Whatever I write here cannot be a fair critique on Allora and Calzadilla’s Fault Lines at Gladstone Gallery, for we did not see all the elements with which the artist wanted to fill the space. However, Gladstone released a statement proudly presenting the overall objective below:
“Fault Lines will explore the overlapping mechanics of polyphonic vocal texturing, geological and sculptural displacements, and adversarial rhetorical language in a new performance-based work, featuring an original composition by Guarionex Morales-Matos.”
Playing on the title Fault Lines, Allora and Calzadilla features performances where old-fashioned insults are sung by two boy trebles in a “verbal duel.” As Gladstone says, apparently the (beautiful) “voice escapes the letter, allowing the musical texture to take precedent over the word’s intelligibility.” But I felt more compelled to write about this because I read a Jerry Saltz article on Vulture slamming the show:
“Fault Lines consists of ten large stone 'sculptures,' all arranged tastefully about the spacious gallery," he writes. "In actuality, they’re just unnecessarily heavy steps quarried, polished, moved to, and installed in the gallery at who knows what expense.”
I don’t know much about the work Saltz sees the married-artist duo having plagiarized, but it took me five minutes to go around the gallery and see “geological and sculptural displacements,” and I left feeling not much. The ten stone sculptures were two-level choral risers that seem to have been informed by some minimalist aesthetic tips. The surfaces of the two steps made of “pretty marbled stones” were at times clean cut like glass, some corners left ragged. The careful walkthrough of the gallery left me feeling quite silly, after seeing pictures of little boys walking, climbing, singing on them. I probably wouldn't (and shouldn’t) have gone on the risers anyway, but that barricade—the one that beeps “don’t touch, it’s art”—rings as practical solutions to damage but also a psychological elevation of value.
Would these sculptures stand alone as art worthy of being in a gallery space without the performance component? I’m not really sure, but as much as they were pretty objects that could definitely serve other functions, such as a platform to showcase one’s family picture frames in a two-story penthouse in West Village. How does one sell the object alongside performance art? Will Gladstone sell these risers? Is the cost of the performance simply embedded in the material cost + alpha? Jerry Saltz’s critique serves as a cathartic release, a working bullshit detector in the art world:
“Fault Lines is simply the kind of atria art that goes down easy, making unsuspecting crowds think they’re in the presence of deep thought. A performance with a celebrity sleeping in a box, an artist staring at audience members, and the like. All this work does is momentarily entertain. It is utterly unoriginal, devoid of personal thought, bathed in bathos, subtly sensationalistic, and very windbaggy.”
I had more fun reading his review than being in that space. Maybe it would have been better with the performers, but I absolutely appreciate his mere deflation of objects that occupy spaces with an aura of significance, entitlement and pseudo-intellectualism.
Find Saltz’s article here: Allora and Calzadilla’s Fault Lines Borders on Plagiarism
http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/art-review-fault-lines-borders-on-plagiarism.html
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