On Mapping

Artworks confront, seduce, repulse and beckon. Left unattended, they can flirt suggestively or parade with unabashed nakedness through a space. They can hold you captive or ignore you completely. When grouped together, they display varying degrees of sociability, chattering with one another or murmuring like lovers, arguing loudly over some petty incident that occurred years before, or obdurately standing alone, avoiding eye contact. Laying out an exhibition, one tries to anticipate, conjure and control these relationships to some degree, producing tensions and allegiances that engage the viewer.

To visit an exhibition is to embark on a journey that is somewhat predestined, anticipated for you by someone else. Sightlines have been considered, navigational routes carefully planned. Coordinates fixed, nailed down. Mapped.

To map a space is to imagine that space as completely defined and unchanging, outside the laws of physics, beyond time’s reach. If the space is no longer commensurate with the map, the map is considered outdated, useless. Mapping an exhibition initiates an alternate sense of temporality, a frozen universe through which we often tip-toe or whisper for fear of breaking the spell, of waking the works. For the specified duration of an exhibition’s run, time itself is meant to be suspended. Nothing stirs. Dust is carefully removed as quickly as it accumulates (but not in front of the public), and the artworks ideally appear as new as the day they were made. Yet change remains our only constant.

Some maps are more enduring than others, reflecting their makers’ desires to transcend the ticking of the clock. In 2003, I made a pilgrimage to Marfa, Texas to visit Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation. Chinati is located on a former military base in a dusty town whose only other claim to fame is that James Dean’s last film, Giant, was shot there. The primary purpose of Chinati, as envisioned by Judd, is to present his own large-scale installations, as well as those of Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain and others, in configurations that can never be altered.

In Chinati, everything is exactingly mapped, forever fixed in its place according to one artist’s vision. Nowhere is this more clearly felt than in Judd’s installation 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982-1986). Long rows of waist-high, silver rectangular boxes stand at attention, each equidistant from the other, a perfect unmoving grid of shining right angles which occupies two former artillery halls. Industrially fabricated and polished perhaps daily, the work bares no trace of the artist’s hand. It is almost unbearable in its stillness. Moving through the space, my eyes were drawn to a dead spider in the corner, somehow overlooked by the cleaning crew. More than just a momento mori, its tiny crunched tangle of legs pulled me back into the web of time’s passage.

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), which I had visited earlier in the week, was still fresh in my mind when I went to Chinati. After over thirty years of invisibility, Smithson’s signature earthwork had only recently emerged from the Great Salt Basin, a lost city of Atlantis rising from the sea. Now covered in a glittering white blanket of salt crystals, the work had changed significantly since it was made, and was itself a kind of geological clock, marking not minutes but years, through its gradual transformation. Spiral Jetty is one of the few artworks that can be seen on aerial and graphic relief maps, an artist’s addition to the natural landscape, 1,500 feet of curling black basalt that never moves and yet never stops moving, growing, decaying, changing.

After visiting Judd’s tomb, I returned to Marfa’s Hotel Paisano, where the cast and crew of Giant slept while making the film. A display case in the lobby showed a 1955 Life Magazine spread documenting the film’s production. Below, various props and other objects touched by the stars were on display. An old looking comb and a belt buckle now held court inside the reliquary of other useless things. I had booked the James Dean room. I climbed the stairs and locked the door behind. I turned on the television. After a few seconds, I realized I was watching Giant. It was being broadcast to all the rooms. I poured myself a drink, drifting backward in time, toward memories that were never mine. I needed to plan the next day’s drive. Wearily, I unfolded the map.

David Spalding

Beijing

March 27, 2009

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