Arturo Herrera
Wolfgang Laib: You Will Go Somewhere Else
Other critics have pointed out how suggestive Herrera’s abstract shapes are, seeing in them breasts and penises and mouths and dogs and feces. In the booklet for this show, curator Hamza Walker argues convincingly for a connection between Herrera’s work and the childhood fantasies psychoanalysis has unearthed. Herrera himself–a Chicagoan (now in New York on a fellowship) who was born in Venezuela in 1959 and who has an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago–prefers to reveal little of his biography and intent. (He did tell me that he began as a painter, creating collagelike mixes of abstraction and representation.) Though this show displays a biomorphic suggestiveness and a touch of humor, what I found most extraordinary about it was the way it kept me constantly off balance.
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Herrera’s work tests the limits of conceptualism with a special complexity: each piece here pushes a different “degree zero,” so that the show overall becomes a labyrinth of defied expectations. You think art is painting? Well, here’s a blob of undifferentiated white that seems a simple accretion on the wall. Is art flat? Well, one large work displays on one side of a specially constructed wall two protruding Disney-character figurines, painted white. Does sculpture always protrude? On the wall’s other side Herrera has cut deep holes where the figures are so that we can look into their hollow bases. Viewing this piece is akin to going backstage and seeing how the illusions of a performance are created, except that we’re given inside and outside simultaneously and can view and review them in any order we like.
For one side of Extraction–a “diptych” of two humorously discordant parts–Cannone asked Rebecca Morris to create a piece lacking the traits ascribed to her work by several critics. Yet the resulting painting looks fairly characteristic of her. For the other half Cannone asked sound installation artist M.W. Burns to make a work that had those same traits. He chose to stage an encounter (captured on videotape) between Cannone and a man delivering a singing telegram to him at the show’s opening with a text based on the words and phrases describing Morris’s art. As Cannone listens with some embarrassment to the singer crooning “You’ve got style and class and a cute little…” in a voice that goes way beyond the badness of mere kitsch, it’s evident that Extraction doesn’t merely parody art criticism but any attempt to synopsize the richness of art, or life, in words.
While the simple forms of his sculptures do preserve the purity of his materials, they’re hardly depictions of wild nature; rather they reveal the inevitably partial, alienating quality of encounters between nature and culture. Five large boatlike shapes sculpted entirely of beeswax–the “building material of bees,” as Laib calls it–are arrayed across a wooden platform in You Will Go Somewhere Else. Their apparent motion and elevated position suggest the transformative journey of the title, but these are also roughly geometrical shapes with a cultural history that includes colonialism and war: the raw energy of beeswax has been molded both by human hands and by tradition. Similarly the 27 brass platters of The Rice Meals–26 of which hold mounds of rice, while one contains hazelnut pollen–form a line on the floor that observes the geometric precision of minimalism. Laib implicitly refers to temple offerings of rice in India and to Asians’ rice diet, but each mound is also like a tiny human structure, a pyramid or burial mound–a fact that connects this raw foodstuff to the continuities of human history. This intellectual dimension, however, never undercuts the deep connection Laib has forged with nature, or the way his minimal forms lend beauty to the colors and textures of these basic substances.
