Specificity

Denise Carvalho

In a time when our conception of history is not only non-linear and multidimensional but also simulated and sensational, the notion of a movement or a style or a school is certainly obsolete. One might have to accept that the authenticity and rationale of prior histories led to how we envision the art of today. "Specificity" can be interpreted as a universal moment in any history in which artists of similar verve and depth find singularity in aesthetic form. More to the point, specificity can be understood as the moment when artists find the universal language of form within a particular situation, or even the particularity and singularity of an expression and concept within a universally established form. The true art appreciator will also find another expression in works that contain specificity: a language of individuality. Specificity is individuality as the utmost proposition of art. It is through the solidarity of a movement that art makes progress toward changing the world, but it is by finding individuality that art recreates itself. Specificity as an aesthetic mark can be found in the simple integration between form and idea.

For Stanley Whitney, specificity can be constructed by the most essential geometric forms such as the square or the rectangle. While Whitney reduces the number of shapes to squares or lines, he expands their chromatic relational possibilities. Deconstruction of the grid may be suggested in the original concept, but the result is free from any illusionist references to what is real. By building his concept purely as form, he finds its integration with the concept, and by focusing on this integration as a whole, he finds them again separate and independent. For example, in Here and There (2001), contrasting colors determine the individuality of each square, though the row where these squares are placed remains autonomous from the system of the other rows. The idea is that each form is contained within a larger system while also floating in its own independent and interdependent universe.

Whitney starts from a changing perception of form to determine what is specific, while John Tremblay's large acrylic paintings begin with a fixed notion of elemental form to determine specificity as an interplay of multirelational potentialities. Tremblay's fluid geometric shapes, seemingly alive on the two-dimensional plane, create multirelational perspectives, pointing to an ever-changing position of the viewer. It is through these multiple visual capabilities that a physical reality is assumed. The illusory visual worlds become real in the aesthetic frame. As any other theoretical method, they are created as abstract tools of thought. Tremblay's work questions optical limitations of space in relation to time. This is how semi-geometric, semi-organic shapes create an allusion to the space from which they originate. They are determined by optical illusion but they are also simply lines and colors. They are both background and foreground, alluding to advancing and receding movements, to a sense of stasis and motion. This is the kind of specificity that Tremblay's paintings require: one that encompasses multiple optical perceptions.

Multiple perceptions are part of the process in which color becomes form in the large paintings of Wojciech Lazarczyk. Lazarczyk's work points to suprematism and neoplasticism, but his non-objective paintings are rather personal and immediate, focusing more on their own self-referentiality than on the derivation from other art forms in history. Color theory, for Lazarczyk, is born out of an organic interweaving of brush stroke after brush stroke, pigment over pigment, continuously applied on the canvas. The result is a paradox of color depths and an apparent flatness. Whereas these monochromes of color appear flat, they are a system of passages in which water and pigment slowly build in depth. So, instead of looking like flat and thick surface, these colors appear extremely thin and deep. Certainly, similar visual effects have appeared in both constructivist art in Europe and Russia and in minimal art in the United States, but what is ultimately innovative is the subjective intensity of one's experience of art in any period and at all levels of creative departure. Though Lazarczyk's large spaces of color can evoke a sense of permanence and absoluteness, his process is always immediate and particular. His work is totally self-contained, therefore creating exactly the opposite effect on the viewer: a sense of distance. His large horizontal or vertical expanses of color can be perceived as both illusive dreamscapes or completely synthetic determinations of time and space. Nevertheless, it is the specificity of color as form that sustains the importance of the particular within the universal.

Doug Harvey's work mixes everything from paint to peanuts to foam, from painting to installation to sound. Things find their way to consensus no matter how different they seem. Aware of the inevitability of consensus, Harvey pushes his ideas toward its polar opposite. Each of Harvey's materials is specifically and intentionally chosen purely for its physical and metaphysical potentialities. However, the overall consensus in his work is always speculative. Beyond each of his abstracted painted depictions there perhaps lies a story, perhaps not. The state of wonder this provokes is ironically associated with a sense of loss. Doug Harvey brings into his frame an abundance of visual possibilities, without mapping their relationships or locating them within a specific story. His work carries out a sense of detachment from any historical background, and has no specific reference to any other style or iconography. It intends exactly the opposite: to ramify all possible ends, and to distance art from a determinate point. The innumerable possibilities in his art's departure allow it to create a consensus and closure within itself. This ironic movement of art as an end in itself is also an indicator of a sense of time that is always present. The specificity of a constantly present time in Harvey's work is both humorous and tragic.

That brings us back to the intention of the artist toward the object. Rina Banerjee's sculptural installations are intended as fragments of the near and far. Although here everything becomes universally connected, certain aspects of an object remain unique in the overall generality. This process is also reverted. In her exhibition Antenna, for example, an industrial object such as an umbrella can create diasporic relationships when assembled together with other more organically looking materials. By adding an organic sphere to the once industrial object, Banerjee recreates the object in a world where function plays no role. This kind of multidimensional second nature of the object speaks of the artist's own transmigrant experiences and of her vision of culture as nomadic and in constant change, but also of her own awareness of how easily things become exoticized. Banarjee's specificity is the irony of the movement before and after an appropriation of a code, the moment between naming or claiming an object and its immeasurable potential.

Coming from the other end, Martha Burgess's multimedia work addresses information and technology as specific tools for understanding visuality. Her installation features stripes of vivid colors as the backdrop for large hyperreal color still life photographs, which are connected to a CD-Rom and two iMacs. The interactive piece allows the viewer to click on the still life images to find information about them that otherwise one would have to wonder about. For example, by clicking on the flower images depicted in Golden Orchid, one can read that more than a century ago in China "Golden Orchid" was an association established to legalize lesbian relationships through marriage. In a conventional still life, objects are usually diffused by a romantic aura, whereas Burgess turns the whole concept of the gaze around by fusing sentimentality with an overt sense of visibility, rendering images of flowers windows of information and clarification rather than concealment.

Perhaps overt visibility derives from the same urgency to create signifiers that also creates displacement. To see in an expansionist capitalist society is to create distance. Though to see in a displaced society is to get closer to the source of action, is also to revert an idealized distance by physical approximation. Charlie Citron's large photographs depict GI Joe in different environments. Dressed as a cowboy, GI Joe appears everywhere from Chinatown in New York City to Cape Canaveral in Florida, inside stores in Singapore and at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. GI Joe also goes back to the West where he recollects and reconfigures his own stereotypes. Citron plays with numerous stereotypes of the American cowboy by documenting how the representation provokes diverse cultural interactions and responses. Whether in the arms of a child in Macedonia, or in front of a Palace in India, Citron's GI Joe functions as a link between cultures and peoples. Having transcended its commercial import, Joe becomes a tool in the dialogue of negotiation between East and West. The toy is always depicted in conflict zones whether geographical, ideological, aesthetic, or historical. These spaces of struggle are both arbitrary and specific, depicting similar situations of war, poverty, and degradation, or encompassing similar human feelings and emotions. Citron's work also evokes the specificity and uniqueness of each documented snapshot, reminding us of how contingent and spontaneous each moment can be.

Similar ambiguities are experienced by viewers in Julie Moos's photographs, despite the fact that her process involves planning, studying, and staging her subjects. Her work addresses the ways images are charged with stereotypes that are socially and culturally constructed, and that convey the viewer's unconscious desire to sustain rather than subvert those models. Domestic Series (2001) consists of eight portraits of homeowners and housekeepers from Birmingham, Alabama, paired next to each other. Most photographs depict a white person and an African American. Despite the fact that the relationship between the pairs is not known, there seems to be a predisposition of the viewer to associate the African American subjects, especially the women, with the lower ranking position of the housekeeper. Although today's placement of black women in executive, artistic, and academic positions challenges our assumptions and taboos, it is interesting to note how deeply ingrained these constructions still are, and how much they help to sustain prejudices connected with them.

It is through the observations of the ethnographer that the artist speaks critically of representation of the subject and its duplicity. This is the point in Olu Oguibe's Ethnographia 2.1 (2000), the first in a three-part series of 100 drawings. Here, an Englishman traveling in the New World documents "other" cultures through a combination of facts and stereotypes. Each installment of the series features a protagonist whose views reflect ignorance but are expressed in authoritative first-person statements. They include an American traveling in the Old Country (England), and an African writing home from England. By fusing literary elements (the protagonist, the concept of fiction, and the travelogue) with anthropology (taxonomy) and drawing (a primal human expression), the artist questions, humorously criticizes, and redefines a conventional and stereotypical notion of history. In some of Oguibe's other paintings and installations about Africa, more tragic accounts depict a series of paintings of crutches in black and red, silhouettes of a standing ladder, or the anguished figure of a woman lying on a bed. He illustrates African history as both personal and phantasmatic. The absence of information and the repetition of signs in his paintings are like screams in a void, like references of an untold history, one composed of mementos and remembrances.

Objects manipulated by people can also refer to the games of power, fear, and death, which have become symbolic tools ingrained in our system of knowledge, in our media industries, encoded in consumable objects and toys, and even in portraits and memories. Nadia Benbouta's lyrical and yet intensely political paintings present these concepts as elements of display and reflection. Paintings such as Cisjordanie (1988-2000) or Gaza (1994-2000) provide us with a contemplation of war through the eyes of the media. Using conventional methods of painting and photography such as centering the object to manipulate the focus of the viewer, these paintings remind us of how limited and distorted our sense of reality has become through sensational media documentation. The portrait of the clone Dolly (1998), or of a Camera de Surveillance (1999), takes us right to the core of power manipulation. Even more striking is Julie et Melissa (1998), a portrait of a group of children in which only two have distinguishable faces. Here, specificity is the irony of the documented moment, one that both simulates and reveals reality.

Fides Becker's paintings aestheticize women's stereotypes in everyday situations depicted in advertising. In Becker's work, in the artist is at the center of her actions: she washes dishes, does laundry, irons, and vacuums. Drawing from pop culture as much as condemning it, Becker's images of trivial routine cannot escape the sensationalized depictions of alienation and marginalization. Ugly color combinations such as yellow-purple-pink or ochre-pink-green are systematically and geometrically arranged in multiple blocks of tempera, creating a sense of a fragmented reality.

Standing in contrast to the spatial fragmentation of Becker's work are Habib Kheradyar's whole and large spaces of color. In these extended minimal expressions of color, time is relatively slow and continuous and space is monumental and magnanimous. Though these paintings have a two-dimensional language of color, form appears as a three-dimensional expression of astronomical movements in space. One can feel the dilating openness of Kheradyar's imagination through the vastness of his color fields and their humbly enclosing onto the limitations of form. Specificity is this ability of art to shift directions and expressions without losing its sense of totality.

David Perry's semi-figurative, semi-abstract paintings on bed sheets depict a world of both chaos and synergy. Colorful and dynamic references to the dream-state that reality is, Perry's paintings combine an intuitive sense of concentric synchrony and harmony found in mandalas and a crowded world of cartoonish episodes. There, the human figure seems to come out of the world of modernist painting. Half mythologized, half psychoanalyzed, these figures represent the conflict and irony of modernity itself. His paintings are human scale, his concept of size is always relational. Embracing a smorgasbord of tendencies from abstract expressionism to pop, his work is the expression of the postmodern as symptom: it engulfs everything as fragments to create a totality.

Finally, Daniel Robert Hunziker's architectural environments, such as Is This Rock (2001) serve to deconstruct the apparent interdependence of spatial/social realities, allowing a specificity that is not conclusive or contained. The work consists of both its architectural structure and its relation to the existing architecture of the gallery, the spatial/temporary and the spatial/permanent. The spatial/temporary, which is constructed with an aluminum frame in the form of an enclosing rectangular space and stacks of prefabricated imitation-wood panels, filling in some of the sides of the frame, maintains a relation of inclusion/exclusion with the existing architecture of the room. The photo of a rock star lit by a fluorescent light stands on one of the stacks. His image hints at the spatial dimension that is animated by a socially "prefabricated" identity. His correlation with the idea of self, or of the memory of an appropriated self, determines the place of internal specificity of the piece. The rock singer, also implied in the title, is the subjective voice in both architecture and sculpture. He is pictorial structure and the absent self, subject and object, self and simulacrum. He brings the formal universality of the principles of mass and void implied in a dialectics between architecture and sculpture to a personal and social level. This exercise of dialectics is also seen in some of the sides of the temporary frame, which are extended to indeterminate open spaces, converting the relation between inside and outside to one between negative spaces. While the concept of enclosure usually suggests contained power, deterritorialized spaces could refer to passages between the enclosed spaces or peripheral fragments. This spatial dialectics is accentuated by both modular structure (architecture) and image (rock star), suggesting a state of negotiation between relations of mass production and ideology. By articulating inside-out and outside-in spatial relations, Hunziker creates an architectural/aesthetic specificity that is in constant duality and change.

As this exhibition shows, the term specificity certainly works on several levels. Abstract works elucidate a poetic or simply a formal dialogue with the viewer. Some works praise and clarify their subjective importance, others bring the object to the front, articulating different ways of perceiving it. Some pieces take us to distinct cultures, highlighting the specificity of each, while displaying the uniqueness of each work's individuality. Why is this important in our time? The answer is that what is specific in art can be read as a place where the object of reference is in constant negotiation with its ascribed determinacy, whether as subject matter or medium or process. This negotiation points to art as drawing from both immediacy and its precedents or historical patterns (media culture, subculture, historical data, interviews, personal experience, individual and historical practices with a medium) to form a place of philosophical autonomy. This is art that serves to raise the bar of tolerance and to further the appreciation of a multifaceted world. A specificist art conjoins a state of difference and the uncountable possibilities in which the discourse of contemporary art lies. Nevertheless, to think as well as to create art is to renounce all differences. Perhaps this statement suggests that this art subscribes to a model of relativism; but, if so, not as an aim in itself but as a result from the relationship between artist and medium, critique and form. Indeed, it is the autonomy of art that suggests its potential relativism, one grounded in the languages of many histories, but it is the various subjectivities in art that account for its most contemporary aim: its specificity.