randian - Generating Legacy

2016.07.21 Thu, by

Generating Legacy

“Grown Up Art” —Christopher K. Ho solo exhibition

Present Company (254 Johnson Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, NY 11206, USA), May 13—Jun 26, 2016

With an audio installation, a series of glass sculptures, and a six-channel video installation, Christopher K. Ho’s most recent exhibition “Grown Up Art” proposed a call for pragmatic responsibility. Arguing for political agency of contemporary artists who are fathers, the exhibition composed a framework for an alternative patriarchy embodied by a central protagonist—Saint Joseph, a figure from Biblical texts who is the husband of Mary and foster father to Jesus. Guardian and mentor to a son he did not conceive, Joseph has historically been portrayed as self-effacing—willing to step aside so that Mary could be worshipped—and diligent in his work as a carpenter. Plotting a course from the symbolic ethos of Joseph to contemporary “art dads”, the installations acted as expository works across potential shifts of the male subject. From the conjunction of perspectival representation and subjective experience in antiquity to the reordering of cultural geographies post-1968, the model of Joseph was superimposed on a number of different artistic propositions.

An emblem of the exhibition’s prevailing polemic was “I Endorse Patriarchy”, an installation in two parts at the gallery’s entrance: a ten-by-six foot custom FLOR carpet inlaid with blue-and-grey snail spirals unfurling in a Byzantine pattern, and two flanking speakers emitting looped audio of a female narrator with a Chinese-British accent reading an eponymously titled manifesto. “Patriarchy,” she announced as viewers passed through the entryway, “is what contemporary art needs to counter pervasive indeterminacy.” Positioned in the center of the gallery was an installation entitled “Institution”, a 24-foot tableau of a set of handmade stained glass sculptures tracing the transmutation of a Platonic cube into the spiral of a snail shell in eight steps. Nearby was a small addendum to the central installation composed of a 14-inch column of glass blocks with shapes generated in Google SketchUp that were used to build the larger tableau etched into it. The orientation of the shapes—floating in the vertical stack of glass —evoked the boundless horizons seen in traditional Chinese landscape painting, which suggested an omnipotent perspective that is inherent in 3D modeling. The glass sculptures not only suggested manifestations of power when it is redistributed via alternative frameworks, but also put forth the feminine binary inherent in the proposed alternative patriarchy modeled on Joseph. Celebrated for centuries as a symbol of cosmic consciousness, fertility, androgyny, and regeneration, the spiral of the snail shell became a second protagonist of the exhibition which was also emblematic of an alternative position to center the subject for radically empowered political agency.

Christopher K. Ho, “Institution” (detail), stained glass, 53 x 53 x 53 cm, 2016

The most didactic works in the exhibition were six video projections collectively entitled Joseph as Model. Expanding on its title via animated diagrams and images, the video installation traced multiple sources of cultural criticism and theory—from Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (1973) to the 2013 film adaptation of Ender’s Game—to project possible outcomes for the humble patriarch. One video charted tropes of institutional critique from the artist-as-curator to non-profit spaces to the prevailing DIY ethos of the ‘90s, and lead to what Ho calls the “neo-civic liberal subject.” Another, “Asians and Americans”, referenced Ho’s own upbringing between Hong Kong and LA by Christian parents, and mapped the divide between American self-actualization and Asian filial duty. A third, “Baby/Art Dads” depicts a swirling animation of portraits of Ho’s artist friends who are also fathers—the aforementioned “art dads;” Craig Taylor, Daniel Lefcourt, José Ruiz, Adam Parker Smith, Robert Lazzarini, and Zach Seeger, among others, make appearances. “Because providing stability and semantic security for a child is healthier for that child than self-questioning and undermining authority,” the narrator proselytized from the totemic speakers at the entrance. “Because taking responsibility for one is harder than altering the sensible for all.”

If the subject has been pictured in recent linguistic and psychoanalytic theory as incomplete and self-divided, then Ho offered a view of possible positive manifestations of a centered subject. “Grown Up Art” teaches us not just that indeterminacy can be countered by this but it also shows that it is itself a terminal position where the opportunity to generate a more hopeful legacy is possible. Through modes of representation like stained glass, perspective, diagrams, 3D modeling, and language, the exhibition was able to examine the construction and deconstruction of the subject in Chinese as well as Occidental worldviews in a beguiling and beautiful way.