Still

Michael O’Malley

Exhibition: Jun 19 – Jul 20, 1997


The important thing, says Michael O’Malley when quizzed about his artistic intentions, is “resonance, rather than meaning.” Indeed, the disparate components of O’Malley’s installation are reticent as well as undeniably resonant. They are pieces of a philosophical puzzle that do not yield easily to interpretation. A thick wall of packed dirt fronts the installation, its segments gapped as if by brief grammatical interludes—air hyphens. Passing through the walls, one can see immediately the source of the dirt: a giant, square hole in the floor, about eight feet deep.

Protruding slightly above the lip of the pit is a giant ceramic silo, open at the top, whose interior concave space is the shape of a lipstick missile poised to launch from its inverted launching pad into the earth. Beyond all this, the gallery’s back wall is studded with small, neat shelves, evenly distributed but not in straight rows, each containing a translucent brick of amber resin that looks rather like a photo frame. The bricks, which vary slightly in dimension, each contain a small, suspended object: a faded four-leaf clover, a hotel key, a “pre-Columbian” miniature mask from Mexico, a feather.

Perhaps the first association to materialize from the room’s almost palpable resonant vibrations is that of an anthropological dig. The pit—in this case, the Pit of Obscurity—has been excavated, and the detritus of, we imagine, one humble life has been separated and displayed on the Wall of Omniscience. The chunks of memory are not classified or ordered, but they are minutely encyclopedic nonetheless, no more privileged among each other than alphabetized entries in a book. Of course, each souvenir possesses a resonance of its own, a story. The key to the hotel room, for example, unlocks a whole chapter of imagined biography. At the same time, the objects are bizarrely generic. They tell us almost nothing about their owner: a Catholic, an American, a man. This person’s past is everyone’s past, really; each of us could manufacture a childhood from these “memories.”

If a souvenir, as critic Susan Stewart writes, allows us to convert a historical narrative into a personal narrative (not just “The Eiffel Tower was constructed for the World’s Fair in 1889,” but “I was at the Eiffel Tower, which…”), then these objects allow us to convert a personal memory into a collective narrative. For instance, we can remember the first time we each found a feather. Suspended in amber, these souvenirs become specimens, different in fingerprint from our own representative objects, but similar in type. And, more importantly, similar in their distance from their original context. Without the authenticity of our own individual imprint, these objects give us yearning for the past, but through a cinematic removal. Against this backdrop of connect-the-dot nostalgia rises the mystery of the white silo. A cylindrical tower from the outside and a “female” receptacle on the inside, this structure consists of perfect igloo-style, porcelain “bricks” specially made to accommodate the straight exterior and curved interior. The placement of the whole affair, smooth inside yet outwardly bristling with dentata-like shims jutting from between the bricks, inside the pit is inexplicable. It could not have been found there. It rises above the lip of the pit by half a foot or so—yet how else, within the logic of the installation, did it get there?

The silo resonates in a co-sine to the sine of the manufactured, souvenir objects. While those objects are personal, yet as a totality impersonal, the silo is impersonal and highly polished, yet somehow completely singular. It is made, after all, from clay, and what other material so evokes the humble human hand? In scale it is inhospitable, yet the interior well is sized to cradle a single, upright man.

It was constructed in an industrial setting, yet it is the brainchild of an artist with an exacting aesthetic, who makes a point of the construction’s imperfections by refusing to trim the wooden shims that level it out at the top. This construction, then, replaces the detritus of collected objects with the fantasy of the created object, the true if unlikely evidence of the artist’s hand and mind.

On the wall, some omniscient narrator has arranged objects with no author. The objects are either manufactured junk or collected nature. Not only, Susan Stewart would say, have these objects lost the authenticity of lived experience, they have lost the authenticity of authorial voice as well. Their very lack, their beauty together with their very disconnection from “real life,” creates desire; in this case the movie house desire of identification with someone else’s memories. Yet in this installation, do the collected objects furnish the narrative? The objects appear to sketch out a personal history, but they are not nearly as personal as the porcelain silo, with the “firsthand knowledge” to which it leads us. The silo, along with the packed dirt walls, invoke pure labor and lead us back to the moment of production, and therefore creation. Like the souvenirs, it is devoid of use value, and thus flush with aesthetic (and not sentimental) value. And herein lies O’Malley’s most resonant lesson: it is art, and not the trapped detritus of life, that leads us to the present moment.

-Shaila Dewan
Shaila Dewan is a writer and art critic in Houston, TX.

Artist

Michael O’Malley

San Antonio, Texas, USA

Born in 1965 in South Bend, Indiana, Michael O’Malley lives and works in San Antonio, Texas. O’Malley holds a BFA from Alfred University/The New York State College of Ceramics. He has exhibited at Rrose Amarillo Gallery and Blue Star Art Space in San Antonio. O’Malley recently completed a residency at the prestigious John Michael Kohler Arts Center/Arts and Industry Program in Sheboygan, WI.

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Curators

Elizabeth Armstrong

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Elizabeth Armstrong is a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Dana Friis-Hansen

Houston, Texas, USA

Dana Friis-Hansen is a senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.

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Thelma Golden

New York, New York, USA

Thelma Golden is an associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the branch director of the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris.

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David Avalos

National City, CA

Born in San Diego in 1947, David Avalos is a forceful societal observer and provocateur who employs confrontational gesture, poetic metaphor, philosophical inquiry, public interaction, and a variety of more standard art-making skills – video, sculpture, photography, etc. – in the creation of potent performances/installations/public art works. Long involved in the Chicano art movement, he has been student, peer, and mentor to three generations of artists/activists dedicated to social justice and the preservation and evolution of their cultural traditions. In is solo work as an artist, his ongoing collaborations with other artists, and in his role as a professor at California State University, San Marcos, Avalos extends the research and scholarship of contemporary inter-disciplinary discourse. He has been encouraged in that effort by the receipt of numerous grants and awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowships, two Inter-Arts New Forms grants, and support from the California Arts council and San Diego County. Avalos’ work has been showcased in several solo exhibitions, as well as numerous group shows throughout the U.S. and in Mexico, Venezuela, Canada, and France. His collaborative works with other artists have addressed audiences in Turkey, England, Sweden, Spain, France, Mexico, and the U.S., engaging each local community in a discussion of identity, cultural tradition and change, public/private codes of behavior, and other issues of global concern.

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Maaretta Jaukkuri

Helsinki, Finland

Maaretta Jaukkuri is the Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland.

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