Continuous weave.

Making and Unmaking by Margaret Wagner Mobius Boston, Massachusetts October 14-November 7, 1998

Hewlett Gallery Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania February 4-28, 1999

Returning home to Phoenix this past Christmas, I was asked to clear my family's storage room of some "junk" of mine that remained after I left some years ago. Sorting through boxes of old school reports, art projects, souvenirs and love letters, I was frightened by the thought of losing a part of myself forever. As difficult as it was to discard those remnants of my life, I was left feeling liberated. As sappy as it sounds, I discovered that I could simply and consciously, though painfully, be reborn. This feeling reminded me of my experience with Margaret Wagner's installation, "Making and Unmaking," at Mobius in Boston.

"Making and Unmaking" performs a rebirth that is theoretically viable and personally useful. As performance, the piece does more than just comment: it enacts a rebirth in the gallery, a personal transformation, so that we might reconsider our own transformations and imagine those to come. It does not simply reiterate rebirth narratives of fairy tales and mythology - the heroine here does not emerge transformed merely by circumstance or fate. The installation avoided buttressing that narrative by performing a rebirth that is self-motivated and continual, yet culturally limited and fragmentary. If anything, the work undermines traditional understandings of rebirth with the postmodern tenet that identity is unstable and performative. While this notion of identity might seem ideally libertarian, Wagner's piece achieved a more balanced pragmatism by bringing structuralism to bear upon rebirth through its use of text and images from our culture.

While all of this may paint a picture of "Making and Unmaking" dryly reliant on theory, the installation was rooted in several discourses with varying degrees of theoretical investment. It succeeded not only in intersecting psychotherapy, information technology, gender, domesticity, class and history, but also in eliciting a sincere investment of interaction and consideration from its audience - no small feat. Such was the case when visitors to Mobius lingered amidst Wagner's installation for long periods, often striking up conversations about the piece with complete strangers. This is surprising, given the work's potential to alienate with its inclusion of and inspiration from psychoanalytical and theoretical texts. But Wagner has had the opportunity to develop "Making and Unmaking" in previous venues with previous audiences, in galleries from New York City to Buffalo, with the show metamorphosing and growing in size and scope each time. It's obvious that Wagner has taken note of those experiences. The latest incarnation at Mobius is no exception. The Mobius exhibition is the second time Wagner's work has been showcased in Boston. In both instances, the work has poignantly negotiated the terrain of the personal and theoretical through formal strategies that are sensually and conceptually provocative. With the reconfigurations and additions to this most recent exhibition, along with the ideal space of Mobius's front gallery, "Making and Unmaking" has hit its stride.

Upon entering the gallery one first encountered a wall-to-wall sea of shredded paper material, all of which (one later realizes) has moved through the hands of the artist. Newspapers, junk mail, personal letters, internal memos, photographs, drawings, proposal and rejection letters gave the carpet its salt-and-pepper character with occasional hints of color. In the middle of this flotsam stood two paper shredders on wooden supports, each with an accompanying stool and a basket of paper materials provided for viewers to shred. To reach the stations, one needed to wade through the mass of paper. The stations were positioned back-to-back so that by sitting at either, one faced the large woven panels suspended at either end of the room that seemed to rise from the chaos of the floor. At one end hung two panels depicting the same woman - nude in one and clothed in the other - while at the other end hung a larger single panel of a house.

Sitting at a station and leafing through Wagner's discarded paper life to choose what to shred, one was struck by the variety of material in the baskets. Gut-wrenching love letters, phone bills and photographs were all leveled as fodder for the shredder. Black and white 4 x 5 contact prints of the woman in the panels dressed and undressed in innumerable gender-charged disguises awaited the same fate. Sitting at the shredding station each person supplied the criteria for what to destroy. The activity highlighted one's investment in the materials and in the varied roles of contemporary life that they represent. For instance, Wagner's snapshots were more difficult for me to shred than an old syllabus or her Publishers Clearing House mail. Paradoxically, shredding the snapshots was also more exhilarating, because the possibilities for re-creation became so much greater when discarding what was most valuable. By assisting Wagner in symbolically doing away with her various personas one begins to understand what such a grand project might yield for oneself. However, this is Wagner's project and it yields three panels that hint at her agenda.

At one end two weavings (52[feet] x 9[inches] each) hung side by side and upon closer inspection it became apparent that only the woof of the weave is derived from shredding like that on the floor. The warp of the woven panels consists of large black and white photographs cut into vertical strips that feature a sturdy, larger-than-life iconic woman. In the first weaving she is nude with her arms at her side, with a short cropped haircut and masculine facial hair. The negative space of the photograph is woven with shreds of Laura Mulvey's writing on Sigmund Freud, writings by Judith Butler and other texts concerning female subjectivity. Also woven in are documents from Wagner's life, including snapshots and other photographs, that seem to have been added after and on top of the theoretical texts. Meanwhile, the warp that contains the image of the body is unwoven, hanging free and backlit by the gallery windows a few feet behind it. The accompanying weaving is in many ways the inverse of the first. The figure is dressed in sweats and stands with arms crossed confrontationally. Less can be gleaned about this woman's appearance as it is her body, not the negative space around it, that is woven with shredded strips, while the negative space of the background is left to hang empty. While the nude seems trapped by the dense fill of psychoanalytic writings that surround her, making her appear transparent and less than solid, the fill of the clothed woman, integrated with her photographic identity, acts as visual static that disrupts and obfuscates her. She is pixelated with feminist revisionary psychoanalysis, Wagner's personal documents and her own photographic image.

The visual complexity and copious blurbs of woven text do not prepare the viewer for the back sides of the panels. Walking around the weavings to view them from behind, both take on a more ghost-like quality. With the lack of any photographic identity, each woman's form is "genericised" - made a silhouette by the presence or absence of the woven fill. Each loses her specificity and becomes a blank screen for our own projections. Still, the woof, with Mulvey's commentary on Freud and snapshots by Wagner, remains resonant. This back view of the panels is a new and welcome element to the installation. In previous incarnations the panels were hung either back-to-back in the center of the space or side-by-side against a wall. By making the backs of the panels accessible, Wagner has not only maximized the use of Mobius's gallery, she has added a facet to the piece that encourages subjective projection.

The newest addition to "Making and Unmaking" encourages our projection with a familiar cultural icon - the suburban home. The lack of people or activity in the image frees one to imagine what is taking place, much like the silhouetted emptiness of the back of the two other panels. The new and unfinished panel is a black and white mural photograph of an ideal midWestern, post-World War II suburban house. Its conformity to suburban archetypes sets it at odds with the subversive presence of the women across the room. The house photograph is still a weaving in the making; at the onset of Wagner's exhibition at Mobius, the photograph hung in strips, lacking any fill. People could literally walk through the photograph as one would pass through strings of beads in a doorway. Throughout the exhibition, Wagner wove the warp of the house panel with the remnants of her shredded life that lay strewn on the floor.

In the top two feet of the panel that she was able to weave in that time, it was apparent that her approach to weaving the house deviated from that of making the women. Whereas the woman panels have large areas of unwoven warp that correlate with the positive or negative space of the photographs, both the positive and negative spaces of the completed section of the house panel are woven. The house itself is woven with shredded materials that are primarily personal in nature. The sky and surrounding trees are woven with public artifacts: bills, junk mail, etc. This public/private divide seems at odds with the permeability of the self and culture that is suggested by the panels across the room - unless one reads the house as a metaphor for the body.

Precedents for the association of the house with the person are well-established. Italian Renaissance architect-theorist Leon Battista Alberti's maxim "every edifice is a body" is often quoted. Like the house, the body is a permeable structure. The notion of the house as a barrier between what is outside and inside, between society and the subject, has long been bankrupt, leaving one to wonder if Wagner's exercise with the house is an illustration of futility. But as it is the ideal of the house that concerns her here, her illustration of the inside/outside divide is also poignant (as futile gestures often are), because it plays out the struggle people often have reconciling their experience with ideal binary models having long been theoretically evacuated. In any case, looking at the house as corporeal further suggests structuralist underpinnings for Wagner's project.

The addition of the house weaving to "Making and Unmaking" circuitously links class and economics, time and place, leading to a more comprehensive consideration of the work. At the same time, the specificity of the house limits one's experience with the piece, arguably circumscribing it in narrative. Where the installation could once be positioned in the genre of self-portrait, it now moves into the realm of autobiography - although by proxy as neither of the women photographed is Wagner, nor, Wagner admits, does she have an actual relationship with the house. It seems that autobiography is as malleable as the self - Wagner appropriates the images of others to facilitate her own re-creation. In Wagner's practice, it seems that the personal may not be so personal after all.

In fact, "the personal is political," that battle cry of second-wave feminists that sowed our culture for innumerable projects concerning identity and its politics, bolsters "Making and Unmaking." The evolving installation is rooted in the political as it addresses identity, specifically female identity, from the trenches of Wagner's everyday, bombarded by a crossfire of ideologies. Recognizing the futility of universalizing, Wagner addresses subjectivity by combing the battlefield for shells of disparate discourses and filtering them through her own experience. By weaving together the shreds of her public and private life, her photographs, ideologically-loaded junk mail and theoretical texts that address female subjectivity, Wagner performs and displays her own subjectivity. Her complicity with all of these discourses is recognized, but so is her resistance, as she "deconstructs" the disparate texts and images, then refashions them into a weave that conceals and reveals in its overlapping criss-cross - a weave in which a stable identity, specifically an essentially feminine one, is untenable.

Wagner's performance of weaving in the gallery space, augmented by the public's shredding of her paper life, moves "Making and Unmaking" away from art-as-static-object-of-contemplation to a more active realm that encourages interaction not only with the piece, but also with the artist. These are the characteristics that open up interpretations of the piece beyond its material end; here process becomes subject, and its physical products - three iconographic paper weavings - serve to inflect our considerations of the making and unmaking of the self.

This is the strength of "Making and Unmaking." By unsettling commonly held assumptions that gender, identity, history and art are somehow stable or static, Wagner's installation does what good art does: it confuses said categories. It seduces us then pulls the carpet out from under our feet. It elicits more questions than answers in our internal dialogue with the piece, and in the case of "Making and Unmaking," that meaningful dialogue broadens to include the acquaintances and strangers who occupy the gallery. In my case, the work crept back into my consciousness months later and thousands of miles away. When I stared at garbage bags full of the memorabilia that I would periodically and sentimentally revisit, I realized that those revisits functioned as identity maintenance that limited my potential for personal reinvention. What would have been loss was instead agency. That Wagner's work could have such a meaningful effect in one's experience demonstrates the practical power of art to facilitate reconsiderations of limiting paradigms socially entrenched in our consciousness.

JON LUCKETT is an artist and critic living in Cambridge, MA.