I fell in love with you before I’d even seen you. From the moment I became aware that you existed, I was sure there was no place I’d rather be than inside you. I waited and planned, and came alone, partially out of embarrassment, to see you. The card didn’t tell me much, just where to find you, and that butterflies and rainbows were among your interests. That was enough; I’m not picky, and besides, I felt like I needed you. How could I have fallen so hard, so fast? There was a sign on the front desk warning that if I were hurt I’d have only myself to blame. But still, I had to go in, twice.
Recent art history provides us with numerous holes in the ground, with various stories and explanations, and one imagines that by now their significance as art has been completely exhausted. Like disused quarries, they should yield only corpses at this point. But you can read about them in articles and textbooks, see them at Dia:Beacon, and, from Herbert Bayer’s Earth Mound (1955) to Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007), you can gloat that the expanded field of sculpture is now positively riddled with holes.
You, at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, is a massive one excavated by the young Swiss artist Urs Fischer. Actually, it’s two holes. First, you walk through a low door and enter a small, low-ceilinged room in which the floor has been ripped out, leaving the soil exposed and strewn with rubble. Opposite the low door there’s a full-sized door, which leads to a bigger room that encloses a giant pit dug from reddish earth and encircled by a narrow walkway, filled with more rubble and some electrical conduit for good measure. The walls are pristinely white, and the most obvious place to look, initially, is the ceiling, where the concentric arrangement of cold fluorescent bulbs presents itself as the most studied feature of the room, far, far away from the dirt. Dirt! Demolition! Disorder! Your eyes turn heavenward for intention.
To view the piece, you can either enter it directly, walking/sliding down the soft banks of the soil, or you can pace its perimeter, on the remnants of the gallery’s polished concrete floor. Either way, it quickly becomes apparent that against a stupid hole in the ground, you’re out of your league. Not even the civilized lights are going to help in your effort to maintain control for the next little while. Walking around the tiny ledge and looking into the pit induces vertigo. With nothing to grab onto, you look to the white wall for equilibrium, but it betrays you, turning from surface to depth. Looking directly across the pit doesn’t help either, since it then seems deeper than its ten-or-so feet. The only possible reprieve is—if you’ve got another person in there with you—to look at him, reestablish scale, and remind yourself that it’s not just you and the abyss; it’s you, the abyss, and that other guy, at least for now.
Diving right in is easier, and presents various tasks and distractions. You can look for stuff in the soil (I found an antique bottle, some napkins, and some cigarette butts), bemoan the fate of your shoes, dust yourself off, move dirt around, contemplate being in a grave, or worry about others falling in. You can climb around sportily or simply notice the feeling, almost inexplicable, of wanting to be in there with someone you love. You want to call someone to announce that you’re in a hole in the ground, and they should come join. You’re not there as a viewer, you’re there, in the hole, as an actor.
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Back in 1965, Allan Kaprow issued some mandates for happenings in Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings, and one of his dicta, ironically, was that “Happenings should be performed once only.” Performa07 and Creative Time ignored his advice last autumn when they restaged his 1963 work Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann. Perhaps they thought that re-presentation would best serve the piece’s legacy and add credibility to the biennial’s program, but maybe they should have read Kaprow’s caveat as closely as one could imagine Urs Fischer read the dictum that comes next: “It follows that audiences should be eliminated entirely.”
The recreated work, presented over three days, twenty blocks north of you—at Gavin Brown’s other space, Passerby—took the form of a simulated apartment which could be rearranged, adapted, or adulterated as any visitor saw fit. Its ideal was open participation. But in its third day, Push and Pull still looked brand new. Engagement was low. The walls were covered with reflective silver film hiding gridded snapshots of socialites taken at functions. Some guy was annoyingly turning a paper-covered TV off and on while playing classical records. There was a list posted on the wall of things you weren’t supposed to do, some people milling about eating baguettes, a covered tub of Grolsch that seemed too perfect to disturb, and some hay bales. There was some gross goop on the TV, some overturned furniture, and at one point Elizabeth Peyton came in. Everybody was watching one another. To make a better living space, I wanted to kick out the DJ and crack a Grolsch, but I didn’t have the guts. I couldn’t ignore the encrusted history on Push and Pull’s surface, and despite the sign demanding I take part, I just couldn’t participate in something I’d first encountered in books.
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In 2000, beside Maschenmode, his first gallery on Torstrasse, the influential Berlin dealer Guido Baudach ran a club with artist Thomas Zipp called Dirt. Dirt’s concept was simple: it was a storefront space where people could investigate Party machen, and it would never be cleaned. Despite the club being open only two nights a week, its concept was enthusiastically embraced by excited crowds, and before long the place was completely disgusting. When it was open—and when it was open it was operating Q.E.D.—the place was packed full and had no ventilation; all of dancing and chain-smoking Berlin rallied to ensure that the air was hot, coal-black, and molasses thick. Weeks of spilled Beck’s glued variegated crap to the floor, and the place seemed to be disintegrating, or maybe biodegrading, but surely returning to the earth. The lights were usually left on so that everything could be seen, including the viscosity of the air. I remember glimpsing some dirty underwear flung onto a speaker at some point. It was profane not because of its lack of propriety, but because by then such a gesture seemed prissily theatrical amid the sticking, stinking scuzz.
The project’s self-awareness, and the naturalism of its process, made the devolution of a space of culture into a pit of filth seem clear and productive. Dirt wasn’t grossness in stasis, like many Berlin squats. Instead it was dynamic and goal-oriented: it took a clean gallery and drove it into the ground. Dirt never felt political or authored, and you could never begrudge it its nastiness, because, well, you’d done your part.
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But you, dear reader, probably had nothing to do with the creation of Dash Snow and Dan Colen’s Nest, shown at Deitch Projects last summer, unless you were a Pratt student, and shredded phone books for the show as part of your learning experience, or are one of their fifty closest friends and were on the tightly controlled lists of participants. You may have seen it and smelt it, but you ain’t dealt it. Snow and Colen’s Nest was based on a series of earlier works, their Hamster Nests, for which they checked into hotel rooms with plenty of drink and drugs, inebriated themselves until they felt like rodents, and then got naked and destroyed the room, filling it full of shredded paper and garbage. Or so the story goes.
At Deitch, they did the same thing. Kind of. The thirty assistants shredded 2,500 phone books to fill the space beforehand, and on the appointed nights, the appointed people came to intoxicate themselves, destroy the space, and act like rodents. Jeffrey Deitch proved a good pet owner and furnished bedding and toys so the artists had only to pee on the paper this time, not shred it. This allowed them to concentrate purely on grander defilement and destruction for five glorious evenings.
Rodents, in case you didn’t know, produce cheeky, semi-racist graffiti, knock holes in walls, and sport-piss all over the place. They also enjoy concerts by Gang Gang Dance. The nesting was done overnight, early on in the run of the show, and viewers could only come to view the urine-soaked mess during the day. Your role was to view the authored carnage, soak up the mythos of Snow and Colen’s über-cool, and see the actuality of Stella Schnabel’s underwear. Whereas at Dirt the mess could only be experienced if you were participating in its creation, at Nest the experience came pre-historicized, like a Kaprow Environment, recreated for what could only ever be an audience.
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You is an edition of two, and it cost Gavin Brown $250,000. You can buy one for half a million dollars, and both were still available when I inquired last winter. The dirt in the room is the dirt they found under the floor. They didn’t truck any in. No, you can’t see the basement, power lines, the subway, Jimmy Hoffa, or any trace of the pure gold flake that surely must comprise Manhattan’s crust.
You is extravagant in the way only something egalitarian could be: to see it is to make it. It’s non-depictive. Urs Fischer is not showing you something; you’ve entered a space where your participation starts and ends the event, whose meaning plays itself out entirely in your experience and response. Were you a tree falling in the forest alone, silence would reign for sure. But the tree falls and crashes, loudly, so long as you are there too.