| Archive Project 22: Shirley Tse |
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Catalogue Essay |
Images from the Exhibition |
Spring 2004 Archive |
The Project Series
Project 22: Shirley Tse
In the mid 1990s, when Shirley Tse began exhibiting works fabricated out of assorted plastics and foam, as well as their various synthetic cousins in the family trees of industrial products and consumer byproducts, such materials were enjoying a good bit of buzz about their newness in the world of art. Of course, the art world(s) can be so slow, and so forgetful. Never mind that most of these materials hit the technological stage between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and made their impact felt in culture, despite some early uses in modernist art and architecture, not through the avant-garde but through mainstream commerce and industry before being embraced by a generation of artists in the 1960s and 1970s. The sort of “ooh, plastic” response to works made of synthetic materials in the early to mid 1990s, as if the materials had just arrived on the scene, was in fact the response of art audiences embracing material and craft after a long period of anti-craft and largely dematerialized art production. The resurgence of materiality and formalist concerns in the 1990s made all materials seem new, especially the newest among them. Plastic thus became a sort of novelty with retro-futurist vibes.
Personally, I’m glad we’re over the second “newness” of plastic. Rather than being burdened with the status of the material of tomorrow, instead it can be simply what it is: the material of the moment. It has nicely come into its own as a legitimate and even predictable material for making art, and it has found a comfortable place in global culture, both aesthetically and functionally. It is at this juncture that Shirley Tse makes use of her materials--for their currency and agency, without an exotic future, with a liberatingly limited past, and with a direct connection to the present, not because of their novelty, but because of their proliferation and integration into nearly every facet of contemporary trade, industry, and living. Tse’s materials can do--to invoke the sort of language once used to tout them as the materials of tomorrow--almost anything. They are readily imprintable, carvable, cutable, shapeable, malleable, formable, castable. They are durable, strong, often light, and available in a broad array of densities, colors, finishes. Tse exploits every quality and possibility that her materials offer.
Although they have a strange kind of kinship to minimalist objects, particularly in their internal consistencies (usually an entire work is of one color, or maybe two harmonic colors, and often of one or just a few materials and processes), and although they seem to gel into a kind of wholeness and simplicity, Tse’s works seem less concerned with a kind of formalist reduction than with echoing the odd interface between standardization and variety to which her materials lend themselves, and in which her materials find themselves employed. The proliferation of plastics and foams is characterized by endless options and countless examples of shapes, colors, textures, and properties, and yet there seems simultaneously a kind of generic-ness to many of the raw materials and products Tse utilizes. Everything seems different and specialized and at the same time similar or related to virtually everything else.
Tse’s works revel in mixing the generic with the unique and complex. In fact, her works, which initially might seem primarily concerned with material, in the end seem more to use the materials in a manner not so different from the packaging function for which they commonly are used. Tse is also involved in packaging of a kind, or in referring to packaging and distributing, but it seems that her task has more to do with using plastics and foams as packages or vehicles for addressing proliferation, acceleration, transmission, and dissemination (all words that could be applied to the globalized trade in which these materials have played key roles) in a more abstract or poetic sense. Forms, familiar and unfamiliar, multiply, and markings and information, from mundane to cryptic, abound. Things turn up in odd places, colonizing territory; they stack-up, pile-up, grow to unexpected scales or go to unexpected lengths. Larger objects seem to spawn smaller ones; familiar things are recast into unfamiliar identities or fantastic roles; objects mutate. And surfaces are inscribed with patterns that in some instances read as simple traces of process or tooling, but also suggest enigmatic codings, like tiny crop circles or yet to be deciphered hieroglyphs; ports, slots, and channels for utilitarian applications that remain mysterious; or topographies ranging from eroded landscapes to urban sprawls, to skins of spaceships, to the grooves left in logs by bark beetles. At every turn in looking at Tse’s work, one is pitted between polymorphism and genericity, and one is confronted with one’s own responses registering a perpetual oscillation between senses of clarity and mystification.
Power Towers, Tse’s latest undertaking, represents something of a departure. Past works have seemed variously like formalist investigations, plays on utilitarianism, objects used essentially as volumetric grounds for the inscription of elaborate records or schematics, aggregates or assemblages of found and fabricated objects and information, and more recently as seemingly prototype manufactured environments. Power Towers, however, is a kind of architectural or engineering model for a system apparently intended for the sort of transmission or dissemination that previously has been less literally modeled and more abstracted, schematized, and implied in other projects. It is perhaps the most “built” project, in an erector-set fashion, Tse has generated to date--created from quantities of raw material first broken down into discrete construction units, like trees milled into lumber. It also--unlike previous works that seem to either directly appropriate familiar objects such as Styrofoam coolers or involve the construction of objects that are more unfamiliar or only vaguely referential--is rare in Tse’s production as a piece that deals largely in facsimile. In fact, though they have been somewhat abstracted and stylized--altered here and there in design, and thrown into out-of-scale relationships with one another--the towers that comprise Tse’s system, no two of which are the same, collectively constitute a kind of condensed history lesson and world tour of actual towers used to carry high-voltage lines. Connecting Tse’s Towers is a small network of plastic lines that link to what seems to be some sort of hub, processing plant, or generator.
Although it is in some ways the most directly representational sculptural work Tse has produced, Power Towers also remains one of the most enigmatic, as its implications shift depending upon one’s associations with the materials and the model built of them. The construction of the entire piece from plastic could be seen as a simple material choice, not unlike the choices made rather conventionally by architects and engineers who sometimes model structures from materials far removed from those one might actually employ in taking a concept from proposal to realized structure; for example, creating a scale model for a house entirely out of cardboard when in fact a variety of materials would go into the actual building. To this end, one might understand the use of plastics in Tse’s Power Towers as little more than the use of a material of convenience or preference on the part of the artist. But as architects and engineers often do, in the course of creating models for proposals, employ actual, or approximate or simulated materials of the intended final project, Tse’s material choice might actually propose a network built of materials that are the same as or similar to those in her model. This has radical implications, as Tse would be proposing a network made almost entirely of materials with insulating properties and no conductive properties, while the few conductive elements (steel connectors used to join structural elements together) are embedded and separated, and therefore rendered useless as conductors.
Given the odd combination of material and design, Tse’s work thus either merely suggests that which it resembles, using plastic as a default material, or in fact insists on proposing a kind of exercise in impotence or futility, or declares more of a poetic proposal for another kind of transmission. The word “power,“ as well as the word “energy” for which it is used as a stand-in, is opened up to other understandings as Tse’s network is rendered unfit for its expected use and therefore eligible for others. Tse’s towers and their lines might carry another kind of power or energy, and perhaps in a manner that is rather conventional, such as the way some plastics and fiber-optics, though not conductive of electricity, do carry energy in the form of light. The definition of power or energy, however, also opens up to forms that are perhaps informational, perhaps poetic, perhaps psychological or metaphysical. Indeed, what these lines carry might well be counted, as so many forms of power and energy are, among the ineffable (to use a word that implies grandeur and sublimity) or more simply, and perhaps more sinister, the unknown or indefinable.
There is, after all, always the possibility of a less-than-silver lining to the system you can’t navigate, to the markings you can’t read, and to the transmission you can witness and receive but cannot decipher or diagnose. For all the words that come to mind with this work and Tse’s other works--trace, mark, channel, path, circuit, system, pile, stack, proliferation, dissemination, transmission, spread, sprawl--there are lighter and darker possibilities that come with them when we begin to extract them from their poetic invocations in Tse’s sculptures and apply them to the often less than poetic biological, technological, social, and political realities of our world. Despite the fact that they arrive in material vehicles that often are shiny white or pleasantly pastel, the implications of Tse’s work remain enigmatic as to utopian or dystopian leanings, and to this end, the dazzling and intricate ambivalence of Tse’s work shows itself, like the plastics that give it form, to be the raw material of the moment.
Christopher Miles
Los Angeles
February 2004