they said there was a paradise way out west

Anya Gallaccio

Exhibition: Mar 13 – Apr 20, 1997


When is a cliché not a cliché? When you are forced to experience it, rather than rely on it to represent a set of meanings for you. When you are led to realize why it was powerful enough to become a cliché to begin with. Because, as Anya Gallaccio knows, there is no one-to-one correlation between experience and prefigured notion, between cliché and the thing itself. Her bed of roses laid out in a gallery withers, giving off an obscenely thick perfume. Her block of ice in a boiler room is not as ephemeral as planned, taking months instead of weeks to melt. At ArtPace, her bramble of barbed wire—the national wire of Texas—beckons like a siren, charging the air with the anxiety of a thousand little implied snags. A cliché is static, fixed, but Gallaccio’s metaphors are fleeting. They beg undivided attention, imply their own destruction, refuse to be commodified. By agreeing to be dismantled—to die—they bring the cliché to life.

In examining the relationship between artist and collector, Gallaccio decided the ante could be upped, the scale of the relationship between audience and artist tipped. With her work, it is the collector, or the gallery, who has to deal with the aftermath of creation and its attendant problems. Request Gallaccio, and you will receive the legendary excesses of the Artist in tangible form. Like some of her peers, she is the master of the extreme gesture—but she deploys it in the service of an exquisite sensibility—or rather, sensitivity.

Her rooms full of wilting flowers, poured with molten lead or painted with chocolate, are not photographed for exhibition or sale, because then an audience could see them without smelling them or touching them—in short, the audience could forego the engagement of all the senses needed to experience the work. Gallaccio’s work is truly process art—not about the creative process, but about the ephemeral processes of the thing itself. It shares an affinity for impermanence and mutability with artists like Eva Hesse, who broke Minimalism open to allow for memory, sexuality, and humanity as well as swaying, sagging, and dripping.

Gallaccio’s second Artpace work, a curtain of barbed wire spiked with tiny pink and green buds—jelly beans—has all the prickly sexuality of a Hesse. When Gallaccio, in the 1989 exhibit Freeze, poured molten lead on the floor of the gallery, people inevitably compared her to Richard Serra, of whose earlier work with lead she was unaware. They might have as easily compared the work to Lynda Benglis in the late sixties, pouring liquid rubber on the floor, allowing the material to take its own form.

As Gallaccio’s work developed, it took the subversive simplicity of the same decade’s Arte Povera movement, which took time as a fourth dimension of art one step further–using materials so humble as to be ephemeral.

An installation by Anya Gallaccio demands the sort of attention we give a person rather than an object. It will not always be with us. You can own a work, say a bundle of flowers pressed between glass, but it will be accompanied by a set of instructions. There are feminist values at play: the work asks that we nurture and replenish rather than own. The work asks for a commitment greater than money or idle gazing. It asks for relationship.

Gallaccio travels from site to site creating work which often references its setting. In many obvious ways, her works aim to please a foreign constituency. Beauty is a big part of the way they function, as it is a big part of the way strangers interact. By using materials appropriate to the site, the installations promise the creature comfort of familiarity. Still, they said there was a paradise way out west offers its graceful attributes in much the same way that Felix Gonzalez-Torres gave his viewers shimmering candy in place of his AIDS-stricken body: with total vulnerability. The work is unapologetic about its own philandering because it trades on it. It matters that the white stuff underneath our feet is stunning at the same time that it matters that it is salt—in itself a humble barb—11,000 pounds of it.

The gesture is both excessive and restrained. Gallaccio has not rubbed her salt in our wounds but has given us instead a desert of it—a dry turn, if you will. Its edges seem to vaporize into mist, dematerializing the edges of the gallery, the actual boundaries which contain Gallaccio’s practice. Though barbed wire often marks a perimeter, here it stakes out the center of the room like a pencil drawing that avoids the edges of the paper. One long chain loops back on itself, hanging like a curtain in one corner, swooping through space in a vinelike manner. A thin walkway around the room offers different vantage points from which to venture into the center–certain patches are accomodating to visitors, others have trip-wires slung treacherously low.

This work brings to mind Texas’ miles of fenced-in prairie, or the Texas/Mexico border (Gallaccio had ample opportunity to witness the ways of the border when she did a project in Tijuana). It is guarded space—not rationally guarded, as with a straight fence, but guarded in a tangled, reactive fashion. The border’s exact location, and even its rationale, come into question. After all, what is being guarded here, if not more fences? In the end, Gallaccio has laid herself on the line with her surroundings. they said there was a paradise way out west illustrates not so much the condition of Texas, or the condition of two foreign cultures, but that essential thing to which all others are related: the condition of our souls, strung up with barely navigable boundaries, thirsty above a sea of salt.

Despite ourselves, sometimes we look at a piece of art and say, “But would I want to live with it?” An installed environment forces us to ask a more involved question: “Would I want to live in it?” In the case of Gallaccio’s decaying flowers or melting ice, perhaps, the imaginary answer is yes—if only to witness the entire process of disintegration. But in the case of this installation, fraught with frigid beauty, seductive danger, and the deceptively cool parch of salt, the question for each of us becomes not “Would I want to live here?” but indeed, “Do I already?”

-Shaila Dewan

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

This Much is True

Artist

Anya Gallaccio

London, England

Born in Paisley, Scotland, in 1963, Anya Gallaccio attended Goldsmiths College at the University of London during what would later be considered an influential period in art history, when she and her peers became known as Young British Artists. Over 15 solo exhibitions of her work have been presented throughout the United States and Europe, including Karsten Schubert Gallery in London; The Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Kim Light Gallery, Los Angeles; and Ars Futura Galerie, Zurich. Gallaccio was included in the Walker Art Center’s Brilliant! show that traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 1996, inSITE94 in San Diego and Tijuana; and The British Art Show 4, organized by the Hayward Gallery in 1996. In 2003, she was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize, Britain’s top art honor.

See More

Curators

Elizabeth Armstrong

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

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

Read Bio

Dana Friis-Hansen

Houston, Texas, USA

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

Read Bio

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.

Read Bio

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.

Read Bio

Maaretta Jaukkuri

Helsinki, Finland

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

Read Bio

Related
Exhibitions

View