Summary:
He Tried to Dive In
He Tried Not to Die
He Printed It Out
Danger
I am lucky. I saw Gary Robbins‘ exhibition, Fan Death, at Appendix Space when no one was around, just me walking down the alley toward a shimmering disk hovering flush with the hay-covered ground. It took a moment to realize that this wavering disk was spinning. And on this day, the sky was blue, and I could walk around the disk and see the tops of various trees reflected in its blue. Apparently on opening night, one inebriated visitor tried to dive in.
By transforming an ordinary mirror into a pool, and by making this the rabbit hole through which we enter the rest of this successful exhibition, Robbins frames it as a lens on our tendency to make mystery of the mundane. One of the two printed works stacked on the floor of the space in a take-one, Felix Gonzalez-Torres gesture, gets at the convoluted, iterative, and problematic ways we get to the bottom of mystery or to any meaning at all.
In the back of the space is a dull-roaring sculpture of a cube of floor fans which in and of itself is brilliant both formally and sonically, but Robbins contextualizes it by including a broadside printed on newsprint that one one side is the Wikipedia entry for Fan Death (a belief prevalent in South Korea that sleeping with a fan on can cause death) and verso, the in-the-background “discussion” or “talk” that goes on among the makers and editors of Wikipedia to question, debunk, update, correct, etc. Wikipedia entries. And really, Wikipedia is the enactment of the collective way any “fact” is recorded and authenticated, witness these “discussions.”
The second stack is prints of an interwoven rainbow of hair-thin sine waves held down with a tiny jar of mercury that echoes the mirror outside. Robbins later told me he thought of the mercury as something we, in Portland, might be commensurately afraid of in relation to Fan Death. This brought to mind Robert Barry’s burying barium-133 in Central Park for his “0.5 Microcurie Radiation Installation,” 1969. It’s still there. And on our end of the country, so’s Hanford. Now that’s scary. Why make up things to be afraid of when Japan moved its nuclear alert to 7, the highest it goes. When we’re connected by ocean to the Fukushima nuclear reactors. Unless making fake things to be afraid of, like Godzilla or God for that matter, takes one’s mind off clear and present dangers.