drums that engage the viewer's

attention.
Circus evoked the planet in micro-
cosm. Theatrical, comical, and
whimsical, it embraced the incon-
gruities of everyday life. Goulet
established a plan of action based
on a set of rules and then built
the work from those rules. Found
objects such as a yellow toy dump
truck, the wheel of a cart, a wood-
en planter box, a laborer's lunch
box, and a galvanized steel pail
were embellished and arranged
methodically on the circumference
of a circle. Situated on the floor
alongside myriad reconstituted
vertical units, they were show-
cased for maximum visual impact.
This disparate assemblage not
only highlighted the artist's formal
and aesthetic concerns, it also
recorded psychic phenomena. Per-
plexing entities such as sumptuous
black gloves affixed to a steel shaft
or a brown ball atop a flimsy metal
vertical structure confounded and
stimulated the senses. Other intri-
guing vertical members included a
gray steel conduit surmounted by
a cornice and a steel pole sup-
porting silver streamers that hung
from the wire basket of a lamp-
shade. Goulet maintains that he is
playing a game, not trying to fash-
ion a new aesthetic, using artifice
and basic necessities, artifacts
and cherished moments as refer-
ence points for society.
These artifacts reference a wide
range of human activities, echoing
our shared experiences and com-
munal concerns; they are meta-
phors that can be interpreted as
personal icons. Individuality versus
the collective consciousness is
investigated further in Living
Under Many Banners and Gar-
deners and Gardens of the World.
In Living Under Many Banners,
miniature flags representing many
nations are situated alongside
those invented by Goulet himself.
Official state emblems inter-
spersed with flags representing
emotions such as remorse and
love are relegated to a grid-like
system. Here, Goulet implies that
shared emotions and values tran-
scend borders. The artist also
uses unorthodox typologies to
explore differences in Gardeners
and Gardens of the World. This
series of digital prints consists of
50,000 names, with each name
accompanied by a unique digital
signature. In "A Round, a World"
Michel Goulet demonstrated that
he is more than a clever stylist. He
is moving forward, into a deeper
metaphysical realm, examining
issues of identity in an ever-
expanding and impersonal world.
-Glenn Williams
Oxford, U.K.
Mike Nelson
Museum of Modern Art
The scenery is of a muted theatri-
cality adorned with dusty re-politi-
cized metaphors that creep toward
you out of the shadows of what
is an often lonely and hallowed
space: this is Mike Nelson's Triple
Bluff Canyon. With Nelson's work,
I often feel that the ghost of some
eccentric senior citizen, once emi-
nent in his field, floats down the
artist's corridors like a phantom
from a metaphysical science fiction
novel. But in Triple Bluff Canyon,
the subtle theatricalities-made
up of sequences of meticulously
constructed, interconnecting
installations and intricate personal
props, each alluding to a tangled
narrative of some distant murky
character-appear to pack a con-
temporary political punch.
Within Nelson's worn, yet
strangely monumental buildings
half buried in great sand dunes
and set within the space of yet
another form, that of the white
cube gallery space, we see an
homage to Robert Smithson's land
work Partially Buried Woodshed
at Kent State University. Smithson's
work became a political object
thanks to the chaos of its day-a
campus protest on May 4, 1970
against the American invasion of
Cambodia that ended in the shoot-
ing of four students by the National
Guard. The connection between
Woodshed and the shootings came
about when someone daubed
"MAY 4 KENT 70" on it, which the
artist used to give a socio-politi-
cal identity to the work.
Left: Michel Goulet, Circus,
2002-03. Mixed media and found
objects, 600 cm. diameter. Below:
Mike Nelson, Triple Bluff Canyon
(detail), 2004. Mixed media,
installation view.
Nelson's installation would
appear to arrive with a ready-made
reference to latter-day political
chaos, that of WMDs and current
events in Iraq. The core of the
installation takes its initial form
from the work of Smithson, then
adds a contemporary leitmotif and
increased theatricality, consisting
of the subjectivity in contemporary
media intervention. In the imagi-
nation, the work becomes a stage
for shaky camera work as imagi-
nary bullets whiz past the lens;
we reach this part of the instal-
lation via what seems like the
entrance to a theater. As we jour-
ney through these telescopic and
labyrinthine corridors, news reports
flit in and out of the mind. The
emptiness of the piece creates
a vacuum of detail, if not atmos-
phere, and current affairs appear
to seep through its wooden slats
to enter the mind of the viewer.
And an oil drum half submerged
in sand juxtaposes itself with the
graffiti on Smithson's earlier piece.
Woven through the work we see
references to Smithson's geologi-
cal formations revealing the shifts
of time, an ebb and flow as we
imagine Nelson's sands blowing
over his own politicized wood-
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shed. Of course, it is no wonder
that children wish to climb on these
dunes as they might the ancient
geometry of Smithson's creations.
But with Nelson, the shift is into
the internal space of a cerebral
landscape-there is no great
weight on Nelson's woodshed as
there was on Smithson's-Nelson's
shift of time, his discussion of
entropy, lies in smell and imagina-
tion;.carefully placed dirt and dust,
and not in the disintegration of
structured forms straining under a
mass of soil. Nelson's sand dunes
are hollow, and the dystopian stage
is set.
-Paul Anthony Black
Berlin
Patricia Leighton
GATE P
The location of Patricia Leighton's
exhibition "outside in" near Pots-
damer Platz in Berlin was oddly
appropriate. The erstwhile heart
of the city, which had been beat-
en into a no-man's-land by World
War 11 and the Cold War, has
since been developed into a kind
of oversized shopping mall. The
enormous structure, with its
plazas, cafes, and arcades filled
with tourists and country folk,
seems to have come down on
Berlin like a spaceship, without
relation to the rest of the city and
without reference to its scale or
atmosphere. Similarly, Leighton's
objects appeared as if they were
not from this world. They seemed
to be remnants of an unknown
civilization, unfathomable and
mysterious.
No matter how seasoned one is
as a gallery visitor, these objects
cannot be perceived only as sculp-
tures: for that, they should not
be inside, they should not be that
big, and they should not be cov-
ered in grass. By confounding the
realms of art and nature, of interi-
or and exterior, these sculptures
affect the frame of their percep-
tion.
Leighton's sculptures are angular
wooden constructions, covered
in rollout grass. Their form is
somewhere between a stepped
pyramid, a burial mound, and an
enlarged household wedge. Three
of them were staggered in the
gallery's large exhibition space.
On entering, they almost seemed
to be alive and even appeared to
breathe, as the grass's transpira-
tion humidified the air and filled it
with musty smells. Architectural
in their structure and size, these
works landscaped the interior of
the gallery. Spectators could walk
among them, curious but unaware
of the secrets the mounds might
hide. The only obvious reference
was to the narrow landscaped
park just outside, between Pots-
damer Platz and the location of
GATE P, which is geometrically
sculpted with even surfaces and
sharp edges so that it appears
from a distance as if it were cut
out of a huge block of grass-col-
ored material.
Leighton, who lives in New York,
usually works in the open, inter-
vening directly in the landscape,
carving out of the ground, and
sculpting with earth. She made
a name for herself with Land art
projects in Europe and the U.S. In
her home country of Scotland, she
built Sawtooth Ramps (1991-93),
one of the most impressive exam-
ples of Land art in the U.K. It
consists of seven pyramidal ramps,
which stand along a 350-yard
stretch of the M8 motorway
between Edinburgh and Glasgow,
rising like prehistoric burial
mounds above the ever-present
traffic. For Seven Runes in
Pompano Beach, Florida, Leighton
Left: Mike Nelson, Triple Bluff
Canyon (detail), 2004. Mixed
media, installation view. Below:
Patricia Leighton, Ziggurats,
2004. Wood and roll-out grass,
installation view.
employed a similar approach.
These monumental structures
were made out of fossilized
corals and limestone and then
positioned in a semi-circle with-
in a lake, referencing ancient
sites of ritual, but also connect-
ing the surrounding built environs
with landscaped nature. In
this exhibition she also showed
some drawings of forms similar
to those displayed in the land-
scaped park area outside, though
somehow the sculptures in the
gallery seemed much more rivet-
ing in their exploration of space
and material.
Leighton's sculptures appeared
as though they had grown directly
through the gallery's floor. The
grass grounded them firmly on the
earth below, since our experience
associates the growth of grass
with the exterior and with some
loose concept of nature-even
though nature is hardly involved in
the growth of rollout grass, and
we have to accept that landscape
architecture, even at its most
naturalistic, transforms what we
perceive as nature into artifice.
However, our perception is of sur-
faces, and even though this was
a gallery installation, the grass-
covered blocks appeared as natural
objects.
-Axel Lapp
Sculpture December 2004
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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
TITLE: Oxford, U.K.: Mike Nelson: Museum of Modern Art
SOURCE: Sculpture 23 no10 D 2004
WN: 0434600727030
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Copyright 1982-2004 The H.W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.