Sarah Oppenheimer S-01
7 September - 21 October 2017
Annely Juda Fine Art 23 Dering Street London W1S 1AW ajfa@annelyjudafineart.co.uk www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk Tel 020 7629 7578 Fax 020 7491 2139 Monday - Friday 10 - 6 Saturday 11 - 5
Architecture, mass, experience Sarah Oppenheimer’s work explores the temporal and spatial attributes of the built environment, inviting us to re-evaluate the spaces we inhabit. S-01 is Sarah Oppenheimer’s second exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art. Oppenheimer’s first exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art, MF-142, 2009, skewed the gallery’s gravitational and optical axis by dividing the space with a perforated floor-to ceiling ground plane. More recently, Oppenheimer has explored the temporal sequencing of spatial navigation in two major museum projects: S-337473 (2017) at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio and S-281913 (2016) at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami. For both shows, large planes made of glass and metal were inserted into the museum galleries, camouflaged as walls and columns. At first, these planar surfaces appear to be static barriers, dividing and delineating movement through space. But these forms were far from stable: their thickness concealed the spindles which allowed the planes to pivot. The viewer was invited to rotate the plane. The mechanism required the participant to apply a definitive pressure, a deliberate action, a commitment to engage the form into a new being. A column slowly keeled over to become a floating beam, an opaque plane became a rotating reflection. For her exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art, Oppenheimer is showing two new works: S-011110 and S-010100. S-011110 (2017) is set into the gallery’s main atrium space on the 4th floor. Two columns of glass and aluminium fit seamlessly between the gallery’s ceiling and floor. The top of the columns anchor into the building’s steel beams while the feet have rooted themselves through the gallery’s wooden floor into the structural fabric of the building. Attached to these uprights are the kinetic mandrels that animate the transitional elements. Appearing as facsimiles of the fixed vertical columns, these elements are activated by the visitor. The floating beams slide through a smooth and defined arc to a new horizontal position. The visitor is the interlocutor, placing or moving a barrier within the gallery space, changing the reflection and refraction of light through the gallery-wide skylight. Oppenheimer’s adaptation of the building’s framework enables the viewer to alter the gallery’s architecture into a transitional and fleeting composition. The units act like switches, altering the path of procession and the direction of vision, ricocheting sightlines across glass planes. In the smaller gallery, S-010100 (2016) compresses the expansive grid of the building’s framework into the limits of a dynamic aperture. S-010100 is buried within the hollow of a partition wall. Vertical and horizontal glass volumes demarcate a void within this wall. Rotation reshapes the contours of this void, and the view of the space beyond. S-010100 allows the visitor a chance to peer through another of Oppenheimer’s re-imagined and re-invented spaces. A place that we had once assumed was immoveable and immutable is now in flux. Ian Parker
The Doors of Perception Who has not experienced the unsettling feeling of travelling through space even while motionless and firmly parked in place? It is enough for an object — a bus or a plane or a car just next to our own — as long as it is larger than the frame through which it is viewed, to move against that frame (and hence against the durable environment within which we as perceivers are lodged) for it to pitch us into a minor crisis of sensory and orientational derangement. We respond to this perceptual puzzle with a reflexive startle and fretfully try to re-situate ourselves in a wider flow whose parameters we can, only after agonizing seconds, establish and pin down. We resolve the cognitive crisis by re-fixing the boundaries within which our sensations of self are understood. Only in such moments do we access the work of perception as a labor of drawing, of drawing new frames and brackets to alter or accommodate how we place ourselves meaningfully in the world. Whether it is we ourselves who are in motion, or whether it is something that moves in relation to us, is for the physicist, a problem of inertial or reference frames. But it is a problem for everyday perception as well. How do we anchor ourselves in our world? How do we capture and use the stability of the environment to grasp the motion of an object in it, and how do we order objects, motions, and environments in relation to our ever-perambulating, ever-exploring selves? For every object in real experience belongs to a de facto “three-body problem”, the intransigent equation that seeks to predict the movement of three bodies in continuous gravitational interaction, but never actually does so?.1 Although these seemingly simple correlations happen every moment of every day in experience, they cannot be rationally modeled.2 Every living thing — no, every thing altogether! — is a reflex perceiver, a sentient registrar of differences developing in its surround. It is a wonder therefore that humans ever created the fable that perspectival vision can explain what we do. We do not in fact receive and digest a rigid reality in an impliable perspectival space, but rather probe, sample, and draw inferences; we palpate our world with all of our senses; we draw, re-draw, and actively invent the relations that connect us to it. We continually shift the boundaries and frames in order to produce uses and behaviors, and to understand where we are in the world. To perceive is to modify something outside us by modifying something inside. Now, there is no perception without movement: The senses neither see, nor hear, nor feel what does not move or flow. Perfectly still objects, regardless of how obdurate and accessible they may seem, are not perceptible without the saccadic (tremulous) movement of the eyes, which occurs at speeds up to 900 angular degrees per second, a speed more rapid than the eyes themselves can discern. (We cannot for example see another person’s saccades.) What is at play here, beyond the rudimentary modality of movement, is the living orchestration and intuition of change. A philosopher might use the term “difference” to gather the problem under the single heading of salience, for change in what happens around us is what matters and sticks out. (As the godfather of cybernetic awareness, Gregory Bateson famously expressed it, it is above all “the difference that makes a difference” to which the universe, and its sentient inhabitants, are attuned.)
Perception is the pursuit and organization of distinctions that make up the world that is unique to every organism: places and moments make a difference when they stand out from the evenness of the surround. Ontologically speaking they are points in a (space-time) flow where transformations or conjugations do or can be made to take place, where something connects to something else or opens a wormhole into a new functional reality that did not exist before. Salience — what stands out — is never a given. It does not precede perception but is produced within it. I hold this to be the essential lesson of Sarah Oppenheimer’s work. Our libraries are filled with reflections on rational vision — on the ‘homogeneous, isotropic and continuous’ space 3 beloved of modern “instrumentalist” thought. Oppenheimer’s work has long been treated as the production of paradoxes that mine and shatter the complacencies of mathematical vision, as the orchestration of an essential conflict between the subjectively ‘felt’ and the objectively ‘known’. But this was never the work’s primary concern. What we can grasp clearly today is a progression in her work from mainly conjunctive operations (manipulations of occluding interior surfaces to unseal them and let them seep into other outlying ones) to kinetic appliances such as the one presented here today, whose preternatural displacements and flow schedule perceptual ruptures in time. There is now a deliberate engagement with the mysteries distributed “now here, now there” throughout being, as pregnances in space.4 By pregnance I refer to the poisedness, volatility, and excitability of the worldly surround according to which nearly every point is endowed with transformative (morphogenetic) potential. S-011110, the work set into Annely Juda Fine Art, displays rotational phenomena of an apparently simple yet actually mystifying kind. We know from the visibly symmetrical setup — rectilinear slabs mounted on a 45-degree rotating spindle — that we have to do with the purely linear motion of a body. And yet what erupts before our eyes confounds our ability to track the motion as a simple progression or change of degree. What presents itself to our senses is a transformation in kind. One reason for this is that what is rotated around the diagonal axis is not simply a ‘rigid body’ but the virtual rotation of one dynamic axis around another — 2 coordinated motions in one — where the axis itself serves now as the moving boun-dary, a halo-like envelope adhering to, and travelling with the object. The effect here, like the earlier-mentioned experience of the ambiguous movement of an adjacent vehicle, is to induce a baffling sensory climax and a need to reset our perceptual frame to accommodate what we think we know about the state of the world: That an object in our purview has been simply moved and not transformed. And yet, that is not what we experience. We in fact experience a confounding and magical transformation, reminiscent of the topological burlesques of a high-board diver, in which an envelope of compound action — a performance envelope — mutates from a vertical to a horizontal disposition, as if an integer were literally transformed before us from a post into a lintel (and back) without altering its performance; that is, without showing how it engages the shifting ‘moment’ of its gravitational load. And this is a second paradox that enters into the game: we sense the incongruous movement of gravity and weight around — not a metric “axis” but a free and performative one. The ‘float’ and the turning effect of such works, when placed in a real context at full scale, would punctuate space and embed a transient drawing in it. (One need simply track the corners and black edges of the slabs as they carve their seemingly improvisatory parabolic sweeps.)
The delicate poisedness of the unambiguously weighty prism-forms brings their internal tension to the fore — there is suspension through equipoise — and this grounds attention not onto the mechanical pivot (which is rendered absent and void as the glass volumes vacate the place where the spindle would declare its fulcrum or moment point) but onto abstract or immaterial points in space where intensive values, such as triggers and tipping points, change and actively transform what is around them: these are like singularities in a phase space, places in space and time, where changes happen without apparent cause as if conjured by angels. Such places are remarkable; and although they may well be part of everyday experience, they are rarely noticed. The observation of such a singularity brought the great perceptual psychologist James Jerome Gibson to the study of how organisms use light to tap their environments for advantage. As a child he noticed that when peering out the back of a train or automobile that the ambient optic array — space itself — would simultaneous compress (at the center) and expand (at the edges): objects shrank at the focal point but space rushed in explosively at the periphery of the visual field. Likewise, points in space converge or approach at drastically different rates as we move inside our milieus depending on their distance from us. We grasp information and organize ourselves in our surround based on the direct but unnoticed intuition of relative values, not absolute ones, as one thing progressively occludes or reveals another, as rates of change differ from moment to moment and place to place, either in conformity with, or against routine expectation. Herein lies the fundamentally musical — read mystical, psychotropic — inclination of Oppenheimer’s work: it single-mindedly seeks the thresholds of things. It operates at the front where experience is unstable and easily bifurcates, to be frustrated, confirmed or, as in music, brought into free contact with what is not anticipated in our psychic and perceptual flow. Like music, her work operates through the endlessly surprising disclosure of unseen and unfelt orders of things — anomalies not necessarily in reality but certainly in experience — to teach us that these openings onto enchantment are always proximate and everywhere around us--all one has to do is pierce the veil. Sanford Kwinter
1. The three bodies referred to by physicists and mathematicians were nearly always that of the earth, the sun and the moon. The problem famously has no solution. In the last years of the 19th century, Poincaré showed that there was an infinite number of periodic solutions, hance no regular pattern. On the homoclinic tangles that resulted from his intractable mapping solution, see Ivar Ekeland, Mathematics and the Unexpected (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 2. The classical adage of the math professor who pitches a piece of chalk at a student in order to point out once caught, that the catcher has just solved an insoluble partial differential equation in real time. 3. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1997, 1924) 4. I borrow both the terms ‘salience’ and ‘pregnance’ from the mathematician Rene Thom Esquisse d’une semiphysique: Physique aristotelicienne et theorie des catastrophes (Paris: Intereditions, 1988). The phrase “now here, now there” is a common translation of the Latin nunc hinc, nunc illinc from Lucretius who used the phrase to describe the random distribution of the singularizing “clinamens” or “swerves” that are the triggers for all form and event in the universe. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.
S-337473 Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio 4 February – 16 April 2017
S-281913 Perez Art Museum Miami, Florida 30 September 2016 – 10 April 2017
S-399390 Mudam Luxembourg 22 February – 29 May 2016
BIOGRAPHY 1972 1999
Born in Austin, Texas Graduated from Yale University, M.F.A
2014 Space Interventions, Salon Dahlmann, Berlin
Lives and works in New York
2012 Factory Direct, The Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2011 Performing Architecture, DeCordova Museum
2017 Annely Juda Fine Art, London (Cat.) Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (Cat.)
2009 Automatic Cities, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego (Cat.)
2016 Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami Mudam Luxembourg, Luxembourg CCS Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson
2008 Inner and Outer Space, The Mattress Factory, Pittsburg (Cat.)
2014 Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel Von Bartha Garage, Basel Mills College Art Museum, Oakland (Cat) 2012 Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (Permanent Commission) P.P.O.W., New York 2010 Von Bartha Garage, Basel Rice Art Gallery, Houston (Cat) 2009 Annely Juda Fine Art, London (Cat.) Art Unlimited, Art Basel, Basel 2008 Galerie Duve, Berlin Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis (Cat.) 2006 P.P.O.W., New York 2004 Momenta, New York Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo 2003 Queens Museum of Art, New York 2002 The Drawing Center, New York (Cat.)
2007 Facts on the Ground, CSS Bard Hessel Museum, New York (Cat.) 2005 Odd Lots, Cabinet Magazine, White Columns, Queens Museum of Art, New York (Cat.) No Ordinary, Skulpturens Hus, Stockholm (Cat.) 2000 Transposed: Analogs of Built Space, Sculpture Center, New York (Cat.) Selected Awards 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant 2010-11 Rome Prize Fellowship. American Academy in Rome 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship 2003 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant Selected Bibliography
Selected Group Exhibitions
Sanford Kwinter, The Doors of Perception, Ian Parker, Architecture, mass, experience, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 2017
2015 Unsuspected Possibilities, Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe
Julian Rose, Sarah Oppenheimer: Perez Art Museum, Artforum, February 2017
Sarah Oppenheimer: S-337473, Foreword by Sherri Geldin, Introduction by Megan Cavanaugh, Text by Alexander R. Galloway, Laurent Stalder, Wexner Center for the Arts, 2017 Rene Morales, S-281913, Perez Art Museum, Miami, 2016 Alexander Galloway, Sarah Oppenheimer, BOMB, Fall 2016.
Faye Hirsch, Exhibition Reviews: Sarah Oppenheimer P.P.O.W, Art in America, December 2012 Jeffrey Kastner, Sarah Oppenheimer, P.P.O.W., Artforum, November 2012, p 274 Roberta Smith, Sarah Oppenheimer’s D-33 at P.P.O.W., New York Times, Art in Review, 11 Oct 2012
Courtney Malick, Sarah Oppenheimer’s Unique Brand of Institutional Friction at PAMM, Miami Rail, Fall 2016
Roberta Smith, Art Fairs Full of Bling if Not Fire and Roberta Smith’s Year in Art, New York Times, 16 December 2012
Sarah Oppenheimer, Foreword by Dr. Stephanie Hanor, essays by Julian Rose and Stephanie Weber, Oakland, CA, Mills College Art Museum, 2015
Dina Deitsch with essay by Giuliana Bruno,Neil Leach, Temporary Structures, DeCordova Museum, 2011.
Architectural Record, Sarah Oppenheimer, August 2014, p 104
Ines Goldbach, Sarah Oppenheimer, Künstler, Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, Munich, 2011
ArtReview, In Basel? Four Shows to See on through August 2014, 18 June, 2014
Robin Clark with essay by Giuliana Bruno, Automatic Cities, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2009
Simon Baur, Objekte und Installationen im Einklang, Basellandschaftliche Zeitung, 23 May, 2014, p 3-4 Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media. University of Chicago Press, 2014
Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, MF-142, catalogue essay, Annely Juda Fine Art, September 2009 Tyler Green, Sarah Oppenheimer at the Mattress Factory, Modern Art Notes, 21 and 22 May 2008
Giuliana Bruno and Sarah Oppenheimer, Giuliana Bruno by Sarah Oppenheimer, Bomb, Summer 2014
Nancy Princenthal, Reinvesting in Fake Estates, Art in America, January 2006, p 66-69
Cwb, Durchgänge, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 16/17 August 2014
Nancy Princenthal, Sarah Oppenheimer at PPOW, Art in America, Review, Nov 2006, p 200-201
Naomi Gregoris, Die Kunst des Umkrempelns, Tages Woche, 28 May 2014
The New Yorker, Sarah Oppenheimer, Goings on About Town, 2 Oct 2006, p 22
Christoph Heim, Da kann man den Augen nicht trauen, Basler Zeitung., 23May 2014, p24
Grace Glueck, Off the Wall, The New York Times, Art in Review, 29 Sept 2005
Sarah Oppenheimer, The Array, Art in America, May 2014, p 40-41
ed. Jeffrey Kastner: Sina Najafi, Frances Richard, Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clarke’s Fake Estates, Cabinet Books, DAP Catalog, 2005
ed. Spyros Papapetros; Julian Rose, Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture, MIT Press, 2014 YZ, Oppenheimer / Schlesinger, Kunst Bulletin, 1 June 2014 Julian Rose, Mirror Travel: Sarah Oppenheimer’s W-120301, 2012, Artforum, April 2013, p 240243. Kelly Crow, A Baltimore Museum Becomes the Art Object, Wall Street Journal, D5, 19 Oct 2012
Michael Kimmelman, Inspiration From Real Estate Rejects, The New York Times, 9 Sept 2005 Ken Johnson, Impact: New Mural Projects, The New York Times, Art in Review, 30 July 2004 Michael Meredith, Sarah Oppenheimer, Drawing Room, Artforum, September 2002, p 206-207 Drawing Papers #30a, The Drawing Center, New York, 2002
Details of the works shown at Annely Juda Fine Art: S-011110 2017 Glass, metal, existing architecture Glass and aluminum dimensions: 280 x 203.2 x 122 cm Total dimensions: variable S-010100 2016 Glass, aluminium, architecture Glass and aluminum dimensions: 24.5 x 100 x 122.5 cm Wall dimensions: variable
ISBN 978-1-904621-82-1 photography © Serge Hasenböhler, James Ewing (PAMM) essays © Sanford Kwinter and Ian Parker works © Sarah Oppenheimer catalogue © Annely Juda Fine Art / Sarah Oppenheimer 2017
Printed by Albe de Coker, Belgium