Essay by Sharon
Corwin for Currents 1 exhibition catalog, Colby College Art Museum
2005
Altering Perceptions
Julianne Swartz
uses commonplace materials and simple technologies to create complex aesthetic
situations. Her work challenges our preconceptions and expectations about
art and asks us to see the world in new ways. Swartz's sculptures and installations
are often purposefully low-tech in a high-tech world. Her materials, in fact,
can seem quite mundane-scrap wood, PVC pipes, Plexiglas, Mylar, vinyl, mirrors-and
far from the traditionally valorized materials of high art. Yet the seeming
simplicity of Swartz's materials and technologies often belie a much deeper
project. Swartz also frequently uses intangible materials in her art-primarily
light and sound. It is just this immateriality that interests her. "Light,"
she explains, "is one of my primary materials because it instills presence
without physicality."1 Light and sound function for Swartz as materials to
be refracted, distorted, and manipulated. By exploring thresholds of perception,
her work often functions in a liminal field-in between the perceptible and
the immaterial. In so doing, Swartz transforms the ordinary into the magical,
the unremarkable into the fascinating.
When Swartz uses
a more high-tech medium in her art-fiber optics, for example, as in her sculpture
Excavation-she exposes its mechanism: a visible battery, live wires, a fiber-optic
cable. In her art, we see the functioning of technology; Swartz, in effect,
opens up the machine in order to show us its inner workings. Her sculptural
machines encourage us to question how we conceive of our relationship to technology
today. In this digital age, we often take for granted the functioning of our
technological world, rarely comprehending or questioning how its operations
and communications take place-computers and telephones, for example, allow
split-second transmissions with little evidence of how they work. By simplifying
and exposing technical functions, Swartz demystifies such processes, making
them visible and ultimately more comprehensible. For instance, in Can You
Hear Me?, commissioned by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in the summer
of 2004, communication technology was reduced to its most rudimentary mode-a
yellow PVC pipe carried the voices of participants through this simple acoustical
conduit from the street to a room inside the Sunshine Hotel. The piece's location
next to a pay phone on the street further highlighted the elementary nature
of this primitive mode of communication.
Swartz's periscope
sculptures, three of which are on view in currents, focus the viewer's perception
but often play with or subvert their expectations. Swartz's lenses reverse
images, blur scenes, distort scale, or merge reflections. Upon looking into
one of her periscopes, the viewer encounters an initially confounding view-one
that reflects multiple perspectives of the viewer rather than something at
the other end. The effects constructed by means of lenses and mirrors are
at once disorienting and reorienting, forcing viewers ultimately to readjust
their relationship to what is observed: the top of one's head in Higher View
or one's position in the gallery in You Are Here. In In-Fill-Trait, one's
profile is partially superimposed over a frontal reflection of one's face;
when two people look into the different portals of the sculpture, a hybrid
face is reflected.
An important
progenitor for Swartz's artistic exploration of the optical prospects of mirrors
can be found in the work of the Minimalist and Earthworks artist Robert Smithson.
In 1965, Smithson created a sculpture of mirrors, Enantiomorphic Chambers,
in which two mirrors positioned in steel supports on the wall upset perceptual
expectations. When the viewer enters Smithson's "chambers," the viewer's reflection
is denied through the oblique angle of the mirrors. A similar disorientation
of visual preconception is evident in Swartz's use of mirrors and lenses.
But whereas Smithson's Enantiomorphic Chambers are ultimately an act of negation,
Swartz's work functions through augmentation-the adding of multiple, and at
times divergent, views.
The perceptual
and physical engagement of the viewer is a key element in Swartz's artistic
project. The periscopes, like Swartz's lens pieces, rely on the viewer to
complete them. In these interactive sculptures, or "participatory scopes"
as Swartz calls them, the viewer becomes a part of the work with their reflection
incorporated into the piece. The viewer sees, in this sense, the act of seeing
while their position in space is observed from a detached perspective. This
simultaneous activation and objectification of the viewer is fundamental to
Swartz's work.
Can You Hear
Me?, constructed in New York City's Bowery, demanded partic- ipation in order
to function. The work, however, extended beyond a reflection of the participants'
positions in the environment to a consideration of their social role in the
world. Can You Hear Me?, like much of Swartz's art, was about communication.
This rudimentary communication device connected the lobby of the Sunshine
Hotel, one of the last remaining "flop houses" in a neighborhood once famously
filled with them, to street level, where those who passed by could talk to
those in the hotel's lobby and vice versa. The piece also incorporated a mirror
system that reflected a small and inverted image of each person's face for
the other. The work allowed vision and conversation between urban sites not
usually connected, questioning what we normally see and whom we normally communicate
with in the city. "I feel like these men [in the hotel] are powerless in the
gentrification of their neighborhood," Swartz explains. "I wanted to make
a piece that would allow them to be seen and heard-at their discretion-amplify
their voices literally and metaphorically."2 By traversing such boundaries
that define our social spaces, Can You Hear Me? asked for communication between
the socially regulated spaces of the city-between social groups, between the
public and the private.
Many of Swartz's
installations are site-specific, engaging the existing architecture for which
the work is conceived. In particular, she is interested in uncovering places
that are often kept from the public's view: the pristine environment of the
museum or the gallery-the paradigmatic "white cube"-is excavated and undone
in her work. Swartz often penetrates the museum's boundaries-puncturing the
skin of the gallery wall and revealing areas that are usually off-limits.
Storage rooms, utility sheds, basements, and interiors of walls have been
variously engaged. For Un-Time Structure at the Colby College Museum of Art,
Swartz excavated a space in the ceiling of the museum's Davis Gallery. Swartz's
installation exposes the inner workings of the gallery's usually hermetic
architecture-the electrical systems, support beams, insulation, and duct work.
Like Un-Time
Structure, Swartz's Excavation breaks down the structural limits of the museum-literally
excavating, as the title suggests, a wall in the gallery. A circuit of thin
Plexiglas tubing carries a sinuous 50-foot line of fiber optic cable across
the gallery, transmitting an LED signal from the battery at one end of the
sculpture to its terminus in the east wall of the Davis Gallery. A small hole
has been cleaved into the wall, breaching the gallery's envelope. Behind this
rupture, the work reveals a "secret," as Swartz calls it-a mysterious event
created through her intervention-in this case, light refracted into the colors
of the spectrum. Swartz's excavations, in this manner, transform once neutral
and concealed spaces into newly perceived, magical environments.
For her work
in the 2004 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Somewhere Harmony,
Swartz uncovered a similarly overlooked space in the museum -an engineer's
cabinet in the fourth-floor stairwell. In this previously unremarkable cabinet,
Swartz installed the sonic source of the piece-an eight-track composition
recorded by the artist of more than 64 voices singing, humming, and speaking
the lyrics to the song "Over the Rainbow." These sounds were piped through
a system of clear Plexiglas tubes that traversed the museum's six-story stairwell.
Swartz's composition from Somewhere Harmony, which is included in the exhibition
at Colby, is a hypnotic, cacophonous, and ethereal expression of hope and
nostalgia.
Swartz's use
of immaterial elements is also evident in Spectrum. In this sculpture of magnets,
wires, plastic, thread, and washers, Swartz animates the magnetic forces that
exist in the spaces between the sculptural elements. The formal character
of the piece is the direct result of the attraction exerted by the magnetic
pull of the multicolored threads and washers. By animating this tension, the
sculpture displays the strength of an intangible force while suggesting the
fragility of a delicate equilibrium.
In a similar
way, Un-Time Structure animates the immaterial, giving time an audible presence.
With its exposed wiring, electrical boards, and speakers, the sculpture makes
visible the workings of this time machine; it does not, however, mark time
other than to express its passing through a series of audible ticks. Although
resolutely mechanical in its materials, the piece also invokes natural phenomena-the
rhythmic chirp of crickets, or the pulse of a heartbeat-through metronomic
clicks. Un-Time Structure emanates distinct beats from different places on
the sculpture. The viewer's auditory perception of the work is dependent on
their position in relation to it; visual perception is similarly variegated
as the viewer circumnavigates the piece and observes it from multiple perspectives.
Swartz adds another level of perception in her inclusion of the 12 "spectators"-her
term for the anthropomorphic Plexiglas tubes with optical lenses that surround
the scaffolding of the structure-which offer their lenses as eyes through
which to view the piece. Peering through these visual surrogates, the viewer
is given views of the structure that are alternately inverted, blurred, minimized,
and doubled. The "spectators" do not, in this sense, necessarily aid in the
viewers' ability to see the piece, but rather augment their perception of
it by offering different and unexpected views. Refusing a fixed and constant
view, Swartz's art explores a variable and ever-changing world.
Swartz's currents
exhibition also features a site-specific work, Line In/Line Out, commissioned
especially for the Colby College Museum of Art. The work hails potential museum
visitors and leads them into the museum along a vinyl line drawing that festoons
the museum's entrance, then follows an axis from the lobby into the Davis
Gallery. Once in the museum, the line connects with an embedded lens in a
wall erected at the gallery entrance. Looking through this lens, the viewer
can perceive the rest of Swartz's exhibition on view behind the entry wall.
This view, however, is far from clear: the artist's lens offers an inverted
and distorted reflection of the gallery and a magical introduction to the
work installed within. At the same time, the sinuous, bright pink line of
the piece snakes its way through the architecture of the museum-through walls,
ceiling panels, light fixtures, and doorways-leading the eye over aspects
of the building often overlooked. As Swartz's line enters the lobby, its relationship
to Sol LeWitt's mural Study for Wall Drawing #803-wavy color bands with a
grey, red, yellow, and blue border, which occupies the adjacent lobby wall,
is highlighted. The color of Swartz's line echoes and amplifies LeWitt's tableau
of brightly colored waves, while her choice of material-a shiny pink vinyl-serves
to challenge the dichotomy between the so-called "high" and the "low". The
purposefully "low" quality of Swartz's vinyl line draws our attention to the
traditional hierarchy of materials in the arts and challenges our notions
of what art can be, much as LeWitt's work challenges certain notions of authorship
and originality.
Standing in the
Davis Gallery, the viewer is offered another view through Line In/Line Out's
double-sided lens. From this vantage point, one is able to trace the line
out of the gallery, through the lobby, and into the courtyard. The scene observed
through the lens functions as a movable, living landscape. By framing the
courtyard and the vista beyond, Swartz has created a particular type of "landscape"-one
that exists in real time, incorporating movement, atmospheric and seasonal
change, and an ever-changing cast of characters depending on who happens to
be walking by this spot at this moment. Swartz's work, by means of interactivity
and chance, takes place over time and constantly changes depending on the
vantage point of the viewer and the conditions of the site. Following one
of the major themes in her art, Line In/Line Out deconstructs and ultimately
reconstructs our perception of the spaces of the Davis Gallery, the lobby,
the entryway, and the courtyard and landscape beyond.
By excavating
such spaces, Swartz's art explores the institution of the museum itself-namely,
what is visible and invisible, privileged and disregarded, public and private
in its highly constructed spaces. By breaking down institutional boundaries,
Julianne Swartz highlights such dichotomies and transforms our experience
to one that acknowledges the space itself and its values. Her work asks us
to slow down, to perceive things in the environment previously unnoticed,
and to see our surroundings from a new perspective that potentially alters
our relationship to the world around us.
Notes
1. Julianne Swartz in conversation with the author, October 28, 2004.
2. Ibid.