Longing and Belonging: The Faraway to Nearby.

Published in 1996 by SITE Santa Fe, Longing and Belonging: The Faraway to Nearby documents an event that focused on the phenomenological relationship between people and their environment. The book includes a portfolio of color photographs documenting works (mostly installation) by the 31 artists included in the exhibition of the same name (July 14 to October 8, 1995) at SITE Santa Fe and the Museum of Fine Arts/Museum of New Mexico. It includes essays by Dick Hedbige, Lucy Lippard, Reesa Greenberg and Bruce W. Ferguson and Vincent J. Varga; excerpts from the symposium "The Place of Place" held in conjunction with the exhibition; as well as succinct statements by the artists and brief biographies. Among other things, the format of the book is refreshingly atypical and seeks to document the exhibition as an experience. Like for many documents of ground-breaking significance, however, one must have faith in the inspired title and commit oneself to forge through a visually and verbally dense terrain.

The organizers included Lippard's essay, "Around Here/Out There Notes From a Recent Arrival," even though it criticized their project. Significantly, Lippard discusses Wendell Berry's "place ethic" and chides organizers for embracing the art and nature rhetoric without considering essential communal responsibility, respect and empathy. She states, "In conventional theme shows like 'Longing and Belonging,' outsiders may bring fresh eyes and insights, and may make wonderful things that have little to do with the host site." And adds, ". . . it included site-specific (but not place-specific) works." More significantly, Lippard points out, "it would seem a common courtesy to invite the participation of a token number (at the very least) of artists and other people who live in a place that is about to be highlighted, especially those who have lived there long enough to know the place well . . . Any place is diminished when it becomes a mere backdrop for mainstream art." Lippard ends with "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." Her acerbic pen seems justified when one considers that there was only a one-line mention of an exhibition of 200 lowrider cars during the event. in fact, Lippard could have been more critical, especially since Francis Aly's is given full credit for a mural painted in collaboration with lowrider artists Dennis, Randy and Nolan Martinez. The Martinez's names are in tiny type under the media description, yet it was their vision and painting of Aly's topic.

One of the most successful aspects of the book are the carefully photographed, selected and placed images of each installation. The images flow with a mesmerizing ability to hold the viewer's attention. However, there is an overload of quotations and the book begins to be reminiscent of a school yearbook. Each essay has a solid-colored divider page with quotations. The repetition of images in Lippard's essay are a bit too school portrait-like. Finding the table of contents on page 67 was also quirky. Trying to give the reader an experience of an experience is laudable. Unfortunately, it was not entirely successful and visions of National Lampoon's 1964 Yearbook became too vivid.

Another design issue is Hedbige's essay, "On Tumbleweed and Body Bags: Remembering America," which in itself is difficult to evaluate because of the design. Hedbige's essay is a free-flowing, pensive compilation of quotations (about 65 in 21 pages) and observations that related to the exhibition's title. The switching back and forth between his voice and the voice of others is distracting and difficult to follow. Its difficulty seems to be what it is all about in the end:

Suddenly it's time to leave home again and come back here to where I live, and as I replace the receiver I catch myself, reflected in the mirror by the mantelpiece, face cracked open in the goofy, oafish, adolescent grin I recognized from ancient schoolboy portraits in the family photo album. . . My accent has slipped so far back down towards its 1950s cockney origin that the attendant at the Arco station, where I stop several hours later to by gas, cannot understand a single word I'm saying.

Though it never formally discussed the exhibition or concept, Hedbige's essay is a unique and effective tool to express the essence of the title Longing and Belonging. The problem for the reader is getting to the end of the essay as designed in print. It would be easy orally; however, this remains a book, not a video, and the tools for the designer are font and style changes.

The real problem is how the curators Ferguson and Varga discuss the works in the exhibition. "Long and Belonging," the inaugural exhibition for SITE Santa Fe, was comprised of works by 31 national and international artists using a variety of media. The information provided on the frontispiece about the exhibition states that the works addressed "personal, political, social, and group identities in the complex and increasingly global environment." This statement does not do justice to the profound and poetic nature of many of the works. However, the key flaw is hinted at in this statement. This exhibition tries to be too inclusive. Its openness is its demise, as Ferguson and Varga have difficulty embracing the whole at times.

This is especially evident when they try to describe Millie Wilson and Catherine Lord's piece, Something Borrowed (1995). The work includes cherished objects collected from women who are "lesbians and others who live outside the boundaries of traditional heterosexual relations." Though the curators note what others may think of Wilson and Lord's work, their summation illustrates what they think: "The stories are often quite affectionate or even sentimental." Ferguson and Varga act surprised, thus buying into the stereotype the artists poignantly refute.

Ferguson and Varga tried to do too much. They wrote separately about each artist and their work, resulting in a painfully long series of snippets, each divided by pithy and bathetic phrases like "a cheeky native tongue" for Rebecca Belmore's New Wilderness (1995) or "three times trouble" for Alison Rossiter's Trinity Equivalents (1995). These phrases don't even relate to what the curators wrote about the works, thankfully. The poetic concept might have been worthwhile and related to the title, but the content did not flow between each short investigation. They did, however, group works by place with a vague estimation of how one might encounter one piece after another. This was interesting but longer conceptual threads between artists would have been more effective in supporting the theme and the essays' format. At times even Ferguson and Varga were hard-pressed to find strings connecting certain artists to the whole and tried to use any stretches of educational imagination. In fact, they verge on the ridiculous with their characterization of Untitled (America) (1994-95), by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The piece consisted of strings of lightbulbs hanging from ceiling to floor. Ferguson and Varga state, ". . . these bulbs of Gonzalez-Torres are more domestic (and perhaps feminine) in association, and therefore more human in their relation to the body. Yet they hang like strings of male genitalia as well, mimicking the vulnerability of a gendered human body and the energy which courses through it." As I saw it, the work simply just hangs there and looks like strings of lights.

On the other hand, when the work actually relates to the theme and the artist clearly has an empathy and respect for the subject, the curators have no problem producing an eloquent appraisal of the work. An excellent example is Andres Serrano's Nomads (1990), a series of monumental color portraits of homeless people photographed in the style of Edward Curtis. The curators point out Serrano's ethical position in identifying the homeless people as individuals and discuss that "lack of public identity is a matter of public policy." Another example is Marina Abramovic's Knife Ladder (1995). Knife Ladder is a pueblo-style ladder leading up to a small square window with knives as rungs on the ladder. Here the authors discuss how the body and objects become a metaphor for the personal, political and public difficulties of growth and transcendence from the past. Visual metaphor and its relationship to a poetic and contextual understanding of one's relationship to the environment is the key to the work in this exhibition. Meridel Rubenstein's (the only New Mexico resident in the show) work visually resonates and draws in the viewer to contemplate her well-chosen, evocative images in Oppenheimer's Chair (1995). Rubenstein uses a glass house etched with a tree, video imagery projected on to a chair and a large black and white photograph of armor to explore the cultural and environmental legacy of science on Los Alamos. The seemingly disparate images become a whole through a nearly monochromatic, clean style that eliminates any possibility of a preachy, self-righteous tone by the artist. Thus the piece has a staying power in the mind's eye and one continues to contemplate the ideas to which she alludes.

The role of an exhibition in touching the depths of experience is exactly what Greenberg has in mind in her essay, "The Exhibition as Discursive Event." Though seeped in the methodology of curatorial enterprise and institutional mechanics, Greenberg wants to shift the curator's role from author and arbiter to one who talks with rather than to the public. As Greenberg states, "Judgments of the good, the bad, and the ugly are less applicable. What matters more is how much discussion is generated."

Greenberg's approach is radical and somewhat difficult to understand since the system of exhibition's foundation is based upon the singularity and quality of objects, not ideas of place or "place ethic." Museums and art institutions are still, unfortunately, driven by what might be called a "zoo mentality," one of this and one of that, to represent a diversity of many from everywhere else but their own environment. This approach leaves the interpretation of one's own environment and heritage to someone else. In the same sense it leaves interpretation of other cultures to, typically, non-experts and does not create expertise of one's own environment. Perhaps for larger museums and large cities this is not so much of a problem, but at its worst it forces small institutions and communities to spend large portions of their budget on acquiring/sponsoring a few good pieces that have little or no relation to the community.

As an outsider, it is of course not for me to judge what the Santa Fe community "needs" or what they can sustain. Nevertheless, although SITE Santa Fe does mention the necessity of bringing in international works to the third largest art market in the United States, it doesn't seem plausible that they need more outsiders talking about who they are and what they think for the 1.5 million dollar budget of this event. Let the expert artists from other countries talk about what is important to them and where they are from if one does indeed need to "educate" the community about contemporary national and international art. This is painfully clear with works such as Belmore's New Wilderness, for which the artist purchased hundreds of souvenir mugs and collected soil throughout her journey from Ontario to Santa Fe and then broke them and created a wall/dump to talk about the evils of consumption in U.S. culture. Then there is Braco Dimitrijevic, a former Yugoslavian who lives in Paris, who juxtaposes an "installation/intervention" with the Georgia O'Keeffe paintings at the MFA called "Triptychos Post Historicus or Herald - Homage to Georgia O'Keeffe" (1995). Isn't there enough homage to O'Keeffe in the museum and in Santa Fe? In "Triptychos," O'Keefe's House with Tree, Red (1916) is hung askew on the wall, three apples are above the painting, three trumpets are below the painting and another apple is below the trumpets. Like many people, I want to know more about a former Yugoslavian who lives in Paris.

What this event and the subsequent document say is that issues of "place ethics" deserve and require much more consideration.

K. JOHNSON BOWLES, an artist and writer, is director of the Moreau Galleries at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, IN.