Mark Dion: An Archaeology of Disorder

Mark Dion “An Archaeology of Disorder” 2015. mixed media

An Archeology of Disorder was conceived by Mark Dion while artist in residence at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. The Royal Edinburgh Hospital is a psychiatric hospital founded in 1774 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The piece consists of a glass case that is filled with objects that have a conceptual association to the Hospital, its patients or its methods. For instance, there is a pile of puzzle pieces, to represent the act of puzzle rebuilding as a form of therapy; a taxidermic cat, representing a patient who insisted that he had a cat living in his stomach; a syphilitic skull symbolic of the tertiary stage syphilis sufferers who would have been housed there; and locks that trace detainment and security back over 200 years.

When I saw this piece, there was no information that accompanied it, so it meaning and conceptual associations were lost to me. It stood as a case of some interesting, some baffling objects, that did not seem to have an internal cohesiveness. After doing the research and understanding the concept of the collection, the meaning became clear, but it also brings up the issue of how does an artist successfully convey meaning, especially in a work who’s meaning is necessary to the understanding of the artist’s intent.

Detail of "An Archaeology of Disorder." Syphilitic skull.

Arthur Bruso

© 2017 Arthur Bruso

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WHERE IS HERE

Enrico Gomez | Emmy Mikelson | Kirsten Nash

SEPTEMBER 18 – NOVEMBER 20, 2022

The Map

by Elizabeth Bishop

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.

Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges

showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges

where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.

Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,

drawing it unperturbed around itself?

Along the fine tan sandy shelf

is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.

Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo

has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,

under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,

or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.

The names of seashore towns run out to sea,

the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains

—the printer here experiencing the same excitement

as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.

These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger

like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,

lending the land their waves’ own conformation:

and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,

profiles investigate the sea, where land is.

Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?

—What suits the character or the native waters best.

Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.

More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.

WHERE WE ARE is a basic concern of all humans. Our awareness of place probably stems from our need for self-preservation. An awareness of our surroundings and what may be lurking in them keeps the lion at bay and we get to live another day. The first artistic and magical symbols that ancient humans conceived of and drew were the line, the cross, and the grid.

The line is the way we describe our path of movement. It is a record of where we have gone or are going, from here to there. It also demarks our position in the landscape. The line is the horizon, above is the air, below is the Earth. The cross is an abstraction of the cardinal points: north, south, east, and west. It divides and orders space. Wherever we are, we are the center and from us space moves outward on all sides. The cross becomes the stability and regularity of the number 4: the seasons, the elements (fire, water, earth, air) and the winds. The grid is the idea of being static, of stillness and solidity. It depicts our idea of connected community; the created (what I have built) as opposed to the uncreated (the spirit). The grid is grounded in the process of manifestation. Through these basic symbols, humans began to define themselves and their place in the world. They began to understand where was here and safe, and where was there and danger.

Now we have maps, radar tracking, and global positioning by satellite (GPS). As long as we carry our mobile phone, we can track and find someone, or be found regardless of our feelings on the matter. Still, they all use the same symbols: the line, the cross, and the grid.

Curious Matter has brought together three artists: Enrico Gomez, Emmy Mikelson, and Kirsten Nash who each have based their ideas on location and geography. Each are looking at the earth and trying to define what is place, where is here, and what are we doing with it.

ENRICO GOMEZ, American Sunsets • Edelweiss : Southernmost • Ka Lae, Hawaii, Chrysoprase, Tiwaz, 2019, acrylic, watercolor, water soluble pencil, marble dust on paper, 11.75 x 9.75 x 1 inches

Enrico Gomez has taken his interest in the occult and of ecology and fused the two into his paintings. Layering three different images on top of one another, so that each image can be read between the alternating lines – the line of movement – Gomez superimposes the landscape image and an image of a runic symbol: Tiwaz (warrior), Dagaz (daybreak), Eihwaz (transition), Algiz (protection). Each of these symbols and their attributes adds their layered meaning to the image, while the linear composition adds a progressive movement of a Kenneth Noland stripe painting or the visual vitality of Lukas Samaras’ sewn fabric collages. These images become incantations or evocations to ecology, nature, and to ourselves, that we may treat our planet with greater care and understanding.

EMMY MIKELSON, River Scintillation, 2016, mixed media on paper (digital photograph and oil – photo taken at Adolpho Ducke Rainforest Reserve, Manaus, Brazil) 17 x 30 inches

Emmy Mikelson uses a labor-intensive method of painting, wiping and painting again to build the transparent planes of color on her digital images. This not only creates the subtle layering of transparencies that activate her luscious, lustrous surfaces, like Robert Delaunay’s Orphism paintings, they create structured planes in her anonymous landscape photographs. The base photographic image may be an image from the Brazilian rain forest, such as River Scintillation, but the identity of the location becomes secondary to the layered grid she has painted over it. The gray planes activate the surface and create a regulated visual movement that imposes itself over the watery surface of the river. The water wants to ripple and shimmer, while the painted grid-like structure wants to hold it firm. This sets up a tension between the natural and the human-made, between nature and wildness and construction and civilization. The where is not as important to Mikelson as the here. What is imposed on the landscape must be controlled and must work with the landscape. We must keep the underlying naturalness of the world if we are to impose anything upon it.

In works like Nutrient Bath no. 4, Milkelson is interested in the evolution of life from the primordial pond. Here again she creates a structured environment of circles and lines, the inanimate building blocks of molecules and their attractions. Layered like a Doug and Mike Starn transparency construction, she builds the structure that supports the emerging textured form coming into being in the lower right. Its skull-like shape alludes to what could possibly be the endgame for this new emerging entity. Like River Scintillation, there is an imposed structure of circles and lines, but the emergence of the furry beast sets off not only the visual interest, but an alarm to the world. How will this new form effect the whole?

KIRSTEN NASH, Parties Aren’t Meant to Last, 2019, oil and pencil on linen, 60 x 56 inches

Kirsten Nash is also enamored of the grid and the line. Her interest in the linear composition of Agnes Martin is evident in her series of paintings of empty parking lots. It is not the people of a civilization that interests Nash, but how that civilization imposes itself on the landscape. In a work like The Flood, she finds the geometric structure of the surface of water. Like Mikelson, Nash wants to impose a regularity upon a random, natural surface.

Nash also has an affinity with Chuck Close. In her painting Parties Aren’t Meant to Last, Nash starts with a pencil grid on the canvas, but then like Close, she finds the interest in each cell of the grid. By painting a color and shape in each square, Nash simultaneously keeps the underlying structure of the square, while erasing it too. What we become aware of is the erratic, jumpy movement our eyes make as we look for associations among the colors and shapes. Nash has created her own visual city, an imposed grid that has been built upon and inhabited by her color and shapes. It teems with the predicable, yet chaotic movements of a population of people. Nash has accepted that humans have imposed their structures upon the natural landscape. She celebrates it and finds comfort in its squared off uniformity.

Each of the artists in “Where is Here” are interested in the idea of place. Each of them is imposing something on the landscape. Gomez wants us to honor the naturalness, and spiritual identity of the land. Mikelson holds the middle ground between naturalness and human intervention – we should strive to work with the land as we build. Nash is more accepting of our interference and finds a sort of comfort with how we have constructed our place in it. These are not conflicting ideologies. As stewards of our planet, we have to consider all of these aspects. We are here and we have made our mark. What must we do now and in the future to keep the only place we have to live viable and healthy? What brings us comfort and still allows us to live compatibly with the other creatures that inhabit this Earth. As we forge these new means of living, we will create a new concept of “here.”

Raymond E. Mingst | Arthur Bruso

© 2022 Curious Matter used with permission

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Eulogy for John Zirkelbach

John Zirkelbach, self-portrait.

When I first moved to New York City, I took a job at Pearl Paint, the famous art supply store. It was meant to be a temporary job until I established myself and could find something better. A few months later, this guy named John Zirkelbach was hired. We were not working in the same department, nor on the same floor. In fact, I only met him by chance at a group employee orientation event. Something about his sullen attitude I found interesting, and I moved over to him and introduced myself. His answer to my introduction was, “If you're interested in sex, forget about it, but if you want to be friends that’s OK.” That was the beginning of a friendship that lasted years.

John and I became bonded and nearly inseparable. We both had come to New York as artists. He was getting his Masters in Art Education at NYU, hoping to become more employable. I was trying to create an art career. Together we explored what being an artist meant in New York and looking for a way into what seemed the impenetrable and capricious art scene of the city.

We joined groups, went to talks, saw performances, attended art openings, explored museums, exhibited our work and had long talks about art in West Village cafes. We went out to Far Rockaway on expeditions to the WWII ruins, searched out the vanishing remnants of the bizarre in Coney Island. Traipsed from Staten Island to the Bronx, searching out anything interesting and unusual that the City had to offer.

John was always cynical and often disappointed when things did not live up to expectations or the hype we had heard about it. He constantly complained that he had missed the best art scenes of Andy Warhol’s factory or the 1980s East Village art scene. Nearly everything for John was lame, over, boring, or stupid. It never bothered me. I was bemused by his grumpy attitude. I understood his desire to dismiss the often overpraised and sham business of the art world, although did not share his negative thinking. I was living my dream and was sharing this dream with John.

John and I maintained our closeness until romance interrupted our lives. First me with Raymond. Then him with Chris. He told me he had to find a boyfriend because I had found one. Our lives gradually moved in different directions after we partnered. John moved to Beacon, NY to a towered Victorian and I moved to Jersey City to a modest brownstone.

John became John Clark-Colon after he married Chris. Raymond and I married as well. I still kept our friendship close in my heart, even though we were no longer close in location.

John died suddenly on Wednesday, July 20, 2022. I mourn my friend and have been reliving the times when we were hopeful artists in New York looking for our way into the inner sanctum of recognition and fame. I hope John finds the afterlife everything he expects. But I can imagine him grumbling and saying, “is this it?”

To Chris Colon, John’s husband, I send my deepest condolences and much love during this difficult time.

From the Curious Matter exhibition, "Apparition."

From the Curious Matter exhibition, "Hocus Pocus."

John Zirkelbach's statement from Hocus Pocus:

This work was a site specific work he did directly on the gallery wall at Curious Matter:

I chose the role of a shaman in this work to deconstruct preexisting myths combined with present day reality. The image is a combination of 1950s Vogue fashion models and a news photo of two Iranian teens about to be hung for crimes against Sharia law. The medium is ‘Fire Island Toothpaste,’ a mixture of KY jelly and toothpaste which is ascribed to the legendary drag queen Jackie Curtis.

… the silhouette of John’s installation lingered for years in spite of many coats of paint.

John Zirkelbach (AKA John Clark-Colon), September 4, 1966 - July 20, 2022

Arthur Bruso © 2022

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