Turning The Corner That Never Comes

Turning The Corner That Never Comes (studio shot). 110 paintings from the Altes Nationalgalerie photographed from the side and collaged onto Plexiglass foil with laser-cut magnifying sheets. 50 x 200 cm installed into corner.

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____I will be participating in the 21st International Istanbul Art Fair http://www.istanbulsanatfuari.com/

in participation with the non-profit German-Turkish artist group

http://www.rhmix.com/

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"When we look at a painting we take the frame to be part of the wall, yet when we look at the wall the frame is taken to be part of the painting."

From the essay Parergon in The Truth in Painting p. 61, Jacques Derrida.

Short Artist Statement Regarding the Work:

Of the 110 photographs of paintings I took at the Altes Nationalegalerie principally only the frames are visible. The standpoint of the camera is perpendicular to the face of the painting, bringing the liminal (the frame) to the fore. I chose to take these photographs in the Altes Nationalgalerie for purely pragmatic reasons. The architectural layout of the museum allows one to photograph a large number of paintings in the collection from an almost perfect perpendicular angle by standing in the entrances in between the small circular galleries. This "side view" reveals the mechanisms of hanging these valuable paintings: alarm-wires, hanging wires, foam cubes and bits of wood to correctly position the paintings, hooks, nails, bolts, masking tape to neatly arrange all the wires and some type of plastic boarding.

My personal and honest impetus for Turning The Corner That Never Comes was to play with a certain denial of vision and doubt regarding the hope of art.

Doubt: I was repeatedly told as a child that "Jesus was right around the corner," a corner I suppose he has been turning for the last 2000 years. This

Nonsensical statement "turning the corner that never comes" connotes two simultaneous physical states, continual turning and secondly something akin to standing still—the engagement in a futile action that leads to nothing (beating a dead horse), a ‘nothingness action’ e.g. "art making." Like I said, this is just a play with these ideas, these fears, which occasionally occupy my mind. Lastly, by bringing the frames and mechanisms of their hanging to the fore, these great works of art by Adolph Menzel and others are reduced to mere wares denying their vision.

Denying Vision: At the outer edges of Turning The Corner That Never Comes the paintings are photographed from a perfect 90º angle to the canvas plane, as the images get closer to the center/ corner, the photographed paintings slowly begin to reveal themselves as if entering a gallery and turning the corner from the side of the painting towards its face. However, just as this unveiling begins it ends abruptly in the crevice of the corner.

Bunkering Against Bombardment

Away from Man's Benefit for Man's Benefit

Generals Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley in the Merkers salt mine in Merkers, Germany on April 12, 1945.(Courtesy of the Monuments Men Foundation)

Mirrored Future: Mirrored Past

The Mirrored Works of Michelangelo Pistoletto

Upside Down Furniture, 1976

“Realtà riflessa”

Maria a colori

Untitled (Pozzi)

Untitled (Pozzi)

Divisione e moltiplicazione dello specchio, 1978

Twenty Twoo Less Two

Michelangelo Pistoletto, the great hope of the righteous yet ultimately unsuccessful Arte Povera (One more illustration of commodified dissent), began painting on mirrors in 1962, connecting painting with the constantly changing realities in which the work finds itself. Mirrored Future: Mirrored Past.

Inside Mountain Looking Out: The dizzying art of folding representations of corners into corners.

Stevie Hanley, Mountain Base, 2010.

Stevie Hanley, Inside Mountain Looking Out [Transport], 2011. Courtesy Dr. Ulrich Köstlin.

Stevie Hanley, Inside Mountain Looking Out, 2011. Courtesy Dr. Ulrich Köstlin.

Stevie Hanley, Inside Mountain Looking Out, 2011. Courtesy Dr. Ulrich Köstlin.

[Excerpt from email]

Subject: A few scrambled notes

Dear ◊◊◊◊,

The title Inside Mountain Looking Out, parallel to the artwork it represents is a slight alteration of an older form, Mountain Base, resulting in a profound new existence. The change of title furthermore denotes a change of perspective. With Mountain Base I intended to create a sort of visual pun An individual standing at the foot of an enormous mountain with a severely steep ascension gazes straight forward, not upwards toward the sky, but simply straight ahead in one’s immediate field of vision. This visual reading void of spatial-visual intelligence comprehends a wallpaper-like pattern of engulfing earth, trees staggered vertically upwards, and animals looking almost as if they are floating above or around trees rather than comprehending that instead of a bear floating in a brown nebulous plane above a tree, that actually the bear is standing further up the mountain. When perspective zooms in so close it is unable to comprehend the whole. This naïve visual flight of fancy is something akin to the act of image making itself.

(Example: This Line Is Part Of A Very Large Circle, Yoko Ono, 1966.)

A simple split down the center and Mountain Base became Inside Mountain Looking Out. Of course there was a lot more work to be done after the initial and decisive cut, however they were simply formalities added onto a major architectural transformation. I should also state this cut did not spontaneously come out of nowhere; it was long in the making. In fact, the night before I installed the work at the Center for Endless Progress I came close to cutting the piece but restrained myself judging it to be too big a risk to take the night before installing my solo-exhibition. It was however the first thing I did when I took the piece off the wall, on the very floor of the gallery itself. Moreover, on closer inspection one may see that the original base structure of the drawing was in fact a flat representation of a corner:

The dizzying art of folding representations of corners into corners.

Something that failed to come to words in my conversation with you was the works relationship to shame, perhaps due to a sense of embarrassment itself or a fear that it would be too heavy for comfort. This relationship to shame is in fact the main reason for being drawn into the corner.

I have been interested in shame, in particular shame in relationship to the construction of a homosexual identity. Didier Eribon wrote a book entitled Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. I found this book to be an endless source of inspiration and enlightenment. My senior thesis at the University of California Berkeley for the Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major, my second major after Practice of Art, was entitled Participation of Shame and the "Feminine Stigmata" in Gender Surveillance of the "Male Invert." It was a deeply personal and cathartic text that I believe is still playing out in my work today.

The physical act of shoving ones nose into the corner connotes punishment and it puts the actor into a severely vulnerably state where one's sense of sight is rendered useless to void off what may be coming from behind to breathe down your neck: one is “cornered”. I use to have this fear that the devil was constantly behind me breathing down my neck, and when I would turn he would turn in sequence with me, always right behind me almost kissing the back of my ear.

Horse Blinders

Whereas Mountain Base was about repudiating or severely limiting vision by means of zooming in so close that vital periphery information is denied, a sort of "blinder" vision, Inside Mountain Looking Out antithetically imbues the viewer with a supernatural vision. If one is to take the title for its word: Inside Mountain Looking Out, then the viewer finds themselves in the inside of a mountain looking out through stone and dirt. This is really what the work is all about, a sort of naive child's triumphant over being forced to stick their nose into the corner,

and having the walls simply evaporate to reveal the world outside both thrilling and blissful, and where there should be an absence of sight one finds deep perspective, in which one must squint to make out the birds far in the distance.

Greyhound Corner

Installation view of Artists’ Gifts: Michael Asher at MOCA Grand Avenue, 2007, photo by Brian Forrest

Foot to Face: Portrait Underway

Vladimir Tatlin, Corner Relief (1915).

Dan Flavin, pink out of a corner (to Jasper Johns), 1963.

Vladimir Tatlin, Corner Relief (1915).

Fat Corner with Filter, 1963. Joseph Beuys.

Corner Prop, 1969. Richard Serra.

Smoke Gathers in the Corner

Robert Smithson, 1969. Mirrors and coral, 36 x 36 x 36" (91.5 x 91.5 x 91.5 cm).

Ricky Swallow

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Mormon Ad, 1982.

Richard Serra

Amy Wing Fong Lee