Red Chuck

Hammer Opening

Just a quick note to mention that my cousin Phoebe Washburn has a show opening today at UCLA's Hammer Museum. Entitled It Has No Secret Surprise, Phoebe's installation is another amazing meditation on the ideas of recycling, refuse, and architecture.

Last year I got to see Phoebe's solo show at the Weatherspoon Art Museum. I was totally blown away. Her installation was Richard Serra scaled, large and imposing. This particular show had a gyre-like quality. You walked around and then down and under a scaffold that in turn supported large, circular bundles of color-coated recycled newspapers. And though everything was meticulously put together, you were left with the impression that this was an anonymous construction, something left behind by a construction crew. In this way, her work is not only the sum of its parts but also the equal of its components.

But what really gets me about her work, is once again, this sense of anonymity. So much art work tends to point back to the artist. So many artists are self referential. In Phoebe's work you are drawn out of the self referential dialogue of the artist and his or her creation and into the more outwardly referential dialogue of elements and forces: landscape vs architecture, trash vs treasure, structure vs chaos.

Also Phoebe's work tends to bring environmental issues to mind, which is not surprising since her structures are made entirely of recycled materials. In gallery press, so much emphasis is put on recycling as part of her "process" but I think there's a greater message delivered by her end product. Her installations stand on a question — what are we doing with this stuff? Of course, some people guffaw and say "Why do this?" but I think these structures loudly answer, "Why not?" Aren't more wasteful things being done in this day and age with our left overs?

And though I'd like to think her work speaks a global language, I do think there is something very American about what she is doing. Phoebe herself pointed this out to me when she described an installation she was working on in Italy a couple of years ago. When she went out into the city to collect her materials she had a hard time coming up with enough lumber. That's because many of the Italian worksites she visited were already recycling and reusing their wood scraps in a much more effecient manner than in American worksites. That said, Phoebe deals in a very American idiom, that of conspicuous waste. But you don't really need a story from the artist to understand this fact. Filling a gallery space as large as the Hammer with recycled materials bares witness to the living legacy of American trash and plunder. Thankfully Phoebe has a vision for what can be done with large amounts of our unwanted stuff.

Posted by Red Chuck at September 7, 2005 04:01 PM