Katie Grinnan’s sculptures in the exhibition Polaris assert themselves within the compact interior spaces of the MAK Center at the Schindler House and strategically occupy adjacent outdoor spaces. Incorporating allusions to astronomy, tourism, and artifacts, these works provoke reflection on polarities from the sublime to the picturesque, from interiority to exteriority, and from personal to historical narratives.
Through the works Alignment and Continuum (all works 2008), crowded together in one room, Grinnan establishes some central concerns. In both, Chichén Itzá’s El Castillo, an ancient Mayan pyramid flanked by four flights of stairs, serves as a repeating formal element.1 Here, the monumental pyramid is rendered at model scale, with each casting at about one cubic foot in dimension. The casts, made of Friendly Plastic, are placed base to base, as if in a mirror image, which causes the doubled pyramid shape to visually unify into an octagonal block.2
In Alignment, the blocks perch on tapered, fragmented supports, taking on a figurative quality. Three such figural elements are set in a straight line. Alignment is totemic, imbued with a pop-culture sci-fi quality that conjures “made-by-aliens” fantasies about ancient structures. The surfaces have lush areas of super-saturated blue (think Yves Klein’s International Blue or filmic blue screen).3 Other sections are wrapped with photographic images of constellations, the sun, and the moon that are drastically eroded and crackled, sometimes to the point of being barely recognizable. Polaris, a star that for thousands of years has served as a reference point for navigation and timekeeping, may be among the images, but if so, it is impossible to identify definitively.4 Pathos and humor can be found in how completely these pictorial elements are fused to the surfaces of the sculptures—they remind me of those shrink-wrapped public buses that become mobile advertisements. The effect created by this work is one of dissonance, undermining the integrity of both image and form. The potentially significant pyramid becomes subsumed into a barely readable support for the image; the image becomes a disjunctive veneer of pure decoration.
Literary critic Susan Stewart, whose constellation of inquiry includes the gigantic, the miniature, the souvenir and the collection as a means of situating the human body in relation to objects and their meaning, describes the sky as the most typical example of the gigantic world. Vast and undifferentiated, it is sublime and potentially terrifying to apprehend. Per Stewart, various traditions—philosophic and poetic treatises on the beautiful, romantic pastoral paintings, the Victorian taming of nature within the picturesque, even Earthworks of the ‘60s and ‘70s—have sought through varied strategies to represent and contain the enormity of natural space, whether encompassing land or sky.5 A similar conversion takes place in Grinnan’s Alignment, where the vast expanse of outer space is brought comfortably close and seductively contained.
Continuum consists of two tall towers. One is made from casts of El Castillo stacked vertically while the other mimics, in welded rebar, the geometric outlines of the first tower and houses equipment for a 3-channel video projected on a nearby wall. The sequences, filmed by Grinnan, dwell on banal shots of tourists wandering around the ancient site of Chichén Itzá in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, supplemented with shots of lush greenery and abstract, manipulated footage that consists of layered patterns and colors over live shots. On the audio track, a traveling companion says something like, “No, this is just a pile of rocks; it isn’t anything,” to which the artist responds by giggling faintly as the sound and image trail off. The dilemma proposed by the artist of distinguishing “artifact” from “just a rock” offers another means by which to read many works in this show.
Grinnan has frequently explored the relationship between pictorial/photographic space and sculptural form. Often, she employs a strategy by which she locates interesting shapes in a photograph and then emphasizes them visually and reinterprets them sculpturally. Additionally, Grinnan’s artwork has had an ongoing, albeit somewhat quirky, relationship with architecture. This ongoing fascination with form and structure, as well as her acknowledgment of the dilemma posed by distinguishing the value of a given object one apprehends (as artist, tourist or art viewer), is driven home by Henge, a quasi-mystical circle of “real” and faux rubble and ramshackle, upright wooden pylons that alludes to Stonehenge and other such ancient henges. Lying in the circle is a photograph of a stone with a distinct geometric opening. It is impossible to tell whether this stone is a fragment of an ancient Mayan ruin, the artist’s own fabrication, or merely some found construction fragment. The depicted rock reappears as an object within the circle, freshly cast in concrete. It joins a mishmash of found and custom-made concrete blocks, actual rocks, and indeterminate chunks of white plaster, thereby activating a critical/artistic discussion of dualism often undertaken by transposing simulacra with the Real.
The idea of the souvenir is also suggested by the imagery gathered from Grinnan’s travels to the Yucatan and the dualism of a real/original object (or artifact) in relation to an appropriated representation. Literally meaning “to come to mind,” a souvenir gains value due to its link to authentic past experience. Indeed, to Stewart, the souvenir exemplifies the “…capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience.”6 What seems to happen, however, in Alignment, Continuum and Henge is an economy of equivalence, where ultimately one cannot ascertain which object or image is authentic or meaningful. They are all rendered equally important and significant by the hand of the artist.
Grinnan’s intimately scaled sculptures harmonize with the DIY fabrication of the Schindler House.7 The artist’s palette of cast concrete, wood posts, metal rods and photo-printed plastic skew subtly from the house’s slab-tilt concrete walls, wood beams, canvas, and composite board screens. Even the glimpses of outdoor greenery seen through the glazed strips and corners that punctuate the house’s concrete walls are refracted in Grinnan’s psychedelically manipulated photos of tropical plants incorporated into Between Worlds. Moreover, despite their initial appearance of haphazard assemblage, Henge and Between Worlds reveal themselves to be carefully formulated. This new cohesion seems uncharacteristic for the artist, whose practice often embraces the off-kilter and awkward. In some ways, one can infer from the works of Polaris that Grinnan has matured by resolving certain conceptual and formal issues. At the same time, it leads to a perception that some of these works are becoming claustrophobically self-referential and, as such, leave little room for any interpretation other than as that of a strictly surface reading—a comparison of notes between cryptic symmetrical formal elements. Perhaps this is Grinnan’s aim: to deliberately acknowledge and frustrate the viewer’s innate desire for the fixed point of reference, as invoked by the show’s title.
Excavation I and Polaris eschew the artful flourishes of the works described so far. Consequently, they become the most daring works in the show. The first effectively establishes an association between the remote site of Chichén Itzá in the Yucatan and the Schindler House in Hollywood. Excavation I places the model-sized form of El Castillo on the manicured lawn of the Chase Courtyard. A few feet away, earth has been excavated from the ground to accommodate the inverse shape of the pyramid made from a silicone mold. In this instance, the form of El Castillo is clearly legible as miniaturized ancient architecture. Where Alignment addressed the gigantic space of the sky in relation to the viewer’s body, Excavation I presents a miniature space, one that is physically inaccessible to the viewer except through imagination and projection. This situation of the body in relation to a miniature tableau evokes a space of reverie and interiority.8 The insertion of the tiny El Castillo into the carefully considered geometries of the Schindler House’s surroundings leads me to conceptually equate two iterations of cultural production and preservation: a majestic Mayan compound that has been named a U.N. World Heritage site and the preciously preserved modernist architectural treasure in Los Angeles, each a living ruin in its own way.9
The artwork entitled Polaris presents a minimalist gesture that potently connects to the “here and now” of the viewer and the city that lies beyond the bamboo stands that bound the Schindler House. A tripod, topped by a clamp that holds a chunk of concrete, Polaris is a disconcerting object. Clearly a device like a telescope, it is moveable (although, as a viewer, I am not sure if I am allowed to touch it). Its squarish piece of concrete invites use as a frame for viewing. The work’s siting in the Schindler sleeping loft, with its entrance hidden behind the main entrance door and its narrow, creaky staircase, contributes to a sense of intrusion and insecurity about its meaning. Is this art? Where am I looking from? Moreover, what am I supposed to be looking at? The apartment building next door? Polaris snaps us out of romantic reverie about ancient civilizations and aesthetic pleasures induced by most other works in this show. Succinct and literal, it forces the viewer, as voyeur, to engage in a more self-conscious act of looking. Of all the works in this show, Polaris seems like it could generate compelling and fundamental questions no matter where it was located.
Albeit a radically different work, Robert Smithson’s Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan (1968) haunted my reflections on the entire Polaris exhibition. Driven afterwards to reread Smithson’s nerdy and hallucinogenic text, I thought about his delineation of site/non-site in relation to Grinnan’s project. Smithson’s is a receding horizon. For him, the encounter with the land and culture of other civilizations (the Mexico of 1968 that overlaid an ancient Mayan civilization) is always framed or mitigated by language and informed by history. (He compulsively cites the texts he reads and the maps he consults during his travels.) The Real is always at a remove. Experience is dematerialized into documentation, image, and text. I speculate that this was Smithson’s way of resisting the romanticization that unexamined tourism can easily generate.
Two terms defined by Stewart—journey and excursion—are helpful when considering intersections and differences between Smithson’s and Grinnan’s perambulations around the same physical and conceptual territory:
The journey belongs to the moral universe of pre-industrialism. It marks the passage of the sun through the sky, the concomitant passage of the body’s labor through the day, and the pilgrimage or passage of life. It is an allegorical notion, one that suggests a linearity and series of correspondences which link lived experience to the natural world. In contrast, the excursion is an abstract and fictive notion; it emerges from the world of mechanized labor and mechanical reproduction. The excursion is a holiday from that labor, a deviation and a superfluity of signification.10
In contrast to Smithson’s journey-oriented project, Grinnan’s exhibition Polaris exists in the realm of the excursion. Gathering souvenir snapshots, important artifacts and “plain old rocks” from her travels and observations of stars, Grinnan embraces their materiality and employs devices of fiction and poetry—reverie, symbolism, and syncopated formal or aesthetic affinities—as her preferred method to present questions of history and place.
Karen Dunbar is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.