Method No Madness By Jenni Sorkin
Analia Saban, View Count, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 2021
Analia Saban, View Count, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 2021
Method No Madness By Jenni Sorkin
Analia Saban’s new exhibition View Count, engages in a series of material experiments that work through processes and histories relevant to artmaking. As such, she is almost meticulously scientific in her practice, set up at times as a series of trials, playing out each facet carefully. There is method to the madness, so to speak, but there is no madness in and of itself: instead, there is a simple conflict between instinct and reason, propelling her to work through abstraction by trial, error, and the tribulation of gender inequity that courses through her chosen material, textiles as one of the foundational supports of painting—in that all canvas, in actuality, is a woven fabric.
The centerpiece of the exhibition are five large tapestries made of woven copper wire and linen thread that pay homage to the history of the loom itself: they reconstruct specific computer circuit boards, albeit at a grand scale, in order to make the direct connection between loom and computer technologies. For instance, Saban’s Copper Tapestry (Voodoo1 Graphics Card 3Dfx, 1996) (2020) offers the afterimage of the 1990s-era motherboard that helped to enable personal computer gaming, creating vast resolution and memory systems that would offer gaming enthusiasts fast and vivid color graphics, and the movement and speed of 70 frames per second. Her disparate materiality mirrors the complexities of computer processing itself: combining the sheen of copper wire with the ghostly fade of linen to showcase the entwined histories of punch card technologies.
Voodoo1 Graphics Card 3Dfx, 1996
Right: Analia Saban, Copper Tapestry (Voodoo1 Graphics Card 3Dfx, 1996), 2020
Analia Saban, View Count, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 2021
The invention of the Jacquard loom in the early nineteenth century amplified the speed with which complex textiles were woven, involving thousands of punch cards laced together. Each row of punched roles corresponded to a woven textile pattern. The Jacquard loom is subsequently often referred to as the earliest computer system, in that punch card technologies were also employed to instruct machines to perform automated tasks, including IBM’s 1928 computer, which utilized a punch card system to hold data.
The British cultural historian Sadie Plant first made the connection between textiles and digital technologies in Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997), which opened with a fascinating narrative of Ada Lovelace, the only child of Lord Byron, who produced what is now widely considered to be the earliest example of computer programming, which was misattributed to her colleague and collaborator, Charles Babbage, due to her gender. This was a book that circulated widely in art schools and textile departments in the late 1990s, several years before Saban was even yet an undergraduate. Saban has returned to this history both materially and conceptually, in the form of fauxtapestry production: a medium that is rife with historically female associations, woven by the hands of many anonymous women.
Women also take center stage in Saban’s double portraits of Olympia (Printed Paint Olympia and Woven Olympia Gray (both 2021), sphinx-like in their leisurely odalisque postures. Hers is a trifecta of layered references: the Great Sphinx of Giza (c. 2500 BC),
Analia Saban, Printed Paint, Olympia (Color Mode: RGB (Red:239 – Green:198 – Blue:196)), 2021
Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814), and Manet’s Olympia (1863)—itself already a modernist update Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538)—becomes a way to collapse the historical representation of women into a single frame, chockful of referents. One printed in pink, one woven in gray, the twin
Left: Analia Saban, Copper Tapestry (Riva 128 Graphics Card, Nvidia, 1997) [detail], 2020
works are effectively doubled, silhouettes both recto and verso, the front and the back of a print, which is already a medium historically tiered as secondary to painting, akin to women’s secondary sociopolitical status as a muse only for the whole of Western (art) history.
Weaving is the primary impetus for her other series shown here for the first time, Woven Angle Gradient as Weft (all 2021), six paintings woven with linen and strips of dried paint. These canvases approximate geometric abstraction in a variety of colors and angles, using the canvas as a clockface. The color is most striking at each angle, fading into a diffusion of pigment. The patterning itself, dependent upon the complex weave structure, is a way to highlight the hard-edged precision of geometric abstraction. These works co-opt a long litany of mid-century male producers: Josef Albers, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ellsworth Kelly, to name just a few, who made numerous such works in prints and paintings, utilizing systems and process as a feat that ultimately became clubby and exclusive, a domain of all-male practitioners. Saban’s use of weaving as both physical support and content highlights the gender exclusion and material hierarchy endemic to textiles. She points out its rigorous possibilities by engaging in her own difficult tests, resulting in beautiful solo works that also hint at sublimated content —one cannot help but wonder at the times chosen—marking not just angles, but habits; bedtime at half past ten, for instance, that define the banality of lived experience.
A third series also forces painting’s hand, by compelling a narrative displacement in which digital and analog color live in situ, a printed layer of paint splayed atop a linen canvas, known as Printed Paint (all works 2021).
Analia Saban, Woven Angle Gradient as Weft, Ultramaribe Blue, 2021
In these works, painting itself is used to comment upon its own materials, examining painted color through a sly conceptual framework: by pairing color balancing within digital design programs such as Photoshop, as a means of achieving the purity of color found in pigmented oil paint, hence the titles placed in uneasy repose next to each other: Cadmium Red Medium: RGB Values: Red 217-Green: 0-Blue: 0). These works literalize the exhaustive production of color theory itself, the rote and now-outmoded exercises once mandated and held in high esteem as one of the tenets of high modernist training. Saban purposely depletes the viewer through a profusion of color, which becomes exacting, demanding, precise, and confusingly beautiful, still.
Analia Saban, Printed Paint (Cadmium Yellow Medium / Color Mode: RGB (Red:255 – Green:224 – Blue:32)), 2021
As an exhibition, View Count, charts the number of visitors each day on a chalkboard. This is an analog version of what is known as “engagement metrics”—the same sort of handheld “clicker” counting found in museum foyers worldwide. It is also a ubiquitous practice found online: in the world of digital content measuring, the way in which “likes” are tallied in social media, for instance. But in Saban’s methodical world, her system is to create a series of philosophical rebuttals to canonical questions of what painting is, how far it can be pushed, for whom it should be made, and who, after all, is invited to make it. In this line of questioning, she ultimately invokes a deeper sensibility of figuring out, literally, what matters, and therefore, what really counts.
Left: Analia Saban, View Count, 2021