Sometimes Water Is Deep

I am fucking terrified of water because, you know, water is
terrifying. But my fear is specific. I’m not particularly afraid of
drowning (or its opposite—dying of thirst); I don’t have a
tangible grasp of what a flood looks or feels like; undertow seems
mildly perilous but unlikely; is a whirlpool even a real thing?; I’d
rather not dive into a shallow pool and crack my head on the
bottom, but it doesn’t keep me up at night (however, on that note, I DO
still have visceral spasms pertaining to Greg Louganis hitting his
skull on that diving board in 1988 because FUCK!). Specifically, I am
frightened of very deep water—of floating, tiny and foreign, on
the surface, with uncounted gallons of black possibility beneath me.
You guys, anything could be down there! Which means, I guess,
that I’m afraid of monsters: teeth, tentacles, gullets, maws, lurking,
swimming, brushing against legs, bleeding, decaying, feeding fish,
sinking into invisibility. Just thinking about the Jaws poster
gives me the vapors.

There aren’t really any monsters in Underwater, currently on
display at Western Bridge, but it banks on that limitless, thrilling
possibility—the show’s vagueness is almost silly. It’s just
about water. Anything to do with water: what it looks like from
far away, what it looks like frozen, the way it looks when you’re in it
or out of it. There’s water as a weapon, as recreation, as flood, as
mud, as a life-ruiner, as a terrifying yet world-sustaining bigness. It
seems dumb to think you could possibly cover the breadth of this
subject in one gallery show, but who says Western Bridge is obligated
to try? One can look at water without comprehensively grasping
it—there are millions of heretofore-unidentified-by-science
fishes in the sea. Underwater picks and chooses quite
nicely.

The clunky obviousness of this analogy is embarrassing, but it feels
true: Underwater is like easing into a cold pool. At first,
you’re not convinced. The salon wall is very dense, very long, and
incoherent. Mark Wyse’s photographs of paddling surfers outmatched by
scarily immense gray seas (for fun, can you imagine?!) hang adjacent to
Tony de los Reyes’s silhouetted sailing ship and Kathleen Johnson’s
chlorine blue underwater pool steps. Somewhere, from another room,
comes a bleating, knocking sound that might be whales (it’s not). What
is the point? Water is not enough, you think. But Underwater pulls you into itself gradually; the thing that finally caught me was
Jeppe Hein’s Ice Cube.

It sits on the floor. It is a block of ice, probably about 18 inches
cubed. It is melting (because Western Bridge is not a freezer); each
one takes three days to melt and then is replaced. The puddle it
creates oozes calmly, imperceptibly outward, revealing the floor’s
secret biases. You could walk in the puddle, but you don’t (but maybe
some of you do!), and you don’t really know why. If you stood there
long enough, it might touch you. You can feel the chill. Being
close to it is exciting.

From there I was sold. Let’s go swimming, Underwater! Show me
what you’ve got. Marco? POLOOOOO!!!

Like a lot of terrifying things (heights, the wilderness, Nicole
Kidman), water is also ridiculously beautiful and being in it can be
so, so wonderful (wait—did I just imply that I’ve had intimacy
times with Nicole Kidman? Because prove it). There’s beauty in
Underwater. Gary Hume’s immense painting, hanging on the south
wall of the main gallery—the least literal piece in that
room—shows the gentle distortions of a human reflection or
possibly the shaky, fragmented contours of a body submerged. Or both.
An ultrabig, horizonless photograph of the surface of the ocean (rough,
abrasive) recalls the ultramicroscopic surface of a flake of skin. From
the ceiling, Olafur Eliasson’s Neon Ripple (it’s a neon ripple)
reflects serenely in Daniel Roth’s River Styx—an
appropriately mythic and funereal box of black water.

Sometimes, water is also boring—an aerial photograph by Amir
Zaki of a pool (empty or full?) wedged in a weird industrial nook
seemed off-topic, claustrophobic, forced. Upstairs is more figurative
(and by that I mean the opposite of literal) and less serious: Joseph
Park’s sad little elephant at the Korean bath; Morris Graves’s Greeky
mysticism; Hiroshi Sugimoto’s obscure, beckoning ocean surfaces.

By the time we got to the end of our circuit, lines had blurred.
Water was everywhere. I looked through an open door into a nearby
bathroom. Was that a real bathroom? Should I go look at it? Was my
brain needed for this? I examined, for a moment, the contours of the
tap, the curve of the toilet bowl, and then I realized it’s just a
regular old mundane human bathroom—probably where we interact
with water the most, every day, where it cleans us and whisks away our
waste and where, in one paralyzing childhood episode, it brought a
large rat bubbling up from the unknown depths of our toilet to run
around the house leaving streaks of foul mud. Still, water is awesome.
Thanks for everything, water.