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| ABOUT TRaC |
Fast TRaC Winter 2004
A Captivating Confusion Here is Elsewhere is a disjointed puzzle of incompatible pieces forced together to create a lopsided whole. Instead of binding her choices in a thematic twine, Mona Hatoum entangles her message in the show's confusion. Randomness, abnormalities, juxtapositions adorn the surfaces of the exhibit, finding form in a pile of patriotic candy, a gothic basketball hoop, and a homicidal housewife. Getting past the need to make sense of it all, the viewer can either shrug at the pointlessness or bask in its brilliance. The minimalist decor of Elsewhere's colorless walls, basic frames, and fluorescent-like lighting begs the artwork to speak for itself. Ideas float from room to room, searching for someone to grasp them. Gonzalez-Torres, giving form to the abstract, makes his idea physically available through a stack of posters depicting one week's worth of people killed by a gun in the United States. Taking advantage of everything free, the viewing public eagerly rolls up a copy without thinking of what they actually have in their hands (a poster of dead people). A prolonged observation witnesses the return of some freeloaders who had realized that they didn't want the poster after all. A bed in the middle of an artistic exhibit comes automatically with innuendo. Following a portrait of a young boy who is surrounded by a written narrative detailing the boy's struggle as a homosexual, the bed takes on a sinister tone. Images materialize as the brain forges a mental connection between the two pieces. Hatoum's sequential organization of the pair becomes the bigger art, forcing people to think twice, create a mental image, and chastise themselves for thinking such things. Hidden in the mask of random placement, Hatoum provokes a deeper, psychological meaning from two seemingly unrelated pieces. Juxtaposing the rest of the exhibit, whose pieces primarily involve small, simple, everyday things, Hatoum places two massive, elaborate pieces in adjacent rooms. First is Francis Alys's The Modern Procession. The detailed drawings of individual people walking across a Queens map, complete with posters and figures held up on shoulders, morph into the reality on the screen. The artwork isn't the drawings or the film of the Procession it's the Procession itself. The Wilson's Stasi City encompasses an entire room. Each wall acting as a screen for different scenes, the viewer is immersed in a sea of oranges, greens, and blues. Anti-gravity, abandonment, and relentless mobility flutter across the surface, twirling from wall to floor to wall at a dizzying pace. Both pieces are similar in their grandiosity but both stand independently, from each other and from the rest of the exhibit. Hatoum's Elsewhere succeeds in evoking a rainbow of emotions. The audience becomes a part of the show, from their furrowing brows of confusion to their nodding sighs of understanding to their smiles of delight. In being ambiguous, being open to interpretation, Hatoumb forces exhibit guests to use their minds. And if the complexity of her choices isn't enough to prompt thought, one only needs to look and listen to Bruce Nauman's sole piece in the collection a bouncing head hypnotizing its viewers to "Think! Think! Think!" In doing that, at the least, one finds that elsewhere is here.
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