Walking Around Covered in Magnets

Tolia Astakhishvili, And how I care for, 2024. Plasterboard, wood, oil, coffee, pigment, cement, found objects, metal grate, ventilation. Courtesy of the artist and LC Queisser, image by Charles Benton.

At SculptureCenter, Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother is on view from May 9 to Aug 12, 2024.

In the 1940s after failing as a trolley repair shop, the building now called SculptureCenter was used as a factory manufacturing derricks, hoists, and cranes. This brick mass rejected gravity altogether, determined to make any object weightless. Now, in the same space, Tolia Astakhishvili lets everything fall. 

Tolia Astakhishvili lives and works between Berlin and Tbilisi, spreading across bounds of drawing, architecture, sculpture, and video. Much of the work sits between having-been-started and left-before-completion. In this way, we can imagine either interrupting or slipping in the gaps between frozen moments.

Against particularly verifiable fact, I’ve convinced myself that the derricks manufactured in Long Island City were utilized to bore into the Earth and extract oil. Let’s momentarily say that this is true. If so, Astakhishvili carries on this legacy of dredgerous machines. But, in contrast to their predecessors–which were only concerned with a viscous black smoothie made of dinosaurs–Astakhishvili’s waste product is the refuse of learning, socialization, and of individuation.

Tolia Astakhishvili, When the others are within us, 2024. Plasterboard, wood, oil, coffee, pigment, cement, hooks, found objects, paper, pencil, ink, light. Image by Jacksun Bein.

The exhibition’s title, between father and mother, refers to a text by writer, critic, and collaborator Kirsty Bell: “The child fills in an elastic space, moulded between father and mother, that modulates continuously in form and scale.” Object relations theory, a mode of analysis concerned with relationality–rather than an individual's internal drives–is a nexus for both Astakhishvili and Bell, who quotes D. W. Winnicott (on Wikipedia, Winnicott is described as “theoretically fertile” which, despite having concrete meaning as a term, I find poetic and tragic): “There is no such thing as independence.” The exhibition is threaded all the way through with collaboration. Many artists refuse dispelling and fracturing authorship, but Astakhishvili harnesses artistic interdependence, including works from Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Kirsty Bell, Katinka Bock, Dylan Peirce, James Richards, and Zurab Astakhishvili (Tolia’s father).

Zurab Astakhishvili. I can’t imagine how can I die if I am so alive, 1986–ongoing. Collage. Image by Jacksun Bein.

Here, object permanence slips out of relevance. In this reality, the child need not feel any anxiety. Loss becomes replaced by overstimulation via simulation. Objects disappear and reappear, fitting perfectly amongst a mirage landscape. A brick wall, upon closer inspection, ends up being simply plywood with a painted grid. There are too many objects to keep track of, and each is forgotten when we see the next. Walking through between father and mother, I start to conflate forgetting and disappearance.

I disintegrate when it's time to gaze upon the accumulative “stuff” of a life. I walk in and trip over everything. Existential derangement kicks in, and the question of “Is this all that I am?” becomes unshakable, persistent, and infantilizing. The disassembled furnishing becomes simply the “whatever that is,” and the collaged assortment of things, absolutely and nonsensically dressed in their clothes of cardboard, are together in that box only because they fit that way. Here, we reinscribe human-object marital status. I’ll pick it up and put it back down. Maybe I’ll even bring it to the other side of the room, or shift it slightly to “fix” it—it was askew. All of my things I will take care of, like a child putting a band-aid on the family dog’s boo-boo. Buster walks around advertising Spider-Man.

Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards. I Remember (Depth of Flattened Cruelty), 2023–ongoing. Three-channel HD video, color, sound 10:16 minutes. Collaged images and found objects. Image by Jacksun Bein.

Another excerpt of Bell’s relays the process by which the body sheds extremities in persistent cold. Tolia speaks on this shedding: “It’s bothering me, that we operate between the important and non-important.” Akin to the stuff expelled from Astakhishvili’s chutes, once-important three-dimensional ciphers are discarded and we peek into the waste. I’m looking at a tangled-up grouping of necklaces, and all I see are the nerve endings of a finger. Instead of an antique spoon, I see an elbow inwardly turned and/or turning.

A stranger will soon come in and witness me in my smallness amongst the heap. I suppose they see it all the time but I feel the most pathetic of all living things, for I have too many attachments. It’s not just my mother, my father, my lover-at-any-given-time; it’s my attachment to objects, and books, and pictures. My attachment to the “this” and the “that”—where did it come from? Why does it take up so much space? Where will it go? And how could I possibly part with it?

This world is plastics, metals, sheets of particle board, and most of all: dust. Those of us who live just go from point A to point B, and the objects look down at us like indentured servants. We are desperate to tend to the faltering refrigerator. 

Do not mistake this for sentimentality, everything is too used to be attractive anymore, and whether we want to admit it or not, it’s easier to miss something beautiful. It doesn’t matter by who, or when, or where — just that it once was touched over and over again. I walk through the exhibition craving to be held. A small toy car shows me my antipode: something touched. 

Heading back to my Brooklyn apartment, I notice sentences written in Sharpie like those dispersed throughout SculptureCenter. On Tolia’s walls: “It is rude to summarise people.” On a traffic post: “CARLOS LOVE MEN AND BEAT HIS DICK TO [peeled off].” Another traffic post: “MARCUS IS A KNOWN RAT AND THIEF [insert picture of Marcus].”

Tolia Astakhishvili, The art of sleeping, 2024. Car engines, pallets, plywood, cardboard, found objects, four-channel sound by Dylan Peirce. Image by Jacksun Bein.

Falling asleep thinking about Tolia, I hear a phrase: “Every parting surface is another entrance unfulfilled.” I think what it means is that every barrier Tolia erects is a skin to be punctured with a needle. It all oozes. 

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