8/3/2019 Kraus2002a
2/3
in the floor of your bedroom studio andhoisted a model of the
California FederalBank building down into the basement onpulleys.
The CalFed Bank was a buildingyou saw then, outside your window,
when
you were living in the Echo Park housethat became the site of
this project calledWhole.
Echo Park is part of Los Angeles, adjacentto the block of
skyscrapers clustered
downtown. When you moved in, the housewas owned by the bank, and
while you
were living there it changed hands severaltimes. For a while no
one knew what to do
with it because the real estate market wasflat and the house was
a shack falling into
the ground; there was constant flooding,and the land it was on
hadn't gained
enough value yet for the house to bedemo'd and the lot to be
resold.
We were talking about the mystical powerof money: the way the US
dollar bill is
engraved with twenty seven masonicsymbols and the bills change
hands many
times every day but nobody knows whatthey mean. You made a
drawing then,
called Playful Embellishment, with the eyeof the dollar bill
pyramid waving in front of
the CalFed building, all brightened withcandles and glitter.
Anyway, before the bank took over thehouse, a gay man with AIDS
was living
downstairs in the basement apartment,really a room. He was a
stained-glass
maker, and when he died nobody came toreclaim his stuff. When
you moved in, the
bank let you have it in exchange forclearing it out, and this
stuff became part
of the Whole.
The basement room was covered in cheap
pine paneling, and it became the
metaphysical-conceptual lab for the yet-to-be-fully-realized
Whole. There was a
Tiki Bar down there, a shingled thing like
they use to sell poolside drinks. It seemedto be built into the
house, as if it were
holding it up. You told me once that thebar (which you later
rebuilt and called the
Mysterious Object Bar) is the underside ofthe belly of Whole.
Because it contains the
disturbances at the "bottom" of a housethat is decaying at its
very foundations,
and that has been tied up in lawsuits foryears. Obviously, the
work alludes to the
social fact of gentrification and itsattendant displacement
while probing the
psychic underside of what we call "realestate" - the troubled
lives of actualoccupants compounded by official papersand
documents.
Your video, Whole Film 2002, shows a signhanging on the
pine-paneled wall, a riff on
the kind of inspirational slogans hangingall around the ashram
(that say things like
YOU ARE PERFECT IN YOURIMPERFECTION), but the stained-glass
maker's sign said, IF YOU CAN KEEP YOURHEAD IN ALL THIS
CONFUSION YOU JUST
DON'T UNDERSTAND THE SITUATION ...and I was struck by his use of
the word
'situation," the way it can be both a nounand a verb - just as
you, as a sculptor, i.e.
a visual thinker, in making this piece, mustalso have been.
Because isn't the point
and action of Whole that you enactsituations (the verb) that
result in a
situation (the noun) that is very confused.
In the video, a piece of the outside urban
landscape, i.e. the bank, is viewed throughyour window and then
reconstructed as a
model, small enough to be hoisted downinto the hole ... The
actual bank itself is
full of holes, those porthole windowsdesigned to look like a
plane in the hi-tech
imagination of the 1950s, whencommerce, like God, took off like
a jet. The
landscape outside your window was allblurry and smeared.
At the ashram this week I kept thinkingabout Alice falling down
through the hole,
or Ariadne, how she didn't forget to tieherself to a string when
she left for the
underworld. Mexican radio-music blastingon the video's
soundtrack, the frequency
of the pirate radio station near your housethat we hear when we
talk on the phone ..
Eleanor Antin quoting Baudelaire: The citychanges faster than
the human heart.
At the ashram they always lit candles atthe heart of the circle
and everyone wept
for the 3000 dead on 9/11, because theseare the dead we can
imagine, they are
triggers of grief, and you said, Whatattempt to move forward
isn't an attempt
to become Whole?"
Love, Chris
Chris Kraus is an art critic and fictionwriter living in Los
Angeles.
