Joo
Michael Joo: Drift Curated by Richard Klein and Alyson Baker April 6 to September 21, 2014
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Michael Joo: Drift
Over a career that now spans two decades, Michael Joo has redefined sculpture, creating a body of work that transcends the seduction of technology and the easy answers offered by science to generate a set of questions that place humankind in the context of natural history. Joo, like artist Robert Smithson before him, engages with a deep sense of time, as well as with the cycles of creation and entropy inherent in both nature and human endeavor. For this new project, created specifically for The Aldrich, Joo expands Smithson’s notion of site/nonsite by connecting the interior of the Museum to the surrounding landscape and its specific history. Drift is based on Joo’s meditation on Cameron’s Line, an ancient suture fault that traces the edge of the continental collision that initiated the formation of the Appalachian Mountains. The line—which runs north from New York City into Westchester County, passes through Ridgefield as it traverses Connecticut, then crosses Massachusetts into Vermont—is defined by a belt of marble that includes the famous quarries of Vermont. The exhibition poses Cameron’s Line as a linear experience—but not necessarily in one direction—through both time and space, and features a massive displacement of Vermont marble that takes the form of a fourteen-hundred-square-foot chamber, whose chilled and frosted ceiling echoes the marble’s crystalline structure. For Joo, a Korean American, the idea of landscape has generally had potent political implications, reflecting the bisection of the Korean peninsula into two polarized halves by the Military Demarcation Line, the de facto border between north and south. As pure geometrical figures, lines are clean and definitive, but when it comes to the surface of the earth they are anything but, reflecting the wrenching forces of both natural and human history. As Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his story “Death and the Compass,” “I know of one Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along that line so many philosophers have lost themselves.”1 Borges’s story contradicts the supposed linearity of time, positioning it as actually a cycle of infinite return. Joo’s journey along Cameron’s Line reflects movement not only into the past, but, more importantly, movement into the labyrinth of thought engendered by the consideration of the vastness of time. The title Drift plays off the concept of continental drift, the geological phenomenon of slowly shifting continental plates that incrementally shape the earth’s crust. But drift has other connotations, including a gradual change in meaning over time; rock debris deposited by natural agents; a horizontal passageway in an underground mine; and the materials transported and deposited by a glacier or glacial meltwater. All of these definitions are relevant detours to consider while traveling along the line that the artist has suggested we follow. Joo’s project is composed of three major elements: the Marble Strata Room, an architectural construction based on a displacement of Vermont marble; Back Sight (Quarried), a contained laser device that emits a beam that first penetrates the structure of the Museum and is then reflected through the building’s interior, finally exiting into the landscape; and Succession (Cored), a displacement of a section cut between The Aldrich’s first and second floors that has been transposed to the Museum’s rear stairwell. The three interrelated elements involve time, continuity, adoption, and displacement, ultimately reflecting back on the landscape and Joo’s physical experiences while researching Cameron’s Line. Named for Eugene Cameron, the geologist who first described it in the 1950s, Cameron’s Line is a division between the ancient continental core of North America and terrain that was added to the continent in the Ordovician Period, 450 million years ago. At the beginning of this period, New York and western Connecticut were near the equator; an adjacent warm, shallow sea extended eastward, with deposits similar to the carbonate-rich banks that currently surround the Bahamas. The lime muds at the bottom of this sea were composed of the remains of calcareous shells and skeletons of marine creatures, in places exceeding 2,000 feet in depth. Far off the coast and dividing this shallow sea from the open ocean was an arc of islands, similar to present day Japan. To the east of these islands was the continental plate that composed proto-Africa; this plate began moving west, colliding with the island arc and
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Map showing approximate location of Cameron’s Line
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driving it into the shallow sea, compressing and crumpling its sediment and transforming it into marble. This event is referred to as the Taconic Orogeny, and was the first phase of the continental collision that initiated the creation of the Appalachian Mountains. For brevity, this description is a gross simplification of events, but subsequent collisions resulted in additional uplifts and rifting of the region, distorting, twisting, and fracturing the remnants of Cameron’s Line into the sinuous form that defines it today. But Cameron’s Line is not just an abstract and obscure feature on the landscape. Its unique nature and mineralogy is frequently manifested on the surface, with the resulting topography influencing human history and affairs. The marble of Cameron’s Line is softer and more prone to erosion than the surrounding rock, and both rivers and roadways frequently follow its course. This fact attracted Joo, as the line created a natural pathway between the artist’s home in New York City and The Aldrich—a path that is defined by such features as the Harlem, Bronx, and Saw Mill rivers. (From Ridgefield north into western Massachusetts, Cameron’s Line is the primary path of the Housatonic River Valley.) Marble has played a significant role in history, being utilized for everything from sculpture to architecture. For instance, within a dozen miles of the Museum are several “Limekiln Roads,” named after the furnaces that dotted the landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, transforming crushed marble into plaster for the interior walls of homes and other buildings. The cemeteries of both New York and Connecticut are filled with gravestones made from marble quarried from Cameron’s Line, with the oldest stones coming from local deposits, and the more recent originating in the massive quarrying operations on the Line’s northern end in Vermont. If time is a line that does indeed repeat, it is without irony that the compressed remains of ancient sea creatures now form the human memorials that stand in our cemeteries. Joo’s interest in using a laser in his project originally grew out of a myth connected with Robert Smithson. According to New York poet, writer, and musician Jim Carroll in his memoir Force Entries: The Downtown Diaries 1971–1973, Smithson mysteriously bounced a laser beam around the streets in lower Manhattan for several nights in 1971, an apocryphal event that has now been attributed to artist Forest Myers. Carroll’s story was Joo’s first introduction to Smithson, long before he attended art school, and the story seemed to ring true given Smithson’s interest in both labyrinths and science fiction. But as Joo focused more on Cameron’s Line, the idea of using a laser gained traction independent of Carroll’s mythicizing.
Roadcut in Ordovician marble on Cameron’s Line showing extreme foliation, Route 7, Brookfield, Connecticut
A laser forms a line straighter and more coherent than anything found in nature, and its properties are routinely used for precision measurement, with uses spanning the spectrum from land surveying to guiding smart bombs onto their targets. If the fugitive and wandering nature of Cameron’s Line is anything but straight, a laser becomes its mirrored opposite: a linear phenomenon with no ambiguity. The work Back Sight (Quarried) originates in the Balcony Gallery above the Museum’s Project Space, in a glass box that contains an optical table: an engineered platform that is designed to support and precisely align optical devices. The box houses power supplies, controllers, two lasers—one red and one green—and mirrors that combine the two beams into one and then reflect it downwards and out of the box. The beam passes through a three-inch hole core-drilled in the gallery’s floor and descends into the Project Space. On entering the Project Space, the laser is reflected around its periphery by a series of precision mirrors, echoing the Space’s architecture. The beam finally runs along the Project Space’s east wall and exits through a window, directed towards the horizon. The beam is aimed on a compass heading of 9° north, which is a straight line targeting Danby, Vermont, 145 miles away, the origin of the marble that composes the Marble Strata Room. The site that is the source of the project’s primary material is thereby anchored to the nonsite of the exhibition, drawing together two ends of an ancient sea with an ephemeral optical gesture. Succession (Cored), initially might seem like the simplest element of Joo’s project, but it is an act of displacement that profoundly connects the artist and his personal history to the site of the Museum through an act of reverse archeology. For in creating Succession (Cored), Joo took the site where a passageway for the laser was cut between two floors of the Museum as an opportunity to permanently embed one of his earlier works within the building’s infrastructure. Joo’s sculpture (dating from 1999) was inserted into the space prior to the cutting of a core-drilled hole, with the subsequent core drill transecting the work and removing a cylindrical section. The section, thus made of part of the sculpture as well as parts of the floor
and ceiling, has been horizontally displaced into the adjacent stairwell, where it is suspended at a height that corresponds to its original orientation. Core samples are used by geologists to understand stratigraphy: the origin, composition, distribution, and succession of strata, particularly in regard to time. Similarly, Succession (Cored) inserts Joo’s project at the Museum physically into the stratified timeline of its history, embedding a fossil-like trace that will survive into an indefinite future. Mirroring Drift’s primary reflection on the past, Succession (Cored) directs the artist’s project—and the artist’s past—forward in time, displacing concepts of “beginning” and “ending” with a fact that is as paradoxical as a time machine. Joo’s interest in working with the marble that defines Cameron’s Line brought him in December 2012 to the Vermont Quarries in Danby. There is no clear understanding of why the marble of Vermont is the highest quality found on Cameron’s Line, but the stone that comes from Danby has been compared to the marble from Carrara, Italy, a primary source of stone for both sculpture and architecture in the Italian Renaissance. Vermont Quarries’ Imperial Danby mine is the largest underground marble quarry in the world, with stone now being mined over a mile beneath the surface. The nature of Joo’s displacement of Danby marble, however, was not just based on its quality, but also the specific conditions found on the site. The experience of descending into the quarry and encountering its massive underground galleries reversed expectations for Joo: instead of considering singular blocks of stone for his project as would be expected, he was put in the position of being literally surrounded by a preserved mountain of Ordovician sea floor. Instead of being a mere observer, Joo felt as if he were a participant in time—day became night, notions of exterior and interior became crossed, and his breath froze in the winter air, condensing on the remains of sea creatures that hadn’t seen daylight for countless millennia. Here, Robert Smithson’s 1972 Dialectic of Site and Nonsite2 becomes relevant:
Site Nonsite 1. Open Limits Closed Limits 2. A Series of Points An Array of Matter 3. Outer Coordinates Inner Coordinates 4. Subtraction Addition 5. Indeterminate Certainty Determinate Uncertainty 6. Scattered Information Contained Information 7. Reflection Mirror 8. Edge Center 9. Some Place (physical) No Place (abstract) 10. Many One
Optical table with aligned 637nm red and 532nm green solid state diode lasers Image courtesy of CT. Lasers
Joo’s solution to representing the contradictions found in Danby resulted in Marble Strata Room, a cubic, ten-foot-square construction whose walls are made of two-inch-thick slabs of Imperial Danby marble. The slabs were cut off the four faces of a massive block of stone, and their orientation in the installation corresponds to their original relationship to one another in the quarry. As Joo’s primary experience of the quarry was an interior experience, the work—as its title implies—is a room that one can enter. On penetrating the interior space, however, one is enveloped not by an Ordovician sea floor, but rather a brightly reflective chamber that is more displaced from linear time than anything promised by the remains of an ancient continental collision. Smithson’s Dialectic of Site and Nonsite posits reflection as an attribute of site, and mirroring as a condition of nonsite, with both phenomena being dependent on their opposite (one can’t have a reflection without a mirror); the interior of Marble Strata Room has been mirrored with silver nitrate (the same material used for traditional photographic emulsion), and its reflective, cool silver aura acts to slow down and strangely modulate the viewer’s perception. The apparent drop in temperature upon entering the space, however, is not just dependent on the color temperature of the light, but rather the result of its ceiling being covered with a layer of frost, for the ceiling of Marble Strata Room is refrigerated to below freezing, and any ambient humidity (including the viewer’s breath) condenses and crystallizes on its lower surface. The top (exterior) of this ceiling has been also been mirrored, with its sculpted surface reflecting the topography of the exposed bedrock found on the landscape above the quarry. Joo’s refrigeration of the ceiling is not only a reference to the specific winter conditions he encountered at the quarry, but also an allusion to the transmutation of matter from one form into another: limestone becomes crystalline marble, which resembles snow; water vapor becomes ice, which resembles marble. Much of the topography of New England was altered by the last ice age, which only ended 13,000 years ago—a blink of the eye in geologic time. Glaciers that were more than a mile in
Interior view of Imperial Danby Quarry, Danby, Vermont
thickness covered the landscape of the region, and the path that Joo’s marble chamber took from Vermont to Connecticut is a recapitulation of the ice’s movement from north to south, which perhaps not so coincidentally parallels Cameron’s Line. Joo’s installation is a monument of sorts to natural history, but like all monuments erected by humankind, it tells us more about the maker than any external reality. Drift is not a didactic presentation of facts as much as it is an echo chamber where experiments have been carried out and questions have been posed. Does an ancient tropical sea have any relevance to those living and walking on its remains? Perhaps pausing to consider the spatial dislocations and temporal distortions embedded in Drift will help us to understand that eternity isn’t some later time, nor is it a long time: rather it is that dimension of here and now which time itself obscures.3 Richard Klein, exhibitions director Michael Joo was born in 1966 in Ithaca, New York, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The artist gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Bill Abbott, Tom Bigelow, Bill Booth, Nadine Friedman, Emily Henretta, Brett Swenson, and Jon Wang. Additionally, he would like to thank Ashkan Salamat and Marc Warner, Stefan Nicolescu, Felix Cuesta, Marc Arotsky, Luca Mannolini, David Gelfman, Ben Badoud, Alyson Baker, and Richard Klein
Works in the Exhibition All dimensions h x w x d Back Sight (Quarried), 2014 Optical table with aligned 637nm red and 532nm green diode solid state laser modules, glass, steel, front surface mirrors, hazer, misting system Dimensions variable Marble Strata Room, 2014 Imperial Danby marble, silver nitrate, steel, refrigeration equipment, frost, urethane resin, cabling, hardware 11 x 10 x 12 feet Succession (Cored), 2014 Maple flooring, plywood, pine, sheetrock, urethane foam and urethane resin, snap line, ground chalk, brick 24 feet x 3 inches x 3 inches Courtesy of the artist 1
Jorge Luis Borges, “Death and the Compass,” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 86.
2
The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), p. 115.
3
Paraphrase of a quote by Joseph Campbell from The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers), PBS Television, 1988, episode 2, chapters 13–14.
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum advances creative thinking by connecting today’s artists with individuals and communities in unexpected and stimulating ways.
Board of Trustees Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; William Burback, Treasurer/Secretary; Chris Doyle; Annabelle K. Garrett; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Lori L. Ordover; Peter Robbins; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine
Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder
The companion exhibition Drift (Bronx) will be on view at The Bronx Museum of the Arts from June 20 through September 21, 2014.
Michael Joo: Drift is made possible, in part, by generous funding from Blain/Southern, London, Kukje Gallery, Seoul, Jennifer McSweeney, Robin and Andrew Schirrmeister, and The Aldrich Contemporary Council.
Major support for Museum operations has been provided by members of The Aldrich Board of Trustees and by the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.
Marble Strata Room (digital rendering), 2014 Rendering by Triplet 3D Courtesy of the artist
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