The collaborative activities of Ann and Patrick Poirier cannot be easily categorized whether or not you accept them as “art.” That we should question the conventional senses of “work” that produces works of art seems to be one of their premises. Their use of a given medium seems to be dictated by the nature of the idea they are trying to realize, not by facility. Consistent with these observations was the sequence of photographs shown at The Carpenter Center titled “Homage to Blaschka.” In honor of the creator of the glass flower collection at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Ostensibly the medium here is the large format Polaroid photograph. Each picture is a color close-up of a single crimson rose petal. Each petal has been inscribed with a cryptic fragment of verse by means of pin perforations. From the very peculiarity of the lanced rose-petals you gather that they not the process of photography are the focus of the artists interest. In a way the precision of the “writing process and the perishability of tile rose explain and justify the use of tile camera as tile brilliant color quality of tile images explains the Poiriers’ use of negatives big enough to require no enlargement when being printed. The photographs are sparkling, intense images the violated flower petals have a poignant wounded look. But how much are we to make of the fact the flower is a red rose? Are we supposed to think of the Christian symbol of martyrdom? Or of Magritte’s monster roses? Can we avoid thinking of Rrose Selavy of Duchamp mugging in drag? Can a reference to Duchamp have any place in a work that is supposed to pay homage to a much more literal artist? Though there is an internal logic to the Poiriers “Homage to Blaschka,” there is no way to tell how deliberately they have chosen the red rose as tile center of the work. Do they know a rose is likely to make people think of Rrose Selavy? Can they have intended tile whiff of irony we get as soon as the association with Duchamp comes to mind? My guess is that they did not consider these questions, and that they intend no irony towards Blaschka or towards the spectator. The beauty and strangeness of the perforated rose petals (that is, of their images) explain their desire to see the images made.
The bulk of the Carpenter Center show (the Poiriers have been guest teachers there this year) was a group of works called “Lost Archetypes.” These works are small-scale plaster models of ruins of imaginary ancient architecture. The largest piece, the Temple of 100 Columns, occupied a square platform, below waist height, at the center of a tight, square, white-walled room. Intense cool-white fluorescent lights above gave the space a parched, futuristic aspect. The Temple itself is a detailed plaster construction that has been brought to what the artists apparently feel is the correct state of ruin. Some columns are truncated, many lintels are broken or missing. (There is so little room to pass around this piece, that you run the risk of adding to its ruination by a careless movement as you pass on to the further room and the work it contains.) At first, this fictive ruin seems to be about miniaturization, but when you see people passing around it, you realize it may be about magnifying the human form of the spectator. Peering into the center of the work, people loom over it like gods or giants, their movements, their very lives made to seem ponderously slow, relative to the hypothetical ages condensed in the process of simulating ruin by time. There is an incantatory quality to these works, especially if we try to regard them as sculpture. It is as if the Poiriers are surreptitiously courting the destruction of the actual world, envisaging the devastation we dread under the guise of archeological model-making. Understood as sculpture, or as related to sculpture, the “Lost Archetypes” must be seen as means of affecting the spectator’s sense of his own and others’ scale. They reverse scale relations between the actual human form and architectural form, doing this studiedly where ordinary architectural models seem to do it inadvertently. But again, the Poiriers’ interest seems to be in the process, rather than in its eventual interpretation. The process of looking at these structures under intense white light is a peculiar experience of seeing. All appearances seem to be raised to an unnatural pitch without really gaining in definition. Part of the pleasure of this work is in imagining its execution, which must have been very satisfying.
—Kenneth Baker
