Pamela Rosenkranz
Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Venice, Italy
Light and water – that is, sun and earth – play a strange and subversive duet in Pamela Rosenkranz’ exhibition at the Venice branch of the Istituto Svizzero di Roma. If both solar and aquatic energies are often prefigured in the clichés of positive thinking – ‘life-giving’, ‘life-affirming’ etc. – the Zurich-based artist dispenses with this familiar mythology and takes a darker, more skeptical stance. Her show, titled ‘Our Sun’, explores our closest star as a metaphor for the ‘empty center of ideology’, as the artist puts it, while rising and polluted waters speak for their own destruction. Using the city of Venice’s singular characteristics – water and heat, vast cultural holdings, ruin, past political and religious power – Rosencranz explores the relationship of culture to environment, with an emphasis on the sun as a symbol for a kind of emptying, estranged power: creative, destructive, personal and political.
Artists have long mined Venice’s languorous, swampy death for apocalyptic creative visions, from Gothic masterpieces of the Middle Ages to modern classics like Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912). Rosenkranz’ works on view – which include a planetary video installation, a series of plastic water bottles filled with skin-hued liquids and large-scale framed painted prints and a sculpture that employ the metallic foil surfaces of emergency blankets – are similarly influenced by Venice’s end-of-the-world undertow. For ‘Stretch Nothing’ (all works 2009), a striking series of prints whose mark-making oddly projects the gestural power of Abstract Expressionists like Franz Kline, Rosenkranz uses emergency blankets as grounds upon which to apply earthy, tawny-colored paint either by body-printing or freehand. The blankets – reflective gold on one side, sparkly silver on the other – are normally used to heat or cool bodies as dictated by some disaster; here, they have been stretched taut over a frame, the creases from their packaged folds still evident, creating a backdrop that suggests a glittery, Minimalist grid.
If the grounds of the works bring to mind the famed gold-gilded mosaics of Venice’s Basilica di San Marco, which light the cathedral’s dark recesses like a torch, the painted forms that overlay them – at once figurative, glyph-like and topographical – suggest both a twisting human body and the frequently consulted aerial maps of Venice, with their long, attenuated islands and minute cross-hatching of canals. Rosenkranz’ loosely painted forms are framed by the gold and silver emergency blankets in a way that strangely recalls the Renaissance paintings, everywhere in Venice, that often feature a halo of gold leaf around religious figures. But if Rosenkranz’ painted forms radiate light, they simultaneously appear nearly suffocated by it. By framing the prints behind glass, moreover, she layers on yet another reflective surface, increasing the feeling of both suffocation and a gorgeous, studied remove.
The work’s deft installation intensifies this feeling. In the Istituto Svizzero’s long, narrow gallery, shot through with light from the Grand Canal just outside, the artist hung two rows of prints facing one another. For a viewer positioned between them, glitter, glare, and the ambiguous painted forms – symbols of something we can’t quite identify – became all. A solitary sculptural work had also been placed on the floor between the prints. Made from one of the emergency blankets, silver side up, Bow Human’s long, rotund shape resembled an abstracted, bent body hunched over on the ground, as though seeking cover from some apocalyptic blast.
A counterpoint to all this gild and glitter comes in the form of its polar opposite: a large video projection enveloped the wall at the other end of the gallery with deep green and cerulean hues that penetrated the entire space. Ostensibly a moving view of the earth from outer space, Loop Revolution’s aerial images have been manipulated so that a vertical axis divides our planet at its very centre, creating identical symmetrical reflections like a constantly morphing Rorschach test. If such inkblot-like mirroring is a common trope of contemporary art – see the mirrored Salt Flats of Matthew Barney’s ‘Cremaster’ films, Bruce Conner’s inkblot drawings or Andy Warhol’s ‘Rorschach Paintings’ – Rosenkranz’ vision of a continually morphing earth, one that is not fixed but always regenerating, is startling and moving. It also alludes to a troubling truth – one currently debated by politicians and ‘climate treaties’ across the globe – that is usually not visible to the human eye. If the blue light the video projects falls over the gallery space like water, it is a weird water, one that neither cools nor sooths but chills instead.
This watery theme is taken up again in ‘Firm Being’, a series of plastic bottles of water that stand around the edge of the space, hovering near the walls like awkward gallery visitors or relics of some incoherent gathering. Plastered with stickers from mineral water companies like Evian and Figi, the bottles do not contain the clear water one expects but instead a thick-looking liquid in different hues of (mostly Caucasian) skin colour. The work’s intention feels a little heavy-handed – it concerns the way bottled water companies brand their water as something ‘purified’ that will improve one’s skin – but the bottles’ material presence is more ambiguous, and it adds a necessary layer of roughness, and accumulated detritus, to the otherwise intensely elegant installation.
Rosenkranz – whose conceptually discursive body of work was included in the Statements section of Art Basel this year, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Centre d’ Art Contemporain Genève next year – was inspired for her Venice show, in part, by the radical ecological writings of Iranian theorist and novelist Reza Negarestani. To that end, the artist asked Negarestani to write something to accompany the exhibition. The resulting untitled text, with its strange apocalyptic fervor, imbues the beauty of the works on view with an alarming menace. Evoking his ideas of ‘astral corpses’ and ‘heliocentric slavery’, Negarestani advocates an ‘ecological emancipation […] a return to the promiscuity of the earth,’ by which he means an idea of it less as a subject of the sun than as a free agent. Negarestani further aligns heliocentricism with Venice’s ‘aquatic capitalism’ – ‘The Empire of the Sun’ et al. – and sees the terrestrial waters as complicit agents in that market’s aims.
As Negarestani steadfastly claims: ‘For such an ecology, every moment is an apocalypse which cannot be culminated, and the sun is not the heart of darkness but that which cauterizes the gaping wound from which pulverizing contingencies (or climates) of the cosmic abyss bleed into our world.’ If Rosenkranz’ exhibition does not quite hew to the alarmist prophecies professed here, nor do the works within it view the sun and the earth with rose-tinted glasses. Instead, the artist appears willing to explore the darker recesses of the mythologies, and culture, we’ve spun of our exposure to our sun and the bodies of water that define our earth. That art works of such strange yet straightforward beauty should come from such an examination – skeptical in the deepest sense – seems, like light on water, exactly right.
Quinn Latimer
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