| Upon entering the Bryce Wolkowitz gallery in Chelsea, New York, one often feels an uncanny sensation of skating the rims of a futuristic otherworldiness: a cryptic hollowed-out future void of human meaning, oddly detached yet doomed in its aura of absence of human-motivated intentionality. The pieces in Wolkowitz’s exhibitions often seem to coalesce into a pulsating environment: the lit pieces seem to be breathing, and there is usually one piece or another with a large screen that has cryptically evolving images whose transformation are barely discernible, lodging a hint of a suppressed Sphinx-like moral indictment, or harbinger perhaps, of the state of our lives or our society, in some remote recess of one’s consciousness. |  |
The Wolkowitz Aesthetic: Pulsating Futures – Andrea Liu
Upon entering the Bryce Wolkowitz gallery in Chelsea, New York, one often feels an uncanny sensation of skating the rims of a futuristic otherworldiness: a cryptic hollowed-out future void of human meaning, oddly detached yet doomed in its aura of absence of human-motivated intentionality. The pieces in Wolkowitz’s exhibitions often seem to coalesce into a pulsating environment: the lit pieces seem to be breathing, and there is usually one piece or another with a large screen that has cryptically evolving images whose transformation are barely discernible, lodging a hint of a suppressed Sphinx-like moral indictment, or harbinger perhaps, of the state of our lives or our society, in some remote recess of one’s consciousness.
Ben Rubin’s exhibition “A Ticking Sound” quintessentially embodies these exact aspects of Wolkowitz’s beguiling aesthetic. Consisting of five pieces, with LED displays, florescent displays and dot matrix panels, like so many Wolkowitz artists, or disciples, that came before, Rubin rests upon a foundation of New Media (digitization, computer programming, LED displays) as the spool around which to re-spin emotionally evocative commentary on the changing nature of communication, representation, and human identity.
The Quiet Ticking of Dreams consists of 12 LED electronic displays, 2 by 5 inch cubic module displays matter-of-factly jutting out of the wall in impeccably spaced rows, with an incessant flow of digitized excerpts of a thousand online dream journals. Perhaps most comparable to 12 mini ATM screens or grocery store cash register monitors, they invoke the visual lexicon of the everyday, the irrepressible ubiquity of digitized miniaturized information, ruthlessly spouting fragmented shards of information about our life. Here though they are recontextualized as windows into people’s diaries, as letter by letter banal sentences of one’s life are spelled out in the monitors against the backdrop of a ceaseless ticking sound, with an inexorably bureaucratic quality. Journals are an internal space of privacy, a textual metonym for “personhood” and “inner life,” in some cases, even a personal technology of maintaining our notions of our selves and the stories we tell ourselves to maintain the necessary illusion of a unitary self progressing toward some teleology. Here instead the contents of the journal are broken up into hard, disinterested, even clinical hissing mini-monitors that enigmatically level all journal entries into standardized identical units of information without beginning middle or end, eluding to the fascist insertion of digitized cognition into socialization and personal identity formation processes.
Ulysses/6 uses dot matrix characters set behind acrylic diffusion panels to display, in order, all the six letter words in James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s rare that contemporary art ventures into the realm of Joyce’s Ulysses for its references, and one must give credit to the sheer ambition of Rubin. Ulysses is the nexus for a dense and unwieldy horde of competing literary philosophies, ideologies and conflicting institutions of interpretations.
Within the context of the Western literary tradition, Ulysses marks the threshold of entry into modernism and modernist literary conventions: the fragmentation of a unitary subject or internal univocality, the problematization of mimesis and representation as literary techniques, the exposure of the tension between the signified object and the process of signification itself, and the failure of symbolization and the void of unrepresentability. Put simply, literature before Ulysses was premised on a naïve and uninterrogated acceptance of the mechanics of representation and the assumed transparency of narrative elements: plot, character, resolution, etc. Ulysses revolutionized Western literature in a comparable vein as conceptual art, pop art, abstract art did to visual art: it exploded the conventions of what a text could do, how it could communicate, and what its fundamental purpose was.
Given this, Rubin’s selection of all six letter words in Ulysses to light his module cannot help but situate itself within a nexus of weighty ramifications. With such a barren featureless physical structure, the most fecund content of this piece is the choice of six letter words of Ulysses. It’s as if all the multiplicity and multivocality, the emphasis on the ephemeral, the de-throning of the monolithic and the monumental, that the Jocyean revolution accomplished, is now ironically being funneled into this digital apparatus, this hyper-efficient advertising and commercial mode of communication. It seems almost apocalyptic, or a cultural passing of the batons, as the threshold of one revolution in mode of communication as represented by Joyce and the modernist literary revolution is been supplanted by that of another revolution: the digital, the binary code, the algorithm, the computerized. This piece has the same luminescent peering quality of The Quiet Ticking of Dreams, and curiously creates the sensation that the piece that is looking out onto us, even voyeuristically.
For Sandstorm, a piece of a dozen vertically stacked LED tubes, Rubin scanned a photograph of the orange hue of the desert region during a sandstorm, taken during US reconnaissance missions in the early days of the Iraq and transferred it to the digital files across the tubes. This piece is the most eerily foreboding and has a pulsating quality: seemingly bright and warm-colored, until one learns that the source of the colors is the scene-setting for death, bombings, ravages, imperialism and colonization. Though the latter is not represented in the piece, the choice of the Iraq War as the source of images lends the piece an unsettling undertone. As the various shades of orange, orange-yellow, red-orange, goldenrod, yellow, lemon and white fluctuate in an undulating manner across the surface of the separate 12 tubes, it elicits the textural effect of shades being pulled. The first Gulf War, a hyper-mediated, artificially constructed, videogame-like national hallucination, whereby veteran Vietnam war generals kept the media out for fear of them turning the public opinion against the war, comes back to haunt us in Sandstorm. That is to say, the great void left in our psyche by the war’s absurdly digitized sanitized false representation in real history seems to create a residue, a ghost here that shimmers in the light of LED tubes. The contrast between the soothing, somnolent luscious comfort of the fluxing orange hues and the grim aggressive invasive reality of the ground war that is its source re-interrogate the mechanics of the disconnect between the institutionalized projected representation vs. the reality of the Gulf War.
Finally, Something is Boiling, a wall of 9 vertically columned LED tubes displays the statement “something is boiling” superimposed on top of an image of Andy Warhol’s soup can rotating on an axis. As these 9 vertical columns of LED tubes are about 4 inches apart, there is not a continuous solid image, but the effect of a blurry apparition, or blotches, on a continuous conveyor belt. From a distance, the red, white and light blue wash into a sort of ghastly purplishness. At first one may feel suspicious of a certain sophomoric or fatuous name-dropping—first Ulysses, now Andy Warhol’s soup cans—why so many obvious icons inserted into the core of the works without any organic raison-d’etre located in the pieces themselves? However, a through line can be drawn here with Ulysses/6, in that both Warhol’s soup can’s and Joyce’s Ulysses were assaults on ossified accepted modes of representation that radically refigured the content and the method of how art functions in the 20th century.
Bryce Wolkowitz gallery, opened in 2003 and consistently erecting exhibitions bereft of fluff, is sometimes a lone beacon of inspiration in an oasis of hypercommodity-pedaling Chelsea galleries. Its exhibitions are consistently rooted in substantive attempts to contextualize their art within a larger, contemporarily relevant sociocultural discourse free of chicanery, narcissism, glib intellectual opportunism and over-ornamentalized artspeak that riddles not a minority of galleries in that same neighborhood.
