Slippage: Thoughts on Liminal Space in Contemporary Art
“When you’re looking at two things, don’t look at them, look between them.”
–John Baldessari
Note: This is a curatorial statement written in conjunction with an exhibition I curated title “Slippage.” If you find yourself in New York City this Summer, you are invited to visit!
This exhibition explores what it means to function in a liminal space between two states of being and highlights moments of “slippage,” the liminal experience occurring at the juncture where disparate elements meet. After researching liminality as seen in literature, psychoanalysis, and my own observations during a global pandemic, I came to see liminality not as a discomfort to avoid, but as a generative site. Gaston Bachelard wrote in the The Poetics of Space that ‘imagination augments the values of reality;” art is that augmentation brought to life, and as viewers we can occasionally see the lines between the world as it has existed and how an artist shapes and re-presents it to us.
The five organizing themes for Slippage are Home & Privacy, Physical Distance, Nature’s Adaptation, Between Materials, and Moments of Action. These topics were identified through conversations with the artists, when possible, and my own research. They are not fixed categories, and I encourage visitors to rearrange works in their imagination to create new groupings from what they see.
Home & Privacy
Ideas about home and privacy appear most prominently in the work of Jen
Everett. In her two series Redoubled/Something We Carry (2017–2019), and
Unheard Sounds, Come Through (2019–2020), she works with her own family’s archives and found items, creating collages and objects that represent her childhood memories and what she describes as the “unencumbered” space of the home- beyond of the gaze of white supremacy- that focuses on “Black people just being.” In these installations Everett functions simultaneously as an artist and personal archivist, selecting what to hold back for her personal use, slipping between her roles as a family (private) historian and an exhibiting (public) artist.
Physical Distance
Asako Narahashi describes her work as a view into “that slightly distant feeling.” Her photography series titled Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water (2001) positions the viewer in the water at eye level, partly above and partly below the surface, possibly drowning or perhaps happily floating; we cannot be sure. In Dayanita Singh’s works from her Montage series, the foreground shows an unidentified room, and we can also see another space beyond it. The position of the viewer in seeing both spaces visually emphasizes the threshold between them, allowing that juncture to become the focus. Upon first reading, I thought both Narahashi’s and Singh’s works referenced imminent death–one under water and the other moving through darkened space–but I have come to believe they reflect a sense of detachment, the visual manifestation of what it feels like to be physically separated from solid ground and noticing it, perhaps for the first time.
Candida Höfer’s photograph of a library, Bibliothek Kunsthalle Basel (1999), in which the structural mechanics of the building are purposefully visible to the public, also highlights physical distance. The architecture of the building has created a visual slippage, the barrier between public and private, visually available to the public.
Nature’s Adaptation
Our complicated relationship with the natural environment can be read
through both Marcelo Moscheta’s and Vanessa Renwick’s work. Moscheta’s Pau Brasil (2020) displays the destructive results of interfering with nature, while Renwick’s Layover presents the beauty of nature’s response after humans leave. In the former, a hand gradually removes each of the aculeus (superficial spines) that cover the trunk of the Pau Brasil tree, a resource cited in Brazil’s Constitution and exploited to exhaustion. As the artist states, “We continue in an eternal dispute between maintaining the roots that make us a nation or surrendering to dominant influences, global and foreign, that slowly remove what [is] most valuable.”
Renwick’s Layover video depicts an annual nesting of birds taking over an abandoned building in Oregon. The creatures’ innate movements are accompanied by an original score that begins gently but increases in volume and intensity. The result is like a call to action, asking us to recognize that we have not undertaken sufficient corrections to the environmental crisis and we are, therefore, in a state of liminality between sustainability and irreversible degradation.
Between Materials
Two artists in the exhibition complicate traditional notions of how materials and mediums function as a form of in-betweenness. Shin il Kim turns scenes drawn with pressed lines onto paper into stop-motion films in Door
(2003) and Water (2003). The main subject’s absence within each “drawing”
requires the viewer to fill in the blank space with the assumed remainder of the scene. This brings to mind “visual slippages,” a term architects use to describe purposeful gaps in a particular space that one’s eye instinctively fills in order to make the building whole.
Similarly, Anna Barriball’s Smoke Studies (2018), which exist somewhere on the continuum between rubbings and drawings, call attention to mundane everyday objects. Detritus from a candle brings forth the relief of a window grid from her studio. Both Kim’s and Barriball’s processes require the viewer to connect missing information in order to form the complete image and to correct the slippage. Nadia Liz Estela’s untitled paintings (2020 and 2021) also play with the traditional uses of material, creating tension between what may appear to be a peaceful presentation of her painted canvases and rope, shells, and wax that reference historical forms of violence. For Estela, who describes her work as “a visual language where contradictions exist in the same plane,” the work is simultaneously two and three-dimensional, representing a fraught unease in which, as the artist explains, “the self is trapped by multiple rooted identities.”
Moments of Action
The psychological state of right-before-something-happens can be seen in both Marina Abromovic and Ulay’s Imponderabilia (1977) and in Thomas Demand’s Kreuzung (2004). In the former, we see the video documentation of a performance in which visitors must enter the museum through a threshold
flanked by the nude artists:one male, the other female.Thus, a decision must be made about which way — which artist — to face. Some onscreen participants appear slightly smug as they pass through, others look apparently unaffected, and viewers today can only imagine what it is like for each individual as they wait their turn to decide how to enter. As this work continues to be performed in different venues by different artists, its longevity is a testament to our continued interest in perceptions of social comfort and gender.
Demand’s Kreuzung (2004) extends the idea of thresholds into the political
realm. It depicts an empty (and one could imagine quiet) intersection in Budapest where the first Soviet Union tanks entered the city during the Hungarian revolution of 1956. The way in which Demand fabricates the monochromatic scene without any sign of life creates the eerie indication something is about to happen that would leave a lasting mark. This work is especially affecting today in Spring of 2022 as we experience the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In both Kreuzung and Imponderabilia the setting is itself a threshold; each is quite literally sited in a crossover space, allowing for a double use of the definition of liminality: physical and temporal. Finally, Luigi Ghirri’s Modena (1092–1974) is the punctuation mark of the exhibition, a note to remind us of the simplicity of liminal spaces, that ultimately they are just the spaces between that we often overlook.
- JVN, 2022
Sources
The Poetics of Space. Gaston Bachelard, 1954
Thresholds: Space, Time and Practice. Neri & hu, 2021
Narahashi quote: https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/asako_narahashi/
Baldessari quote: https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s5/john-baldessari-in-systems-segment/
All other artist quotes from conversations and correspondence with the artists
Literary Inspiration for further reading:
My Abandonment by Peter Rock
Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
“The Bullet in the Brain”- Tobias Wolfe (short story)
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
On Imagination by Mary Ruefle
Lewis Carroll’s 1874 ‘nonsense’ poem, ‘The Hunting of the Snark’
Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart
