Diminishing (Lost Hair Clogs Drain)
Installation views of Hard Ground, on view at MoMA PS1 from May 16 through October 14, 2024. Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of MoMA PS1.
The tightness sets in, and it leaves me to my tedium. It will take me my life, but no matter—this room is too small. With sandpaper or chisel or torch or grinder or a continuous drip of water in hand, I wane the drywall down ever so slightly. The first pass: I find the room marginally larger. The amount of oxygen doesn’t change, so as this hollow den expands, a vacuum forms, pulling me taut against the walls. My face, covered in sweat acting as glue, is coated in the dirt from the air. [1]
My face has limited real estate, and the remaining dust settled at my feet. What then was all this refuse about? I come to the tragic realization that this room has not gotten larger, [2] but instead simply changed proportions—the width has become larger, and the height has become smaller. The thought sends me to my knees, from heartache as from dedication. I begin the next phase utilizing the sticky wetness of my tongue.
Screenshot of an Abraham Lincoln coin on carbonate hardground in Ohio, via Wikipedia. Image by Jacksun Bein.
My cavity called “stomach” fills up with drywall dust, and now I am happy. The shrapnel of the room settles in my gut, like a comically large funnel siphoning the fallout of an entire apocalyptic city down my throat. Now that I’m filled with gypsum, mica, clay, resin, and indeterminate additives, consider this: Will I start to make different decisions? And I don’t mean from realizing my blunder, but from the neurons of my gut’s microbiome going haywire. If so, what might I decide moving forward? Maybe to move backward.
All this while, I’ve been at the walls. I continue this sanding/chiseling/torching/grinding/continuous-water-dripping of the room around me until I can almost see through the grape skin that remains [3]. All I’d have to do is huff and puff, and it’d meet its fate on the ground, but I wait. I’m playing a game with myself. There is something beyond the veil/film/screen, hobbling. It seems to gyrate to and fro, coming back again and again to where it once was. The Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven question: What is that thing? I am testing myself on materiality. Like all those times I’ve gazed out upon a line and said, Oh, yes, undoubtedly that is eleven and a third feet, or gazed down upon a line and said, Oh, yes, undoubtedly that is three and a third inches—you lied! The thing hobbling inches ahead is—well, we’ll come back to this later.
I will misuse/miscontextualize Glissant momentarily by quoting For Opacity: “For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures.” If you want to know what he meant, read his essay. If you want to know what I mean, keep reading. In many ways, I wish I never studied art because I love art. I miss walking through an exhibition with no idea how anything came into being, allowing it all to be as it is, right in front of me—with no “but if it,” “well how did,” or “so it could’ve been.” And with no internal rolodex of the ‘m*ves’ (a term I’m desperate to remove from my mind), plans of action, processes, or even the struggle that a certain material poses. In Hard Ground, however, the analysis of the process becomes a direct means of connecting with the work. I won’t talk of the processes though. Instead, I will say that:
Time spent is either wasted or … well, what else? With an artwork, use value becomes an impossible question. If the use of many objets d’art is to take up space [4] (enter Serra’s Tilted Arc), then we disregard the value of air, the value of vacuum, or the value of the soil which compresses bones into fossils. The cynic in me would like to say, “Surfacing fossils presumes that the dirt isn’t meaningful, and that it serves only as the barrier which conceals the valuable.” But then what about carbonate hardgrounds, in which both the fossil and dirt are the same?
Among the guiding frameworks for Hard Ground is the seven artists’ engagement with reductive measures. I face a question seemingly shared by the artists: Is it possible to make nothing from something? Subtractive sculpture is actually more like separative sculpture, because all the refuse goes somewhere. [5] Yes, making something from nothing is possible. For example, imagine a large solid behemoth advancing toward the sky. Now that we have that, I will remind you that there is no such thing here. See, all it takes is a moment to make something from nothing.
Making nothing out of something is a far more challenging endeavor. (Apparently, there are nine distinct levels to nothingness, more on this another time.) In an ocular-centric culture, burning away seems to suffice, [6] but just as the ground glistens with shaved, chipped, hammered, pierced particulate, all the away-stuff is still here with us.
Back to the thing that was hobbling around beyond the grape skin I made from the wall: It no longer moves. I can’t keep guessing and finally let out my breath, which I’d been holding, and it collapses. I find that all around me, they (whoever they are) have poured fresh concrete. Cast into the manufactured stone are three prongs, letting me know the thing was a bird. I follow the track for miles—imagine that—and come across a drip-shaped gray mass. The three prongs are coated in once-wet, now-hardened goo. [7] No more walking, no more hobbling, no more flying—the feet are too heavy. I chisel away, slowly, delicately, and uselessly, at the solidified toes of the pigeon.
Jerry the Marble Faun. Currents, 2016–17. Limestone. 17” x 14” x 8”. Image by Jacksun Bein.
Gianna Surangkanjanajai. Untitled, 2024. Four plexiglass cylinders and paint. Each 96” long x 8” diameter. Image by Jacksun Bein.
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[1] In Wash Rag (2018–24), pollutants that mate with Kern Samuel’s pores are wiped onto and pigment a muslin scrap. The fabric’s folds are sharp and read permanent, and the double entendre of “Can I Rub Off?” leaves me comparing/contrasting the cloth's non-existent odor to my cum rag’s smell at home.
[2] My tongue cleaning the floor decides to leave the fallen powder of Maria VMier’s Objects of Request (2022). One of the guards says that men tend to grab the wall-knocker, which resembles testes first and foremost. The piles of MoMA dust beneath remind me: Just as God walked on water, mortals hover on particulate.
[3] In Amina Ross’s Body Vessels (2024), rainwater collected from PS1’s gutters provides a home for algae growing around grape-skin-thin casts of Ross’s body. We are shown the outer shell of these glass cavities, opaque as we rely on the small instances of fingernails emerging, or lips pressing against the glass, to piece together an image of what these forms are replica to. By providing an image of the self, Amina becomes an absent attendee in the space.
[4] Matt Browning’s open-ended edition of carved Douglas fir resists easy subsumption (by both Ausubel’s and Marx’s definitions). His whittled whimseys—each determinately carved from a single block of wood—position ‘progress’ (the persisting tenet of capitalism), ‘speed,’ and ‘difference’ as negotiable and worthy of disregard. Here, those principles are replaced instead with meditative slowness and iteration. “Their singular value is unclear. If ever there will be someone buying it, they’ll never know how many will be made. Much of my iterative works trouble both classical and neoclassical conceptions of value, from fancy prices to the law of diminishing returns” (Browning in City Arts Magazine, interviewed by Margo Vansynghel, 2017).
[5] Jerry the Marble Faun’s limestones, often retrieved from construction sites, reach their halfway point when the chiseling, incising, and abrading are finished. He considers the carving process liberative rather than creative, based on the principle that shape, form, and direction sit within the stone itself. Afterwards, his archetypal forms of mythical equines and the sublime are scrubbed with potato, coaxing overgrowth of moss.
[6] In Dora Budor’s Always Something to Remind Me (2023), a CitiBike is smelted down to what I’d like to call the moments of aluminum. It is then recast into a mold made from the first readymade by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, piled over in art history by Fountain, and fossilized for Budor to filter back to the surface. The numbers continue to rise for the ride. Here, a cipher of mobility—no, capital—is reduced to parts, reshaped, useful. Oh, how the wind swipes your face as your legs loop with electrical assistance. Liberated from its need to be “docked”/“homed”/“placed”/“lodged,” the bank’s offering is never to be seen again.
[7] Like samples of a plasticine earth, Gianna Surangkanjanajai’s tubes lay in the sun, which had once been boarded up. The water in the blue paint fails to escape, beading up, tenacious, on the inner surface of the chamber. Dense, pressurized, contained, still. Before the dam broke everything was quiet.
Hard Ground is on view at MoMA PS1 from May 16 to Oct 14, 2024. The exhibition features Matt Browning, Dora Budor, Jerry the Marble Faun, Amina Ross, Kern Samuel, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, and Maria VMier. It is organized by Jody Graf, Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1.