Kader Attia is fond of emptiness. His exhibition at the Henry Art
Gallery is full of it. A large wall sculpture is a circling of metal
around a hole, modeled on the diaphragm of a camera. Rows of silver
crouching figures cast in foil have holes, voids, nothing where their
faces should be. A maze of oversize boxes made of Sheetrock is defined
by the oddly angled alleys between the boxes. And then there are empty
plastic shopping bags, sitting on wide, plain-like plywood tables like
gaping lungs ready to collapse.
In a piece of writing printed on the gallery wall, the
French-Algerian artist explains that the emptiness in this work
describes “the limits of political and social discourses in art in the
face of the concrete and fatalist reality of everyday life all around
the world.” The message is an unusual interjection from an
artist—like an artist’s statement in the heart of the galleries,
which is weird on top of the introductory text at both ends. The wall
it’s on is in the plastic-bags section of the show, which in addition
to actual bags includes pen drawings of plastic bags on recent
newspapers from around the world and on photocopied pages from a book
about French ethnic politics.
Attia was born in 1970 in Paris to Algerian immigrant parents, and
his work often has a blatant sociopolitical bent. For one project, he
documented a community of transgender Algerian refugees in Paris and
organized them for a public protest “against clandestinity.” In
another, he set a chic Parisian neighborhood on edge by opening a
downmarket clothing boutique called Hallal Sweatshop (named
after
the Muslim equivalent of kosher). Flying Rats is his
best-known installation, in which children made of birdseed were pecked
away at by live pigeons until their remains looked like the aftermath
of a bombing.
His exhibition at the Henry, organized by Henry chief curator Liz
Brown, turns more abstract, and follows right on the heels of another
show of new work he did this winter at the Institute of Contemporary
Art in Boston. A favorite quote of Attia’s by Taoist philosopher Lao
Tzu, “Human beings create things, but emptiness gives them meaning,” is
the advertised motto for both shows. It’s in the intro to ICA’s
description of the show, and it appears three times on the walls at the
Henry (in the text at the beginning and end of the exhibition
and in the artist’s text).
In Boston, as in Seattle, Attia uses Home Depot–style
materials and other people’s bodies; at the ICA, Attia fashioned crude
beds with cheap foam mattresses, in a re-creation of his family’s
crowded sleeping quarters in a suburb of Paris, and local students tore
out their own silhouettes from the foam. The magazine Art
Papers called it a “funhouse simulation” that represented a
dominant-culture fantasy about the conditions of immigrant life rather
than a real portrait—and that allowed the artist to do a
disappearing act.
The plastic bags and empty bodies in Seattle are also signs of an
evacuated presence, as if the artist has taken leave of his own work,
perhaps for reasons either caused by or signifying a lack of connection
between him and the hosting institution or city. This condition must
afflict many of the artists who travel around the world producing art
for international biennials and so-called global audiences, and Attia
may be characterizing the futility of this experience. It would help to
account for the scattered, disembodied feeling of the exhibition,
which, paired with the museum’s constrictingly high, bright-white
walls, gives the environment an unpleasant air.
In part, that’s planned. Horror is a recurring theme. Attia has
choreographed the exhibition so that the slumped foil bodies of
Ghost—praying? begging?—are seen first from
behind, where their backs look full and meaty. It’s not until later in
the progression through the galleries that the terrible gaps on the
front of them are revealed, when you turn a corner and enter the room
from the other direction.
In another inversion elsewhere, Attia turned the most spacious
gallery into a brutalist, constricting maze, modeled after a barricade
of cast-concrete blocks on the Algerian coast which are there to
prevent flooding but are used by poor locals as a beach with a view of
distant, wealthy Europe. The maze of Sheetrock boxes looks easily
navigable, but some of the angled alleys only appear large
enough to pass through comfortably. What looks like the fastest route
out of the grid is sometimes, actually, a trap.
In addition, there’s a video of oil being poured on a sugar
sculpture and the sculpture buckling, collapsing, and melting into a
sparkling mess in the afternoon sun. The political implications seem a
touch blatant.
Attia spent a month and a half building this exhibition at the
Henry, and only one of the works—the video, dated 2007—is
not new. (Ghost was created elsewhere, but re-created here
using six local models; the figures will be destroyed when the show is
over.) This represents a major output from both artist and museum. Yet
the effect of it is underwhelming, a little thin, richer on paper than
in person. It’s hard to fathom why, except to wonder whether, in terms
of execution, Attia is somewhat too in love with the gaps, the
flimsiness, the discardability both of his own presence and of his
materials. In the end, his formalist stainless-steel sculpture
mimicking a camera diaphragm may be the most hardworking of these
pieces. The hole at its center is all the more soft for being bounded
by such freezing solidity, such certain and still-present decisions
made by the artist. Probably he likes it least. 
