Anicka Yi.
Kuo, Michelle
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
SOMETHING SMELLED OFF IN THE GALLERY. Something ruined, or bad. The
distinctive, slightly sickening odor turned out to be emanating from a
plain cardboard box: Inside were stacks of clear plastic petri dishes,
each flush with its own living, burgeoning bloom. Anicka Yi was growing
bacteria, and the microbial cultures were spreading, metastasizing, like
an unholy contagion in crimson and black and pink.
Yi had cultivated the organisms from the swabbed samples of one
hundred women, mostly friends, or friends of friends. Working with
biologists and the firm Air Variable, the artist embarked on a process
of conversion: she chromatographically analyzed scent molecules from air
samples of the collected bacteria, as well as air samples taken at
Gagosian Gallery in New York during the run of an Urs Fischer
exhibition. The data from both sets were then translated into a formula
of synthetic compounds and produced as a chemical, recalling the way
commercial fragrances are composed and generated. A scent diffuser will
send the synthesized aroma wafting through the gallery for Yi's
solo show at the Kitchen in New York, opening on March 5; the bacteria
themselves will also be on view, remaining alive during the run of the
exhibition and likely finding an afterlife in subsequent projects. Shown
here for the first time, the germs can be seen both life-size and
microscopically, in photographs and video stills that capture two
different timescales--both the cells' imperceptible creep in agar
and their magnified movements up close.
Teeming and communing, the bacteria conjure a microcosm of the
larger social structures from which they are culled. But this isn't
some seamless sensus communis; the microbes' wayward undulations
are isolated biological events, evoking an unsettling scenario of
biopower broken down and reduced to Brownian motion, primordial soup,
dumb stuff. In much the same way, Yi's olfactory missives are
stubbornly physiological. For upcoming exhibitions at the MIT List
Visual Arts Center and at Kunsthalle Basel, Yi will give us a lake of
menthol aroma--her madeleine for a specific memory--and a burning book,
made of incense paper she crafted with the aid of a Parisian perfumer.
So, too, the artist's previous work teases our nerve endings with
the material admixtures of our time: Perspex and tripe, aldehydes and
silicon oxide, hair gel and nori.
Yi's amalgamations give the lie to so many present-day cliches
about our world as some infinitely wired, immaterial, immersive
surround. They remind us that such an omnipotent totality is itself a
man-made narrative; they force us to remember that the supposed
instantaneity and acceleration of our current moment is everywhere
snagged by waiting, faulty infrastructure, signal interruption. Against
the humanist and idealist myth of the seamless digital world--a myth
that is inevitably reduced to the visual--Yi's scents give us
something messier and more granular, something discontinuous. They do
not remain at the level of symbolic code, of programming language, but
revel in matter and hardware. They alter our chemistry.
--Michelle Kuo
"You Can Call Me F" is on view at the Kitchen, New York,
Mar. 5-Apr. 11; two solo exhibitions, each titled "Anicka Yi,"
will he on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, May
22-July 26, and at Kunsthalle Basel, June 12-Aug. 16.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
