compactspace

THE DARK TOWER

curated by Cauleen Smith

May-June 2009

drawing by Louis Schmidt © 2009

Shane Anderson / Susy Bielak / Crystal Z. Campbell

Micha Cárdenas / Mauricio Chernovetsky / Lili Chin

Ted Chung / Leigh Cole / Micki Davis / Monica Duncan

Nico Herbst / Glenna Jennings / Merve Kayan

Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli / Dolissa Medina / Elle Mehrmand

Chuck Miller / Vincent Manganello / Jesse Mockrin

Zac Monday / Clare Parry / Brianna Rigg / Lesha Rodriquez

Louis Schmidt / The Community Insourcing Bureau

Julia Westerbeke / Suzanne Wright / Claire Zitzow

In fairy tales the dark tower imprisons. In poems it taunts and beckons, or shelters and protects. In sci-fi narratives, the dark tower is not so much a destination as a portal-mirror that negotiates slippages in space and time and reflects our latent desires back to us.

The Dark Tower exists.

It is within the tower that, like the works in this show, our bodies may stretch along a sliver of time, tumble within a quantum of space, and warm to the heat that travels to us as light from stars that guide our way. For the purposes of describing the artists that the show’s title seeks to bind, I looked to the imagery of two poems. (“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855) by British poet Robert Browning and “From The Dark Tower” (1927) by black gay American poet Countee Cullen) Browning’s poem describes the arduous journey toward The Dark Tower, and Mr. Cullen’s poem leads us away. However, it is the short-lived but seminal American salon, named after Mr. Cullen’s poem, that this show most powerfully invokes.

In Browning’s poem, the Childe (untested knight) Roland, wanders lost in the wastelands that challenge and deceive him as he attempts to reach the dark tower. At one point in his journey, the young knight, must cross a river littered with the bodies of those who have come before him.

By contrast, Countee Cullen describes the artist as an attendant to precious germinations that might one day safely escape the dark tower to be embraced by the broad light of day. In 1928, on the one hundred and thirty-sixth west block of Harlem USA, heiress A’Lelia Walker, daughter of Madame CJ Walker – hair care magnate and first black American woman to become a millionaire, converted a floor of her glorious Brownstone into a salon and named it after Countee Cullens’ poem. She gathered together the raucous and brilliant stalwarts of the Harlem Renaissance, various international gadflies, and Greenwich Village aesthetes like Carl Van Vechten (who had been a constant fixture at Mabel Dodge’s salons in the lower east side). A’Lelia Walker’s Dark Tower was lit for only a year, after which Harlem’s salon lady died at the age of 46. When she passed, Langston Hughes declared that the glory days of Harlem died with her. Indeed, in 1931, the glory days of American industrial power were dying as well.

And so it goes that The Dark Tower with its ability to fold time, compress space, and re-animate the body [so much like the artists presented] finds us today in the flotsam of hedge funds and the wreckage of mortgage-backed securities. One can no longer assume that a Masters of Fine Arts from a reputable institution entitles one to leap form their cramped campus studio into a one-person show at a glistening New York gallery like a debutant in the order of myths. One may leap indeed, but like Browning’s Childe Roland, the landing, even if one arrives at one’s chosen destination, may not hold the promises that looked so tantalizing from afar. What happens, if like Browning’s Childe, we arrive at the tower and discover that it is the end, rather than the beginning? What then? Browning, Cullen, and certainly A’lelia Walker exemplar, all declared that it is the journey that matters- and the dream.

So here we are slipping through time. The year is two thousand and nine. The place is compactspace. The artists are twenty-seven MFA candidates at UCSD who welcomed me into their studios for conversation and shared this slice of their journey with me, one of the more recent additions to the faculty. This salon extends our conversations into the present moment so that we may look through this ephemeral window, lit just long enough for those seeking the tower to join us.

–Cauleen Smith

works on paper by Scott R Horsley

storespace: Through a Glass Darkly by Owen Mundy

October-December 2008

curated by Glenna Jennings

Owen Mundy’s through A Glass Darkly in our storespace

Scott Horsley: YOUR LAND or something like it

by Glenna Jennings

I want to show you something!

But first, here is a helmet to protect you from dangerously high-heeled shoes, impotently toxic candy wrappers, swim fins, plastic bags, jelly fish, the occasional omnipotent octopus and other consumer fall-out.

As we venture forth, watch out for those men in a graphic/graphite circle jerk of post-industrial proportion (rocking out with their cocks out) and try not to fall victim to flying engine parts cast from auto-combusted Hummers. Oh, and you’ll need this Hazmat suit (the fear-based fashion of hazardous-materials-evasion looks good on everyone, hiding

most physical signs of gluttony and/or filling out flat asses!)

As we move along, please don’t be afraid to sit down and check your email on one of those MacBooks — free wireless issues from your body at cellular level here, and this is gonna be a long ride, so you’ll want an empty inbox to fill with all the fantastical floating signifier-souvineers Scott Horsley’s landscape-void so generously offers up.

Dorothy, if we’re not in Kansas anymore, then where are we?

TS Elliot’s Hollow Men issued the post liberal-humanist whimper with which he ended the world. But this is not that world. Scott’s world exists in Perfect Preterite, it has ended, and it accomplished this apocalypse with a bang, then a burst, and 300 more booms that culminate in an orgasmic explosion whose ejaculate has spawned a parallel universe on paper, pain-stakingly rendered with pencil for a contemplation and enjoyment that prompts frequent choruses of “that’s so cool!”

But there is far more at stake here than hipster-cool works on paper. Scott Horsley’s art touches on crisis of many colors: environmental, economic, ecological, linguistic, scientific, gendered, and, of course, the father figure of Art World Angst himself: the Crisis of Representation.

Are you still with me? (this part of the tour is free!)

Scott Horsley’s current show at compactspace Gallery provides the shuttle for our journey, and, conveniently, we are greeted by two galle

ry sitters who characteristically ignore us as we pass by, engaged as they are in their own reproductive contemplations of re-presentation. One uni-sexed, Hazmat-suited figure peers steadily through a tethered video camera while its adjacent twin punches away at a lap-top, attacking the delicate keys with oversized protective hand-gear.

These twinned drawings are carefully nailed to the wall with roughly 3 feet of negative space separating their respective endeavors. But our discerning gazes discover the umbilical — the technologies the twin figures cradle from the comfort of fold-out chairs are working in tandem, with Scott’s conjuring paper picking up where the empiricizing wall has left off. Floating in the jetsam of their gray and white world (plastic bags, rolls of duck tape, a de-magicized carpet), this pair partakes in one of the games rampant throughout Scott’s world: looking at stuff that we can’t see.

It is, after all, what is made invisible in these figurative drawings that creates the space in which we viewers are traveling. This is the landscape that late capitalism has so generously rendered for us; which is to say, there is no landscape at all (so no reservations are necessary).In another of Horsley’s large-scale tandem drawings, a headless figure in street-clothes (remarkably akin to those in which you might see the artist clad on any given day) examines a de-peopled boat through a suspiciously analog pair of binoculars. Is this vessel (also accompanied by its jetsam) abandoned, capsized or afloat? Is the de-capitated spectator a marooned victim or an undercover investigator? Is the line of suited figures in the upper right corner descending to claim territory or fleeing a toxic catastrophe? We will not gain any clues from the absent geography, but as free-born readers we can certainly map-up the space if we so desire.As we traverse this duo-dimension of milky white we can project any number of plots and escapades and desires onto Scott’s seemingly willing paper — but we will, of course, run the risk of anyone whodecides to colonize the invisible through such fancy flights of projection and self-indulgence.

Scott is aware of the connotative powers of his work and passionate about the issues it evokes. But he remains something of a mystery when it comes to its genesis. He does not promote an agenda by peppering the work with cleverly wrought theoretical quips or political statements — after all, one has little control over the effects of Nuclear Fall Out.

I lied earlier. This is not a long ride. In fact, our  fancy flight of projection is almost over. As another Eliot reference tickles my ear, I share it with you (while you take off your Hazmat and show your nakedness to an awed and snickerless crowd and prepare for your return to a world void of the walking headless):

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death’s twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

But Scott’s men (if that they are) are not so much hollow as constructs of some bio-engineered DNA he picked up from a lost Phd student during an all-nig

hter in his earlier RISDI years.This is not the Wasteland, the post-primordial pit,the Jonestown afterlife, the Disney Holocaust, the peopled Tabula Rasa, the Ground Zero where Melancholic Nostalgia meets War-Time Angst and/or self-congratulation. This is not a Kansas, a Vietnam, an Abu Graib, a Chernobyl, a Main Street, Wall Street, Juarez or any other site specific place of timely loss and tragedy. THIS land is your land, THIS land is my land, from the graphite Target bag shell of an impulse purchase to the blank white stretches of expensive paper that have implicated us in a dance of creation and negation since first we first laid eyes on Scott’s oeuvre.

THIS land was made for you and me.