Oscar Tuazon: Ass to Mouth

Issue 37, December 2009

Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris
8–24 October

By Chris Sharp

Anyone walking into this exhibition is in for a surprise. Now whether that surprise is due to the machismo of hanging a one-ton sculpture from the ceiling, the boldness of presenting a single (two-part) work for a gallery’s inaugural exhibition or the reckless beauty of the piece itself is hard to say. Despite a propensity for grand gestures, clarity of intention doesn’t seem to have ever been one of Oscar Tuazon’s main interests.

The American-born, Paris-based Tuazon recently began to create a stir with his wood-and-steel proposals for jerry-rigged, DIY evocations of architecture and ad hoc furniture. Tuazon’s fragments were underpinned by the ideological residue of alternative living communities from the 1960s, and by the thoughts of Buckminster Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. Given the themes and materials with which Tuazon is working, his art-historical references were and continue to be pretty standard: Smithson, Matta-Clark and Serra, with a bit of Dan Flavin and early Mark di Suvero thrown into the mix. If anything beyond four decades separates Tuazon from his ‘heroic’ forefathers, it’s the fact of his working in the renascent if leery optimism which characterises the posturban, postindustrial, postideological and even postheroic age we live in. Nevertheless, the artist’s first solo exhibition at Balice Hertling’s new Belleville space, perversely entitled Ass to Mouth, is anything but cheerful.

The two-part site-specific installation consists of a steel six-by-two-metre armature hanging from the exposed concrete beams of the ceiling. Reminiscent of a massive inverted mattress, the armature itself features four panels of Plexiglas, with a broad plastic drop sheet coating the interior. On the floor, perpendicular to the ceiling piece, is a rectangular slab of concrete, and just noticeably smaller than its celestial counterpart. Splotches of water, periodically applied throughout the exhibition by hand to the interior of the ceiling piece, grown rusty from mingling with the steel, drip down and stain parts of the floor and slab underneath, lending it a dark, organic edge.

The slab on the floor could have been the foundation of an architectural structure – an association that would have been much more plausible had the armature been placed directly over it like a roof – or a kind of stage. But due to the armature oppressively hanging over your head, the space resists any genuine will to host thespian antics. Meanwhile, the presence of water and architectural evocations seems to want to symbolically locate this somewhere in the world, but the enigmatic incongruity of the structure eventually thwarts said evocations. Indeed, for all its structural lucidity and sudden majesty, the piece remains a feral and obdurate affair. Turning Minimalism on its head, this work makes it viscerally clear that here, the activating agent of theatricality – the human being – is persona non grata.

Maybe that’s what is so surprising about this piece: its inhuman self-sufficiency. And so powerful is it that you are able to immediately intuit its rejection of you, while nevertheless being irresistibly drawn to it by its crisp and brooding opacity. If that is indeed the case, then this show is something of a high-wire act: because what saves this work from posthuman allegory is precisely the complex formal tension which brings it so close to the brink of posthuman allegory.


See more reviews, including illustrations, plus the entire December issue of ArtReview magazine, free on your screen, here.