On Cyprien Gaillard’s “Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens” at the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, NYC
The giant excavator head served as an eclipse, blocking the entrance so as to appear impossible to penetrate. Feelings of unease and uncertainty arose: can I not enter?
Enter one could, as there was at least two feet of space between the excavator head and the entrance. With these feelings tucked into my chest, I entered the exhibition space. A series of excavator heads were placed in a trapezoidal setting leaving a gap in the center for the viewers to tread upon. Each mechanical part was placed directly onto the floor, rather than on a pedestal. Yet some of these monumental heads towered over the viewer, presenting themselves as titans. Other heads, the dwarfs in relation to these titans, reached the kneecap in height.
Contradiction emanates from the series. The majestic aura radiating from the luxurious onyx of the excavator head manages to mélange with the “dismal landscape” encapsulated within the ruggedness of the rusted sculptures. Each excavator head is set with smoothly carved pieces of onyx, inserted in the hinges. The rusting exterior is further dulled by the shine of the bright yellow and orange onyx pieces. Two different worlds presented are at a paradox: seemingly oppositional yet complementary.
Instantaneously was I absorbed into this new-found, transformer-like realm! Duchampian and drenched with symbolism was the exhibition. Marcel Duchamp is someone who one could call the father of modernist art. He submitted a ‘ready-made’ urinal, entitled the work ‘Fountain,’ to a gallery exhibition and signed it with the pseudo name ‘R. Mutt.’ This prank meant to stir the judges and call attention to these judges excluding artists steering clear form expressionism (the genre of art of the period). Duchamp’s act questioned the role of art and the perception of art: anything, essentially, can be art; it is the artist who decides.
No doubt was Cyprien Gaillard heavily influenced by Robert Smithson’s notion of entropy in art and, in particular, by his article, “Monuments in Passaic.” A framed photograph with “Passaic” printed on it, placed by the staircase leading up to the second part of the exhibition, pays homage to Smithson’s theories. The exhibition title was inspired by a series of slogans on murals used to hide the detritus of a building site in Beverly Hills, California. For Gaillard, the coupling of the slogans with the construction glimmered with irony. He assumed the message of the slogans to denote a Dickensian world marinating in poverty, loss, and distress. Progress is reverting society into a funneled vision of the future by destroying the present thereby taking us back into a much more ‘primitive’ state, generally associated with the past. Human progress coupled with human destruction collapses time into this limbo of temporary detritus as it hints to greater future.
The exhibition is meant to reflect the dystopian state of the world: rather than evolving, we are devolving.
Olympia Christofinis