Since September 23, New York's Hispanic Society of America (HSA) includes a set of three dioramas. They would pass for authentic parts of this nineteenth-century philanthropic complex, were it not for their unlikely content and their rather bookish introduction. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster is responsible for the three installations in the HSA. This institution was once a center for new world hispanophile philanthropy and is now a curious anachronism off the beaten art track.
Gonzalez-Foerster's ‘Chronotopes and Dioramas' is the third in a series of quite successful solo projects that combine site-connectedness with an opportunity to continue a line of individual artistic research. The Dia Art Foundation, mostly known as custodian of Walter De Maria's ‘Earth Room' and ‘Broken Kilometer' as well as for its sizable collection of minimalist and conceptual works of art in Beacon, started this uncommon commissions program in 2007. Looking to develop another pied à terre in New York, Dia partnered with the HSA, a under-known institution thirsting for more exposure to the wider, non-hispanophile audience. Francis Alys's ‘Fabiola' collection was the first project to be installed in a gallery with late 19th-century picture salon cachet. Next came Zoe Leonard who showed her ‘Analog' series of documentary photographs, and who, in the library area, presented a selection of extraordinary navigational maps owned and restored by the HSA.
DESOLATE
‘Chronotopes and Dioramas' is on view at the HSA until the beginning of April 2010. The three dioramas feature 20th-century novels in desolate landscapes, as if civilization had perished or an exceptional wind had caused the landing of books in a savage space. If traditional dioramas bring the viewer into a time before history, Gonzalez-Foerster's project post-historic and possibly post-human scenes. Each diorama stands for an abstract geographical area of the Americas: the arctic, the desert, and the tropics. Books, some more visibly placed than others, are scattered in these landscapes. Viewers can piece together parts, but can't find a thematic connection between the showcased titles. Other traces of human or animal life are absent.
Prior to viewing the dioramas, the visitor faces a white wall upon which a large web of literary, multilingual quotations - as if Apollinaire's calligram met Burroughs's cut-up. Several selections refer to specific areas in the Americas and establish a relation between the literary act and the experience of space. Faced with this mural poem, the viewers are thrust into a literary, palimpsestic space that reactivates a Pan-American imaginary. Gonzalez-Foerster's installation does comment adequately on the type of knowledge and imagination shaped at places like the Hispanic Society. Her extension of the library into a visual reality might very well talk more to past approaches than it does to future modes of understanding the world.
LITERATURE
But beyond the textual apparatus, ‘Chronotopes and Dioramas' takes a twofold approach to literature - as discursive container and as material reality. Gonzalez-Foerster has worked before with literature, in what she calls ‘tapis de lectures', and has been associated with ‘relational' artists who have created bookstores, libraries, or discursive situations. The reason for the inclusion of novels in the work at the HSA, however, stands in close relation to the context in which the dioramas appear. A place mostly frequented by Hispanists, the HSA holds manuscripts and works that focus on Spanish culture, particularly from the Renaissance through the late 19th-century.
Shortly after the invitation to create a new work at the HSA, Gonzalez-Foerster browsed the Society's library and proposed expanding its rather meager collection of 20th-century works. The extension did not happen in the stacks, but in the adjacent gallery, current home of the dioramas. While each diorama includes at least one item of the HSA's library, the artist has supplemented the list with names such as Conrad, Stein, and Vila-Matas. With ‘Chronotopes and Dioramas' Gonzalez-Foerster proposes a site-oriented and institutionally critical work, but without relinquishing consistency with her larger practice. This New York intervention continues her previous explorations, such as ‘TH.2058' in Tate's Turbine Hall or ‘NY 2022' included in the Guggenheim's ‘anyspacewhatever' program.
Sarah DEMEUSE
lives in New York. She has a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley and is currently enrolled at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.