The West at Sunset

Issue 48, March 2011. See the entire magazine online here.

Abrons Arts Center, New York
9 December – 20 February

By David Everitt Howe

The Abrons Arts Center’s ambitious group exhibition The West at Sunset pins its theoretical premise on René Daumal’s surrealist novel Mount Analogue, published posthumously in 1952. Allegorically detailing an ascension to the peak of its namesake mountain, which is located on a strangely Lost-like island littered with impossibly spherical crystals, or ‘peragrams’, and linked directly to heaven, the novel is an extended spiritual journey told metaphorically through natural landscapes, its human denizens and elemental symbolism.

Thoughtfully curated by Adrian Geraldo Saldaña, The West at Sunset includes work that manifests this spiritual journey to sometimes underwhelming, sometimes evocative effect. Alberto Borea’s Apareces (2009) fits in the former camp. Featuring footage of the artist scaling a mountain in Peru and gazing melancholically over landscapes, the video bears interest only for its allegorical relationship to Mount Analogue. As such, it points to the problem of an exhibition that allegorises an allegory: it can lapse into a kind of metatextual muddle.

Many pieces hobbled by one-note simplicity are seemingly shoehorned into Daumalian symbolism. For Adam Parker Smith’s Umbrella Cloud (2008–10), swelling and circling bursts of floating umbrellas are metaphorically related to the clouds on Mount Analogue. While I suppose the shoe fits, that relationship seems too hewn to its literary source, and belies the fact that the installation only provokes on an aesthetic level. The work also points to a question facing any curator: to what extent should a curatorial framework frame? Or perhaps more to the point, is the theoretical framework a supplement to the work at hand or is it compensating for what’s lacking?

Unsurprisingly, the strongest work here either relies less on Mount Analogue or playfully transgresses its allegorical moralism. Rachel Pollak’s delicate and fey gouache paintings depict simple, vaguely Shaker rituals, yet the patterned portrayals of separate male and female tasks draw into sharp relief gender mores and social norms intrinsic both to religious practices and to seventeenth-century allegories, such as The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), to which the title of this series of works, Delectable Mountains (2010), refers.

Perhaps the most evocative work is Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff’s ‘guided imagery programme’ – consisting of a seating area with an auditory track and several ancillary objects – which explores the science of whale lore as well as whale behaviour, such as sounding. Accompanied by clip-art whale sounds, the artist narrates a journey through the sea in a hilarious, soothing therapy voice. In order to gain a “watery knowledge of grace, forgiveness and compassion”, he asks the visitor to imagine his cock hard, its inside shaped for slippery measuring. The long metal rods laid out on a small table gain new meaning as whale sounding takes an unexpected turn into penis self-sounding. Poliakoff assures his listener that if “you don’t wish to have a cock, you can use mine”, and that “you can sound me, or we can sound each other”. As the kind of watery journey Matthew Barney and Björk might find productive, Whale Lore (2010) is both unsettling and funny, an allegory undone.

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