Barry Schwabsky on "Mishrabiya" by Jaime Gili

 

Published by BloombergSPACE, London

for the exhibition COMMA04, April 2009

COMMA is a dynamic new series of commissions enabling
artists to experiment and expand their practice in relation to
Bloomberg SPACE and its communities. Twenty of today’s most
outstanding emerging and established international artists will be
invited to create new work, installations and architectural
interventions in a fast paced succession of exhibitions. COMMA
at Bloomberg SPACE reflects the core principles of innovation,
engagement, adventurous creativity and education central to
Bloomberg’s reputation for arts sponsorship.

Jaime Gili: Further Adventures in Modernism

By Barry Schwabsky

When I met up with him recently, Jaime Gili
happened to mention in passing, but ruefully,
the fact that just about everyone who writes
about his work sooner or later has to say
something about “the failure of modernism”.
I wonder if he noticed me wincing, for I too,
reviewing an exhibition of his several years ago,
had touched on the same topic. Well, not in
just those words, mind you. But detecting an
elegiac mood in Gili’s meditations on the fate
of an officially sanctioned abstract art in his
native Venezuela, I proposed that “the artist
whose heritage is a failed utopia might be
more fortunate than the heir to one that still
offered hope”.

Really, modernism has always harboured
opposing desires. For every artist who has
dreamed of being the Samson who pulls down
the academy at all cost or has simply dreamed
of pursuing an idiosyncratic intuition to its most
logical and extreme and therefore most irrational
end, there has been another whose every effort
has been to found a new academy, a school
for the end or the beginning of history, perhaps
even embodying what Ad Reinhardt once called
“the true museum’s soullessness, timelessness,
airlessness and lifelessness”, but more often
allied to ideas of progress than of stasis.
Sometimes that progress was envisioned as
reform, sometimes as revolution. For every Dada
there was a Bauhaus, and sometimes the same
artist belonged sometimes to one movement,
sometimes the other. Art has been a project
for the total transformation of society, and a
specialist, quasi-technical endeavour to criticise
and thereby refine its own criteria; one of these
conceptions of art may be realistic, the other
mired in illusion, but which is which? In retrospect,
modernism may teach us that we do not know
how its failure could be defined. Every breakdown
of modernism is, from another and arguably
equal valid viewpoint, internal to it, a fulfilment.
Thus, the decrepitude of a state-sponsored
modernism such as Venezuela experienced in
the post-War era should merely be seen as an
opening for a modernism that would be free of
the limits, and of what might be seen as the
unfulfillable responsibilities, of an entirely public
and rational art. For Gili, the story is not over:
“The European modernist project may have
failed or ended” he concedes, “but not elsewhere:
in South America there are still many cities to
build, and it may be something sustainable
from an ecological point of view.” In any case,
while many outstanding artists have taken a
dogmatically polemical stance on one side or
the other of the many debates that have
constituted the history of modernism, their art
has more typically sustained its contradictions
in an inextricable tension, experienced
sometimes as painful, sometimes as
pleasurable. In my view the greatest of the
Venezuelan modernists was Gego (Gertud
Goldschmidt)—though Gili’s own primary
reference seems to be Carlos Cruz-Diez—and
since I’ve already quoted myself once I might
as well do so again: In her art she “constantly
wrestled with the relationships between order
and disorder, unity and multiplicity, containment
and dispersal, system and randomness,
discipline and spontaneity.” Nor was she alone
in this, but more to the point, she represents a
beginning and not an ending.

Take away the quotation marks, and I could say
the same thing about Jaime Gili: His art
constantly wrestles with the relationships
between order and disorder, unity and
multiplicity, containment and dispersal, system
and randomness, discipline and spontaneity.
Probably the only way to fail in this game is to
be boring, and Gili’s work is never that. It always
contains the potential for exploration, for
discovery. It is expansive. Gili is in the strictest
sense a painter, and his art expresses itself
fluently within the limits of the portable canvas
rectangle: There, within those four edges, we
can experience the dynamism and ebullience
of Gili’s continuing adventures in modernism,
but also the work’s strange and sometimes
unnerving sense of catching the viewer up in
something like that timelessness and airlessness
that Reinhardt proposed as the true milieu of
all art worthy of the name but which most of
us, I suspect, cannot help finding a bit eerie. For
most painters, those limits are, most of the time,
enabling. Gili, though, cannot help letting his
work spread far beyond them. It spills out onto
the walls and floor and ceiling and sometimes
even further. Indeed, one of his current projects
is meant to cover what its sponsors have touted
as “the largest canvas for public art ever
developed”, at the Sprague Energy tank farm
in Portland, Maine—261,000 square feet (about
24,250 square meters) of surface on the sides
and tops of a series of massive industrial tanks,
still in operation. “I would like to see paintings
take over cities”, Gili has said. In lieu of that, for
the moment, he is planning what just might be
the first painting to be visible to extraterrestrials.
By that standard, Mashrabiya, Gili’s commission
for Bloomberg SPACE is pretty self-contained,
as are his previous large-scale installations in
London and elsewhere, such as Ruta Rota, for
which he covered much of the exterior of 5
Cheapside last summer. In contrast to the
project for Maine, Mashrabiya is not about
covering a surface. Of course, in the most literal
sense it does involve that, since the material to
be used is vinyl applied to the office building’s
windows looking onto the atrium. But for that
very reason it deals with transparency or
translucency whereas painting in its conventional
form can only deal with opacity except as an
illusion. With Mashrabiya, it seems, Gili aims at
finding a way for painting to fulfil its vaulting
aspirations not simply by expanding itself to
encompass its physical context—and Gili is
Installation of vinyl applied on glass and on walls
not always content to do this in the most
comfortable way: His recent exhibition at
Alajandra von Hartz Gallery, Miami, included not
only a 60-foot-long wall painting but, more to the
point, “four paintings taller than the space” that
had to be wedged at an angle between floor
and ceiling—but also by undoing itself as a
material practice. “No need to paint because it
is already a painting” Gili explained to me in an
e-mail, relating it to other recent paintings of
his (on canvas, painted by hand in the studio)
which differ from many of his previous ones in
their polycentricism—their multiplication and
dispersion of compositional nodes,
organisational centres.

To speak of the organisation of the painting, in
modernism, is always somehow to speak of
the organisation of collective energies in daily
life—that is, of society. Despite everything, Gili
still holds to this position, which to some may,
in retrospect, seem rather arbitrary—though it
may be that by holding at a level of generality
greater than that which some of his precursors
would have allowed, he is hedging his bets: “In
my opinion,” he has said, “modernity is a
spiritual state, the willingness to work
alongside others in order to attain a specific
goal, beyond mere formalities”. We can
wonder what political stance is involved in
making art for a working industrial plant or
information-age office building, but whatever
the answer is, it has nothing to do with
nostalgia. What is perfectly comprehensible to
nearly everyone today is that the illusion that
an invisible hand is at work benignly shaping
our destinies is one that we can no longer
afford. Our survival depends on our ability to
undertake collective projects that we have
collectively and consciously chosen. Every
form of enterprise is a reservoir of collective
experience, and there is none that is a priori
irrelevant to our future undertakings. Art can at
least remind us that modernism is the future or
nothing is.

Barry Schwabsky is an American art critic and
poet living in London. He writes regularly for
The Nation and for Artforum, where he is also
co-editor of international reviews.

1 APRIL to 25 APRIL 2009
Opening Hours
Monday - Saturday, 11am - 6pm
Thursday 2 April open till 9pm
Free Admission
www.bloombergspace.com

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