Daniel Laskarin

There are some encounters you don’t want to try to fold anecdote around (I personally keep a promise never to speculate openly about the state of other people’s fortunes or marriage.) “Agnostic Objects (things persist),” Daniel Laskarin’s 10-year survey at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, is a bit like this. Accompanied by a newly published comprehensive catalogue with contributions by curator Nicole Stanbridge and independent curators Jessica Berlanga and Bruce Ferguson, the exhibition is both pointedly choreographed and intransigently ambiguous. In his studio, Laskarin showed me the sheets of aluminum aircraft honeycombing he uses and pointed out that until braced they remain manipulable but, afterwards, become entirely rigid. On the shelf in a kind of Jim Dine chorus line, pristine hammer, tongs and pliers lay at the ready—everything projecting the morphological presence of process in waiting. An artisanal sobriety governed the place, reinforcing an underlying concern that most studio interviews are less dialogue than double monologue: artist to writer, works to materials.

The survey is divided into two rooms along near-chronological lines, bound together by a plastic currency of metal, resin, fibreglass and enamel that have been pleated, melted, slumped, folded and bent, an interpenetration of mass and space that is fluid but somehow stuttering and sometimes suggests the presence of hidden spaces within. A few of the pieces are kinetic, but the overwhelming impression of the spaces is dictated by the static work, notably Agnostic Objects, 2005–2006, sculptures loosely based on orthogonal renderings of 19th-century farming equipment. Titles culled from the same source are sharply epigrammatic: Holds One Feed, Takes a Man’s Place and Jack the Wagon, for instance, suggesting a participatory but absent hand. This restless access entails a bait-and-switch for viewers caught between sizing-up scale and unwittingly engaging contradictory propositions of function and force, the entirety being unavailable to any single prospect. Coleridge once dubbed epigram “a dwarfish whole.”

Despite a material vocabulary referencing minimal sculpture, Laskarin’s work does not pursue that same immediacy in rendering object-strangeness to an open-ended reading. Instead, process is represented via elegiac theatre. Snippets of Samuel Beckett’s words used as titling (“As if with moonlight,” “In the silence, must go on, can’t go on, go on”) speak to that author’s belayed lyricism: cauterized by grief, rounded out in rough play. Immediate precedents for Beckett quotation run through Bruce Nauman to Laskarin’s former teacher Mowry Baden, but as Bruce Ferguson intimates (citing Christian Giroux) in his catalogue essay “Last Shrugs,” Laskarin’s work does not incite participation in performance or play but compels one to oscillate around it, pondering the ways this complex present was developed. Or where it could go, but won’t, yet, without some further permission. And how did we begin? Who besides you should decide?

Jasper Johns said, “I personally would like to keep the painting in a state of shunning statement, so that one is left with the fact that one can experience individually as one pleases, that is, to focus the attention in one way, but to leave the situation as a kind of actual thing, so that the experience of it is variable.” (David Sylvester, About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948–2000, Pimlico Press, 2002.) Relate this to Laskarin’s remark on the exhibition: “I set out to create objects which might look almost recognizable, but never quite identifiable—that hover within the agnostic condition of uncertainty between the general and the specific.” Some who have seriously engaged Johns have called his bluff. David Sylvester noted (commentating on works such as “grey rectangles” of the late 1950s) “their formlessness is corrected by the insertion into the surface of simple geometric shapes placed symmetrically or by a one-word inscription painted in capital letters of a classic mould. Both devices evoke the tomb…” There are similar qualities of interpenetration and arrest in the dense, even refraction and desultory welds of Laskarin’s steel rectangles, the configured, defeated animism of the Agnostic Objects, and the reserved entropy of his resin-glazed cardboard boxes. One way to think of it is to consider the phenomenology Laskarin invokes in talking about his work: an “I am” unable to remain sure of itself beyond the hum of its own machinery switched on, yet that sees itself as possessing a truth that can never from moment to moment be accounted for while that same “I am” rests on the horizon line of operations taken for granted. The artist is not in the tomb, Sylvester will finally decide, but in the studio, playing out its narrative of process in passive, past-imperfective tense: there used to be work I was making: the work of art seen through the grave.

How to illustrate the nature of this theatre that is in its offering very profound but in experience, piano, a soft sound? The first thing to consider is a trio of sculptures made of welded steel that are, in effect, one and three chairs, trials of a common body of work whose ultimate outcome—to be riddled with shotgun blasts, draped in metallic cloth and elevated via a platform above everyone—now beacon, now sea, 2010, serves as a placeholder. The work has a serious level of complexity that comes from taking an otherwise conventional, albeit anonymous, structure and redefining it, retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings, implying conditions past and present. But beneath the pantomime of fabric, the shotgun pellet cavities are curiously obscure; they settle the room’s argument, evading variability by insisting on a violence that is both origin and outcome, cutting a hole from one read to another. This double action—relatable to Gordon Matta-Clark’s phrase “centering and recentering”—betrays the desire ignited to make looking equivalent to touching. Like Caravaggio’s doubting Thomas, our finger slips into a wound that has all at once become real. ❚

“Agnostic Objects (things persist),” curated by Nicole Stanbridge, was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from October 8, 2010, to January 30, 2011.

John Luna is a painter, critic and teacher who lives in Victoria, BC.