May. 13, 2009 - Issue #708: Three Square Meals

The Box: This way up

Stripped of context, The Box is a little light

What you see of Cesar Forero’s The Box when visiting the gallery isn’t quite the whole thing. The sculptural works on display at Harcourt House owe their existence to the dance performance which spawned them, and without the animation of the one-off opening night performance the show contains a curious sense of absence.

As you enter the gallery, all you can see is a forest of hanging stuffed fabric figures, posed as if dancing and dressed in garish clothing and supporting frogs and birds made of the same stuff. As you walk towards the room from the outer, smaller gallery space, the mannequins seem intimidating as they crowd around the entrance, forcing you to walk very close to them if you wish to enter. This tense approach has a sense of magic to it, and it is surely the best part of the installation: although strands of rope on the floor invite you deeper into the space, what they lead to lacks the liveliness of the hanging figures.

What lies farther into the room is in part less exciting because it is so clearly the debris left after a performance. Forero is in a difficult situation here, as he has attempted to create a sculptural work which functions on its own terms even after his performance, in which it played a crucial role, has passed, since the dance element of the show only occurs one time during the month-long show. But despite these efforts, the titular “box,” an assemblage of unfinished wood, and its accessories do not seem whole on their own. Left in a slightly organized heap, probably their final resting positions after the dance, the items seem largely uninteresting. Two rolls of fabric hang from the ceiling, suggesting that they can be pulled further to unroll them, but this implied motion is counteracted by the static, unconsidered pile of wood that pins their ends to the ground.

The overall impression is completely unlike the sense of movement in the figures.

It is worthwhile to compare this to 2007’s The New Alchemists, by Blair Brennan and Catherine Burgess, which was exhibited in the same room of Harcourt House and took a very different approach towards implied performativity. The work in that exhibition had some of the same magical implications that the wooden structure of The Box reaches toward, but allowed its form to bring it to life. The New Alchemists did not have a literal performance or dance aspect to it, but despite this the work was surrounded with an aura of ritual and of interactive, transgressive performance. This is strongly related to Forero’s exploration in The Box, in sequentiality and the mediation of elemental dichotomies. In the static version of The Box, these ideas never really come to the surface despite their importance in his statement, and we are left wondering what their significance truly is.

The difficulty for Forero is untangling the function of the materials of The Box. They exist both as documentation and residue of a performance now passed, and as art objects in their own right, and these two functions are here in conflict. Apparently abandoned in a pile at the end of the performance, rather than set out for display, the objects seem used up and uninviting. Adding to this is the way that the supporting material emphasizes the primacy of the performance, despite the way that the work is exhibited for the other 30 days of the exhibit. It’s disappointing to know that the work properly includes video and sound elements which are no longer present, leaving the space behind the figures as mundane as Harcourt’s beat-up carpet. If you didn’t have the prescience to see this work at the opening, it can only leave a sense of emptiness in you that the handful of photographs on the flyer will never fill. V

Until Sat, May 30
The Box
By Cesar Forero
Harcourt House, (Third Floor, 10215 - 112 St) 

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