Jennifer Steinkamp: Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
Hudson, Suzanne
In language so pithy as to be axiomatic, Ed Ruscha suggested in a
1979 drawing that HOLLYWOOD IS A VERB. Something similar is communicated
by Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer Steinkamp, a onetime commercial
animator (of ads for candy and cockroach spray, among other things),
whose works in digital video employ special effects to excess. Utilizing
abstract geometries that rival those of M. C. Escher, as well as
representational elements like waves, trees, and garlands of flowers,
which she stylizes to the point of uncanny hyperreality, Steinkamp
through her immersive environments dematerializes galleries'
architecture into undulating fields of color. This spectacular use of
technology has meant that Steinkamp's work tends to get framed in
relation to her presumed genuflection to the entertainment industry and
read through the suspect terms of beauty. Indeed, the two words that
appear most often in the literature on the artist (regularly in anxious
proximity) are ravishing and vapid.
But Steinkamp's new projects, a selection of which were on
view recently at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, seem to propose that surface is
the point, and that a focus on it needn't represent a throwback.
(Critics have also compared her unfavorably to California Finish Fetish
precursors, a connection that nonetheless gets at what is worth
attending to in her work. This position is opposed to, say, the view
aired by Doug Harvey that she is a producer of "digital updatings
of Haight-Ashbury lightshow aesthetics," and to Peter Frank's
assertion that she manufactures high-tech "lava lamp[s].")
Gliding across the walls, The Wreck of the Dumaru F, 2004, a
computer-animated digital projection, is downright disorienting,
surrounding viewers on all sides and reaching from floor to ceiling.
Representing an ocean of sickly red-yellow--the colors are swirled
together, taffy-style--the water writhes, rises, swells, and crashes
below a virtual sky (actually the sea as it might appear from a
different vantage point) of equally impossible crystal blue. Yet its
awesome superficiality also admits of a kind of "depth,"
displaced onto a brief vinyl wall text. From this we learn the missing
narrative, which transpired during World War I: At the age of nineteen,
Steinkamp's great-uncle was on a ship that was struck near Guam;
after thirteen days on a lifeboat that lacked sufficient provisions he
suffered hallucinations and then died.
Foiling the baroque landscape and involved back story of The Wreck
of the Dumaru F, a new series, "Formation," 2006-, which
features six projections of falling sheets, filled the rear gallery.
Despite making use of all available vertical space (as does The Wreck of
the Dumaru F), the work achieves a cool restraint. At Lehmann Maupin,
each projection occupied a floor-to-ceiling area of wall, within the
boundaries of which linens crumpled and tumbled down, in perfect, if
illusory, response to gravity. They glide over the interior's
surfaces but also, falsely, imply its irregularity (the sheets sometimes
look as though they're being snagged on uneven planes or blown by
an unseen wind). They have different patterns--stripes in Formation 1,
circles in Formation F, circles and stripes in Formation B--but they are
all, though I hate to say it, ravishing. (So much so, actually, that one
woman in the gallery contended that Steinkamp should merchandise the
designs to home decor retailers.) Steinkamp has given us the perfect
take on the mythic "dream factory," all gloss and no depth,
with decoration unapologetically unmoored from narrative. Her
projections are not so much whizzbang as languidly hypnotic, and the
effect of viewing them--appropriately enough, given their
"subject"--is not unlike that of counting sheep. In the end,
the installation works, and it does so irrespective of its
technowizardry, finally exercised unabashedly, and, one surmises, for
its own sake.
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