GLENN KAINO

Hollow Earth is a sculpture made from glass and wood that creates the illusion of a tunnel descending deep into Earth. Once inside the darkened shed that contains the work, viewers become uneasy as they peer into a brightly lit hole that appears to drop into infinite darkness. Glenn Kaino’s installation was a contemplative gesture exploring the complicated and diverse history of tunnel making, from the secret tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to the common childhood (and Orientalist) fantasy of digging a hole to China. The title, invoking numerous legends of subterranean lands, elicits an idea that the world is inside out—a reference to the crisis of our time. Paradoxically, as the viewer stares down at the piece, wondering about the depth of the tunnel, they are actually staring at themselves as seen through a series of mirrors. With irony, art directly reflects (their) life and the meaning, value, and power that they assign to it.

neville wakefield: Sand often featured in your past work. What does sand mean to you, and how does it relate to your experience of the desert?

glenn kaino: I have a long relationship with sand as a material, both from an environmental standpoint as well as in sculptural works. I grew up in Los Angeles and spent time in the desert and on the beach—very different sands, but also very similar in their granularity. I’ve made hourglasses, spinning hourglasses in which time is suspended as well as others. Probably the most important project I made was for the 2004 Whitney Biennial—a large sand sculpture that evokes the visual presence of a large architectural formation, in that case the Emerald City, based on the Emerald City of Oz, sitting within a floor frame inspired by those mini, executive-desk Zen gardens. It was imposing in its size but so ephemeral and fleeting in its condition, because at any moment it was very fragile.

My studio team—there were four of us—spent three days in my gallery at the time, called the Project, up in Harlem, working with sand. That’s when I learned to craft using that textural material. I remember we were covered with sand, and we finished and we went down to Dallas BBQ in Midtown. There was a door, a little entryway, and as we walked in from the wind, it blew shut behind us, and bam, we were all in the restaurant, with the sand we’d brought with us on our clothes. We looked up at the TV screen, and President Bush was announcing the sandstorm had abided. We were about to go to war.

An extremely auspicious moment.

It was an auspicious moment, and an emotional moment, because we had just created a five-ton, three-cubic yard sand monument to the ephemerality of institutions and government, or self-organizing structures. It was a crazy thing.

Initially, I actually studied with the Guinness World Record-holder Todd Vander Pluym, who taught me how to make sand sculpture. He explained that “the enemies of sand sculptures” are vandals and weather. Because when you tamp the sand down during its creation—and this goes directly into the piece I conceived for Cairo [Kaino represented the United States at the 13th Cairo Biennale]—you’re organizing it into vertical columns. That’s how it stands up. And so for that project, I had envisioned this connectivity of the different deserts.

How would I realize the dream of this dialogue poetically, using local materials? For Cairo, the idea was to create a drawing of a city out of wind. I had a thought that the conversation we are having now might travel out the window, jump on a jet stream, and end in another place. With this artwork, when you walked into the exhibition space, you felt the wind on your face, but you couldn’t see anything. And then every hour, on the hour, a thin sheet of sand would fall from the ceiling, be pushed by the wind, and create the shape of the drawing for less than thirty seconds—a fleeting moment.

Hollow Earth was about what lies beneath the sand.

This exploration spoke to that same notion of dreams, of connectivity. What lies under, and what connects us.

In England, we say, you drill a hole through the Earth and you’ll end up in Australia. Here, you end up in China, right?

It was obviously a Western-Orientalist fantasy. And as an Asian American growing up in a relatively diverse but still Eurocentric environment, it was always a little irritating to hear “dig a hole to China.” Japan was probably too small to hit accurately.

It also invokes a kind of political tunneling—from the narco tunnels of the nearby border to the tunnels of the Gaza Strip.

In cartography, mapmaking is a subjective science. The fact that there are invisible tunnels underneath invisible borders was a pretty great thing to think about.

Having grown up here and being aware of border policies definitely had some influence.

The way we designed the artwork was influenced by the brickwork in some smuggling tunnels

as well as in the narco tunnels, but also with a light that not only improved the resolution, but also made it feel like a missile silo. You know, it really gave your mind an opportunity to wander to all those different areas when confronted with the piece.

The housing of the piece added to that. It couldn’t have been a more innocuous frame through which you entered, and then it opened up. One thing that struck me was the effectiveness of the illusion. We had some kids who didn’t want to step inside for fear of falling. I also remember a couple cops coming in and holding onto the edge of the doorway to peer down.

Well, the funny thing about that story was, when the cops came in, they thought that someone might be smuggling something in a shed, because they had a report. You and I were standing there, and the cops rolled up, like out of a movie, saying they had a report that people were going in and out of a shed that had just appeared in the middle of the desert.

After the cops came in, holding onto the walls so they wouldn’t fall down, I think you said, “Well, we weren’t hiding or smuggling anything, but what a great place to smuggle and hide something: underneath the illusion of a tunnel.”