Conceptual minimalist Ceal Floyer is back stateside at 303 Gallery, proving once again just how little you can put into a big room. Taking up just two of the walls, Scale and Ink on Paper are an agoraphobe’s nightmare. For the rest of us, the show provides the airy calm for which so many spaces aim and miss.
Floyer likes to deal in plain dialectic. Fans will remember a slowly boiling pot alongside a glass of mineral water as it effervesces its last bubbles (H20 Diptych, 2002), or an inverted waveform of a country song contending with an edit of the original audio (I Do/I Would 2006). In the current show we have Scale, 24 black speakers forming a diagonal staircase along a wall. The duality here is aural, the speakers emulate the sounds of a person mounting, then descending a stair. There is always a pause on the fourth step, providing a human poignancy (does she really want to go up there?) in what is at first a somewhat cold-looking piece.
Floyer has a talent for the clarifying potential of dualism. As the audio cycles, she means to strip away the viewer’s aesthetic expectations until their mind is settled on the staircase itself, an object which synthesizes “up” and “down.” To go up is trepidatious, exhausting; to go down is perhaps to flee. The associative power of a staircase is surprisingly potent.
We are asked to reboot our conceptual expectations for Ink on Paper, where method is brought to the fore. The piece consists of a series of colored circles on white paper, which were created by a pen being held vertically as its ink bled out. On close inspection the circles are irregular – almost cell-like – with errant shades of ink escaping the outer membrane. Whether these are the same drawings from the Ink and Paper of 1999 I was unable to ascertain, but in either case it is clear that the concept is one Floyer thinks highly of. It isn’t hard to see why – here she has successfully integrated the chance maxim held to by elder minimalists like Rauschenberg and Cage. The beautiful shading seen in the circles is the product of the density of the paper, the flux of the ink as it spread, the temperature of the room and so on. The artist herself was stationary in the act of creation.
If the concept works for you, Ink on Paper builds an organic momentum, unveiling circles as shifting forms; cell, eye, sun, bruise. If not, Floyer’s work at least succeeds as an aesthetic cleansing, which is a nice thing to have done before crossing the street to take in Picasso’s Mosqueteros, or any other matter of the heart.
