Henry Art Gallery
Through Nov 20
Lead Pencil Studio's new installation in the east gallery of the Henry Art Gallery is part fiction and part fact. The factual part is called Regrade, which approximates a slope that was removed to make room for the museum's 1997 expansion. The reproduced grade is made from basic construction materials ("filter fabric, geo-textiles, survey whiskers, and nylon netting"). It covers the east gallery, disappears from the passageway, reappears outside in the sculpture court, and ends in the shadows of James Turrell's paganistic Skyspace (only heathens worship light).
The fiction is the hole in the middle of this slope, which is called Footing. The hole leads down to a suspended and ethereal sculpture that is made from long lines of white plastic, and represents the heavy concrete footing for the locally famous George Washington statue. The statue has been uprooted and replanted three times since it was first completed and unveiled in 1909 for the festival that celebrated our city's first real flush of capital, the Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition. What makes Footing fictional is that the George Washington statue has never stood in the position of the hole in Regrade. According to Lead Pencil's research, the closest the real footing has been to this fictional one is 30 feet.
Although it may seem whimsical for the architects of Lead Pencil (Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo) to put so much time and effort into investigating, unearthing, and reproducing the physical history of this site, only to brazenly disrupt the factual foothill with this mass of floating fiction, it is necessary for two reasons. First, and far less important, the disruption transforms Regrade from a mere model into a work of art. Second, the collapsing of fiction, facts, theory, inquiry, construction procedures, history, and geography extends Regrade and Footing beyond the limits of art and into the full realm of the social.
This is the heart of Lead Pencil Studio's installation and architectural projects in general (much of which is also on display on the west wall of the east gallery): They subordinate art and emphasize the total sum of human activity, which is social. As Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour have taught us, nothing exists outside of the social, not even nature. There is no line between us and what is not us; what is not us is simply not there in any kind of way. What appears to be the product of God, or some cosmic world spirit, or natural selection, is in fact the product of human design and interaction. We make all things happen; we make good and evil, we build and destroy, we manufacture reality, and what we will always find within any object—the very thing in itself—is nothing but our own selves. Pull back the curtain of appearances and then "go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something beyond there which can be seen." (No need to attribute that quote—if you know my writing in this paper then you know where I got it from.)
The ghostly, air-stirred Footing that hangs beneath the hole of the reproduced grade represents an object that is mostly invisible to us. When do we ever think about a footing for a statue? It almost never pops up during conversation and very few people (if anyone at all) take time out of their lives to write about footings. Go through the library and just try to find a book about blocks of concrete that are forever buried in the ground. Statues, on the other hand, are immediately social. We can see them and talk about them constantly. We know, for example, what the statue of George Washington represents: The whole state is named after him; he fought in the war of independence; he owned slaves; he wrote about freedom and rights and other equally important things; he is a founding father. There isn't a day when his name is not mentioned, circulated, despised, or loved. He is all over language. But not his poor footing.
By focusing on the object whose function is so perfect that it seems almost a natural thing, and therefore extra-human, Lead Pencil Studio reestablishes the object's place within language, therefore within social history, therefore within humanity. Look into the floating footing and what you'll find is you, the maker of all things.
