“La Poussière de soleils”
Real Fine Arts
Borrowing its title, which translates as “the dust of suns,” from a 1926 play by Raymond Roussel, the influential beau ideal of the Surrealists, Olivia Shao’s curatorial venture at Real Fine Arts this past summer was a tone poem on myth: from the myth of time as vast continuity to the myths that often surround obscure artists. The carefully planned installation of tight corridors and intimate galleries in some ways recalled a line from a 1963 study of Roussel by Michel Foucault: “La Poussière de soleils is constructed like steps descending down a well to the treasure.” Yet the dominant feeling may have been less that of “descending” than that of meandering along an imaginary horizon; Shao placed the objects and artworks in a chain, animating their (sometimes discordant) affective and material reverberations. Here, one slowly discovered odd yet compelling visual, textural, and metaphorical resonances among a motley group of artifacts and works—from an ancient Egyptian handheld mirror and four tiny amulets to a 1921/1974 cast-bronze iron by Man Ray, to pieces by underrecognized artists Pat de Groot, Clay Hapaz, and Cletus Johnson, to 2013 works by Rey Akdogan and John Kelsey.
It’s hard to say precisely when the show began. The architecture Shao designed for her exacting affair had actually first served to house the exhibition that preceded hers—a solo show by Mathieu Malouf— and she kept one of his paintings on view. “La Poussière de soleils” featured a bookshelf by the entrance offering a range of publications provided by friends; two small galleries of sparsely installed objects; and a long, narrow passageway leading to an interstitial space containing nothing but a George Nelson platform bench and a lightbulb. This room opened onto a shorter hall that terminated in a looping projection of Shuji Terayama’s 16-mm The Cage, 1964. A nonnarrative, chartreuse-tinted film showing people performing strange rituals in rural and urban postwar Japan, Terayama’s piece felt like the “treasure” at the end of the show, but the sole work installed in the preceding corridor—a framed photocopy of a black-and-white photograph by Genpei Akasegawa of a door handle on a cement wall—was the paragon of the exhibition’s overall mood. The photo derives from Akasegawa’s “Thomasson” series, 1972–, named after the American baseball player Gary Thomasson, who played a few very unsuccessful seasons in Japan in the early 1980s. (In his 1993 sci-fi novel, Virtual Light, William Gibson coined a term based on Akasegawa’s work, defining “Thomassons” as “useless and inexplicable monuments, pointless yet curiously artlike features of the urban landscape.”) Akasegawa’s irrational image echoed Man Ray’s nearby Surrealist iron with its row of nails jutting from its undersurface.
Three small, untitled abstract canvases from 2005 and 2006 by Hapaz—impastos of muddy, bottom-of-the-sea greens—rhymed nicely with De Groot’s April-Pink Moon, 2004, another petite painting, which portrays a pulsing orange orb over a sapphire sea. De Groot, now in her eighties, is known for making a painting of the ocean in Provincetown, Massachusetts, every day. Like De Groot’s ongoing enterprise, this show seemed a kind of hymn, an act of appreciation that itself registered as art.