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Promiscuity of Space: Some Thoughts on Jessica Stockholder's Scenographic Compositions Author(s): Miwon Kwon Source: Grey Room, No. 18 (Winter, 2004), pp. 52-63 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20442670 . Accessed: 30/08/2011 22:10
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Jessica Stockholder. Your Skin in this Weather Bourne Eye Threads & Swollen Perfume, 1995. Installation at Dia Center for the Arts. Paint, concrete, structolite, miscellaneous building material, carpet, lamps, electrical cord, purple plastic stacking crates, swim ming pool liner, welded steel, stuffed shirts pillows, paper mache, balls. 3,600 sq ft/ 18 ft ceiling. All photographs courtesy of Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York.

52

Promiscuity

of Space:

on Thoughts Some Stockholder's Jessica Compositions Scenographic

MIWON KWON

Jessica Stockholder's installations often appear messy and funky,

almost out of control. Drawn from the stuff of hardware stores, sec

ondhand furniture shops, garage sales, and basement storage rooms, her installations over the years have included ordinary things like
oranges and lemons (plastic and organic), skeins of yarn, fabric,

couches and chairs, carpets, refrigerator doors, mattresses, electric fans, lightbulbs, chests of drawers, cables, lamps, balloons, newspa pers, blankets, birdcages, plastic storagebins, packing tape, linoleum tiles, electrical wiring, wire mesh, ribbon, shower curtains, twine, tables, spools of thread, bathtubs, washing machines, stoves, PVC piping, roofing paper, Christmas trees, clothing, tennis balls, nets, stuffed animals, cardboard, Sheetrock, old suitcases, lumber,kitchen sinks, and so on. This seemingly indiscriminate accumulation of
"stuff stuck columns-that throughout together"1 is usually attached to, framed by, or support architecture of the

ingquasi-architectural constructions-platforms, ramps,walls, ledges,

in turn play this large-scale off of the existing assemblage is another

given exhibition space. Intersecting, overlaying, and juxtaposed

layer of aesthetic

information: bright patches or fields of paint (orange, aqua, yellow,

objects as the contours of the accumulated red) that tend to disobey walls or preexisting well as the shape and edges of the constructed and visual cues and floors. The sheer volume of disparate materials it as "things in Stockholder's work has led various critics to describe

"orchestratedhavoc," and a "cacophony thrown eccentrically together,"

of materials."2 But all tend to agree that her seemingly anarchic instal in the end, a rather miraculous formal resolution (as lations achieve, as aMatisse for one critic). That is, Stockholder's painting, pleasing and visual languages into a talent in transforming diverse materials

coherent compositional whole has been duly recognized.

on the specificity of the installa But to place central importance tions' constituent parts (for ametaphorical reading) or the finesse of materials with which the heterogeneity (for a the artist handles work. is tomiss a key aspect of Stockholder's technical appreciation)

Certainly the combining andmodifying of the stuff of everyday life, literally including the kitchen sink, links Stockholder's work closely to the precedents ofAllan Kaprow's and RobertRauschenberg's assem blage aesthetic.3 But in taking over entire rooms, hallways, and sequences of spaces as an arena within which, and in relation to which, to create assemblages in architectural proportions, Stockholder also figures as an inheritor of the prominent tendency toward spa tialization in postwar art. (Different versions of this spatial ambition can be traced in a variety of practices, from abstract expressionist and color field painting to "flatbed" combines, minimalism and process art, happenings, environments, installation art, and land art.) However, Stockholder's particularmode of constructing what I would call "scenographic counterarchitecture" within the austere "real" architecture of art andmuseum galleries is not well accounted for in relation to, and in contradistinction with, other artistic endeavors that have also pushed towardbroader spatial parameters or frames for the work's articulation. In confronting Stockholder's work, the inade quacies of various postwar arthistories become all too apparent in this regard. Which reminds me ... A parenthetical remark toward the end of Rosalind Krauss's influ ential essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (1979) has always troubledme. Every time I revisit the essay, Iget stuck at the same point, at leastmomentarily, wondering how one might think through the assumptions and implications of the bracketed idea. Each time I imag ine that this thinking through would be important and worthwhile in opening up new ways of under standing certain aspects of post-1960s artistic devel opments. But this rupture in reading is always brief
I proceed to the end of the essay In doing rather easily, bypass

ing the path of inquiry suggested by the seeminglys

casual parentheses. so, I take my cue from the >

textual treatment of the remark itself, presented as an

aside, almost a throwaway thought. I do not return to it. In fact, I forget it. That is, until the next time I come across it, and as ifmeeting a familiar bump in the road, I am reminded, The invitation there it is again, to write about the unanswered the work ques

tion,waiting for a thorough unpacking.

of Jessica

Stockholder prompted me to decide thatmaybe it is finally time to attend toKrauss's parenthetical remark
more and if not to directly or fully answer seriously it, then to reflect on it enough to get it off my back (for a while).4 For some readers, putting Stockholder's colorful, decorative, theatrical, large-scale assemblage

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installations, comprising amotley selection of familiar stuff from daily life, into proximity with the stringent, anti-aesthetic vocabu laryof some of the artists highlighted in "Sculpture in theExpanded Field" would seem an unproductive juxtaposition, a foolhardy art critical effort. But theway inwhich Stockholder's practice fails to fit intoKrauss's schema is of interest and significance.Why Stockholder's work should prompt me to rethink "sculpture in the expanded field" will become clearer, Ihope, as Iproceed. Krauss's essay lays out an impressive structuralist mapping of how themodernist category of sculpture-understood as autonomous, its centrality and nomadic, self-referential, and universal-loses grounding by the early 1970s. In the work of artists such as Carl Andre, Alice Aycock, Richard Long,Mary Miss, RobertMorris, and Robert Smithson, among others, Krauss sees sculpture's reconnec tion to its physical context, but not in order to return to the premodern as place-bound commemoration. logic of themonument-sculpture Krauss instead argues that sculpture can now be understood as sus pended between a set of oppositions, constituted as a double nega tivity: not landscape and not architecture. Sculpture iswhat is in the
room that is not the room; it is what is in the landscape that is not

Jessica Stockholder. Skin Your

& Threads SwollenPerfume,
in this Weather Bourne Eye

the landscape. Unfolding the relations of opposition and negativity

1995.

Kwon

Promiscuity of Space: Some Thoughts on Jessica Stockholder's Scenographic Compositions

55

further,Krauss diagrams other alternative positions that define the expanded field of sculpture afterminimalism: marked sites (land scape/not-landscape), site constructions (landscape/architecture), and axiomatic structures (architecture/not-architecture).After leading the reader through her precise logical operation, she remarks as an aside-and here is the parenthetical statement that has been my stumbling block: "The postmodernist space of painting would obvi ously involve a similar expansion around a different set of terms from the pair architecture/landscape-a set thatwould probably turn on the opposition uniqueness/reproducibility."5
On the face of it, the remark does not seem all that remarkable. To

Jessica Stockholder. Your Skin in this Weather Bourne Eye Threads & Swollen 1995. Perfume,

propose uniqueness and reproducibility as opposing terms tomap out painting's postmodern expansion seems reasonable enough. After all, techniques ofmechanical reproduction-particularly pho tography-are unavoidable in thinking about, for instance, Andy Warhol's repetitive and serialized silkscreen paintings orGerhard Richter's photo-realistic canvases and his citational paintings of various genres, including abstraction, still-life, portrait, and landscape. The complex tension between uniqueness (originality) and repro ducibility (copies) is indeed a central problem for twentieth-century painting. But as one thinks aboutKrauss's statement,more questions

<, . # 1 ~~~~~

. E
56 Gre Roo ~ 1

creep intomind. For example, is she suggesting that the opposition of uniqueness/reproducibility is not equally relevant to sculpture?6 Conversely, is the opposition of architecture/landscape not equally appropriate to painting, especially in the postwar period? "Sculpture in theExpanded Field" is an essay that argues against the modernist need tomaintain variousmediums of art as separate and pure. Krauss explicitly counters themodernist critics of the 1970s:
What appears as eclectic from one point of view can be seen as

rigorously logical from another. For,within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium-sculpture-but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, forwhich anymedium photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself might be used.7 Yet, does not Krauss's suggestion imply that a foundational,medium specific opposition of cultural terms exists throughwhich tomap a particularmedium's postmodern expansion-architecture and land scape for sculpture, uniqueness and reproducibility for painting? It might be commonsensical to situate sculpture in relation to spatial conditions defined by architecture and landscape, but is painting not also a spatial and spatializing practice? The purpose ofmy posing these questions is not to
undercut Krauss's claims or their impact but to hint

at the possibility of other art-historical narratives, or relations between mediums, thatmight be occluded by the seemingly irrefutable and thus powerfully seductive logic of her argument.For instance, I wonder, perhaps illogically, about the possible relationship between Krauss's expanded field of sculpture and the "field" of color field painting. Further, what are the stories to be told about the link between the hori zontal spatial drive evident in Jackson Pollock's allover drip paintings orBarnett Newman's wall-like, environment-making canvases and the spatial drive indicated in, for example, Dan Flavin's room-size color-light installations?8More generally, is there a convergence of New York School abstract painting andminimalist and postminimalist sculpture, specif
ically around the issue of space, despite their sup

posed ideological opposition?9

It has become a commonplace to locate the origin of installation happenings or minimalism-that in recent years art (the category is to postwar neo

under which we can place Stockholder's art) to either

Kwon

Promiscuity

of Space:

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on Jessica

Stockholder

s Scenographic

Compositions

57

avant-garde performance or sculpture-insofar as both asserted tem porality, bodily experience, and "real" space as integral aspects of aesthetic experience. This emphasis on "real" space, reflecting an
interest in making art that calls attention to the actual material con

ditions of a room or that in itself becomes a spatial environment to move through or occupy, was a central point of debate among critics and artists of the generation following Abstract Expressionism. Broadly speaking, three different notions of space seem to have structured the discourse of art from this period. First is the residual notion of space as fictive, illusionistic, pictorial, representational, and depicted. This is the kind ofmimetic space thatClement Greenberg wanted purged from painting as not only superfluous but also a betrayal of the essence of themedium. The second kind of space is abstract, ideal, and transcendent-beyond the visible and themate rial. This is the kind of sublime space that artists likeMark Rothko and Newman sought to achieve with their paintings, creating envi ronments in their own right. Finally is the idea of space as literal, behavioral, phenomenological, "primary,"10social, and real-the space of lived experience. This is the kind of space thatminimalists likeMorris and Richard Serra championed (with the support of critics like Krauss) and that their famous detractor Michael Fried called "theatrical.""1 What is so distinctive about Stockholder's accomplishment in light of this discourse is how all three notions of space seem to come together and coexist in her installations. Without opting for one model of space over another, as her predecessors felt ideologically compelled to do, herwork sustains amultiple spatiality inwhich the viewer can simultaneously experience several different types of spaces.Moreover, the quality of these different types of spaces oscil
lates, so that what looks from one view to be a representational or

pictorial space (distanced from and excluding the viewer) is in another instance actual, embodied space (immediate with and encompass ing the viewer). Curator Lynne Cooke captures the complexity of such multiple spatial experiences in her assessment of Stockholder's tour de force installation Your Skin in thisWeather Bourne Eye-Threads
& Swollen Perfume, a 1995 work Arts in New York City: When appears the installation that is totally exhibited at the Dia Center for the

later, when

is first approached via the ramp, a view in type from the one revealed different the panoramic scrutiny opens up from a single van

Opposite, top:
Jessica Stockholder. Kissing

tage point. In the former, the rectangularwooden jamb serves to hold in tension, in precarious andmomentary equilibrium, various "events" that are experienced temporally-plummeting
vectors,

the #4 red green, & 1988. Wall

Paint, newspaper, Styrofoam, one small piece of furniture, one red and one green light. bottom: Opposite, Jessica Stockholder. Kissing the Wall #1, 1988. Enamel, small piece of furniture, small incandescent light, and news paper with glue. 2?/ ft high.

partally

concealed

volumes

and

planes,

and occluded

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spaces. By contrast, from the synoptic perspective, the seem

ingly promiscuous miscellany arranges itself as if a series of overlapping flat planes, in a composition that is now implicitly in format and that exists rectilinear in a kind of suspended present: in short, into an image whose duration and form is

quintessentially retinal.12
What Cooke is pointing relative out here position. is not simply Rather that Stockholder's the ways

installation gives on to different views and impressions depending

on the viewer's she is describing

inwhich the installation inscribes the viewer into different modali ties of spatial perception: both an embodied experience thatunfolds
over time through the viewer's movement through the work and a

pictorial coalescence that freezes thework into an "instantaneous"

image, flattened and the viewer's between out into a series of planes, body (reduced, as Cooke squeezing out time, space, notes, to the retinal).

Here, then, is art that proposes the possibility of positioning itself

the two-dimensional, three-dimensional spatiality the installation itself shifts as an integral flatness of painting and the pictorial and scale of architecture. The status of to object to architectural from picture framing and compositional element

construction, with the given architecture of the exhibition space

functioning

throughout.13Furthermore, in embracing painting and architecture equally, Stockholder's work asserts (somewhat voraciously)
a both/and affirmative attitude partaking rather than one of either/or. This of both categories (evident even in

Stockholder's smaller furniture-scaleworks, like the pieces from the 1988-1992 Kissing theWall series) confirms Cooke's observation that Stockholder's installations are antithetical to the formally reductive or deconstructive
to site-specific art seen in the work of, for approaches Asher (brought to architecture instance, Michael through art and institutional conceptual critique) or Serra (arriving

7_

at architecture through sculpture). Stockholder's explo

ration of the interface and reciprocity between painting as Cooke and architecture, has put it, also supports notion the heuristic of "painting's extended field"14 as a potential to Krauss's in the counterpoint "sculpture

expanded field."
The ongoing realization of the consistency and discrep in the exchange between visual recogni ancy that coexist tion and bodily encounter-of colors, objects, structures, and spatial modalities-is the dramatic reward for viewers of Stockholder's stagings (who inevitably become the works' are simultaneously abstract "actors"). Her installations

Kwon

I Promiscuity

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and literal, pictorial and material, representational and real, decora tive and structural, and available forhaptic and optic apperception. And these oppositions flip-flop throughout a viewer's experience of any one installation. What produces these unstable doublings engendering what the artist describes as "a struggle between differ ent ways of viewing contribut[ing] to the rise of a kind of blur, a confusion of boundary"'15-is that no one element, be it an object, a color, or an architectural structure (thus, by extension, spatialmodal ity), is allowed tomaintain its integrity or to fully accommodate another element. Stockholder's use of color is particularly exemplary in this regard. Just as it is impossible to find a stable, objective sense of spatial ori entation to inside/outside or front/back in her work (these relations continuously alter depending on themovement of the viewer), the presence of color as a surface condition is often undercut by color as volume and vice versa. In the installation House Beautiful, for exam ple, exhibited at Le Consortium inDijon, France, in 1994, a squared
Below: Jessica Stockholder. House Beautiful, 1994. Installation at Le Consortium, Dijon, France. Paint, wood, hinges, hardware, seven rugs, braided steel cable, fan, chande lier, green carpet, 100 balls of yarn glued together with silicon caulking. Opposite: Jessica Stockholder. TV Tipped Toe Nails & the Green Salami, 2003. Installation at Musee dArt Contemporain de Bordeaux, France.

stack of 100 skeins of red yarn (two rows are painted over in a lighter shade of pinkish orange) sits as an almost abstract cubic form on top cube of yarn of a piece of olive green carpet. Next to the pink/red fan painted green, blowing stands a household "green" air away from of a large rug. The rug is one the yarn cube and into the underside

amongmany others thathang from the ceiling by braided steel cables. This particular rug is slightly twisted in relation to the planes of the floor, ceiling, and walls, revealing in its drooping heavy form its
materiality, ear shape, to its own flat rectilin on the one hand, and a resistance on the other. Further, the rug's pattern is visible from the

underside through the semitransparent green paint (matching the color of the carpet on the floor) that almost covers
the full spread of the rug.

Even within
we can inventory

this small installational episode,

the double operation of color in

Stockholder's art.On the one hand, color is applied

to the underside of the rug (green) and to the dou ble row of yarn (pink); on the other hand, it is a of the olive green carpet on the material condition

4 floor and the skeins of red yarn. The proximity of these surface/material aspects throws into relief
the ambiguity of color in a profound way. The green

colored fan, for instance, oscillates between being

a fan that has been painted green and a fan that is to say the status of color as an is green, which a detached and abstract or surface entity, with

independent relationship to theworld of things,

collides with color as a condition of things in

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themselves. This interest in the play between themateriality of color and the color of materials is central to Stockholder's artistic effort.
As she admits in a 1995 statement: "Color drives me. Imake art to

[But] I experience color as sculp play with color, to see itwork.... tural, as something that collects onto things and takes up space, a physical event existing next to physical objects."16 IIiII It is impossible to effectively convey inwords the shifting play of perceptual experiences within Stockholder's installations, involving as it does the unpredictable movement of the viewers' eyes and bod ies as they negotiate theworks' open-ended sequences of exposed and intimatemoments. These moments, created through a seemingly idiosyncratic and arbitrary overlaying of colors, familiar objects, and spatial conditions, reflect Stockholder's ambitious and sustained exploration of the convergence of collage, abstraction, and the ready three key artistic innovations of the twentieth century. made-the Positioned somewhere between painting and architecture, or com positing the terms of each, Stockholder's work produces an "experi ence having to dowith the difficulty of having things cohere, a lack of definition, or a possibility for expansion lurking in the background of everything we make."17 Just as the artist seeks to upset her own she clarity of vision to "make room fornew thoughts,"18 offers the same to her audience.

Kwon[

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Notes 1. The "Lynne (London: 2. See characterization is the artist's with own. See Jessica Stockholder, in Jessica quoted Stockholder in

Tillman Phaidon reviews

in Conversation Press, 1995).

Jessica

Stockholder,"

for the exhibition

Jonathan Sculpture Flash Art 34, no. 218 Chambers, 100, no. 7 (Summer 2001): 174. 3. On "Formalism 32-43. 4. This de Bordeaux Toe Nails essay was originally for the exhibition # the Green Krauss, Salami the link between and Its Other,"

Goodman,

+ Lee" by Bravin "Jessica Stockholder: Gorney 77-78; 20, no. 7 (September 2001): Christopher 2001): 151; and Barbara Pollack, Art News (May/June work and see John Miller, 1991),

Stockholder's in Jessica

Stockholder

(Rotterdam:

assemblage, Witte

de With,

d'art contemporain by cape, Mus?e TV Tipped of Stockholder's installation catalogue here with minor modifications. (2003). It is reprinted commissioned in the Expanded Field" Krauss, (1979), in Rosalind and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press,

5. Rosalind The Originality 1985), 289. 6. Krauss remark practice of this

"Sculpture of the Avant-Garde

the parenthetical before herself just a few sentences acknowledges a pervasive within the maintains and integral presence that photography in the expanded is made field. But nothing of those artists forging sculpture to the uniqueness of sculpture. The issue is in relation and reproducibility instead in later essays specifically See Rosalind Yours" 151-70, (1982) addressing Krauss, the "ethos "The Originality of reproduction" of the Avant

practice. sculptural Garde" (1981) and "Sincerely and Other Modernist Myths, would have little in common but in the expanded ticity pertaining with field,"

taken up in Rodin's

171-94.

in The Originality of the Avant-Garde seem It would that Rodin's work

with of "sculpture the kind of post-studio production I suspect and authen the problems of originality/copy as the art to the "ethos of reproduction" (even intensifies) persists the field. in the Expanded Field," such connections 288. between color field painting and in Michael Auping, ed. Developments,

object merges 7. Krauss, 8. Michael

"Sculpture

Auping some minimalist and "Beyond Michael the Sublime,"

makes

land art through the trope in Abstract Expressionism:

of the sublime The Critical 1987).

Auping, 9. While the

146-66 issue

(New York: Harry Abrams, is not central to his of space and break between "The Crux MIT of Minimalism," 1996). Serra

simultaneous abstraction the Real, 10. The 11.Michael

continuity in Hal Foster, 35-70 term (Cambridge: is attributed

Hal Foster maps the argument, minimalism and New York School in Hal Foster, The Return of

Press,

to Richard

in Auping, inMinimal & Co.,

155. Art: A Critical 1968). in this Weather 1996), Bourne 29. serves with as the space Anthology,

Fried,

"Fabricating & Swollen Perfume Eye-Threads 13. John Miller has observed an expanded canvas, Debordian spectacle." really are. See Miller, not But 38.

ed. Gregory Battock, 12. Lynne Cooke,

"Art and Objecthood," 116-47 (New York:

(1967)

E.P. Dutton

Sight/Site," (New York:

in Your Dia Center

Skin

for the Arts,

that in Stockholder's derived distant

as a minimalist Iwonder how

space "gallery its affinities 'theater,' with these two uses

work,

of the gallery borrows

14. Raphael Rubinstein, idea from the title of a 1996 Center for Contemporary Art

in his exhibition

evaluation

of Stockholder's Konsthall Extended

work, and Field."

this

at the Stockholm "Painting?The

the Rooseum See Raphael

inMalm?:

62

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Rubinstein, 15. Jessica

"Abstraction Stockholder,

Out

of Bounds," artist

Art

in America

(November

1997):

111.

Century Magazine (Spring 16. Jessica Stockholder, Art in America Rubinstein, 17. Stockholder, 18. Stockholder, quoted "Shapes

in Turn-of-the originally published in Jessica Stockholder 1993); quoted (1995), 142. to Come," of Things interview "Shapes by Raphael (November 1995): 103. in "Lynne of Things Tillman," to Come," 41. 103.

statement

Kwon

I Promiscuity

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d der's Scenographic

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