Cyrilla Mozenter: Very Well Saint

The Drawing

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CYRILLA MOZENTER Ve r y we ll sa in t The Drawing Center's DnewINc

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M a y 12 -Jun e 1 0 ,20 0 0

Having established the physical arena, I work as directly and unhesitatingly as possible. Each drawing becomes its own adventure. I can't predict what the experience will be or what the evidence of that experience will look like, and in that sense the work is always ahead of me. I don't impose a theme or consistent spatial organization; each drawing develops in the way it does. I am a birthing nurse, attentive and ready to perform whatever intervention is required. Although the drawings look different one to the next, the accumulation allows deeper consistencies to emerge. My intention is to involve as many levels of myself as possible in this process.

As in any seriousplay,there are rules and restrictions.Each drawing is made with two 12 l/4 x l7 l/8 inch sheets of Okawara handmade paper, layered and sewn together at the top edge. Marls (sometimes in the form of actual cuts, punctures, and piercings that are pathways to the space that is inside) can be made with pencil (eraser), scissors,needles, or by the inclusion (or removal) of felt, paper, silk thread, band-aids, wood (toothpicks, discarded popsicle sticks, or ice cream spoons found on the street).

The paper chosen has a relationship to light, beautiful feathery edges,and is a color that hovers. It has the quality of refinement: thin, with a delicate, porous surface. Sensitive, it bruises easily but is surprisingly tough. (lt can take abuse.)A worthy opponent/collaborator, it resists.

I use a soft pencil with a sharp point. Like a surgeon, I mean to be precise and penetrate the surface. By contrast, the other "ingredients" sit on top in tactile relief, while felt offers patches of softness,warmth, comfort, silence.

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Untitbd (#24)

(#41)

(#23)

Forty-fourdnwlngs from the'Very well saint" series,1999-2000.

Mixed media,including pencil, silk thread, toothpicks, woodenice cream spoons,felt, adhesivebmdages,chipbmrd, and cut-and-pastedpaperson a double layer ofpaper, 12 ll4 x 17 I/8 incheseach.

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In 1989, Cyrilla Mozenter began stealingpartially used bars of soapfrom public bathrooms.

She collected them wherever they could still be found with the knowledgethat these softly melting dinosaurswere doomed to be replacedby the cold efficiency of pump dispensers offering up sanitarydollops of sudsygoo. The soapswere small sculptures for the taking, rounded by numerous hands and the slow insistence of water. In the course of conversation, Mozenter divulged that one of her favorite hunting grounds had been the Whitney Museum.

Bars of soapat the Whitney have since gone the way of the venerableannuals, replacedby devicesthat better serveto separateone set of hands from another,be it that of a guard, a visitor, an artist, a janitor, or a curator. Unbeknownst to each other, we both marked the passing,she as an artist on the lookout for art in likely and unlikely places,and I as a (then) employee.Having learned of Mozenter'spoaching, I told her about coming across,in the days before the dispensersappeared,a tacked up note abovethe sinks in the fifth-floor bathroom 2

written by a staff member alarmed by the unsanitaryperils of sharedthings. Mozenter seemed pleasedbut little surprised at our serendipitouscrossingof paths, as if such occurrenceswere the small yet inevitable gifts at the heart of her practice.

Mozenter speaksof the bar of soapas a renewableresource-solidly inert at one moment and luxuriously expansivethe next-in perpetual re-creationdespite or becauseof its eventual demise.This quality of the renewableis everywhereapparentin the seriesof drawings"Very well saint," 1999-2000,which includes such unlikely materialsas wooden ice cream spoons, toothpicks, and flesh-coloredadhesivebandages.These things combine with bits of felt in plush beige,the occasionalpencil line, and stitchinghere and there. The stitching holds together two identical sheetsof white paper that reveal,time to time, Mozenter'sfound materials peeking out and sliding beneath, almost out of view. Into the works she inserts other marks, cutting the top layer of paper to leave a fissure, or grafting one paper fragment to another to create a seam. Such alterationsof the surface embody the hushed yet potent force of the nearly imperceptible. This is the case with Untitled (#13), which is dominated by two groupingsof vertical strips of felt-the most stick-like of stick figures-that march acrossthe 3

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paper'ssurface, some in isolation, some inclined towardseach other in symbolic partnership.

In the lower left foreground,Mozenter has introduced a horizontal cut strip, a ghostly stick figure (a stick figure down!) that announcesitself simply by the shadowit casts.

These inset marks and outcroppingcuts representthe outcomeof integratingone work into another.Many of Mozenter'sfinished drawingsdocumenta recyclingprocessthat causes scarring;vestigesof the past hang around in the present.This is true as well of the objects Mozenter employs.Most of the woodenice cream spoonsbear tracesof havingbeen used and discarded."Rescued"from the street, they are valued by the artist for the fast-forgotten consumptionthey evidence.Little in life is as universallypleasurableand innocently illicit as ice cream on a summer'sday.And like all such pleasuresit is hard to savorin memory with any of the intensity of the real thing: desireis perhapsmost palpableat its most elusive.So the spoonsare remembrancesof the handsthat graspedthem, the mouths that took them in and let them go. And the spoonsare themselvesshapedlike bodies, totem-like figures that hover and effect a balance with the aide (or, alternately,the burden) of small appendagesand additions.

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Untitl.ed(#25) showsan upright spoon pinned down by a horizontal bandage"strap" marked by two dots of felt that are, in turn, echoed by two penciled circles. Togetherthese elements suggeststumpy arms. Piecesof a toothpick stand in as rickety legs. Mozenter'suse of the adhesivebandageis perhapsthe most disturbing aspectof her practice. Its addition to her vocabularyof materials complicatesthe reductive palette that she employs so consistently.A bandageis inherently abject, it proclaims the presenceof a cut or sore at the sametime that it pathetically mimics the appearanceof skin. Like the sharedbar of soapit is at once dirty and clean and servesas a metaphor for that most primal of metaphors,the fetish: something that stands in for somethinglost and is all the more precious for it.

Mozenter is fond of Cycladic sculptures,and the wooden spoonsand bandages,both oblong shapeswith equal curves at either end, are humorous low-rent versionsof the refined forms of theseancient objects,which can be consideredfetishesin their own right. This is one of Mozenter'ssleights of hand, how to see the "high" in the "low" and vice versa.There are diverse moments of art history circulating in this game-in addition to Cycladic sculptures she looks at the work of Fra Angelico, particularly the Annunciation at the Convent of San Marco, Florence, 5

and her use of felt and found objects makesa respectful nod to JosephBeuys.This material connection is furthered by a sharedsensibility toward use. Like Beuys, Mozenter createsart through a practice that registersprocess.Things that she adds and removesfrom her drawings Ieavedeposits-quiet, ephemeralmarks comparableto the roundabout map of a snail passing through a garden.(She refers to this aspectof her work as "making wrong things right.") In contrast, Fra Angelico offers Mozenter directnessand order,a graceful deploymentof the unavoidablevisual pulls of geometry.By her own account, the compositionof Angelico's Annunciatioa circled around and drew her in; simply,wordlessly,communicating.Within her practice, encircling happensamongstthe insistent, singsongrhythm of simple things. In Untitlcd.(#29), a pencil line archesover two objects-a woodenspoonand a toothpick-like a kind of halo. Within its embracethey are at once trappedand free-floating.Mozenter believesin divine gracecropping up in the everyday.Objects and small gesturesdo the talking; she listens in.

The title of the series,'Very well saint," is adaptedfrom the operaFour Saintsin Three Acts,an irreverent collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson. Set in sixteenth-century Spain,the originalproductiontook place in 1934 in Hartford, Connecticutwith sceneryand 6

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costumesdesignedby Florine Stettheimer. Photographsof the sets suggesta particularly productive trip to a store specializingin all of the shimmering varietiesof cellophane.In contrast, Stein'slibretto has solidity to it that doublesback upon the pleasingrepetition of plural nouns, such as saints, pigeons,and fish. "Four saints are never three. Three saints are never four. Four saints are never left altogether.Four saints are leave it to me."'As a writer Stein was both generousand fearless;a true believer in forging understandingsthrough misunderstandings,of joining her readersin a pact of the imagination that allowed some things to remain joyfully unexplained,elusive.With a rare economyof meansshe throws the reader heels over head. The opposite of expectationsturns out just right. The samecan be said of Mozenter'sart. Across one drawing she has scrawled'Very well saint," and an additional fragment of the libretto, the words "oridnary pigeon" (accidentallymisspelledand left that way), appearsin another. It's possiblethat Mozenter'sprocessof creating through recycling ends when a particular work arrives at the state of being of the "very well saint," and all of the things she makes are like ordinary pigeons,so significantly forgotten and found again. l. Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson, Far Scints in Three Acts (New York/London: G. Schimer, 1948), 9.

2. Ibid.. 8-e.

The Drawing Center is the only not-for-proftt institution in the country to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings,both contemporaryand historic. It wasestablishedin 1976to provideopportunitiesfor emergingand under-recognizedartists; to demonstratethe significanceand diversity of drawingsthroughout history; and to stimulatepublic dialogueon issuesof art and culture.

This is number 8 of the Drauting Papen,a seriesof publications documentingThe Drawing Center's exhibitions and public prdgramsand providing a forum for the study of drawing.

Major support for the developmentand presentation of.the Drarting Papetshas been generouslycontributed

by FrancesDittmer.

The Drautittg Paperspublication seriesis printed on Monadnock paper.

Board of Dlrcctorc DitaAmory GeorgeNegroponte Co-Clnimcn

FrancesBeattyAdler JamesM. Clarh Jr. FrancesDittmer Colin Eisler Bruce W. Ferguson Michael Iovenko Wemer H. IGamarsky Abby Leigh William S. Lieberman Michael Lynne Elizabeth Rohatyn+ Eric C. Rudin Dr. Allen Lee Sessoms JeanneC. Thayer* EdwardH. Tuck ElizabethWeir Andrea Woodner Catherine deZngher Exzc*ive Dbecnr +Enteriu

The Drawing Center 35 WoosterStreet NewYorlqNY 10013 Tel:212-219-2166 Fax: 212-966-2976

Desigrer:Luc Derycke Copy editor:AnastasiaAukeman Coordinator: Katie Dyer Photographer:Philip Perkis @ 2000 The DrawingCenter

Covet Untitleil (#7), 1999