in the Philippines—and then she warms its awkward, narrow seat almost to the point of burning. The show's title, "Literally Means Collapse," could literally apply to you. Ir could also apply to Andy Coolquitt and Michael Mahalchick on the Lower East Side. Once again in art, the boys are tearing the place apart.
Caving in
That video unfolds almost entirely in real time, in four "chapters" over forty-five minutes. It lingers over not the darkness, but strange pillars, like piled stone, in the harsh light of day. Lydia Ourahmane takes her title from Tassili n'Ajjer, a plateau in southeast Algeria, at the border with Libya. Every so often the camera shifts to a hot, arid expanse bearing only rubble. Down in the basement tunnels, the center bills its 2022 "In Practice," its open-call program, as "Literally Means Collapse"—where the missing, implicit first word is ruin. That may not make much sense for the group show downstairs, but she wants to know how once fertile ground in Africa lost every trace of its rivers and forests.
Her video is all about loss and recovery. How did a "largely inaccessible" plateau become a site for pilgrimage and tourism? How did its discoverer, an archaeologist, contribute to French colonialism, as Algeria fought for independence? How does archaeology itself reduce to extraction and ruin? How do dedication and documentation become instruments of power and surveillance? That may seem like a lot to load onto an obscure scholar and a remote location, but Ourahmane lays everything on thick.
One might never know it from the outside, but the pillars hold caves and their art. One can, though, imagine walking slowly among them and entering. Every so often the scene shifts to night and the camera closes in, for the texture of dry ground and rubble. More rarely still, it closes in on the art, painted on or etched in stone. I took my opening description from The Cave Painters by Gregory Curtis—about the more famous cave paintings at Lascaux, in southwest France. Born in Algiers and living part of the year in Spain, Ourahmane must have affection for both.
The paintings in France date from forty thousand years ago, when Cro-Magnon walked the earth—often said to be the first artists. Those in Africa may be up to twice as old. They look older at that, with bare, frontal, almost comic outlines. Close-ups drive home their lack of perspective. Curtis cautions against isolating the figures in cave art, apart from the greater mystery. Ourahmane makes a point of it, before the camera all too quickly turns away.
I can never forget a horse at Lascaux, legs extended and muscles tensed, or a bearded man in motion. In context, he was herding horses and cattle. Ourahmane balks at anything so down to earth. She imagines a "hallucinogenic array" of ancient demons and extraterrestrials, in "conflict and ritual." She speaks, too, of an "exquisite corpse"—and never mind that the term refers to a collaborative procedure in Surrealism for making art, without a dead body in sight.
Still, for all her wild and contradictory points of reference, feel free to cave in. Ignore the heat and bring your face close to the earth. Think of the installation as a political mood piece, and each of the four chapters (with its own composer on the soundtrack) strikes a different mood, shifting with the light from white to red to black. Ourahmane enhances that impression with digital animation and photogrammetry—a way to convert photos into a panorama in 3D. She applies it, too, to a black thermoplastic curtain (a "generative adversarial network"), with gridded photos on one side and a well-worn relief on the other. Sometimes it seems that SculptureCenter has given up sculpture for video, as with Rindon Johnson and Tishan Hsu, but sculpture may yet have the last word.
Literally speaking
What art giveth, it can taketh away, and "In Practice" seems ambivalent about what to take or to give. Cherisse Gray calls the bench "faux Brutalist," lest one take for granted so much as a handle for one's experience. It is just one of four building elements, each ripped brutally enough from context. A model of spiral stairs leads nowhere, in cold steel, while ceiling tiles lend a blank face to meaningless box, their insulating function gone. A lamp looks homier, on a carpet of red, but it must compete with LED lights and a "predator flashlight" while stranded on the floor. She has given a social space to what the show calls "anti-social design."
Nothing here is obvious, just as everything works ever so hard to make a point. Brutalism itself becomes little more than a bad pun. Violet Dennison translates for you—unless, that is, she obscures things further. She imagines her snaky black polyurethane tube, set against shimmering color tubing, as a knot, a code, and the "exhaustion of legibility," not to mention a reference to a music video game. And she and Gray are the best and clearest of the bunch. The show is at once terminally obscure and utterly tendentious.
The curator, Camila Palomino, has trouble taking anything literally. Her title quotes Svetlana Boym, a critical theorist: "Ruin literally means collapse, but actually ruins are more about remainders and reminders." Boym's first word gone, nothing can be taken literally, in a quote that muddles ruins and ruin. I cannot swear that it says all that much anyway, but the eleven artists do their best to help. In SculptureCenter's gloriously decrepit basement tunnels, they seek the intersection between architecture and politics.
Fred Schmidt-Arenales addresses it directly. His video recreates a 1955 panel at the University of Chicago, where administrators laid out caps on African Americans in housing. Community organizers seem more perplexed than angry. But are academics all that central to segregated housing, and can actor asides bring a closed-door session from more than half a century ago into the present? Others make the connections still harder to find. They are also less literal.
Ignacio Gatica places souvenir watches from American political campaigns on pedestals spelling out CIA activities in Latin America. But which is to blame for snuffing out democracy? Monsieur Zohore creates a machine for blowing paper money, in memory of roses released from the dome of the Pantheon on Pentecost. But what does Catholic tradition in Rome have to do with "the esthetics of late capitalism"? Marco Barrera lines a tunnel with doors to safes from homes and businesses, with amateur paintings of watery landscapes and a shelf of water samples from nearby locations. I am still at sea.
After that, politics and architecture become little more than personal impressions. In their different ways and media, Enrique Garcia, Allen Hung-Lun Chen, Alan Martín Segal, and Stella Zhong invoke public squares and temples, but the spaces are neither sacred, impersonal, nor easy to visualize. Jessica Kairé at least has the decency to ask for help. Cotton canvas lies in a heap on the floor, and pulling on canvas cords make it rise into the empty base for a monument. Where Adam Pendleton at MoMA remembers the anger at a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, for Kairé the tribute to Christopher Columbus has already come down. So much for ruins, reminders, and remains.
Installation and community
Can an installation still be overwhelming and not mind-numbing? Can it stop short of an artist's private language or a five-ton public spectacle? For a brief while, those labels actually passed for compliments. In the boom years, it seemed, what artist (mostly male) did not deserve a memorial to himself? That model has taken a hit, just as painting as self-expression took a postmodern hit the generation before. And yet painting is back, and piles of trash are not exactly going away.
Matt Hoyt has approached the problem by sheer modesty, with small objects and, amid all the clutter, a delight in the handmade. Michael Mahalchick seems desperate not to promise too much, with his mess tossed here and there—rearranged, like (seriously) some slices of bacon, as needed in performance. Andy Coolquitt delights in excess, too—in big boxes, bright colors, brighter lights, and marks of destruction. Yet he has ties of his own to formalism. One enters past a "chair" of fabric-covered metal, its rigid V right out of the Bauhaus. Cordy Ryman could almost have made his column of colored stripes, give or take its melted disposable lighters.
Others, like Bill Walton and Bill Jenkins, try to ground an installation in architecture, set design, or the artist's studio. Guyton/Walker have their own modern stage, and Leslie Hewitt manages all as if dissolving the gallery walls. Mahalchick loves to be on stage, perhaps especially if need never get out of bed. At the 2012 Dependent art fair, he reportedly took advantage of the hotel room to restage a certain famous bed-in for peace. John Lennon and Yoko Ono could not have sung "Give Peace a Chance" for half as long—or with half as knowing a carnival air. His exhibition includes a guitar, a cot, studio scraps, and not much else.
Coolquitt, too, has trouble leaving anything behind, and even a good show looks like a fire sale of his personal life. His private obsessions extend past the lighters (and a sign thanking you for not smoking) to fruit drinks, beer cans, and sculpted hands with a certain obscene gesture. A box allegedly holds dead squirrels. One has to wonder about his lifestyle. At the same time, he longs to recreate the gallery as a public space. His welcome extends to a title like A nice soft space, for wall-mounted cushions, and to the centerpiece, a plywood box covered with Plexiglas that he imagines as an old-fashioned hardware store counter.
At her most fragile and expansive, Sarah Sze hints at model cities, with fragile utopias that never reach completion and always threaten to come apart. Coolquitt's utter disorganization leans more to furniture than architecture, like an artist or a dorm mate obliged to make do. He indeed calls the show "Chair w/Paintings," after that more or less actual chair. He likes tubular designs, sometimes topped by lampshades—although the actual lights come as the end of a giant dumbbells, one end up against the wall. Again he is adding pop-culture glitz to Minimalism. These things become repeated elements, but rarely side by side and never quite coming together.
He is acting out some old dilemmas—not just in art, but in America. Does democracy rest on liberty or community? No wonder America captured the avant-garde with Abstract Expressionism, and critics still debate whether to see most the abstract or the expressionism. No wonder, too, that Mahalchick never does get all that far past a private joke, while Coolquitt comes alive in Lisa Cooley's new, larger space. One hardly dares lean on the counter or against the cushion, and one has to keep circling past that chair to find more stand-ins for the artist, who somehow left his pants on the floor. One can, however, feel both overwhelmed and very much at home.
Lydia Ourahmane and "In Practice" ran at SculptureCenter through August 1, 2022. Andy Coolquitt ran at Lisa Cooley through May 6, 2012, and Michael Mahalchick at Canada through April 22.