The Solace of the Rabbit Hole
By Zhanna Veyts
Remember the first time you imagined Alice falling down, down, down the rabbit hole? The sense of transient transit, blurred vision, decelerated pandemonium. In our own world, the subway tunnel provides a similarly inescapable vacuum of slowed chaos; a space of constant transition, of calculated routine. Where Alice began her grand adventure, we feel aggravated by waiting; we urbanites scurry around in these tunnels like frenzied rodents. The metro is the place of passing, of beginning or ending a journey. It produces a forced recognition of being underground and suspended in time. Artist Marusela Granell, however, sees the passage as opportunity, and with her conceptual video work, Seeing the Sea, hopes to transform the turbulent public space into a gallery for tranquil contemplation.
Granell emerges into the conceptual genre from a background of collage. Her project is deeply rooted in the ever-shifting ideas of recombination. By the time the World Cup comes to Valencia, Spain, Granell will have placed video monitors into the busiest subways, train stations and airport in the city. These screens will telecast the view of the city’s ocean coast, recorded in real-time.
The show creates a dialectic of spaces, changing the viewer’s notion of presence and the specific experience of transit. This is directly in line with the artist’s intention of installation: "I think that artists must intervene in public life, with their means, with their language…I want to propose the artist in the city, the city that is antagonistic with its noise. I want to participate in the worries of the city, the business of its streets and institutions, the problems of its people. This is where the artist has the business of creating a space of tranquility and relaxation."
The inhabitants of Valencia, a city situated on the Mediterranean, have hardly incorporated the sea into their longest traditions and customs, to say nothing of their daily routines. The culture is situated around the elements of fire and land. Traditional fire ceremonies are centered on saints and on the fertility of the cultivated land. The orchard of Valencia cannot bear fruit near the salty water and since the sea is burdensome to the agriculture, the community discounts it. The ubiquity and omnipresence of the water makes it easy to overlook and disregard in daily life. Granell is working against this current, hoping to bring the water to the people, to the center of their city life and its routine.
In the rabbit hole of the Metropolis, Granell confronts the passerby with the views the traveler normally ignores, the sounds the commuter is too busy to hear. Seeing the Sea is aimed at registering the absence of the water in the underground habitat and takes advantage of the submerged space of impatient waiting to reinstate the natural rhythms of the waves, tides, and changing natural light. The water’s motion and tempo are visually and aurally translated into a collage of the urban and natural in the project. Granell considers the sensual interference elemental to the success of the work: "The art should communicate another way of seeing the world, another way of understanding life…The sea is life, future, water is a hypnotic movement." Through the ongoing telecast, the commuter experiences a different sea every day, thus altering his routine passage into a channel of poetry. The cacophony of the trains is laced with the sound of the water, the dynamism of the station is slowed by the undulation of the waves.
Granell revels in the hypnotic repetition of what she sees on her screens during her own commute. The magnetic collage of the scenery performs a superimposition of forms and ideas, and here she executes a positivist spatial and temporal overlay. Granell intends to teach the viewer that that knowledge that can only be acquired through direct observation and experimentation: "The ultimate [art] piece is the one that suggests a piece of life."
Marusela Granell will present the first instantiation of Seeing the Sea at the Broadway Gallery, from October first to the fifteenth.
