While on foot in the rooms housing the Frick Collection, the artist stops to look at El Greco’s St. Jerome (1590-1600), a portrait of a saint, a superior authority, which the audio-guide points out is: ‘placed high for dramatic impact’. The space between the viewer and the work (a lofty elevation) at this moment of recognition and reception, is in a kind of inverse relation – in terms of distances between things and thoughts – to the close range intimacy established through a listening device between the anonymous professional whispering voice and, the ear and cognitive centre of the viewer. The collector – rich enough to own an image of the ‘Doctor of the Church’ – could also position him as he wanted. In contrast to eyelevel hangings – and the supposed democracy of a horizontal arrangement works in a space – here he indulged in a bit of subjective liberty-taking in terms of the aesthetics of display. His hanging, while neither Petersburg, nor Baroque, is nonetheless above-the-mantel piece high.
The anecdotal however, doesn’t circumscribe this exhibition. It is a ploy, an enticer. In the 1960s a British sculptor impressed New York with his absence of plinths signalling that discipline’s vertical liberation in the same way that flatness for paintings had already become de rigueur. (Plenty of art wants to be high even when it’s on the floor.) Postmodernism messed up these and other linear relations providing angles and new methods for thinking of what went before in order to go forward. In Nashat’s exhibition a series of prints and sculptures focus on neoclassical plinths and pedestals through truncation or ‘abridgement’ as some of their titles suggest. The artist downloaded images and then essentially cropped off the offending part. He also reproduced one as a sculpture, Downscaled and Overthrown (2008) – a kind of Siamese twin abandoned it to its own sealed-off mirrored relationship with itself. Nothing will come between its two volumes, even though their relation is unequal, one being somewhat smaller than the other.
Respite: a glimpse of part of a body is better than a full frontal. Feet are an everyday fetish and accordingly have as much place in art as anywhere else. Walking, stepping up and out are two photographs The Foot of Adrian Hermanides and The Calf of Adrian Hermanides (both 2008), of parts of an artist colleague’s body. These studio snapshots involve putting photography at the service of a kind of slippage into the sculptural. Extremities and supports also play roles in the transferred to video Super8 film Modern Body Comedy (2006), which was shot in a theatre and features two athletic male actors. This work without a spoken script functions something like a piece of dance theatre. Chairs (people plinths), socks, sneakers and a fake moustache take the place of words in the staring duo’s relationship – a stage-y heart wrenching renegotiation of subject and object.
Dominic Eichler