Opening January 22, 2012
The precepts and implications of
architecture have long captivated New York-based painter, printmaker,
installation artist and writer Peter Halley. His instantly
recognizable abstractions concretize architectonic rigor; he runs his Chelsea
studio with the precision and scrupulously delegated authority of an
architecture firm; and after the initial sunburst of critical discourse
surrounding the art movement he helped spur in the 1980s, neo-geometric
conceptualism (aka “Neo-Geo”), he found that Neo-Geo’s central concerns were
taken up by architects such as Rem Koolhaas, even as they were largely dropped
by artists. This orientation toward architecture dovetails with a body of
thought contending that public and private space — from the rise of agrarian
culture to the vertical metropolis of the present day — have been geometricized
for purposes of coercion. The seductive geometrics of technology may in fact be
instruments of enslavement masquerading as liberation.
In his widely
read essays, Halley applied Foucault’s essay "Discipline and Punish" and
Baudrillard’s text, "Simulations" to his own theses and their visual
expression: a devilishly iconoclastic vocabulary of squares, rectangles,
and connective conduits, garishly colored and laden with the ceiling-popcorn
material known as Roll-a-tex. Beginning in 1981, Halley painted prison bars
inside the hitherto sacrosanct modernist square and rectangle so exalted by the
likes of Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman. These prisons (and other,
barless squares and rectangles, which Halley dubbed “cells”) willfully
literalized forms that modernism once held up as spiritual ideals.
It is
this same barred, rectilinear motif that Halley deploys in the installation
"Prison." The venue is apt. As one of Portland’s most sociable spaces,
Disjecta lends itself to this exploration of space and the social. Wrapping
around three long walls inside the soaring, barn-like exhibition hall, a smooth,
seemingly seamless stretch of prison-patterned appliqué unfurls. With
tongue not quite fully in cheek, the artist calls it “wallpaper.” Two
adjacent walls, bare except for yellow DayGlo paint, are dappled with colored
directional light, which lends acidic, post-nuclear atmospherics, in keeping
with Halley’s Pop-influenced predilection for technological, rather than
natural, light. Stacked one upon one another like an infinitude of tiger
cages, the prisons exert a collective intimidation that verges on the sadistic.
After spending some time in the space, however, viewers may find their
initial experience of confinement and dread yielding to feelings of expansion
and amphetamenic rush, induced by the frenetic moiré effects of myriad repeated
vertical and horizontal lines. The psychological and visceral experience
continues to pivot between oppressiveness and exuberance in a whiplash of
Charles Jencksian double-coding. On one hand, the prisons seem to
metastasize as if on some sinister manifest destiny pulled from the pages of
science fiction: the hive mind of "Star Trek’s" Borg, "The Matrix’s" vast
network of fluid-filled pods, and the exponentially replicating monoliths of
Arthur C. Clarke’s "2010: Odyssey Two."
Conversely, they
emanate a wonky good cheer — perhaps even a downright cuddly-cute,
stuffed-animal adorability — that flows from Halley’s particular strain of
absurdist humor. Perhaps the prisons are more Tribbles than
Borg. Either way, opening-night viewers who traversed the space, noshing
brie, sipping bad Chardonnay, found themselves turned into players in the
codified semiotic game of social and aesthetic intercourse. Whereas Halley’s
acrylic paintings present discrete diagrams of contemporary experience, "Prison"
expands into vaulting architectural space, rendering the exhibition hall itself
a life-sized simulacrum indistinguishable from reality, with viewers the
unwitting or complicit pawns in their own corralling. This adds up to an
exhilarating, unsettling immersion.
