Sara Deraedt
Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series
August 24 - January 5, 2020
@
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603
This Sucks: A thousand twangling instruments
by Julian Van Der Moere and Gareth Kaye
Here we stumble past the prolapsed entrance and into a doubling echo chamber. Hiding coin under tongue, Charon guides us, promising that all things are both, all things are everything and nothing. A reeking of irony floods our nose, acting like smelling salts. We gasp and push the vial away with a newfound vitality, a new longing to see and be awake. We float through the river that divides the living and the dead, sucking down metallic gulps. :$
Sara Deraedt’s work is a doubling anachronism; never truly existing in the present, but in the past and its projections of the future. We dare not write while present in the gallery, for we will not see anything to write about. We cannot simultaneously look and write. It is near dusk; at one moment a room is bathed in a hot blue light and the next it is sweating under a warm orange glow. We hold my breath as we listen to the air vent funneling air in or out and the sound of footsteps passing the room behind us, but as we exhale it is all lost. A singular gaze is near impossible in this sparse show, the moment we see something is the moment that it actually becomes something else. We thought we knew what a vacuum looked like, but we realize that we are not seeing a vacuum. We are seeing a mediated vacuum, a surrogate that lies within ourselves. These vacuums are what one is supposed to look like, the David of a vacuum, a floor model, the projection of a perfect suction.
The sub-plot of 2005 animated film Madagascar follows a gang of mischievous penguins who long to escape the Central Park Zoo and return to the paradise of Antarctica. Long story short, they steal a commercial shipping vessel by incapacitating the crew and changing the boat’s course. They reach the desired destination and the camera shows them from behind standing silently against the barren landscape to which Private, the junior most of their crew says after a beat “Well this sucks” All this said, we know this feeling well but in reverse. We wish we had never seen a vacuum before so we could experience the photographs’ alien want. We got Antarctica before we ever got to have the dream of Antarctica, except with vacuums. We hear some voice behind us cough a joke out about their own vacuum being art. Then we realize Deraedt is not trying to sell us a vacuum, or a photograph, but instead is trying to sell us our eyes back. She is trying to short-circuit them
Deraedt’s show at the Art Institute of Chicago consists of two potentially discrete things: photographs of vacuums and a recreation of the entrance to the modern wing one floor up. Deraedt photographs vacuums in situ, on display to be sold. A neutralizing flash floods the image with bold contrasts between white and black – both presenting an over abundance of visual information.
Deraedt propels her work into the past as opposed to the future. She settles herself into the architecture of the institution. Photographs of vacuums hold onto a moment somewhere in the early 2010s, but her present tense remolding and echoing of space places the work into the out-of-time void that the Art Institution pantomimes at eternally. What does it mean to celebrate the tepid architecture of an institution? Is there as much joy in the destruction of replicated walls as there is in their being built up? How do we feel about enjoying the glorification of an institution - or is it even a glorification? Does the performance of a thing constitute idolatry or is it farce?.
The vestibular facsimile draws viewers in with the sacrosanctity of a church nave. The museum replicates the sacred, there is a suction. Is the museum a vacuum? Are these galleries nothing more than dust chambers? Here we are left to float and collect amongst the flotsam and jetsam pulled within by the flow of images, architecture, and history.
The work continues to inject a degree of the surreal into the historical lineage of Edward Weston, and f/64 still lives, but in a characteristically louche manner. It effectuates a disregarding toss of the hand, and while Weston’s legacy turns away in frustration for a perceived slight, it is blown a flirty and salient kiss when it isn’t looking. The eroticism of Weston’s vegetables are matched and outdone in the eroticism of the vacuum. Where Weston’s images are sexy, Deraedt’s images are erotic. Vacuum cleaners are the ultimate desiring machine, always hungry, always lacking, sometimes phallic, protrusive and cumbersome objects to be pushed upon things, but always internal, always needing to be filled.
Prolapse is a process by which the interior of the anus is by force or some kind of suction pushed outwards and exposed, not unlike Deraedt’s reimagining of, the art institute’s gallery space, whereby interior and exterior exchange places regularly. While Deraedt’s work and installation is meticulous and painstakingly precise to the last detail (you will never see frames hung so flush to the wall in your life!), the indeterminate and wildly oscillating locus of presence and position are what make this work all the more ungrounding. The orderly perfection of the architecture is quickly upended by the emptiness of the space, no labels or didactics (all titles, text and spare supplementary information are outside of the gallery) only the vestibule and the nine photographs.
Each image is printed uniquely, and the method of its production is explicitly noted accompanying the branded name the process as well, with each methodology becoming a corportized metonym for reproduction. Sara Deraedt explores the antagonism between doubles. The animosity between the image of a thing and the thing in our mind’s eye. Isn’t that what all doubles are? Isn’t there always a favored twin: Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus? or at least one version of the two who comes out on top.
These vacuums are weird, and by the transitive property, so is the space. It is too pristine and shining - so are these vacuums - and the distance between us and them is too illegible for us to really understand these things as something other than a theatrical version of their best selves. The gallery space becomes sharp, every little detail is thrown into relief, the small porous vent in the south-east corner of the room pushes air into the space like a gentle vacuum in reverse. Each stainless steel capped anchor point in the floor becomes a well mapped grid that provides strange frames for the viewing body to enter into and interact with the space too.
If you go at night, the southern half of the space glows a warm orange that doesn’t seem to match the rest of the museum, but the bulbs and temperature really are the same as everywhere else, and the northern one is a deep blue. The room is lit throughout the day only by light filtering in from the garden. At certain points in the dark Chicago winter light the two photos in the room become all but consumed by the lack of luminescence, but even the startling lack of visibility seems more natural than the strangely specific orange glow in the neighboring room. Even before the sun sets, the soft even daylight filtering in through the open windows onto the photographs (we thrill at the thought of a stressed conservator!) seems better than the track lighting on the other side of the vestibule: what the museum does is not natural.
It is helpful to think of Sara Deraedt as one work, rather than a set of discrete images and interventions. When it’s all one thing, the exhibition functions as a throbbing sensory organ, like an agitated ear, more than an eye. An input organ attuned to ambiance and aggregation rather than specificity. Something that needs to be tuned. When we say Deraedt is trying to sell us back our eyes, she’s trying to sell them back to us to be more like ears. Untitled, 1979, an Isa Genzken photograph from the Art Institute’s collection selected by Deraedt to be hung in the corridor acts as an unofficial primer for exhibition, attuning us to a strange blend of anonymity and specificity that will come to pervade the space you are about to enter. To emphasize such a sensory organ as such requests the body by extension perform likewise with the work, as something attune to input and listening throughout the experience.
We leave the space porous, the hum of the surreal leaks into everything now. Leaving like an ear, rather than an eye, picking up the aggregate sounds of all the vents in all the galleries, and all the lights sounding a bit too orange.
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again. And then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again[1]
[1] William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Harvard University Press, 1958)
Installation view[s], Sara Deraedt: Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series, the Art Institute of Chicago, August 24, 2019–January 5, 2020. Photographer: Sara Deraedt. © Sara Deraedt. Courtesy the artist and ESSEX STREET, New York.
