Although it is technically an exhibition of individual objects, I take “Black Moon” by Chicago arts collective Adds Donna at Half Dozen Gallery as an intriguing installation, an installation that addresses the archive and the ways it makes (and influences or confounds the making of) meaning. Maybe I’m just in a gestalt-ish frame of mind. Adds Donna writes in their statement about objects infecting one another to create an “assemblage of influence,” a phrase I flat-out love. Not unlike installations by Portland’s Oregon Painting Society, there is a shared aesthetic among many of the objects that suggests a situation, but there are also a number of outlying elements that confound any neatly wrapped up narrative. And not unlike shows by Portland’s Appendix Collective, the aesthetic of the individual artist is evident in the individual object, but the whole greater than the sum of its parts is in fact a whole that informs and elevates the individual object.
Before a dramatic, scene-setting, massive black-and-white digital print of a barren something-scape…the title of the exhibition wants this read as moon or planet, but it looks like a snowy expanse to me…are objects and documents sparsely arranged on white slatted storage shelving as well as on the floor. There are perhaps more plaster casts of take out containers, especially the little plastic cups for salsa, than any other object type, giving the whole thing a kind of archeological feel. Adds Donna calls these “Empties,” and en masse, they’re terrific. There are faux “rocks” and digital pictures of the same rocks and there are series the same photo (boxes in the snow) tinted in red, pink, green. There are crumpled and flattened blank pieces of white paper in frames resting on white folding chairs (referred to as “Speeches” in a brilliant bit of titling). There are monochromatic portraits on the covers of corrugated boxes. And a readymade cow mug. And a crystal paper weight in the shape of the ice cream on a Dairy Queen cone. Two sci-fi soundtracks play from sets of speakers up high on the wall, and on a bottom shelf. There’s something to be said about the way the objects are displayed: especially that some are place one on top of another forcing relationships between objects that elsewhere are displayed solo.
Just the way that most of the objects are not at eye level, but up high or down low, forcing you to bend and stretch to see, you have to bend and stretch to form a kind of understanding. And I should mention that the choice to put two of the three shelf units at horizontal angles smartly sets them up as framing devices for what’s beyond.
The tension, the tug of war is between the “Adds Donna Line” the verso of perhaps a dozen business cards lined up to graphic effect and “19.1.2011.13.35” the fabulous, desolate, wall-sized image of the snowy, rocky expanse. “19.1” wants to situate all of the rest of the objects in the room as related to its image of site whereas the “Line” wants to put us in the Adds Donna studio storeroom where the objects are there because and only because they were made by members of the collective.
“Line” also reminds us of the filtered nature of any archive, that any experience of whatever the archive documents or collects is many-times mediated before we ever get our hands/eyes on it.
Documentation is the first filter. The documentation can never replicate the experience, action, phenomena. Documentation relies on the documenter who makes choices even in the collection of raw materials, evidence. The collection of documentation and primary source is the second filter. What do we collect? What do we make space for? What do we toss? The preservation or lack thereof of the collected is Time’s filtration of the collected. Access and discovery of the archive itself winnows who experiences. Ordering organization will influence whether or how aspects of it are experienced.
The paradox in the archive is that it simultaneously creates meaning and confounds searches for meaning and truth. And this is not accidental, but a reflection of, at least to some degree, choices made by those assembling and managing the archive. In reference to a project of my own, I’ve recently been pointed by a friend to Jacques Derrida’s lecture “Archive Fever, a Freudian Impression.” In his introduction, Derrida etymologically digs into the word archive, discovering roots of commencement and commandment: commencement being the place where things commence or are to be found in nature or in history and commandment being the naming and keeping of those things. For Black Moon, considering the former means wondering what these things are/are meant to be, where they came from. The “Line” rather has us consider the latter, asking why these are objects here and addressing the choices made by Adds Donna. This flexing of authority rather violently wrests the baton of meaning making out of the viewer’s grasp.
Black Moon is the last show at Half Dozen’s Everett Lofts location. They move Eastside in April.