Two monks are walking down a beautiful garden path next to an ancient stone wall. One monk pulls a spray can with a Molotow Skinny cap from the folds of his robe and proceeds to bomb the wall until he's totally killed it. The second monk exclaims with pleasure, "Your writing burns!" But then he asks, "Is it right to destroy this ancient wall?" The first monk returns the can to his robe and responds, "What wall?"
OK, so the above text may or may not be a
real
koan, and it may or may not offer precise insight into Keep Adding's installation,
Wrekage
, but it's close. On view at the Center for Contemporary Arts (1050 Old Pecos Trail,
982-1338) through Nov. 18,
Wrekage
is a precarious balance of physical and conceptual space, digital and analog sensibilities, and overt theatricality and subtle spiritual potential. "Precarious" is the word, not because the exhibition is on the verge of failing (well, not any more than it should be), but because balance is a crucial element. CCA has given its gallery space over to more manipulation than at any time in recent history, allowing Keep Adding and exhibition curator Craig Anderson to
create two proportional and fluid spaces: the first housing two mylar-over-light-box constructions and a video projection; and the second hosting an ambitious, brooding sculptural hulk that is the core of the installation.
Following the lead of a site-specific work from 2001,
Wrekage (Old Mesilla)
, in which Keep Adding used the graffiti spray-can techniques of a youth spent avoiding art classes to layer their own brand of organic abstraction onto the burned-out shell of an old adobe, this construction mimics an adobe ruin. A curious and deliberate layout allows viewers to approach and even touch some sections of wall, but demands that others be inspected only by craning the neck or crouching down to peer through window openings or around half-destroyed corners. The walls, again, are painted entirely with furious calculation. Reds, yellows and blues twist and curl in striated bands across the plastered surfaces, positively seismic and undulatory. The lines might describe cellular fibers or some kind of exploding geography of structure, an instinctual hit-and-run urban shale, a bedrock of theoretical math. It is as though the walls descend into the ground and the imagery that coats them is something clawing its way up roots and mineral deposits with the need to be free-an effect deepened considerably by the entire structure sitting inside a shallow reflecting pool. Dim and designed lighting augments the paint work and its reflection as well as the charred decay of the structure. It also augments how staged and fake the building is. An accompanying essay by Mary Anne Redding gives a nod to Peter Greenaway's baroque set aesthetic as well as homage to the ghosts that haunt ruins, but for me the sense of façade has more tangible, if less concrete, meaning. The emphasis on surface not only backs the viewer into an immediate metaphor of considering the depth of things, but it does so by contrasting the sense of surface in the canon of fine art painting vs. that of street painting. The next step-magnified by the ruined building-is the consideration of ephemeral value against long-term fetishization of the object.
Finally, the installation's digitally constructed works lead to a place where permanent archiving and inevitable change coexist in the kind of logical contradiction that just might encourage sudden enlightenment. The point, Grasshopper, is that the show, experienced amid the echoing sound design of Richard Devine, is fairly bitchin'.
Devine, by the way, laid out his own work, accompanied by VJ Scott Pagano, as an opener to alva noto, aka Carsten Nicolai, at the Lensic on Thursday, Sept. 6. Holy young people at the Lensic, Batman. I'd been starting to think the Lensic shot invisible darts into anyone under 30 trying to approach the building, but Devine and noto brought them out in droves. Devine's work is meant to challenge, and it does-demanding the listener bend around and hear from a different place. For the first half of his set, Devine scratched me inside my brain-you know, that spot right between the thalamus and the hippocampus? The video was repetitive, alarming and mesmerizing, like a cross between
The Blair Witch Project
and
Fantastic Voyage
(the 1966 film summarized by the Internet movie database thusly: "A diplomat is nearly assassinated. In order to save him, a submarine is shrunken to microscopic size and injected into his bloodstream with a small crew. Problems arise almost as soon as they enter the bloodstream."). But the set was long. Better to leave people wanting more than give them too much.
Alva noto, on the other hand, was downright therapeutic. Years ago, I tried some therapy that involved an overpaid guy putting on an Enya album and telling me to close my eyes and think about my problems. This never worked because, at the moment, my biggest problem was always Enya. If only I'd paid noto, I might understand all my issues with my father. His sound and visual performance,
Xerrox
, with black-and-white blips blinking in and out of existence on a huge screen, made me feel like Captain Kirk. Spread out before me was the universe and all its possibilities for the future of humanity and, along the way, some hot space booty. Noto's meditative magnification of light, sound, duplication and degradation really did put me in a koan frame of mind for Keep Adding's installation, but it didn't quite lead me to enlightenment. I tried to get curator Craig Anderson's take on how some fake walls and spray paint could have such a resonance by asking him about the yearlong process of organizing
Wrekage
. He said a lot, but summed up by saying, "Dude, it was cool." I was still struggling. "Craig," I asked, "How was it cool?"
"Exactly," he said.
