Paul Gabrielli
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
For the major part of Paul Gabrielli’s sophomore solo exhibition, “Generally,” half a dozen everyday institutional features—a railing, a fire alarm, a soap dispenser, etc.—installed around the gallery’s front room at points appropriate to the functions they reference, were afflicted with awkward protrusions. Each artifact hosted a parasite that glommed onto its surface, evoking a tumor or a tick before any form of assemblage blessed with an art-historical pedigree. Here Gabrielli blended the found, the manipulated, and the constructed to loosen the hold of use value over even the most workaday stuff.
First in the space, and typical of the series, was Untitled, 2011. Perched atop a surveillance camera’s metal-and-plastic housing, mounted on the entrance wall above head height, was a simple black flashlight. At first glance, the combination almost seemed to make practical sense—both objects are used to enhance vision—but a second look clarified the arrangement’s absurdity. It was as if the oddly matched components, in gently but insistently pushing against one another, cast doubt on the whole idea of “purpose.” And in playing with objects without altering them too much, Gabrielli reestablishes their inherent strangeness in a real-world arena. Think of the improvised and accidental mash-ups in Richard Wentworth’s photographic series “Making Do and Getting By,” or the way that materials in Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s video Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go), 1987, seem to act without regard for what they were originally “supposed” to be “for.”
More evocative still were works based on an alarm bell and a soap dispenser. In the former, a plastic smoke detector the approximate size and shape of a hockey puck is affixed, barnacle-like, to a cherry-red fire alarm. In the latter, an air freshener has settled on a liquid soap dispenser. Both works are also shaped by the artist’s own manipulations and additions; in the fire alarm, for example, the text on the bell’s central label has been blurred by digital processing, rendering it not quite legible. It’s a tiny change, but one that arguably undermines our expectations more profoundly than any more obvious or exaggerated intervention. Again, we find ourselves nudged—not shoved—toward an interzone of ambiguity and uncertainty.
In the show’s second set of works, Gabrielli employed a different format but again juxtaposed pairs of independently familiar elements to produce a radically unfamiliar third. Par for the course is a battered piece of aluminum preserved behind clear plastic and attached to a cardboard backing printed with a photographic image of sunset-tinted clouds. The reference to standardized commercial packaging is immediate, but what exactly is the product on display here? Is the encapsulated fragment a piece of evidence, a religious relic, a fetish object, or some private souvenir? It appears at once unique and mass-produced, utterly ephemeral but linked by association to the natural sublime. As with its companion series, we are left with endless questions around function and value, nature versus nurture, played out through products and their physical makeup. We might compare Gabrielli to the protagonist of Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, whose search for authenticity requires him to make and remake the real until its very substance is undermined.