Danny Paulete – Climber's Dream
Danny Paulete, Self Topo (Photo courtesy the artist)
Art changes a person. It has a cultish effect on those who decide to delve into and explore its rejuvenating powers. It’s a personal practice that because of its history and its intrinsic cathartic representative nature allows the interlocutor (artist) to feel as if he/she is transmitting the untransmittable: the intangible, pre-linguistic experience of reality. And what metaphor is most appropriate to communicate this process? … The floor.
Among traditional sculpture and painting mediums, floors are a recent obsession. One relies on the floor as an invisible substrate that supports every activity we participate in: walking, dreaming, etc. Paradoxically, every environment/process except for flying (no longer a metaphor) is girded by the floor. Yet, the ground is the most material symbol possible. Conceptual artists par excellence utilize the floor as a space that doesn’t lie, an encyclopedic space where things are rendered visible, defined as clearly as possible for an audience that takes the message as truth, but a truth that is still sullied by the faults in language. This space of truth is necessary for artists whose goal is to show/perform their life.
Danny Paulete, Unresolved Circumstances
Leo Steinberg calls the prone “flatbed picture plane” a revolution in “seeing”, stating that, “The horizontality of the bed relates to ‘making’ as the vertical of the Renaissance picture plane related to seeing.” For Steinberg, the flatbed picture plane paradoxically represents a space where the artist transcends his earthly yoke and creates a more fully collective cultural place devout of figure, landscape, and detestable affect—in short, a space more fully reflecting the truth. This pivoting of the angle of presentation is as revolutionary a dichotomy as the wave/particle duality or the mind/body problem.
Danny Paulete, Unresolved Circumstances
Although not explicitly so, the sculptural work of Atlanta based artist Danny Paulete rather subtly exemplifies investigations of the ground. For a recent performance at Atlantic Station, Paulete actually takes the floor from the ground and installs it on a scaffold, creating Unresolved Circumstance. After seeing his sculpture and remnants of a performance at Eyedrum in 2007, I became interested in its surface bending antics and it’s implication for art theory.
The Climbers exhibition at Eyedrum consisted of an enormous concrete dangling hand crack that Paulete expertly jammed for the opening reception. Directly behind the interactive Climber’s Dream Route was another sculpture built from red steel bars that traced the circumference of a series of vertically arranged rocks, each with its own hand crack. The sculpture, along with several others in the exhibition, not only anomalously existed outside of nature, but also seemed to be turned inside out. Each climbing route was exposed so the cracks in the rock were minimally insulated by stone, leaving the void of the gallery as a stand-in for the mountain. In fact, the performance of Climber’s Dream Route (at least on video) seems a bit like those metaphorical clichés of the artist splattering life onto a canvas. With a wave of the artistic hand, the opaque surface of the artwork is magically transformed into life. Paulete seems to be climbing the inside of the mountain (because of the uncanny presentation), i.e. life itself.
Danny Paulete, Boat Rock
As soon as the performance is over and Paulete jumps off of his sculpture, we are left again with the opaque mathematical surface of crisscrossing steal and majestically geometric concrete. I guess this link fascinates me. For many conceptual sculptors, the residue from art/life takes the form of geometric abstraction. Think of Tom Friedman’s early bubble performance pieces. The only product created by Friedman’s performance was the perfectly geometric form of his spit-bubble. Whether he is hanging over it, displaying his body as topography, or climbing the vertical version of it on a cliffside, the prone geometry of the ground is implicated in Paulete’s work. Exteriority becomes paramount. Like so many conceptual sculptors, e.g. Chris Burden, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whitread, and especially Barry Le Va with his overtly geometric rubber coated ground sculptures, Paulete’s work is an exploration of the mute surface of the artwork, and paradoxically how that mute surface functions as a site to live. The sculptures both show and tell. To use Steinberg’s analogy, they make sight.
