Of Men and Monuments,
Vessels and Vectors...
Julian Laverdiere's Art of Uncertainty: "Goliath
Concussed" at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery NYC
by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
"in
architecture form is a noun, in industry form is a verb"
R. Buckminster Fuller
In Egypt's
sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows.
"I am great Ozymandias," saith the stone,
"The King of kings: this mighty city shows
The wonders of my hand." The city's gone!
Naught but the leg remaining to disclose
The sight of that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
– Horace
Smith, "Ozymandias" 1817
Horace
Smith composed this sonnet on 27 December 1817, during an evening
sonnet-writing session with P.B. Shelley, but the echo, the sense
of quotation of content and context is what I want to evoke with
this piece. Think again: Rhetorical bodies, matter and memory, teleplex
tautologies, suture and synedoche... codes and modes... like I always
enjoy saying: it all just flows. It's been a long time since 1869
when the U.S., as an aspiring regional super-power, laid the first
trans-continental telegraph and railroad lines throughout the newly
reconsolidated polity that the Civil War had given birth to. It
was an ambitious project, but like all American endeavors of size
it had a small beginning. During the month of May 1869, in the middle
of Utah, and at a place very few of us would ever check out, a silver
spike hammered into the a railroad track that was almost finished
completed a continent wide circuit in the newly linked transcontinental
rails. The spike set off a electronic trigger pulse that was supposed
to celebrate the occasion: a current moved through the newly connected
and then infantile networks linking the East and West, and spread
throughout the rail and telegraph lines like some newly remade disembodied
Paul Revere howling through the wires. In New York and in San Francisco
two cannons - one facing the Atlantic and the other, the Pacific
Ocean - fired a shot triggered by the phantasmal pulse sent from
the joining of the railroads in the middle of America, making the
newly ambitious U.S.'s sense of Manifest Destiny telephonically
clear to the rest of the world - from the heart of the country a
silver spike closed the circuit on reality as our ancestors knew
it. The rest, as it's always said, is another story. Ah, the logic
of history. Like the poem that I begin this essay with, its something
that at first glance evokes a series of historical allusions, and
then one realizes the legerdemain - it's not Percy Shelley's, but
an echo, a remix, a quote within a quote. One could argue that that's
the sense of uncertainty of origin that Laverdiere strives to convey
with his work.
The above
mentioned event is true but hovers someplace in my imagination at
a point mid-way between Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, with dashes of
Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" thrown in for good
measure. That's what Julian Laverdiere's work is like: it puts a
spin on a commonplace situation and for better or worse creates
a place where fiction and reality, like everything else these days,
seem to be completely meshed with one another. In "Forbidden
Aspirations for Ascendancy," Laverdiere's first solo show at
Gallery Andrew Kreps back in 2000, one entered a room where two
capsules sat on funerary trestles, and another work - a hyper-meticulously
rendered model of a rusted safe - sat spinning in an almost holographic
video projection several feet off the floor. In another section
of the show a couch made of material normally used for NASA's space
programs invites a hypgnagogic reverie of the rusted safe spinning
on the wall. It was all about inducing a kind of hypnotic, mesmeric,
fictional, mode of contemplating the installation. The soundtrack
made by Wolfgang Voigt (a techno-minimalist composer who works under
the name "GAS" for a german avant-garde label named Mille
Plateuax - that's based on the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari)
was set in a minimalist drone of techno -pulse like beats, a kind
of repetition that reminded me of the timelessness that you feel
in a nightclub - that sense of the "prolonged present"
completes the installations sense of suspended time. The two major
pieces of the show, "First Attempted Trans Atlantic Telegraph
Cable Crossing" and "First Attempted Manned Space Flight"
pointed to two major failures at the edge of two eras of the information
age. Both pieces were rendered as kind of optical sarcophagi, each
one a puzzle piece in a mental map made of loosely tied fictions
and near-real hypothetical situations. What better way to look at
today's information saturated world where no one is exactly sure
of events and the news about them?
The 1854
cable venture of Cyrus WW. Field , a would be media mogul in the
mold of a prototypical Bill Gates of the early industrial age, and
the mid-WWII German rocket scientist Werner Von Braun, have little
in common except their sense of being rendered into historic vector
motifs - they inspired other people on to carry their ideas to much
greater heights than either of them attained, and it's that sense
of engagement human frailty in the face of technology's omnivourous
gaze that Laverdiere evokes with an uncanny sense of hyper-realism.
The capsules contain exquisitely rendered models of the failed projects,
rendered exactly to scale, and the optical quality of the plastic
encasing them gives the objects an almost holographic quality -
Laverdiere has worked on film shoots and video shoots for several
years, and the experience gained in rendering reality into a video
shoot has paid off handsomely. Indeed with the exquisite detailed
attention paid to every aspect of the show - the capsules, the digitally
rendered hyper-realistic photos of the ficitional events that he's
encapsulated - Laverdiere can say, as so many of us feel in these
heady days of hyper-modernity, like the main character of H.G. Well's
1894 classic "The Triumph of The Taxidermist" who creates
new hyrbid creatures from the bones and skins of extinct animals
for kicks so he can convince people he's found new species: "But
all this is merely imitating Nature." In the story the Taxidermist
then points to his models in a shop filled with artificial creatures
that he created for media spectacle - "I have done more than
that in my time. I have - beaten her...."
I have
to admit: the precedents for this kind of work in the conventional
artworld - Racheal Whiteread's fascination with making everyday
life into a funereal reality, or a larger scale artist Micheal Heizer's
project "City" - a huge simulated metropolis made of monumental
mastabas and other regalia that we normally associate with Necropoli
and the other effects of the wealthy or elite aspects of cultures
world wide, Chris Burden's minature model cities, Gregory Greene's
exact replica's of weapons and satellite communications systems,
or even more cogently relevant, Constant's fascination with his
"New Babylon" worldwide city of architecture and dispersion
- have with Laverdiere's show been rendered into their scientific
counterparts. This is the impulse of contemporary society's deep
fascination with archival reality - what I like to call the "museum
impulse"- and it makes its way into the installation via the
route of the "rusted safe" encapsulated and then made
into a video image projected spinning aimlessly on the wall. But
before the musuem, before the collections of the contemporary artworld,
there was the tradition of the wunderkammer or "wonder cabinet"
that focused on a mode of display that was deliberately eccentric,
and expressive of the personality and history of its creator. The
first wunderkammer is believed to have appeared in Vienna around
1550 and the tradition grew and evolved for about one hundred years
until its function was taken over by conventional museums. Where
Laverdiere makes reality a transparent parenthetical statement about
desire and expansion, other artists - for example, Rachel Whiteread's
sense of space encapsulated like a concrete shell, or Mariko Mori's
"Time Capsule" - a sarcophagous inverted and made transparent
- contain a strange sense of trying to outrun death and impermanence.
The museum impulse is the congruent - it ties everything down to
its last impression, and acts as it assigns. Let's face it: it's
a fixed place in the history of objects.
Laverdiere points us in another direction. Just as his casket-like
investigations of near historic events hover on the edge of reality
point out, in his work, everything is up for grabs, everything is
remixable. This is something people have started noticing on-line
as well - omnipresence doesn't imply omniscience - in fact it usually
creates a muddled sense of what's going on in the "real"
world. This is the central metaphor "Forbidden Aspirations
For Ascendancy" points to - Icarus and Daedulus - think of
faded outlines and shimmering optical indeterminancy, and you'll
get the picture, but the idea is there: the memory of an event and
it's transposition into a living museum time shard is what creates
the artistic tension in the installation. Again, a poem:
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled hp and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
.And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works. Ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
– Percy Shelley 1818
I'll end
with a metaphor about permanence and impermanence: when he was asked
to come up with an idea for the New York Time's recent efforts to
freeze time in a media sphere of, of course, a time capsule, media
artist Jaron Lanier came up with a novel idea: he felt that genetically
encoding the information into cockroaches would ensure the information's
retrival 1000 years from now. The Times felt that they needed the
obvious statement: a capsule. One is forced to wonder which will
be around longer.... We always want the obvious ways to encode and
preserve time, when it may not be the best route to take. Like the
soma-tropic statue come to life in Robert Wiene's "The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari," we're left with a sense of extreme indetemincany
in the cultural landscape: a nine foot model of a ship-wreck that
can still be found at the bottom of some of the harshest areas of
the Northern Atlantic, a rusted safe put onto a solaris-like optical
pedestal, and a hauntingly rendered model of a shattered space craft
that could have existed, and that was created from the V-2 rocket
notes of a Nazi aerospace scientist who was brought over to the
U.S. to aid in our space program.... sometimes I think of this century's
sense of trying to capture time - think, for example, of Duchamp's
famous "Nude Descending a staircase" and it's critique
of Edweaerd Muybridge's stop motion rendering of a woman walking
nude down a staircase... when we examine every last item holding
our perceptions together we're left, like the techno soundtrack
that backs the installation, silently marooned in the repetition
of the present, left wondering if one action or another would have
produced some radically different situations and moments. Laverdiere
in his own way, cleverly critiques this. Who knows... perhaps a
rendition of the shells that announced the first transcontitnental
land networks is in the works. All I can say, is given Laverdiere's
historical breadth and craftsmanship, I wouldn't be surprised. This
was an excellent first show. He tells us, like the New York Time's
project (I'm not attacking the project, by the way, I think it's
a good idea) that will probably decay with time, some things are
best forgotten. The more recent "Goliath Concussed" shows
the evolution of an artist concerned with todays images of empires,
and like Horace Smith's Ozymandias remix, we're asked again to think
about
"What
wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place."
Artist's Statement
about Lost Cornerstone by Julian LaVerdiere
Lost Cornerstone, is a massive sculpture, which serves
as weighty evidence of the architectural regime change between the
ideologies of Neo classicism and Modernism. This piece will be presented
as a large weather worn architectural artifact presumably recovered
from the ruins of the original Pennsylvania Station. This artifact
is a massive guardian eagle, hanging off kilter in a sling, suspended
from a construction hook and cable.
The piece in motion at the Lehmann
Maupin Gallery
This particular Eagle is a replica of the last surviving
cornerstone of the twenty-two that adorned the facade of the late
great Pennsylvania Station. These heroic eagles crowned the original
Pennsylvania Station, which was torn down in October of 1963. This
action was the principal catalyst, which ignited New York’s
historic preservation movement and was the direct reason for the
formation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission
in 1965.
With respect to the extraordinary architectural changes
that have taken place in New York City since September 11, 2001,
I believe that the historic moment of Penn Station’s demolition
is now cast in a new light, and is a vital and important subject
to revisit, so we may better understand the importance of the symbology
of our iconic public buildings as well as the multiple trajectories
of American Imperialism. The dethroned Eagle is an apt symbol of
the fallen empire of Neoclassical Architecture that largely personified
the public buildings of New York City and its Empire State, as well
as the artificial heraldry upon which we have founded aspects of
our culture and our selves. The abrupt deposition of these sculptural
icons metaphorically illustrates the indictment of the old guard
by the new. This fallen Eagle is one of the obvious casualties of
the paradigm shift between Western Neoclassicism and International
Style Modernism. Obviously, the 1960’s were a volatile and
complicated moment in American history -- the razing of Pennsylvania
Station and the conservationist response to its destruction and
loss were symptomatic of the many important cultural revolutions
occurring at that time.
“It is inconceivable that a twentieth-century
city should have torn down such patrimony”
-Philip Johnson
I am using a laser range scanner to generate a twenty
first century “digital casting” of this 3,500 lb. marble
Eagle artifact. This range scanning technology is used by engineers,
architects and archeologists, to document remote and historic structures.
Incidentally, this scanner was used to document the ruins of the
Roman Forum, Chartes Cathedral, and the Guggenheim Museum. The scan
of the Eagle will be used to control a CNC milling machine that
will carve a perfect scale replica in Polymer foam. This replica
will actual weight of only 250 lbs. The eagle will then be painted
and treated to look like weathered Iron.
The act of digitally scanning and rapid prototyping a physical 3d
rendering of this artifact, as a work of contemporary art, will
aptly demonstrate the manner in which this 21st century technology
of mass production pays critical homage to the lost traditional
study of classical architectural artifacts. The plaster casting
and replication of the marbles and ruins of ancient Rome is a Renaissance
practice that is now simply symbolic trope of western education
and culture. This reverence for classicism is indicative of the
manner in which our culture mindlessly repeats history as it aspires
to meet the nostalgic ideals of antiquity.
Evidently, This eagle icon of the Roman Empire has
had many re-incarnations in descendent Empires. Always as a symbol
of power, pride, and Prowess, these Empires in turn have come to
ruin.
This Sculpture is not necessarily intended to suggest
that the symbol of the American eagle has fallen like those of other
empires, but rather that this volatile symbol may have brought ruin
upon its self through the hubris encoded within its own tradition.
-Julian LaVerdiere
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