Julian LaVerdiere's imperial designs: with his first museum shows and a suite of new works recently unveiled in Chelsea, Julian LaVerdiere has taken on themes of global power using a signature blend of the retro, the high tech and the frankly spectacular - Biography

Art in America, June, 2003 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

When Adenoid Hynkel, Charlie Chaplin's parodic Fuhrer, frolics with a buoyant globe in The Great Dictator (1940), when General Buck Turgidson advocates preemptive nuclear annihilation beneath blinking lights tracking the progress of B-52s to their Russian targets in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964), we readily grasp the essential relationship between cartographic representation and the exercise of power. For notwithstanding the routine association of power with primal drives like lust and hunger, it may be that the urge to absolute supremacy requires a complementary detachment, which is, in turn, well served by the abstractions of charts, diagrams, symbols and maps.

The political interests at work in the ostensibly disinterested science of cartography and, more broadly, the encoding of Western imperial ambitions in an enduring iconic repertoire were the themes of "Time Trial," the first museum exhibition of Julian LaVerdiere. Installed in a darkened pavilion of North Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art, the 12 spotlit or, in some instances, serfilluminated works covered the years 2000 to 2002. Still a relative newcomer, LaVerdiere had his first solo gallery show in 1999, at Andrew Kreps in New York; he garnered extraordinary public attention two years later as one of the team of designers of Tribute in Light at the World Trade Center site [see "Front Page" and cover, Nov. '01]. His participation in group exhibitions began precociously, in 1992, while LaVerdiere was still a BFA student at New York's Cooper Union. An MFA from Yale followed in 1995.

The trim exhibition at MOCA confirmed, as the 1999 debut had indicated, LaVerdiere's gift for scenographic presentation, his facility with extra-studio materials, his delight in historical arcana, his passion for antiquated technologies, and his fascination with reliquaries and memorials. The museum show also evidenced his preoccupation with political power, whose workings he invokes in impressive arrays of imagery and information, but whose deeper implications for political art this student of Hans Haacke's may not yet have mastered.

Two monumental efforts anchored the North Miami exhibition, their significance elaborated in an audio track, a pair of smaller tripartite sculptures and eight sepia-toned Diazo prints. "Elaborated" is the operative word here: LaVerdiere's complex work, for all its visual drama, requires substantial exposition. The showstopper was FIRMAMENT: Upon Which Time Has No Mark by Definition (2002), a world map printed on Textalene, a vinyl-covered polyester netting, which has been stretched trampolinelike across a 20-foot-diameter aluminum frame and woven through with two sets of electroluminescent cable.

Originating in the North Pole at the map's center and extending through the familiar contours of the continents are 24 glowing blue lines which correspond to the straight lines of longitude that would demarcate uniformly measured time zones. A second, red system of 24 irregularly angled lines, also projecting from the Arctic pole, is rhythmically illuminated in sequential pairs, like the hands of an analogue clock. These red lines delimit actual time zones, any uniform and ruler-edge ideal having been bent to the will of sovereign nations such as China, much of whose land-spanning breadth occupies a single XXXL time zone, and to the practicality of looping line-straddling islands like New Zealand into a single zone. Canted from the wall and extending from floor to ceiling, the pulsing disk looms overhead, intimidating even as it offers the privileged sensation of a polar vantage point.

The diameter of FIRMAMENT equals that of the seal which hangs in the General Assembly hall of the United Nations, and its schematic map--the world bisected vertically by the prime meridian, with the Americas to the left and the continents of the eastern hemisphere to the right--reproduces the projection adopted as the organization's emblem in 1946. As the artist recounted in a wall text titled "The Revolving Semiotics of Peace Keeping Power: A Brief Analysis of the United Nations Emblem," the seal is a pointed revision of the U.N.'s first, provisional emblem, which was designed by American intelligence interests and had oriented the map to favor an upright U.S. capped by a tiny Canada, upending Europe and Asia while scooting the remaining unlucky continents to the periphery. The variant U.N. insignias are the subject of The Emblem Controversy (2001), one of four Diazo prints in the show that reproduce world maps.

FIRMAMENT's chronometerlike tracking was accompanied by Time Trial (2002), a one-minute audio loop engineered by Paul D. Miller, the musician and writer known as DJ Spooky. (His Web site, www.djspooky.com, and a CD of the work distributed at the museum, call the LaVerdiere-Miller collaboration Standard Time.) The audio, which hijacks your cardiac tempo as only ominous electronica amped up in the dark can do, mixes recordings of two timepieces of erstwhile global authority. The first is the H4, one of Sir John Harrison's maritime clocks (housed today in London's Royal Observatory), whose reliability helped establish longitudinal reckoning as an alternative to star-based navigation in the second haft of the 18th century, paving the way for world time zones and facilitating Britain's administration of its far-flung colonies. The second is the NIST 7, one of the cesium atomic clocks (no tick-tock here, but frequency and humming) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder. As audio adjuncts to FIRMAMENT, one signals the first age of modern imperialism, specifically the British Empire, while the other corresponds to the post-World War II advent of the U.S. as a world power, which coincided with the nuclear age and the birth of the U.N.