Where The Art Isn't

Negative objects in a studio that's not a studio — and a computer that says "no."

By Robin Rice

Jeanne Silverthorne

Gary Hill: Withershins

Institute of Contemporary Art, 36th and Sansom, through April 14, 898-7108.

At least since the Middle Ages, artists have enjoyed representing their studios, and (sometimes) representing themselves in the studio, engaged with humble industry or heavy-handed allegory in the act of making art. Artists may take the studio as a subject because it is there — not, like Mount Everest, a looming challenge — but simply handy.

On the other hand, in studio representations there is likely to be an element of vanity, of advertising oneself — like Courbet surrounded by philosophical trappings, friends and admirers or Vigee-Lebrun smiling modestly as she balances her palette like a tray of sweets (baked by somebody else, of course).

To the artist, especially in today's self-referential art climate, the studio does tend to become a microcosm of life itself. Jeanne Silverthorne, enjoying her first solo show ever at the I.C.A., says in a catalogue interview with Jo Anna Isaak that her own involvement with the studio is "about the impossibility of making traditional work at the end of the 20th century, when it's been so compromised and used up. The question is, how can you be in a studio and continue?"

At this point, one might well imagine that Silverthorne is announcing her retirement from the art field to enter one which is less compromised, but just the opposite is the case. She goes on: "One of the things you can do is look around the studio and start mapping that site as if it were something out of the past — as if it were an archaeological site."

My initial response to Silverthorne's decision to document the "used up"-ness of art was the kind of impatient irritation one feels with a friend who can't give up a bad relationship but constantly complains about it. Why doesn't she stop tormenting us with her cast rubber visions of 19th-century decoration in bondage to 20-century electrical wiring?

But then I thought of Hannah Wilke. She performed nude and documented her body as a sculptural object. She was attractive, and there was clearly an element of vanity in it. But when she contracted breast cancer, she couldn't switch to photographing nice bouquets of flowers just because her body was no longer beautiful — that would invalidate her vision. Wilke kept documenting herself. It was self-indulgent in the manner of Anas Nin, but also courageous. Wilke, like everyone, was stuck with one body, and she lovingly recorded its progressive mutilation and corruption until she died.

Perhaps Jeanne Silverthorne is in a parallel situation. She's an artist and she's stuck with the studio. What we see at the ICA are relics inspired by a studio she once occupied in a rundown 19th-century building, the kind you might see on a back street in Chelsea. The most eye-catching element of the installation is an enormous cast rubber chandelier, which is hung below eye-level in the middle of a gallery. Remembering that the huge tentacled garlanded thing is as hollow as a beach ball is difficult. It's physically imposing and intriguing close up.

Silverthorne has called the chandelier a "severed head" and a symbol of the enlightenment. Both these analogies were a bit far-fetched for me, but the idea of empty decorative form worked. Electric cords, not cast but real, slither through the installation like intestines or ganglia, reinforcing the sense of the studio as a metaphor for the body. Unlike the chandelier and framed or other formally displayed works, these cords become part of the environment — tangential, temporary, less and more "real." One steps over them.

The electrical stuff is related to the studio she once occupied, but the most obvious souvenirs are works made in the semblance — vastly enlarged — of drips of rubber accidentally accumulated during the casting process. The artist has carefully modeled these drips in clay and then cast them, elevating waste material to the status of art. Like the electric cords, they are negative objects — specific places where "art" isn't (and through their negativity, possibly a commentary on the casting process itself). Eccentric in shape, they stand in romantic contrast to the severe yet awkward electrical apparatus and the decorative symmetry of cast frames and chandeliers.

The most visually appealing works in the show are a series of skin "paintings," enlarged sections of latex "skin" which illustrate various pathologies. Displayed so that flayed edges flap outside the frame, the skin comes in resinous, slightly translucent shades of orange-brown like old varnish or tortoise shell.

Reminiscent of 19th-century scientific displays, these "paintings" are also an unsettling reminder of the human skin lampshades prized by Nazi camp guards. They are framed in baroque flourishes of black cast rubber and hung from thick rubber-coated nails, on rubber straps which stretch and must be adjusted as the exhibition progresses.

This adjustment process is but one manifestation of the character of Silverthorne's use of rubber and latex. Though initially resilient they are not enduring materials. They will crack and decay. Within decades, I should think, the artist's work will be decidedly altered. It will age as the body does, extending Silverthorne's metaphor into time.

Also at the I.C.A., Gary Hill is showing an installation which won the Golden Lion sculpture prize at the Venice Biennale, but which on some levels seems like a big toy. It's a room-size diagrammatic maze with entry points at opposing ends. Two big screens project images of the back of someone's head and a pair of age-spotted hands gesturing in sign language.

When people enter the maze (a shallow metal pattern on the carpet), male and/or female voices make statements in sequences triggered by footsteps on the pathways. All is controlled by a responsive computer program. The title Withershins is a Scottish spelling of widdershins (a word meaning counterclockwise, or in a direction contrary to the direction of the sun). This is considered an unlucky way to go around the outside of a church, but is the right way for those treading Hill's maze. Hill's is a structuralist world defined by negatives rather than positives.

Although the initial experience of sight and sound is fun, that's the peak. The computer works in binary sequences. One eventually realizes that messages from the computer are all "no"s. "Yes" is merely a continuation of the status quo. Communication ceases when one breaks the rules by pausing too long or by stepping over a barrier.

There is no reward for success, only punishment for transgressions (the punishment of Job: silence), though one can learn to trick the computer in minor ways. Is this an allegory of life, perhaps on Buddhistic terms: sensation leading to motivated behavior? Or is it a discussion of language la Charles S. Peirce? A key (structuralist) facet of the work is that the content of the communications (spoken language and hand signs) is void in terms of its connection to human behavior. The only meaning lies in the existence of language. Perhaps accurate, but not a very comfortable picture of the world.