Last week, Zavitz Gallery played host to R & D, a showcase of work by students in the MFA program, including; Jen Aitken, Stephanie Cormier, Denise Higginson, Jasmine Reiner, and others. It would be futile and boring to attempt a comprehensive description of the whole show in this limited space, so the focus is on a handful of pieces.
These pieces presented themselves as a series of small answers to a series of small questions. The artists may have asked questions such as: What if I crushed the metal ring from the top of a mason jar?; Would that do it?; What if I crushed a second and a third? The results, hung from three nails, and did not present themselves as masterpieces, grand statements, not even necessarily as art – they were data. They were results, and this was research.
The phrase “research and development,” which may have inspired the exhibit’s title, represented a new way of thinking about an old idea. Art has always proceeded by experimentation and refinement, and the language of science is not totally strange to the art world – polish theatre director and innovator of experimental theatre, Jerzy Grotowski, for instance, called his work the “theatre laboratory,” a mesh between arts and science. Research and development suggested a process – that the item before you was simply one model of something which will be improved in future. It also suggested product development, and there is probably a measure of irony in this.
The strangest and most wonderful works in this show were a number of tiny, exquisite, and inscrutable artefacts, displayed on cardboard platforms. Higginson’s experiments produced the following results, among others: two blocks of sponge with “things” stuck on, in, and around them. The one orange sponge, wrapped with a strip of pink cloth, poked with bendy straws; the other green sponge, stuck with tiny twigs and mini-marshmallows – one of the finest winter landscapes recently displayed. They were precisely improbable, almost accidental. What they suggested was the insanity of the spirit of experimentation, the endless variation on questions such as; What if?; What if a twig here?; And another twig here? A couple of Reiner’s pieces seemed to exist in the same mode: a strip of rubber from a tire, twisted into a cylinder and clipped together with a clothespin – a jar wrapped in green webbing.
These items had an odd beauty to them, but did they have a point? This may be where the art and science metaphor fell apart: unlike the concrete objectives of the sciences, the objectives of art cannot always be put into words. Indeed, it is this ineffability that compels the artist and the viewer. We are both, in the moment of the work, struggling to reach something unreachable, each of us an asymptote. Art always drives toward transcendence: imagine the artist poking those bendy straws in that sponge.
Art critic, Dave Hickey, thinks art would be best practiced with try-outs, stopwatches, whistles. This show has gone toward convincing others that art should be conducted with lab coats, goggles, and clipboards.