The Architecture of Possibility

Everyone feels it. Poised on the brink of the millennium, we are treading water, swimming in stone. The lifeline of history has unraveled, leaving us holding the end of a thread vanishing fast beneath us. But far below us, in the culture trenches, the currents of the future turn in the deep. An uncanny similarity is emerging between the evolution of certain kinds of art work and the process of geological formation. Geological strata are formed in a two part process: sedimentation, or the depositing of material, followed by the folding process that fuses the material into a stable and functional structure. This stratification process has been described like this: “Strata . . . consist of imprisoning intensities or singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy. Strata are acts of capture . . . they proceed simultaneously by code and territoriality” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus).

The analogy should be clear enough by now. Warning signals have been sighted for some years now all over the hi-lo. The increasing use of “mutant” high technologies and materials in industry and medicine, the possibility of international assembly lines where goods are manufactured non-sequentially at several points of origin, shifting alliances among the nations of what Benjamin Barber has call “McWorld.” All of these dovetail with the deployment of composite material and social strategies by a number of artists.

In recent works by Brian Tolle and Toland Grinnell, two young artists may be seen approaching these issues with almost diametrically opposed sensibilities. Their separate involvement with these issues has resulted in an intriguing overlap between works shown simultaneously this spring at Basilico Fine Arts and at the Gramercy International Art Fair.

Figure 1.

Toland Grinnell, Gateway to Eternity, 1996. Installation in Room 505 at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Photo: Courtesy Basilico Fine Arts, New York.

Grinnell’s installation, Gateway to Eternity, at the Gramercy International Art Fair was a triumph of the will. The Gramercy, at the hotel on the famed private park, allows only a one day window of opportunity for installation and only stays open for four days. In this brief space of time, Grinnell effectively rebuilt every surface of a two room suite, transforming it into three eerie chambers, loosely based on the funeral architecture of pre-Christian cultures.

Grinnell’s work has previously emphasized the immediate gratification of visual consumption and this show proved no different. Starting with the sheer “Just how did he get all this in here?” initial wonder of the audience, Grinnell’s installation ran on a peculiar kind of aesthetic adrenaline. Hyped up on a synthetic soundtrack, echoing somberly through the cramped and eccentric cells, the viewer stumbled from the pink, womb-like, “boat slip” to the darkened, phallic, glass “observation car,” pausing to observe the goings-on in the “quarry” in between. A ladder of dubious utility extended to another concealed area above, hinting at a vast and shadowy architectural construct, extending through and beyond the literal outlines of the hotel.

Throughout, the primary phases of the sedimentary process could be clearly seen at work. Grinnell makes little effort to digest his sources, prefering instead to revel in his abrupt material processes of forcibly annealing and bracketing material and historical contexts together. But hybridization, or the marrying of the different, is only part of this process. It was a common practice in the 1980s to accumulate and deposit material side by side in a fashion that proudly characterized itself as Hegelian. But there is no place in Hegelian duality for the antimony of a complementary idea. In this type of doctrine, “the only concrete expression of the dialectical force which opposes its many terms, is the armed soldier” (Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience).

The Hegelian dream, or nightmare, of the perfect whole, presupposes an absorption of all the diverse contradictions from which its unity will derive. But of course contradiction, or difference, is the basis of the world. Grinnell...