The first time I saw Susan Robb’s work, I was mildly interested. It
was seven years ago, in a dark church on Broadway, and she’d rigged up
a rickety glowing forest of tall tubes with a tiny video monitor on top
of each one. What played on the videos was lightly mesmerizing, some
abstracted biological processes in motion, and there was soft material
underfoot. But over the years, I kept having these experiences with
single pieces—a photograph here, an installation there—that
were more or less just fine. I began to dread the occasion of Robb’s
upcoming solo show at Lawrimore Project. I knew I’d have to contend
with the fact that another group of editors, before I worked here, felt
strongly enough about Robb’s art to name her a Stranger Genius in 2003,
but I’d never felt it. What did paintings of blue monsters
from Second Life have to do with a mad-science video of a man’s arm
implanted with tiny trees, or with juicy macro-lens photographs of
constructed “organisms,” or with knitted tubes coming out of the wall?
Robb’s art seemed to me an acute case of circling the center.
I was five works into Robb’s new Lawrimore Project show last week
when I realized she’d hit the center. Either something has jelled in
her work, or this is its most coherent presentation so far, or both. As
weird as it sounds, this is the show Robb won the Genius Award
for—this is the show somebody knew she had in her. It’s not just
a gathering of her strongest stuff. It’s thematically tight, made up
mostly of new works and newly refined versions of recent works. In a
variety of mediums and in a palpable range of temperatures, as though
it had its own climate system—fluctuating from hot-pink desert
rocks and a campfire to freezing-cold white crystals with shivering
Mylar blossoms—the show explains what Robb has been trying to do
all this time.
Formally, the consistent thread in Robb’s work is that she is a
colorist. She prefers hues associated with artificial colors and
preservatives, only occasionally choosing the muted colors
traditionally associated with landscape or nature—especially
wooded Pacific Northwestern nature. But the choice is more than formal;
her use of hot colors is like her use of up-to-date technology. It’s a
way of harnessing, collapsing, and expanding collective fantasies about
human progress. A field of plants that actually clean the soil
(hyperaccumulators, used by artist Mel Chin in the 1990s) looks like
creepy candy in Robb’s flat digital rendering. That print hangs near a
floor installation of mini-speakers on stalks that broadcast the
whispered words “it’s in the air” and “it’s in the water.” Art as land
laundering (see also: Olympic Sculpture Park) has been going on for a
while, and this is its dark echo voice.
Robb’s art has a bit of a reputation for being contrarian (to erase
herself from a 2006 show she felt was being curated irresponsibly, she
created a piece involving repetition of the text “I’m not here, this
isn’t happening”), but the reversals in this show are subtle. Take
Digester, a row of crude biodigesters said to contain the shit
of dealer Scott Lawrimore. Through a system of 55-gallon drums and
tubes, the shit is broken down into methane gas, which powers a
campfire on the floor of the gallery. (Marshmallows are available for
roasting.) The early buzz on this work saw it as an institutional
critique, a punishment and test of the art dealer: make him walk to
work for months carrying a wide-necked mason jar full of his own crap,
which Lawrimore is doing. But Digester isn’t really that
feisty. The sadism is processed as clean as the shit, which goes unseen
and unsmelled. And despite what the label says, the artist contributed
her own shit along with Lawrimore’s, as well as manure provided by
local zookeepers, to keep the fire burning. It’s not an inside-art
joke, it’s a gentle biotech metaphor that reverses time. New-fangled
“green” drummage fuels an ancient technology—fire. We’ve come
full, fucked-up circle. Which dreams of primitivism does the “green”
movement trigger and feed?
And how does art fit in, anyway? In a cuttingly winsome sculpture
called Using De Maria’s Lightning Rods, the Animals Stage a Valiant
Surrender, a 14-foot gleaming steel rod built to exact
specifications from De Maria’s 1977 earthwork is thrust into a pile of
pink and orange acrylic and mirrored “boulders.” A white flag of
wired-up feathers and fur flies from the top of the rod. The same week
Robb’s show opened, the cover of Time magazine paired the
headline “How to Win the War on Global Warming” with a tree being
thrust into the earth in an alteration of the 1945 photograph of
marines planting the American flag on Iwo Jima. Meanwhile, art has been
working “green” territory for years, and is way beyond the binary logic
of war. Robb’s sculpture takes into account the discomfort that you
feel when you look at that Iwo Jima image now with supposedly global
eyes. The sculpture asks: If we’re fighting for the planet, how would a
work of art join the “valiant” side? When is art nature? When humans
are animals? Robb plainly doesn’t believe in the human animal’s ability
to make peace with the rest of nature—not unless we stop defining
ourselves as outsiders and defining “nature” as an extension of what we
want.
Valiant Surrender‘s proud thrust contrasts with two small
sculptures, Racing Towards Hardness Is a Kind of Softness and
The Gentlest Gesture. In her studio, Robb grew crystals on
sakura branches and attached silver and purple Mylar blossoms to the
branches using a green circuit board and a hair-thin “muscle” wire (a
wire that actually shortens in length, or contracts like a muscle, when
it is electrically powered). Every few seconds, the blossoms are
programmed to twitch slightly, as though they were dreaming of being
real, outside in the wind. They’re plugged in instead.
Maybe the greatest revelation in the show is a digital video made
from Robb’s public installation last summer, Warmth, Giant Black
Toobs. For the live installation (scheduled to happen again in
Idaho, Montana, Texas, Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York in 2009), Robb
turned a grassy lawn in Volunteer Park into a field of 50-foot-long
black stalks buoyed by sun and wind like a big plastic colony rippling
underwater. On screen, with a staticky remix by Robb of music by the
artist Shuttle 358, the black forms look unbelievable, as though
they’ve been Photoshopped into the landscape, or drawn in, or like time
has been slowed down in the filming. Actually, nothing has been added
or changed. What you see are just black plastic garbage
bags—environmental foes—repurposed into magical creatures
from a world that’s already way beyond what “greening” can fix, for
better and for worse. 
