D’nell Larson
Institute of Visual Arts: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA
In 1972 Robert Smithson wrote, ‘...the whiteness of the room looks like a little neutral cell in heaven and the painting hanging on a wall...you’re supposed to not even think of the wall that the painting is hanging on.’ D’nell Larson’s show at INOVA invokes Smithson’s invisible white room, side-stepping institutional critique and trendy context manipulation for metapsychology and fluorescent ambience.
With a curved and seamless expanse of joint-compound and plaster, Larson successfully moulds the gallery into an affectionate hollow, filled with electrical outlets, phone jacks, environmental controls and fire detection apparatus. Never really displacing the structural integrity of the floor, wall and ceiling, her stylistic treatment is analogous to collagen injections; rounding and smoothing the perpendicular planes of the space with a new contoured mass. It’s a fundamental sculptural technique and a prudent feminising of a neutered space.
Larson intentionally falls short of establishing convincing illusions but her white, minimal handling of familiar edges, artificial light and planer intersections evoke the projects of Robert Irwin and James Turrell. The gallery is no longer a vessel for artefacts but an acute, shadowless volume with only intrinsic electrical mounts to blemish its complexion.
Larson has also discovered a way of developing light and space into a vernacular architecture. Potentially, the gallery is a show room for an interior design that can provoke transcendental conditions while maintaining practical considerations for the office or home - a tasteful remodelling technique that parallels the happy swollen curves that shape the new VW Bug, Apple’s new Imac and inflatable furniture. Marina Warner has called this bloated style ‘infantile’ but if selectively expanded, as is the case with Larson’s exhibition, the contours takes on the look of optimism and prosperity.
Hanging onto determinacy and order, Larson finds it unnecessary to over-inflate context. Her gallery installation is located in one of four exhibition spaces that comprise INOVA. Gallery Two, Larson’s space, is housed in one of the original University of Wisconsin’s buildings. Like the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society, the gallery is contextualised within higher education; institutional hallways, classrooms and faculty offices. Although bracketed in pedagogic overtures - literally across the hall from the University’s Art History offices - Larson bravely steers clear of chilly critical rhetoric and instead breathes a whole new type of spatial control and formal beauty into the state sponsored exhibition space.
Smithson continued his discussion of site-specific work by saying, ‘You’re supposed to just respond metaphysically to the painting in terms of colour, line, structure, you know, and talk about the framing support, but forget about where you are standing, where you are and the ambience of the space.’ Larson’s wall and floor treatments collapse location, atmosphere, decor and hopeful disposition into an organised mass that is neither architecture, installation, sculpture or painting. Where you are standing in relation to the lack of iconic objects is overtly apparent. Larson has successfully inverted sculptural form - as if a Richard Artschwager table or a Donald Judd cube had closed in around you. Context becomes unclear whilst craft, structural integrity and formal beauty define your physical and psychological perceptions.
Finally, like a dangling participle, Larson chose to leave an old beige rotary telephone sitting on the floor. Plugged into the wall jack, it is obviously not a prop but a functioning phone. A conduit to the real world? A direct line out of academia or simply a re-assertion of the everyday? Regardless, it is a humorous safeguard against the euphoric haze of too much fluorescent abstraction.
Michelle Grabner
