THE ELDER
JOAN Los Angeles, 2015We made The Elder in response to an invitation to participate in the group exhibition “Sylvia Bataille”, organized by Adam Marnie and Rebecca Matalon at JOAN Los Angeles in 2015. The piece was prompted by our brief correspondence with an artist whose portfolio was found in a Manhattan trash bin by Tuomas’ late father in the 1980s.
Sometime in 2014, curiosity drove us to take the portfolio out of storage. Not much remained: a handful of black-and-white photos pasted to board, a few photocopied sketches, and a typewritten CV… Surviving evidence from a decade of sculptural production, roughly spanning the mid-1960s to mid-70s, in a post-minimal mode then in vogue within the burgeoning downtown art world in New York City.
Given the portfolio’s path into our possession, underlined by the loss of a father who was the vehicle for its recovery, we were unable to separate the work from the sense of failure and disillusionment the object itself seemed to embody. We suspected that this artist had eventually given up and—both figuratively and very literally—threw it into the trash one day. The CV allowed us to track down the artist, who confirmed this story, adding “there came a time in my life when I got quite angry with the art world and I destroyed all my work that I could get my hands on… I have regretted that lapse of good judgement in later years as I have no record of work done in that period of my life. It’s a portion of a large portfolio that I threw away when I gave up self-expressive art in the 1980s.” We set about filling in the missing parts.
The Elder was an attempt at overlaying our respective biographies, as well as our fathers’, onto this narrative, in order to map out points of intersection. The piece was installed in a corner of the gallery. A projector, propped up by a book cataloging all of our publications to date, cycled automatically through a carousel of 80 slides. Initially the carousel contained images from the portfolio, interspersed with gray slides that formed a gradient from white to black. Over the course of the exhibition, we replaced the gray slides—filling in the gaps, so to speak. Among these new slides were images of work by Tuomas’ father, a Finnish immigrant who turned to sculpture as his industrial design work dried up. Another image, showing a man wearing a bear mask and a boy in a stroller by the seashore, suggests a father simultaneously present and absent. The primary colors red, yellow, and blue recur: toys before a baby, a painted 5-gallon water cooler jug atop a metal pipe adorning an auto body shop, an illustration of a boy painting with a tricolor palette. A wax candle in the shape of a lightbulb burns, its flame distorting and finally consuming itself.
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