I agree, Christopher, this was kind of an off weekend. For me, though, it was an off weekend in part because I was buried in J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World—a mesmerizingly weird place to find oneself for sure—only to find at the end of my weekend that he’d died.
I started the book Friday night after seeing Ann Lislegaard’s new show at the Henry Art Gallery that afternoon. The show is called 2062, which is the year that Scandinavian artist Lislegaard will be 100 years old. I wish I had an image that demonstrated what the show looks like, but basically, the Henry’s entire subterranean space has been opened up—no temporary walls—for the first time in years. This large open space is also, dramatically, completely unlit, except for the light coming from the art: three video installations. The windows and the small conical skylit space at the back have been sealed off. It feels as if the only way out is through Lislegaard’s video screens and speakers.
That’s not reassuring considering that none of Lislegaard’s three video works and three sound works feels much like an escape route. Instead, each one represents a closed world with limited outside contact. Pictured above is a still from Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard), a two-channel installation projected on screens that lean on the gallery’s wall. The action, a 3D animation created using the program Maya, follows the progressive crystallization of an abandoned modernist hotel in the forest, and to my mind it’s not only a brilliant (pun intended) interpretation of the purgatorial zone of Ballard’s crystal world. It’s a magical work of art on its own, and the best in the exhibition. (I also love the way the two channels read like an open book.) I snuck into the (closed) gallery and gazed at it for 20 minutes straight until I was kicked out after Lislegaard’s talk Saturday.
Science fiction is the base for the entire exhibition. Lislegaard’s other two video works are based on Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, about the city of Bellona (image at left), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, about a society of people capable of switching between sexes. (Ballard was 78; Le Guin is 79; Delany is 67—I’m a little nervous to read the others.) There’s a funny reference to the 2001 monolith in one of the sound installations.
A review is coming; you can watch part of Crystal World here.
maybe i should have given ballard another chance, but after the shock of hearing him on public radio sounding EXACTLY like a character from the monty python “upper class twit of the year” skit i couldn’t be bothered with him ever again.
I’ll bet I could write Dhalgren in ten pages.
I loved the layout and structure of this show (it was a beautiful use of a HUGE space!) but the work itself didn’t interest me much.