Ruins in Reverse: Time and Progress in Contemporary Art - Review

Afterimage, May-June, 1999 by Reine Hauser

edited by Grant Kester Buffalo, New York: CEPA Gallery, 1999 40 pp./$10.00 (sb)

In the exhibition "Ruins in Reverse: Time and Progress in Contemporary Art Parts I & II" individual and collective notions of time are played out in unique and challenging ways. The extensive two-part exhibition structure allowed CEPA and its curators to explore in depth this particular concept. "Ruins in Reverse" also took full advantage of CEPA's new quarters in an historic arcade, occupying the main gallery space on the second floor, a passageway gallery space, display windows both inside and outside the building, basement level gallery spaces and also extending beyond the physical confines of the building onto city buses, on a website (http://cepa.buffanet.net) and in a special issue of CEPA Journal that serves as a catalog.

"Ruins in Reverse" looked at art on the eve of the Millennium, focusing on time and its passage. The exhibition was a meditation on the paradox of time, by its nature both elastic and rigid. Some of the work looked at the way time compresses or expands experientially. Other work questioned photographic documentation, involving a Barthean approach to both its possibilities and futility. All of the work in "Ruins in Reverse" proved how malleable and yet inflexible time can be. There was a wide variety of concerns - the effect of time, environmental politics, personal journeys - and media - video, audio, found objects, traditional photographs. Yet a cohesiveness was clearly visible among the seemingly disparate approaches.

In Part I, Kim Abeles's "Smog Collectors" (1998) - artworks made from accumulated smog particles in the air - look as if they materialized by some form of black or perhaps gray magic. The images and texts are composed of particulate matter collected on an array of surfaces including fabric, Plexiglas and dinner plates covered with stencils of portraits of a selection of United States presidents from William McKinley to George Bush. Abeles set the materials on her Los Angeles rooftop for varying lengths of time. The longer the time frame, the darker the image became due to the collection of pollutants. The length of time each was exposed to the elements was determined by each presidential administration's response to environmental issues. This political work is contextually related to Christy Rupp's work on environmental destruction and similar in form to other works utilizing domestic objects and stenciling such as Carrie Mae Weems's series of dinner plates celebrating African American men, "Commemorating" (1991), although Abeles added a fresh slant in her use of this remarkable technique. Of particular local interest was what Abeles refers to as her "collaboration" with the late Patricia Bazelon. Abeles created "smog translations" of Bazelon's 1982 photographs of industrial elevators in Buffalo. In each of these two postcard-sized works, a copy of the original photograph was placed next to the Abeles version.

An exciting selection of new work entitled "The Trouble with Arcadia" (1998) by MANUAL (the Houston artist team of Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom) included large-scale idealized panoramic scenes of nature created digitally. In the four sections in this piece, MANUAL explored the subject of the pastoral, investing new vigor into this subject matter. Arcadia is traditionally considered to be the ideal of pastoral simplicity, one of the more enduring themes in art history. Some of the digitized photographs recalled the artificiality of the idyllic scene in the seventeenth-century French painting The Arcadian Shepherds (1627) by Nicolas Poussin. A videotape, Death by Landscape (1998), invested this subject with the idea of the loss of the original to create a technically imaginative (not to mention paradoxical) place. A photograph of a landscape is a representation of nature; a digitally re-worked photograph of a landscape is particularly "unnatural."

Carol Flax, an Arizona-based artist, created a site-specific series for seven windows in the Market Arcade mezzanine. For this work, the weakest in the first half of the exhibition, Flax combined photographic prints, text and objects to explore personal identity and history (primarily related to issues of adoption). The IRIS prints on unstretched canvas in "Crossing A Line" (1998) depict the human body with a combination of appropriated images, language and objects but not in a particularly engaging manner. The intellectual construct underlying this work was not well-developed, and the images she selected were visually uninspiring.

Patty Wallace's maquettes for placards designed for a "Metro Bus Show" (1998) (CEPA's ongoing series of commissioned works by artists placed on city buses and in bus stations throughout Buffalo) also combined images and text. A phrase by Walter Benjamin was among those incorporated: "The taking of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things: it is hard to explain the crowd movement other than by the animosity of the people against monuments that are their real masters." Wallace believes that architecture is the concrete manifestation of the ruling class or classes and as such it can serve as a target for those not in a position of power. Wallace's threatening, weighty images of buildings and monuments and the associated text will travel throughout the city in the next few months, adding to the social dimension of this work.