The Brooklyn Rail

There’s something so vulnerable to it. Coming into contact with artwork outside of the white wall galleries of the city makes art feel less inherent—softer somehow. Less assured.

Maybe it’s the shadows.

A shadow, afterall, is a metonym for time, and a way of dealing with time that isn’t heroic.

Maybe it is true that there are “no shadows, no ghosts. In a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility, we are led to believe that everything can be seen, but also that everything is available and accessible for our consumption.”¹ Maybe what is felt is the anxiety of the white cube—knowing how fragile shadows make us, and how necessary it is to erase them. The old Ockawamick School holds onto them, and within its semantics of abandonment, there is now a show. It is now the inaugural exhibition of The Campus, and it comes at a time of soul searching for much of the art world. It feels appropriate to have an exhibition at this scale come off as more of a question—something less declarative. The interventions of the artists fight to keep their edge in a place where everything is drawn into comparison. The space is so expressive. The Campus wants to be a scene, or a milieu; or wants to be, at the very least, visible and uncontained.

Alternative site curation draws so much out into the open.² It has a way of beginning all of the fights and criticism and discourse all over again, with new and undiminished force. Where and how and when, if ever, does art have the mandate to intervene? What gives presence, and what denies it? When do we mean when we reference the “public”? Regardless of intention, every work at The Campus shoulders doubt. My friend Molly Zuckerman-Hartung has a piece that says “doubt is what allows a single gesture to have a heart.” This heart is necessary, and worth the narrow avoidance of error that the curator Timo Kappeller navigated. If the work is too responsive to the space, it runs the danger of becoming a prop, or worse, it becomes invisible. If the work is too ambivalent to it, it is fully deracinated, and can feel like just another thing made to be circulated, consumed, sold, and swapped.³

I found myself trying to think of a way to not evaluate the work of The Campus by whether it felt aligned or misaligned within the space, to release this binary, and it reminded me of how the curator Jean-François Chevrier has described his process as a “mixture of composing and montaging procedures.”⁴ Larger expeditions feel expressively cinematic. They are made of interludes, cuts, denouements, and episodes—anthologies of trace affect. Composition builds a rhythm—momentum. It’s embodied. It carries you along, dictating your movement and the speed at which you take it all in.

Montage, on the other hand, gives the gift of distance. In Gilles Deleuze’s cinematic theory, the collisions of montage are what reveal the idea. It’s a rupture that produces the image of time. While some of the rooms of The Campus felt like a synthesis between the work and the space (like Manfred Pernice’s desk-like objects or Sanya Kantarovsky’s Symbolist chalkboard drawings), I found myself drawn to the moments where the space felt charged, but ambivalent; where the sensorial nature of the space was announced but didn’t narrativize the work. It wasn’t conflict or harmony but montage curation—the space and the work lent each other credence through their parallel force.

I feel like Michael E. Smith’s work in the double kitchen will stay with me; and I’ll remember how it seemed to trace Bill Viola’s Reflecting Pool (1977–79) on the other side of the wall. I felt the intensity of abbreviation more clearly from their proximity—Viola’s body frozen in a cannonball above the water, and the sound of his loud and sudden “hyugh” as he pulled his knees into his stomach in one quick motion. That hyugh felt carried across, reciprocated, in Smith’s separated trumpet. Smith has also adapted a portal logic—a strange cadence that made me think of the way Charlie Kaufman scores his films with sharp violins to undermine his reality. The sinks hold the trumpet-object twisted in its spatio-temporal jump; and the rest of it feels like the excess of impossible travel, the place where all of these objects accumulate each time the artist reaches into the past. The room is so strange on its own: a kitchen duplicated for two cooks, or two teams of them, to work across from each other—a world of parallel. Smith took notice of this parallel divide. Within the cabinets is the excess, the overflow of manic and repetitive making. It is the material of what gets lost or shed (really stacked), between the spaces of two mirrors. It feels like Smith is grasping at the resilient shadows that Viola kept. Viola’s body disappears, or slowly lets itself go; leaving only the shadows of swimmers beneath him, leaving only what passes and takes hold beneath us in the pool.

The art world’s anxiety seems to return art to its phenomenal ability to “[make] visible the invisible space of air”⁵ around it. Whatever has been lost, art still “moves the earth into the Open of a world and keeps it there” and “lets the earth be an earth.”⁶ Some of the work in The Campus issues visibility in this way. The exhibition moves the abandoned high school and all of its atlases of memories and experience out into the open. The invisible architecture that conditions and frames how we relate to the world around us is brought into place-as-region. Heidegger’s breaking of the word Gestell is relevant here: ge- meaning the totality of completeness and -stellen, of a setting in place. Curation can access this rare completeness—arrived at through the setting of a thing in place.

I think of the way Tal R’s outdoor sculpture encroaches. Outside the window of a classroom, under the shade of a prairie elm, it is a dark imaginary, a trick of metaphysics that the teacher is unable to see. The students see it, and the psychologist treats it as real. It makes me think of how myth often enters after things come to an end, how magic opens up what has been closed off and inhabits what has been abandoned. What does it mean to include Shinichi Sawada’s totemic objects in the bookshelves of the library? Is it giving us the ability to feel animistic presence in a space designed to disinherit it? Or is it attempting a deeper replacement of knowledge with the atavistic impulses of the unknown? Tal R and Sawada in this context seem to unsettle primary education’s reliance on the Enlightenment, questioning how our earliest stages of development have become so codependent with positivism. Who and what made us all into empiricists?

The Campus is a redistribution of the sensible⁷ that centers the role of the imaginary within the spaces that we learn. It has made the old high school into a ritual site of becoming. “Becomings belong to geography, they are orientations, directions, entries and exits.”⁸ Our ability to grow and merge with the forces that counteract us is forever located and specific to geography. It is bound to a specific place. Here it allows us to see how intentional and designed our sociability is. What Timo Kappeller offers is a Romantic dissolution of epistemology, a way out of the limits of this materialist orientation, achieved through the abstraction of collective montage. It is a show that makes sense to a student that is stuck in class all day and retreats to her daydreams. There, the dark libidinal fantasies (Philip Pearlstein), the world of spirits (Jim Denomie), and the dreams and angels of others that we need to give space for within our own imaginaries (Lloyd Foster) are all a host that waits to be found. Too much has been made intractable through the erasure of shadows.

The Campus feels in some ways like a Greater New York show in the Hudson Valley. It converses with Hans Ulrich Obrist’s 2014 iteration of do it at the the Episcopal Academy school in Newtown Square, PA; and with the curatorial sensibility of Sonsbeek. The invitation to address the landscape made me remember Pawel Althamer’s piece Ścieżka (Path) (2007) in the 2007 Skulptur Projekte. What makes The Campus unique and distinct from the others is what it is able to bring together. It is a curation of the shared vision of a vanguard of galleries. It is not overtly a survey, as it draws largely from the six galleries’ rosters, but it does act as a collective vision of the sweep to form a topology or collective pulse. With criticism’s waning authority, this type of consensus amongst galleries is a significant answer to the market that hopes to establish itself as the only remaining criteria. The Campus is a peer-reviewed form of montage curation, which feels like a model that needs to be studied and emulated. Together the collective eye of the galleries and the curation of Kappeller have formed a Borgesian arc, a chain of individually sequenced dialectical positions that offer complex responses to the complexity of our crises. Off-site montage curation, like that of The Campus, is urgent, and it is what allows us to step back and see the artifice of sequence, of its narrative, and understand what it is all in service of.