Catalogue Essay FLAT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE Flatness, horizontality and thinness. Photography; measurability; language and labor. Annetta Kapon has put together this loose assemblage of categories to make it easier to plot a path through the seemingly disparate elements of her work. As a set of informal organizing principles, or perhaps operating assumptions, they are threaded together by three other concerns: feminism, the body, and experience. Her current work bears this out: here there are pieces which draw together several of these threads, and combine or adapt them. With Blues for Moses, for instance (Pl. 1): it’s hard to avoid stepping on it as you move through the show. Cut from a roll of mass-produced soft plastic floor-covering, it is now the size of a small area rug, assisted by the addition of three-inch fringes at each end. Its surface is glossy, as befits an object which is effectively a one-and-a-half by two-meter photograph, 5 mm thick, of a section of terrazzo flooring. Quite a deadpan photo, though — the industrial mass-reproduction of a terrazzo surface — except that on closer inspection it looks more like imitation terrazzo — like linoleum, for instance. So in stepping on it we’re already treading a fine line between object and representation. And it contains several layers of embedded labor: to begin with, and barely above the threshold of consciousness, it’s an oil-based product as opposed to one made of hide or natural fibers. It recalls a previous generation of industrially-produced flooring, linoleum, and in turn the technology that preceded that, terrazzo or mosaic.. So there are also several layers of nostalgia here, going back to the mosaic designs that were common in continental European homes until the 1930s, when the oil economy began to supercede them. The nostalgia, of course, is not only for the uneven surface texture of terrazzo, with its patterning variable to order, but above all its artisanal installation process, with all the tiny variations that implies. In fact the de-skilling of labor in each successive stage culminates in that of the housewife, for whom, no longer involved in spinning or weaving or even beating the rug, labor is reduced to a single pass of the mop. At the same time we’re reminded that the passage to the oil economy was also the moment when, throughout Europe but especially in France, the employment of servants in middle-class households was beginning to break down, and the introduction of labor-saving devices signaled the advent of the middle-class housewife — even in the French countryside, where the bateau lavoir, ‘timeless’ site of women’s collective village labor, has been de-functionalized into a carefully conserved and labeled historic monument, and superceded in the last forty years by the domestic washing machine. Indeed, as Kapon observes, plastic is the new rustic in rural France, and ‘authentic’ rustic articles are to be found only in châteaux, bourgeois town-houses and museums. A couple of other issues here: first, Kapon has a tendency to respond to her immediate environment — not so much site specificity as critical regionalism, involving not only cultural critique but a sometimes rueful and ironic engagement with local conditions. Second, labor: the thing is full of it, in fact and by association; and not just the alienated, industrialized labor that went into making it, but the multiple references to the kind of artisanal, non-alienated labor it no longer contains, and the mundane unpaid women’s domestic labor required to maintain it: it’s a historical document. But there’s also Kapon’s labor, and her feminist interest in the sexual division of labor. For her it has “enough labor to make it laborious and not a found object or readymade”. The assisted readymade, of course, is a double-edged sword: after Duchamp it carries the weight of a stereotype, a kind of shorthand or short-cut toward understanding the work. But it also carries the possibility of challenging the process of representation, of enriching and complicating the work’s reception, its potential for signification and its capacity to engage the viewer in dialog. Kapon re-poses the question, What is the place for the assisted readymade? Before we try to answer that, let’s pause for a moment on the related question of function: we’ve already alluded to the potentially enriching function of the readymade. Now for Blues for Moses: the thing functions as a rug; it covers the floor; I can stand on it, walk on it. The frisson here is with the Kantian definition of art as non-functional. Within that definition, that division of labor, Kapon once more treads a fine line, assisted by her fringe, which tends to play up both the nostalgia and the sexual division of labor. But the thing, ambiguously as such, is also a representation, and here by inference we come upon another art-historical reference: beginning from the object rather than the image, Kapon revisits, from the other side as it were, a pivotal moment between representation and actuality, the passage from analytical cubist painting to synthetic cubist collage — from deconstruction, we might say, to reassembly. In that collage the wallpaper and veneer, though ‘real’ enough, lost their function and were subsumed into the image. With Kapon, the object not only constitutes the image, but retains its function, calling into question once again the nature of the work of art and the process of representation. That very functionality brings us from the wall to the floor. Here Kapon, removed from both easel-painting and collage, and aligning herself with feminist post-minimalist sculptors, implicitly critiques and parodies ‘traditional’ minimalists like Donald Judd or Carl André, with their hard, distancing, machine-finished surfaces — not only by the softness and accessibility, the everyday, downmarket domesticity of her rug, nor even its inescapably functional nature, but by referencing Bataille’s informe through the ‘vectors’ of Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois: the horizontal as a refusal of the viewpoint of homo erectus — the vertical, the erect, the phallic. Here, however, the horizontal, rather than being an operational vector or an anti-concept opposed to taxonomy, serves as a feminist positionality — the place from which patriarchy is opposed. Flatness, too, has here abandoned its association with Greenbergian idealism and essentialism, though it has not parted company with the proto-modern disintegration of single point perspective and its mythical corollary, the predominantly male, sovereign, autonomous, bourgeois individual. Here it is not just that the alienated subject of late capitalism, fissured and mass-produced, has collapsed the perspectival frame — something we have known about since before cubism. Here flatness represents not so much the back-projection of that disintegrated subjecthood, but the very ground of an alternative vision, an alternative positionality. But what else does it mean to be standing on the rug? Kapon is looking back and moving on from her own previous work in this mode, Floor Scale of 1991 (Pl. 2). There she took another swipe at the hallowed institution of the sculptural pedestal, already battered by Picasso, Caro and the minimalists — not to mention Judy Chicago and other feminists on both sides of the supposed essentialist/theoretical divide. In Floor Scale, Kapon reduced it to a collection of contiguous bathroom scales — again using functional objects, critiquing the diet industry that feeds on women, and introducing the viewer/participant as a living sculpture. Here with Blues, we are literally one step closer to the floor; and unlike the scale, we barely make a conscious choice to tread on the rug. If Floor Scale ironically suggests an erect figure, Blues suggests kinetic human sculpture: Gilbert and George on the move, so to speak, or on the carpet — again with a feminist charge. Here, however, and more to the point, there is an unavoidable tension between viewer, object and representation: the viewer, of course, observes the rug, this object that signifies so many levels of embedded labor, alienation, nostalgia and loss. At the same time the viewer who stands or walks on it becomes by implication, as with Floor Scale, the upright sculpture it ironizes, with or without pedestal; and the object itself has undergone a barely noticeable transformation. Here, then, is the triple frisson of functional and esthetic proximity — between viewer/actor and object; between found object (with all the labor embedded in it) and the minimal labor required to transform it; and between object and representation — which characterizes Kapon’s best work. Crucially, this constant state of suspense demands dialog, the sine qua non of sociality: it is here that labor makes the leap into language. For it is merely by cutting it out with scissors, adding a fringe and laying it on the floor that the object is made to speak. These minimal mundane interventions, then, generate symbolization, re-socialize the object and transform it into a means of communication. Other works in the show function similarly: they too have a kind of deadpan, throw-away quality, a wry humor, a play on formal and art-historical issues and a grounding in social engagement. With Cornucopia, for instance (Pl. 3), colored strings of clothes pour out of a plastic panier fixed high on the gallery wall. Sculptural flatness, texture and surface — the fabrics — have become line (A few years back, Kapon was working in the opposite direction with a trompe l’oeil clothesline in acrylic on canvas). Meanwhile this region is still, after a century and a half, one of the centers of the French textile industry, and these fabrics — literally cast-offs and throwaways — represent surplus production. With a little additional labor, Kapon transmutes them into ideological use-values, ironizing the over-production of commodities and reclaiming them for critique. This deadpanier dispenses with classical mythology and pours forth a different kind of bounty. With Collection d’ Hiver (Pl. 4), a string of clothing tied together and running from upper window to ground, there’s a similar play on flatness, texture and line, a similar nod to regional specificity. It’s another of those “frisson of proximity” gambits: faced with the desire to break free from the constraints of representation, to strike out for a world of immediacy, we find that our very means of escape exposes that world as an illusion, and brings us back to the trials and triumphs of language. Finally, Kapon takes on entropy: not the inevitable internal dynamic of physical structures but the vast ecosystem created between humans and their world. A lopped-off segment of tree trunk, long dead, sits on the floor encoiled in electric wire. One end of the wire is plugged into the tree-trunk, the other into a wall-socket (Pl. 5). This is a bitter-sweet image, and the play on the relationship between line and contour fades before the urgency of the task: can the destructive power of human endeavor, launched with such violence against the limited resources of a vulnerable planet, be redirected in time to break the cycle of exploitation and create a circuit of self-sustaining natural forces? We have picked our way through Kapon’s assemblage, adapting and discarding allusions to previous work, hovering at the margins of modernist and post-modernist typologies, following the threads of feminism and bodily experience. I would argue that the present work serves to refine, reduce, re-focus, pare down and condense her previous modes of operation: in Venus de Milo, for instance (1991) (Pl. 6), she sought to create verticality out of horizontality, and to suggest the body as a surface without interiority. In Blues for Moses, horizontality and surface are all there is: verticality is left to the bodily presence of the viewer-participant. Similarly with photography: in Venus, she was wrestling with how to include the stereotypical photographic mediation, and left it invisible and implied. In Blues, photography is a visible and material part of its construction — in fact, again, it’s very nearly all there is. On the theme of problematizing the “private”, in Floor Scale she constructed a surface out of functioning machines, and with it a self-reflective tension between public space and domestic activity. In Blues, the sense of a constructed surface has all but disappeared. The public-domestic tension takes place in a virtually naturalized environment. To conclude on the question of labor: in Floor Show (1999) (Pl. 7), the laminated cross-sections of tree-trunks recalled the mass-produced yet hand-made objects found in souvenir shops. The tension was visible and tangible. In Blues, the process has been reduced to historical memory, and the tension to nostalgia. Conversely, when the tree-trunk re-appears in Art, Science, Technology, (pl. 8) it is no longer transformed by labor, but juxtaposed, inert, to its nemesis/savior. In her current work the transformative power of labor is pared down to an absolute minimum. The thing is — almost — left to speak for itself. In fact I’d argue that Kapon is at her best where this frisson of proximity is most intense: where the boundary between object and representation, experience and construction, essence and discourse is so fine, so deadpan that you can easily walk right over it without noticing. |