March 31, 2005
Amy Rathbone: "probably raw."
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Amy Rathbone: "probably raw." Memorial Union Art Gallery, University of California, Davis, Davis, California, January 13 - February 25, 2005
All images Amy Rathbone and UC Davis used without permission (source). Click any image for full view.
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From at talk by Milton Resnick at NYU in 1960:
"I think it’s more exciting to know what’s on the other side of the moon. If excitement isn’t necessarily a part of art, then that’s all right too. I can imagine an art that would have an innocuous surface where you don’t see anything at all of interest; you wouldn’t dream of looking at it with any idea that it could knock you over or have any power or anything, and then slowly you can begin to read into it all kinds of wonderful, imaginative things that you can see in it, and that could be a very marvelous form of art. I don’t know who does it. I think most artists in the last fifty years have been impressed more by art that has a way of attracting you to it to begin with; whether it lasts for very long or not doesn't’t matter. There are some artists who feel it’s just the first look that counts and then, after that, you’re bound to lose interest anyway. But there are those of us that think art ought to be more complicated[1].”
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Amy Rathbone's intriguing gallery installation at UC Davis Memorial Art Gallery consists of a wall of spray-painted dots, sandbags hanging from the ceiling, lengths of wire looping out of and back into another wall, and small clusters of marks on various wall and column section throughout the gallery that may not be immediately noticeable. Her goal, according to the press release, is to "take the banal and make it something of interest" to the viewer who will "notice, be curious and respond." Consider a list of any typical artist's materials and intentions, however, and we'll find that that's pretty much any artist's method and goal, of course. So besides these expressed intentions, what is this installation called "probably raw."? 
What is it made of, what does it do, what does the viewer do? One might ask, too, what its meaning is, but I tend to think that "meaning" in art is overrated and tends to bypass the experience of actual looking, through which a variety of possible meanings are then found.
First, let's note that the title "probably raw." is in lower case and has a period after "raw." The title could be a fragment, the final two words at the end of a sentence. It seems that something preceding these two final words has been edited out, censored, or forgotten: the subject. Is the missing subject being highlighted by its absence? To say that something is probably raw is an attempt to confirm the state of some object; in this case that object is the sentence's missing subject. What is this unidentified subject that is probably raw? By not identifying the subject Rathbone may be pointing out that there are a number of immediate and tangential raw elements to this installation: the gallery space; the materials used; the images and situations she composes; her subject matter and meaning; the viewer's response to the works; and the cultural and social conditions surrounding a gallery visit that frame the viewer's approach and relationship to art.
"Raw" has several meanings: uncooked, natural or basic; coarse or crude; unfinished or unformed; fundamental or basic. To say that something is "probably raw" means that one is unsure if it is indeed raw, but that some information, condition, or context is present to be taken as evidence of rawness. Again, the title could be a clue that the artist's subject matter or intended meaning has a raw quality or aspect. It could simply refer to the artist's raw materials. But if Rathbone's intention is to transform the banal into something interesting then the artist's materials, which appear to be minimally touched, likely require some kind of "cooking" even if that means simply measuring, cutting, or placing.
Perhaps the first raw material we should be aware of is the gallery itself; that's the space that Rathbone has to work within and against. Because it's the place in which everything happens it is her first raw material, even though the walls are newly white, the floors are shiny, and the windows are clean; this is a deceptively neutral space. As we know, the gallery is only an apparently empty box that is, because reserved as an institutional space for art, already fraught with expectation and meaning. This is something laid out in Brian O'Doherty's "Inside the White Cube[2]," an idea the Minimalists worked with and the Post-Minimalists worked against during the 60's, and which led to art happening outside of this kind of institutional framing. The gallery is received as a kind of readymade, or something pre-cooked, and so it is Rathbone's job to do something in this space to work around or overpower these meanings so that the room functions as other than a gallery in which the viewer is dominated or passive.
The rest of Rathbone's materials could be the result of a trip to the hardware store with a shopping list that signals home improvement or maintenance- spray paint, wire, sandbags, markers. The use of each material leverages inherent qualities that are still in quite a raw state; nothing is much transformed into something that it already isn't, or made to do something that it can't readily do. Rathbone's work is a distant cousin to the Arte Povera sensibilities of, for example, Michelangelo Pistoletto. Giovanni Anselmo, and Luciano Fabro. These artists arranged, combined, and juxtaposed materials such as stone, cable, cloth, lights, ice, plants, newspapers, vegetables, flowers, to make sculpture in which these everyday materials more or less remain in their given state.
At first glance when entering the gallery the arrangement of images and objects make the space feel like a large, pleasant, open parkland. One broad wall and a corner is filled with clusters of approximately three to five inch spray-painted black, copper, or silver circles, each with a single drip running off the bottom edge. The 
accumulation of these across the wall read as a hillside covered in bushes, lollipop trees, or a sky filled with floating balloons. A large expanse of another wall is partially covered in a wavy field of looping and drooping vertical sections of wire and shadows made by cutting the wire into various lengths and inserting each end into a hole in the wall, one end above the other. The field is more sparse and loopy on the left, and becomes denser, flatter, and more compressed on the right. Sand-filled burlap bags are cinched at the middle and suspended from the ceiling like small bodies on a swing; two of these stand on the floor against the wall under a wall drawing, heavily leaning and drooping under their own weight. There is the recognition of these raw materials, but also the feeling of landscape, distant space, and some kind of activity that one not only observes but in which one is also a player.
In "The Infinite Line[3]" Briony Fer points out how, "O'Doherty traced the emergence of the tableau as a genre in the work of artists like Segal and Keinholz where 'the illusionist space within the traditional picture is actualized in the body of the gallery'" and that as a tableau "the gallery 'impersonates' other spaces, say, a bar, a hospital room, a gas station, a bedroom. But whilst others, like Kaprow, had called for a total absorption of the subject in his or her surroundings, and a blurring of art and life in what he called 'total art', O'Doherty drew attention to the way in which the tableau form made the spectator feel as if one should not be there, as if one were trespassing on the scene." In Rathbone's installation there is this sense of place created by the illusion of space, but it is not a place of absorption. And although the installation works to become a place other than a gallery, it is not a tableau in that one can identify exactly what kind of place Rathbone has constructed. I would like to propose that we look at Rathbone's installation not as a tableau but instead as a diorama. In particular, I mean the kind of diorama that elementary school teachers and students make with a shoe box and various cheap and handy materials such as magazine pictures, pipe cleaners, toothpicks and popsicle sticks, fabric, glue, and paint. Diorama's often employ simple, direct, and crude craft techniques, and Rathbone's barely manipulated raw materials and ambiguous setting create the feeling of being miniaturized, as if one is inside one of those homemade dioramas.
Besides the rough crafting of raw materials, another contributing factor to the feeling of the gallery as diorama is the extreme differences in scale from one section to the next. The spray-painted circles are relatively small and seem far away, no matter how close one gets to them. In contrast, the sandbags have the predictable, stable scale of real objects in relation to the viewer, and there is nothing illusionistic about the space between the bags and the viewer. The looping wires, however, are more ambiguous; if one sees them merely as wires then the viewer's relationship to them is a real life situation like the sand bags. However, one can also read them as images creating deeper space, so our relationship as both real objects and as images isn't really stable at all. For example, from the side the wire is readable as looping material projecting out of the wall into the gallery. But when facing the wall the wires and their shadows can both visually flatten and project into a space between the viewer and the wall. 
The viewer's experience of these three kinds of scale- illusionistic, real, and unstable or flexible- coordinated in a unified environment inside one room can make one feel pulled in many directions, and so difficult to easily resolve the installation as a whole. But there's more. The longer one spends in the gallery the more one notices, and the odder the installation becomes. Faint drawings on different walls of the gallery are finally noticed. A cluster of very small black "V" shaped chevron figures, like profiles of flying birds or bats, emerge from a chevron carved into the wall. A spray of faint yellow hi-liter marks fans low across one side of a column in the middle of the gallery, and another set of pink marks is on another wall. The shadow of one hanging sand bag is cast on a nearby column, and at the lower corner of this shadow are black ink drops spilling downward, like tears, sweat, or blood, drawn as if pouring from the shadow. The two sandbags on the floor are slumped over on either side of a wall drawing like guards that have fallen asleep on duty. Another sandbag hangs low above the shiny gallery floor where several concentric circles of wire are just below the corner of the bag, reminiscent of rings in water. Soon after noticing these details the gallery space changes, and the objects in the gallery assume another dimension. The floor takes on the quality of water, and one notices how much of the installation is reflected in the floor. The wire looping from the wall seems very wave-like, or like turbulent rain. The sandbags become more figure like, and David Margolick's lyrics made famous by Billie Holiday flash into mind:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
The mood suddenly turns somber. Having made this association it's easy to think that this work is ultimately figurative, and we are a figure in it. The installation as a diorama is the construction of a landscape of dark memory into which we are projected, an interactive theme park of discovery. The disjunctions of scale that project us into this diorama have qualities of both physical experience and the unconscious about them. But have I gone too far here in trying to dig up a meaning, especially after having stated above that meaning can be overrated? I could for the moment go a little further, so please indulge me in the following observation that is not meant to be taken as a clue to the work's meaning, but is instead a clue to the way we (or I) make associations from seeming unrelated things.
I was curious to notice that Rathbone's web site URL is www.yamrathbone.org. Why the scrambling of her first name- childhood nickname, perhaps? Has someone already registered www.amyrathbone.com? It's just this little incidental detail, "Amy" to "Yam," that made me suddenly flip "raw" to "war," and I instantly thought of Bruce Nauman's neon sculpture that flickers between two words, "RAW" and "WAR." Sure, this is farfetched and surely not intentional, but who cares what associations I'm "allowed" to make; this is my experience I'm talking about. In fact, it's significant that Nauman's neon changes from "RAW" to "WAR" as if mimicking our own thought process of switching from one thought to another. This kind of switching is what we do when we try to construct narratives or meaning, especially from pieces that don't obviously link into a sequence from beginning to end, or when we try to hold parallel thoughts in mind at once, flipping back and forth from one to another. This is my experience with "probably raw."
There are three ideas I think worth pointing out. First, I want to emphasize the playfulness of this installation through the use of the materials, an almost comic directness in the imagery, and a complicated but explicit creation of space and use of scale. Exploring the installation is an engaging experience because it emerges slowly, and while it's difficult, like landscape, to "hold" the entire installation as one experiences it, the pieces do "hang" together as a coherent whole.
Second, while there is an undercurrent of violence to "probably raw.", I don't want to suggest that the point of the work is to arrive at this meaning and to stay fixed in this dark state. The viewer gains access to this aspect of the work's subject matter by first entering a playful space, and because the meaning of the work remains open it is possible to return to the non-violent side of the work, which is like going back to the beginning and re-entering. The possibility of a narrative exists, but it isn't linear, and various components of the installation can be put together in different ways. I think this is a strength of the work.
Finally, the various meanings that one can construct from this installation occur not simply through observation but through experience. There is not, I'm thankful, a the giant hand of theory hanging over this installation ready to slap me if I get it wrong, or pat me on the back if I get it right. One must walk through the gallery and pull the pieces together, reading the images and objects in order to tell some kind of story, even one that is circular, loopy, or broken. To do this one must enage the complex physical and psychological experience of encountering the effects of space and scale which, when combined with the raw materials, create the effect of a diorama into which we enter. We become part of the work, and the pull of memory, awareness, sentiment, fear, and joy is enormous. And perhaps this is the key to the subject missing from the sentence that ends, "probably raw.". Not only are the materials of this installation raw, but our experience is raw and is essential to any kind of understanding.
Installations only last as long as they are installed. Fer mentions O'Doherty's "simple but important fact that avant-garde gestures 'have two audiences: one which was there and one- most of us- which wasn't.' Memory completes the work which at the time of its happening is necessarily incomplete... The photograph plays an important but curious role, then, as a kind of primordial fact of experience that is necessarily past- and often lost." And that is my struggle in writing this. I happened to be in Davis for a meeting on Friday, February 25, the final day of this exhibit, and had just enough time to walk a good part across campus to get a look at the installation during a lunch break. The installation has stayed with me this past month, and all that I have described has been an effort to articulate not only what I experienced and why it stayed with me, but how it has grown with me. The photographs shown here are the merest attempt to document some slices of the overall work, and can't begin to hint at the complex array of experiences and associations that Rathbone's installation prompted.
Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
March 2005
[1] Dorfman, Geoffrey, Ed. Out of the Picture - Milton Resnick and the New York School / Geoffrey Dorfman ; New York : Midmarch Arts Press, 2003.
[2] O'Doherty, Brian. Inside the white cube : the ideology of the gallery space / Brian O'Doherty ; introduction by Thomas McEvilley. 1st book ed. Santa Monica : Lapis Press, 1986, c1976.
[3] Fer, Briony. The infinite line : re-making art after modernism / Briony Fer. New Haven [Conn.] ; London : Yale University Press, c2004.
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March 30, 2005
March 29, 2005
March 28, 2005
March 27, 2005
March 26, 2005
March 25, 2005
Recent Drawings
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French Trail Album 4, 1-5, 2005, Pencil, watercolor & ink on paper, approx. 8.75 x 6.75" each (scanned)
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Qinglü (Blue & Green), 1-5, 2005, Pencil, watercolor & ink on paper, approx. 8.75 x 6.75" each (scanned)
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Untitled, 1-5, Pencil, 2005, watercolor & ink on paper, approx. 8.75 x 6.75" each (scanned)
See recent French Trail drawings, Sets 1-3.