It's the In Between We're Concerned With: Finding Hypertopia in David Herbert's Hand-Me-Down, Written by Morgan Joseph Hamilton, Ph.D. Candidate

It's the In Between We're Concerned With

Finding Hypertopia in David Herbert's Hand-Me-Down

Written by Morgan Joseph Hamilton, Ph.D. Candidate

It's the In Between We're Concerned With

Finding Hypertopia in David Herbert's Hand-Me-Down

Written by Morgan Joseph Hamilton, Ph.D. Candidate

1. Holodeck

2.Toys(1992)

3. Zardoz(1974)

4. Taos Pueblo

5. Uncleftish Beholding

6. Centre Pompidu

Can you feel the barrier between You and the infinite Universe that is not You? If you could feel that barrier, could you cross it? Or would that ‘crossing’ merely push the borders of You into the infinite Universe? Since ‘crossing’ is only pushing You further into the infinite Universe (andif we agree the infinite Universe is very much not You), then space is either You, the infinite Universe, or both. If space represents the absence of You in the infinite Universal whole, then there is no space between where You are and where you are. This pedantic exercise is meaningless in the face of experiencing a physical world where You are no more you than the infinite Universal whole you are a part of.

What does the edge of You (or anything for that matter) look like? Deleuze and Guattari's (1980) metaphysical jaunts of edge-finding and edge-denying play at a resolution. Do You end at the outside of your skin? What of the microscopic flakes that brush off your skin? What of the fact that You exist in the hearts of loved ones? Where You end and space begins is irrelevant, what matters to me and You is who drew that edge and for what purpose? When power hoarders define personhood for us (the youness in non-you space), existence is political. Being a political being turns the edges of a natural entity into a controlled border (and borders do a lot of heavy lifting in the imagined communities they define). The border of You is a site of tension that ripples through our understanding of what it is to be in the Universal whole. Art is an action that doubtingly fingers the space between being and not being, between You and everything else, between definition and liberation. We often accept the narratives we’re given at the thresholds of museums and galleries that chant “This is Art and that is not!” In David Herbert’s case, it’s the in between we’re concerned with.

I question the edgy-ness of things as I experience seeing David Herbert’s Hand-Me-Down at Grizzly Grizzly in Philadelphia. His installation is singular and engulfs you; it welcomes you in and slams the door closed behind you. Each work, the whole room really, begs the question: where does artwork end and art space begin? Herbert sculpts the metaphorical distance between two cities, Paris and Philadelphia, by calling on ancient and modern art, fused by Memphis colors and textures on Euclidean shapes. Grizzly Grizzly, a gallery no larger than 200 square feet, is made ever smaller by the site-specific construction of a pink wall; a gridded barrier defining what is to be seen (and how it is to be seen) and what is not. Herbert’s choice to shrink the space puzzled and intrigued me. Removing a volume of the gallery renegotiated the space that his sculptures and drawings existed in. A space that no longer belonged to Grizzly Grizzly, nor you and me, but to the artwork. When artwork becomes art space, the everything-in-between-ness expands from floor to ceiling.

Museums and galleries are examples of what Michel Foucault (1986) called heterotopia, the third (and most achievable) sibling of Utopia and Dystopia. If Utopia is “not a place”, heterotopia is “all places at once”. Think of heterotopia as a site where all other things are possible simultaneously (i.e. a movie theater, a botanical garden, an aquarium, an museum). In what other reality could you see a Brancusi bronze near an Egyptian sarcophagus as in The Met? Distances of geography and time are collapsed. Heterotopia describes a world where all other things combine to create a new space of endless possibility. The turbulent travel from one gallery to the next (e.g. one era to another) in museums is smoothed by heterotopic understanding. Walking from a room of Greek and Roman artifacts to a room of European decorative arts is no more taxing on us than changing channels, or swiping to the next TikTok. The hallways and corridors are physical manifestations of the static glitch between channels (or WiFi buffering).

We are primed for the whiplash of simultaneity in our culture, itself a product of globalized consumerism. Neil Postman (1984) expounds on this in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he details mass communication’s role in mainstreaming heterotopia. Perhaps with a wry wink at Monty Python’s And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), Postman articulates how the ubiquity of news anchors’ “and now… this” introduced us to a barrage of unrelated topics unified by what media companies deem important. Herbert acknowledges how art spaces collapse time and place and recreate (or reinforce) the “and now… this”-ness of art experiences. In one room, he combines the world out there and a world of his own, we are invited to view it, but he knows we’ll never see it as he does.

1.Those raised lines on the wall, the wall that pushes into the space, the already limited space of Grizzly Grizzly, make up a graph paper sheet awaiting assignment. The Wallgrid divides the already small space into even smaller chunks of room, where have I seen this before? While flying aboard the USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D during Monday night reruns; Picard or Geordi, or Data, trapped in the yellow grid of their own making. The Wallgrid pulses in the room like the Tholian Web Kirk encountered on an earlier, “D”-less Enterprise, entrancing curious passersby and entrapping them. There is a warm smell in the air, I expect the stink of paint or hot glue or sawdust, but my expectation is replaced with a uniform, musky scent. Sandalwood? The wood floor creaks beneath my foot, that’s not very futuristic, but neither is the wall, nor the art, nor the space. Herbert remade the space to suit his idea of the art space, something that has been transforming for centuries. From colonnades full of stolen marbles to white walls of privileged vacancy. This interrupting pink wall has somehow slipped into this room from another dimension, is it part of something bigger or is it a computer malfunction, glitching to glean the underlying structure of a holodeck? The intrusion reminds the viewer that everything around her is a fantasy, an illusion, a created space.

2.Grizzly Grizzly is on the third floor of an old warehouse, tucked in the back, past a labyrinth of corridors and hallways that cut the space into artist hidey holes. First, one must park in a city whose lots are already full to capacity, is where I am illegal? Then under bridges, down roads where people work and live to the unprepossessing entrance, which door? The stairwell is wood that stopped growing a century ago, rings terminated in another time, another Earth. Before machines could strip a tree down to twenty pieces of specialty lumber, these beams came from the heart of whateverwood. I half expected a church bell at the top of my journey. No gallery is the same, each its own microcosmos of specialty or novelty. Grizzly Grizzly is famed for its concise size and powerful artistic experiments. There is a sensory overload one endures to even reach the door to the gallery, once inside I am lost to the immersive dreams its curators and artists have weaved. The walls close in inevitably as I huff and puff for every breath. The Wallgrid with its cuts in and bumps out presses on me. It is a recurring nightmare I inherited from a scene in Barry Levinson’s Toys (1992), where toy innovators discuss fake vomit. The gridded wall slowly squeezes in on its occupants who have only the table top left. Whether I’m inspecting Herbert’s meticulously crafted drawing cases, or the is-it-real-or-is-it-fake Duchampian wheel, I feel the wall, the dreaded gridded wall, inching ever closer to me.

3.One of the two insets of the Wallgrid holds a bust, itself gridded, with a calm face that cheats toward agony. It looks into me as I enter the room and watches me every step of the way. Who does this bust represent? Is this bust a depiction of itself? It puts in mind the marbled works of art in galleries and museums around the world meant to honor important people (as determined by important people) the ancients, you know. The mouth purses, the eyes cave into a mysterious internal world held above our heads out of sight. It floats there, judging me, is it not for me to judge it? The relationship between viewer and viewed is in flux, a compounding of empathy in a room barely big enough for it, like Tom Hanks’ frustration with his befuddled Wilson. Please, just like me. The bust is omnipresent, very much like busts in art spaces through history. Herbert uses this fill-in-the-blank bust, oversized and underresolved, to draw lines through heterotopic space between our idea of museums (i.e. The Louvre, The Pompidou, The Met, etc.) and what museums actually are (any cultural clearinghouses). The bust transforms behind my back, it is replaced in my mind's eye with the eponymous floating tyrant Zardoz (1974). The fictional gun-spewing, hate-mongering villain of the film represents the growing tension and ebbing class warfare, a societal cycle set on repeat. The icon of a bust, as is the head in the Wallgrid , symbolizes the hierarchy we set as humans (who is and is not important) and the political non-neutrality of museums (whose art is Art and whose isn’t). The bust is made of everyday material, cardboard perhaps. Herbert’s use of tangible, familiar, inexpensive materials speaks to the readymade, rough and rugged approach to illusion developed to an artform by Hollywood. Zardoz is no more a floating mountain of granite and iron than the bust in the Wallgrid is of Parian marble. He begs we ignore the man behind the curtain… behind the wall? All we see is a fantasy, but perhaps the fantasy is the artist himself.

4.When I see something new my mind quickly compares it to what I’ve already seen and understood, hoping to place it alongside the familiar. The other cubby in the Wallgrid housed a strange ziggurat stack of tiered wooden structures, levels connected by ladders, and cut outs that seemed meaningful (but were as empty as the eyes of the bust above me). My brain fired off, trying to recognize it, make it fit in what I know. Unless you were a child in the 1980s, or had older siblings who played with the Navarone Cliffs playset, it lay just out of reach of recognition. The closest I came was the Taos Pueblo community in New Mexico. I grew up visiting these sites of ancient and contemporary historic importance. Ladders shoot up cliff sides and dip down into kivas where ancients and contemporaries communed with Spirit. Each the pueblo and the object before me reach into a history and meaningfulness I’ll never know and enjoy. The sculpture is composed of dark alcoves (as itself sits in a dark alcove), close to the ground, close enough to play with. After reading about Navarone I learned that it's based on a fictional WWII battle on a fictional Greek island. The playset is a reference of hegemonic culture, whether real or not, based on gamified domination. This low-res sculpture represents Herbert’s memory of a fake Greek cliffside, the details are only as resolved as he was interested in them (levels, alcoves, ladders) much like the fake Grecian bust alongside it. Museums only represent things, abstracted versions of real life objects and experiences. The moment they enter the museum or art space, they are extracted from the infinite Universal whole and put on a political pedestal. The structure is foreboding, it captures the dismay of the battle it portrays. Herbert asks how something so dismal can become a fun hand-me-down toy for children; it echoes the cognitive dissonance he feels when viewing art handed down to him from the hegemonic history writers.

5.Language is bound up in the history of humanity and extracting pure tongues from the polyglottal soups of borrows and cognates that make up English is a flight of fancy. Poul Anderson took on such a project in his work Uncleftish Beholding, an anglicized translation of Atomic Theory. Writings about this text describe Anderson “stripping” or “purging” the text of Atomic Theory words that do not derive from Germanic origin, uh oh. The text is simple and roughly understandable, perhaps as confusing as Elizabethan English is to every 9th grader in the US, but it has a darkness to it. I struggled to come up with a less violent word than strip or purge to describe what Anderson did to this text, I come up short. “Translate” is close, but isn’t quite accurate. The words are familiar and yet distant; English is a good example of patchwork and bricolage communication. However, the adaptable and assimilating aspects of English are borne through the violence of invasion, colonialism, and genocide. My language is itself a museum of people, culture, and lands forever changed and often destroyed by Eurocentrism. So what does the Uncleftish Beholding project actually do for us? Perhaps it does what granular analysis of any cultural site does: send an infinite Universal whole through a fine mesh sieve, wait for what settles to stratify, name the layers, privilege what rises to the top, and discard the rest. Does that not apply to the project of museums through history? Herbert reckons with that through this exhibition, which became apparent when I saw the image attached to the marketing materials for the show: a view from the ceiling, looking down into the gallery. When I visited the space, I noticed the Wallgrid goes right up to the ceiling, there isn’t room for a camera up there. On closer inspection I realize the image is of a maquette he created to pre-create the installation. He is looking into his own work from above and inviting us to do the same. Nothing should be taken as given, not even the very real space we occupy.

6.Beyond the physical structure (and re-structure) of the space lies a narrative that is just holding together. The replica of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, an icon of Philadelphia art pedigree, stands proud, accentuating a pillar (he makes us notice what isn’t meant to be noticed, the structure of the building). The Wallgrid operates much the same way, reminding you that you are looking, not necessarily ‘seeing’. Looking has a voyeuristic flavor, where the looker is very much aware of what he is doing (see: peering, peeping, etc.). Seeing rests on the context of understanding, accepting, adapting. When one sees Herbert's drawing, they are looking at acrylic glass, paper, graphite, and paint, but they are seeing a hand missing a fingertip, or a caged helmet, or a chair of dubious use. Museums through time have strived to be a neutral backdrop to the artwork they present as important. But neutrality dissolves with every curatorial choice exclusion. Western art history focused on the transcendence from beatific paintings to scientific depictions of reality (as White men saw it), and back to conceptual works that questioned the format of art. It followed the looking => seeing => looking cycle. Museums were not to be seen, intermingled with the artwork they elevated, until they were. David Douglas investigated the Centre Pompidou _/‾ and its iconic reimagining of art museum architecture. The Rogers and Piano design inverted the structure of art museums by showcasing the steel beam structures, plumbing and air conditioning pipework, and external stairs. In a place so efficient and streamlined, who could confuse the artwork with the building? The conversation between space and art broke down, leaving the building itself to occupy imagination and inspiration in the visitor. Herbert plays with the space You occupy, he reforms the space you’re looking at (not seeing) and reminds you that it is made up of matter, no different than the sculptures and drawings he exhibits.

The work Herbert does is mostly unseen. He collapses the dimension between references of time, culture, and space. He is hyperlinking in real time (when you click a link, it takes you to the reference in an instant). You aren’t meant to witness the centuries of scientific understanding that led Tim Berners Lee to ditch file directories and make words responsive, you simply click and you’re there. Lee and his colleagues developed hypertext, text bridging points within an entity non sequentially. Is that not what I’ve described in so many words? Hyperspace is something that is or exists in a space of more than three dimensions. The prefix haunts me as I dig deeper into its contemporary uses, it serves so many things Herbert’s exhibit elicits. This article is hyperlinking from my perception of the exhibit to the myriad connections I make in my own experience. If heterotopia is “all other places”, then hypertopia is “the beyond place”, or “the place between”. Hypertopia exists in the non-physical aspects of mass communication’s “and now… this”-ing of the Internet. Hypertopia exists within us. It is the moment of connection when we enter an art gallery and see fantastical new things. Hypertopia is to traversing incongruous things as hypertext is to linking pages online. Foucault’s (1986) heterotopia necessitates the rooms within rooms, the picture of the maquette of Herbert’s exhibit looks into the room that holds the picture of the maquette of Herbert’s exhibit. The recursive turtles-all-the-way-down-ness of Herbert’s creation is itself only one atom of his lived experience. All atoms or unclefts of his life-as-experience come together to tell a story to himself about himself. The narrative thread connects everything, from a candy wrapper on the street to god itself. Theorist Jane Bennett breathed life into new materialism in Vibrant Matter (2010) arguing for the vital life force of everyday objects. Gutter trash is as much a part of the human story as grand creation myths. If everything is vibrant matter in a simulation of itself, how do we know what is special, what is Art? I’ll offer a cliché: it’s in the eye of the beholding.

Through personal thoughts, doubts, revelations in a context that typically privileges refinement and rigor, I review the list of links at the top as a very narrow set of connections. Though a participant in pop culture, to what and how I make sense of the exhibition is uniquely me. I enjoy the gut reactions to art in art spaces, I rely on the entire experience of seeing art. It doesn't always begin in the parking lot, but this time it did. Where do I even draw the line between “seeing David Herbert’s new exhibit at Grizzly Grizzly” and “not seeing David Herbert’s new exhibit at Grizzly Grizzly”? As I write this, I am in a mental recreation of the gallery, perusing my memory of the artworks. In a way I am more there than when I was actually there. Many of us make immediate connections to our lives when we see new things. We construct our understanding of the world, and no two minds see the world in the same way. Herbert’s Hand-Me-Down creates a brand new space never before seen and never seen again in the existence of the infinite Universal whole. What is left is changed and contextless, floating in a worldview of our own making. Herbert looks at artworks and artists as legacies handed down through generations and has to decide what they mean for himself, he begs us to do the same.

References:

Anderson, P. (1989). Uncleftish Beholding. Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Boorman, J. (Director). (1974). Zardoz. [Film]. 20th Century Fox.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter. Duke University Press.

Davis, D. (1990). The museum transformed: Design and culture in the post-Pompidou age. Abbeville Press.

Deleuze, G., & Gauttari, F. (1980). A thousand plateuas: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, M., & Miskowiec, J. (1986). Of Other Spaces. Diacritic, 16(1), 22-27.

Levinson, B. (Director). (1992). Toys. [Film]. 20th Century Fox.

McNaughton, I. & Gilliam, T. (Directors).(1971). And now for something completely different. [Film]. Columbia-Warner Distribution.

Postman, N. (1984). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Viking Penguin

Grizzly GrizzlyAugust 10, 2023

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