| Ivana Franke
by Y. Michael Barilan MD
"Full Empty Space"
Many museum–goers admire art in complete oblivion to
the fact that most people in the world aspire for magnificent and sublime art, while being
limited by extreme poverty and few raw materials to work with. We tend to associate either
the devotion to art and the ability to execute it with complex and leisurely societies.
Indeed, the objects we regard as Art usually require expensive materials, high social
positioning, and transformative magic at one’s fingertips when you care for neither.
A new installation in P.S.1 by Ivana Franke compellingly
connects us to this seemingly simple lesson.
In her gallery space, which is a rather simple, small and
empty room, she suspended from the ceiling strings of transparent fishing wire. She weaved
the strings into a bigger mesh by short stripes of scotch-tape, creating a grid like
pattern of floating screens of transparent semi-squares. Natural light ripples magic in
the strings and tapes thus producing an hallucinatory effect of endless void within void.
The viewer is first taken by a trompe l’oeil effect of surprising
disorientation, which is reminiscent of common optical trickery. But the initial
playfulness is quickly overtaken by a hearty artistic experience of a deeper kind. The
stripes of tape are puerile and the tight fishing strings are solemn or even threatening.
Majestic light embraces them all, along with the viewers who are welcome to step into the
installation room, not merely to behold it behind a protecting rail or even a marking on
the floor. There is no hint of a museal or artistic context. The room and the installation
are raw and direct. Nevertheless, Franke’s kaleidoscope of transparent and
monochromatic semi-squares is actually a sophisticated tribute to the humane and sincere
in many traditions of art.
It is a formalistic abstraction that invokes strong
supremacist and transcendent responses. It is minimalist in design, material and in the
use of repetitive geometric objects that directly interact with their space of exhibition.
The grid-like composition is part and parcel of what Rosalind Krauss calls "the
originality of the avant guard", and Franz Boas would regard as a fundamental
ingredient of "primitive" or any other crafted art. The emphasis on light and
transparency is reminiscent of the art of Turrell or Flavin. The kaleidoscopic effect is
kinetic and the retinal images are transitory. The use of sellotape is a tongue – in
cheek wink to Pop or even the emphasis on crafting in feminist art, and the fish strings
wave hello to Arte Povera’s choice of raw material and style of hanging. Even
Beuysean or Christian symbolism may be noticed. Franke blends together the harking on a
timeless albeit nostalgic pastoralia and utopist daydreaming.
Franke’s installation, which is titled "full
empty space", is much more than a smart illusory effect or the sum of witty
references. I was taken by a powerful sense of sublimity and joy that still echo within
for sometime after visiting P.S.1 and to a degree that intrigued me to think over this
beautiful work of art.
Indeed, if words and sentences are needed at all in order
to account for this exquisite and almost immaterial creation, I dare suggest that Ivana
Franke manages to eloquently offer alluring resolutions to some inherent contradictions
that have plighted abstract art from the very beginning.
Briony Fer points out to an inherent tension between the
material and the transcendent in abstract art. The latter includes an emphasis on the
properties of the material used, on seriality and on simplified decorative patterns. The
beholder is either asked to look through the work of art for an authentic and powerful
experience to which the art-work serves as a medium; or the viewer is prodded to see the
work of art in its formal excellence, nothing above, below or sideways.
Regarding "full empty space" in this context, we
realize that the art–object is too elusive for formal meditation and too simple for
sublime levitation. The space is empty of ostentation, irony, corporeality and
obstruction. Frank suspends the complicated relationship between abstraction and the
flatness of the artwork by dissolving our intuitive sense of dimensionality. The air and
the light dance the translucent patterns like an inebriated puppeteer, and thus undoing
the unrelenting rigidity of the grid structure while saluting to its artistic prowess. The
floating visage of light and reflection in "full empty space" does not cast
illusions. Rather it makes us grasp how illusory some well-chewed antinomies of art theory
are.
Contrary to other recent artists who were taken by
unmediated and simple natural phenomena, Ivana Franke does not frame nature or adored
light. She enlisted these primordial forces to the service of her metamorphic touch. The
beholder is immediately and directly connected to human survival through the life cycle of
nourishment and to intimate chores and crafts of the household. Carole Calo’s writes
that Martin Puryear’s "reconciles the disparate fragments of modern existence
with the timeless texture of being". Her words are cogent to this discussion as well.
Franke, I think, reached new heights in an unseen ladder of refinement, lightness and
virtuosity. She does not pose a post-modern irony against the interpretive traditions and
the presumptuous manifestos of abstraction. Hectic New York life along with its art-world
jargon, appear impoverished in the light of her non-sentimental and non-pretense humility.
Franke shuns the quick sand that paves a seemingly straight path from basic forms to
emotion and metaphysics; a road taken by the early twentieth century abstract artists. She
indirectly and non-visually invokes both metaphysics and emotion, granting freedom and
candor to the experiencing her art. Franke knows how to keep the medium, the subject
matter, the form and the context servants to the art. Moreover, she knows how to solicit
their graces. "Full empty space" orchestrates simplicity and exuberance in a
symphony of a panhuman experience. The rays of the sun, which scorch and lick every tear
or wound all around this earth, gently wrap "full empty space" along with its
creator and viewers.
Boas F. (1952) Primitive Art. Boston, Dover
Calo C.G. (1988) Martin Puryear: Private Objects, Evocative Visions. Art Magazine,
February Issue, 90-3.
Fer B. (1997) On Abstract Art. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Krauss R. (1981) The Originality of The Avant Garde and other myths of modern art.
Cambridge, MIT Press.
Y. Michael Barilan MD works at the Sourasky–Tel Aviv
Medical Center and The Sackler Faculty of Medicine, at Tel Aviv University. |
