Vija Celmins, “Untitled #3,” 2016, mezzotint on wove paper, edition 21/35, plate: 16 x 15 inches, sheet: 21 ½ x 18 ⅞ inches. Museum purchase funded by Judy and Marc Herzstein; Brooke, Dan, Lily, and Brette Feather; and Bari, David, Max, Elise, and Theodore Fishel in memory of Isabell and Max Herzstein
…meaning for other people tends to be a projection of their own romance.
-Vija Celmins
A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.
-Cormac McCarthy
Spanning time, as we do through life, incorporates dimensions often contemplated yet also taken for granted. I think as we age, one of the gifts we receive is the ability to maintain this paradox in the very essence of how we define ourselves.
Sagan’s quip, We are made of star stuff, would appear to be the final word on from whence we came. The rigor of cause and effect, of science, our modern religion, lays bare all our origins, squelching the very notion of “why?” When we look up at the stars — when the light pollution allows such an awesome experience — we see with our naked eyes, billions of years into the past. The constellations remain the same only in our tiny window of perception, yet in some sense, we have experienced all of the time and space of which they constitute. We are not really separate from any of it… We are energy. But we are also funny creatures. The evolutionary process which allows humans to self-reflect, to abstract, to compose with concepts, has given us a quantum leap in understanding of our material reality, but at the cost of having to accept the true futility of everything. Not just on a personal level, but on every conceivable macro level as well. Entropy rules… The End.
Art exists somewhere in between the paradox of having a meaning-finding tool, perhaps the most complex tool in the entire universe, the human brain, in a reality that has no meaning. Another way of saying it is: Art gives us something to do.
Vija Celmins understands this and her work is grounded firmly in the conundrum. Her work is conceptual in the sense that she denies all concepts draped upon her art. Her business is the particular medium at hand or rather the transference of imagery from one substrate to another. The austere focus on process somehow creates a universal invitation to contemplation. Through desaturating sentiment from her work, she evokes mood, dread, longing, nostalgia, comfort, defeat, serenity…
The depiction of pin light galaxies on a velvet black ground, handled in mezzotint in this instance, provides the viewer with a seemingly simple composition — an “all over” work that brings little overt invention to the content. Yet the longer one spends in front of the actual work, where the light in the room is reflected so specifically off the surface, where one can study and ogle the quality of the actual thing, one can begin to slip into that in-between realm of knowing and believing. Each exposed dot of paper, a galaxy formed via reduction, represents a specific distance and time that we are told correlates to our own perception of space and time, but in terms we can only pretend to comprehend. In the same way that when we learn our sun will expand into a red giant in about 5 billion years, boiling the oceans away and rendering our planet inhospitable to life, we do not care too much. It is a concept of reality we can only imagine. We utterly can not relate to such computations in any emotionally meaningful way. We are left with having to describe our universe in terms of awe, filling the gaps in with our love of deities — something or someone to make sense of all this.
We are lucky to have shared this life with others. The best art knows this and contributes to the grand pageant of life by giving others our labor — a work born of a love of life and creation and a respect for things just as they are, not infused with sentiment. When the last human brain thinks its last thought, there will be no more meaning in the universe. And gradually all matter itself, all galaxies that ever were or ever will be will slow and cool, coalescing into an eternal stillness. Does matter care if it is known or not? Will any of our thoughts mean anything to the billions of stars in the billions of galaxies we will never experience, yet know are there? Why does art give us solace at the end of the day?
Celmins writes, “I think you see what your imagination allows you to see.” In that, we are all artists creating our realities, spanning time and space, forgetting what we are and never letting go of what we long for. When I look at the surface of Celmins’ drawings, the methodical drive that is harnessed to create such unassuming, layered grounds, the hand evident in a subconscious way, belying the individuality of the work and process, I find comfort. I’m not sure why — I’m not sure if I weren’t an artist myself, that I would have such a reaction. I’m glad I do. I’m glad Celmins decided to make work devoid of any sentiment, to allow our own personal narratives to fill in the space between what we know and what we are.
Untitled #3 is currently on view in 200 Brown Gallery of the MFAH’s Caroline Wiess Law Building.
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