Demetrius Oliver: Jupiter

By Joshua Mack

Take a moment, preferably after reading my post, since you probably won’t return, to check out photographer Demetrius Oliver’s blog. With links to poems by Walt Whitman and news features – with gorgeous images – about planetary and lunar events and celestial light as a record of the deep past, it not only offers fascinating content, but suggests an intellect intrigued with, and humbled by, the universal order. It also goes a long way to elucidating the poetic intent of Jupiter, Oliver’s first major public commission, and the latest in the High Line’s series of artist projects, which opened last week.

As a bit of background for the uninitiated: the High Line is an elevated railroad spur running through Chelsea and the West Village which once carried freight and which, as a planted park (or as it actually functions, a corridor two stories above street level), has become a wildly successful tourist draw. Oliver (born 1975), slight, shy, brainy and refreshingly no-bullshit, has garnered attention of late for his evocative fish-eye views of interiors made from reflections, most often those on the surface of a metal teapot.

In the current case, five views of a bedroom in various stages of surrealist transformation – from a relatively straightforward shot of a lunar globe on a chair to images of a telescope and violin cases before darkened windows and furled umbrellas balanced at the edge of a bed – appear to rotate across a billboard next to and slightly below the High Line in a parking lot at West 18th Street. Shot at night in a time-worn prewar hotel in New Haven, the images have the dreamlike, time-capsule feel of mid-century TV reruns – the very idea of the past made present which characterises astronomical research and seems to fascinate the artist.

Photos: Jason Mandella. Courtesy Friends of the High Line, New York

Like those seen in telescopes, Oliver’s images are traces of the past, events constructed by the artist and reflected off the shiny surface of a convex teapot. What he shows us is the residue of refracted light, just as the moon and planets appear to us in the glow of reflected sunlight. But while props like the lunar globe and the telescope in his vignettes allow such glancing, poetic connections, the inclusion of the violin cases – a reference to music and apparently the artist’s interest in John Coltrane – and umbrellas seems forced and distracting.

Oliver’s installation is timed to run for a full lunar cycle – his five images are meant to suggest the moon in its various phases – and will coincide with the fall equinox and the Jupiter opposition on 21 September. As supplemental programming, Friends of the High Line has planned a public viewing of the opposition with the New York chapter of the Amateur Astronomers Association; and in response to the artist’s desire to add a musical component to the installation, students from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music performed John Coltrane’s Jupiter Variation (1967) on 7 September. .Further performances are scheduled for the 18th and 21st of this month, and the 2nd of next.

On Tuesday the music was often overwhelmed by ambient noise, lending it an intense intimacy, as if the performance were an act of faith in art’s redemptive power played out against a city which sucks its residents into cacophony and obliviousness. I suspect, especially given the broader context provided by the ancillary programming, that Oliver is striving to achieve a poetic synthesis akin to the reverie suggested by a line from Walt Whitman quoted on his blog: ‘In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,/
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars’

But his ability to create complex and evocative connections between images and performative media has yet to catch up with his fascination and search for meaning.

Demetrius Oliver's Jupiter is on view at the High Line, West 18th Street, New York, until 6 October