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An Intimate Dance of Objects: Gordon Hall

Exhibition review, Mousse Magazine

11 June 2019

  • An Intimate Dance of Objects: Gordon Hall, Through and Through and Through at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, 2019

    An Intimate Dance of Objects: Gordon Hall, Through and Through and Through at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, 2019

New York-based Gordon Hall’s new exhibit offers an encounter with objects, which invites us to re-experience the (gendered) body.

Gordon Hall’s sculptures are small delicacies, placed ritualistically in space like carefully punctuated words on a page. To encounter Through and Through and Through without prior knowledge is to be pleasantly surprised by an invitation to be intimate. This overture bypasses thought and nestles itself comfortably in the elongated curve of an arched foot, the cavern of an armpit, or the crevice between two buttocks. Although presented in the rational object-derived language of abstraction, Hall’s work is intensely sensual, with its sherbet-colored palette and softer-edged vocabulary of serious play. It speaks back to minimalist sculpture in ways that overlook the commercial reification of the interim period, embracing instead its early phenomenological dreaming. Hall’s oeuvre dreams further, however, asking questions that speak to the transforming corporeal imaginaries of the present moment: If an object holds a body and a body is not a thing, how might we move or be still together in the same space? Are you curious about my being? Can I imagine you to be everything you are, with no boundaries? Can you see me too as an open-ended possibility?

Hall’s sculptures act like a successive iteration that unexpectedly summons the floor of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, calling to life the traces marking the building’s former uses as a site of industrial fabrication, skateboarding, and art making alike. This all-encompassing drawing in space invites viewers’ encircling bodies into a collaborative dance, echoing the way that each sculpture has been developed from the exploration of a body with a found object. In fact Hall first trained in ballet, moving into gestural abstractions accompanied by increasingly precise and ambiguous costumes and props until there were no bodies left in the dance. In their writings, published as a collection for the first time on the occasion of this exhibition, Hall recalls that this transition took place in parallel with a more personal and political transition into ambiguity.

While all of Hall’s “extremely precise objects of ambiguous use” imply movement and demand a response by bodies, the exhibition opening is interspersed by moments in which the crowd grows silent to watch solo performers engage in physical exercises; small corporeal vignettes that act in parallel to, or directly engage with, sculptures in the dancers’ environs. In one such performance, local dance-trained artist Takahiro Yamamoto balances his body on the triangular edge of a sculpture base resembling a low lectern. In another, Payton Barronian gently holds two feet in mid-air so that the body becomes a triangular form that meets the floor on its axis, echoing a nearby graphite-covered wedge. These performances will continue at intervals throughout the exhibition, following the tradition of Hall’s recent shows at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Renaissance Society.

Echoing the subtle material sensibilities of Richard Tuttle’s assemblages, the works gather a range of tactilities that have a poetic persuasion. Their titles – “Stoop ornament”, “Kneeling Object” mingle utilitarian objecthood and human interactions, which resonates in turn with their making process: cast concrete, carved brick, waxed poplar. And yet, even in their titles, the memory of touch and the fact of human presence are near. “Floor Door” is “for Fred”; “Parallelogram Bench” is “for Dennis”. One of Hall’s earlier works involved them seeing the photo of a hand-made bench in a friend’s grandmother’s home and traveling there to replicate it. Months of research confirmed that the bench was the work of artist Denis Croteau, whose AIDS-related death in the ‘80s lends the work a melancholic layer. In their book, Hall writes about their grief at the unbearable vulnerability of the non-traditionally gendered body and suggests that the pushback against misrecognition, objectification, and aggression lies in care. Through and Through and Through cares for objects in ways that offer us a renewed experience of the (gendered) body, “so that in the moments we encounter one another, we are actually able to see differently than the way we have been taught.”1 The exhibition too is the result of care, following a three-year conversation with its curators and the collaboration of many. The radiant result makes this labor of love worth every ounce of effort.

Gordon Hall: Through and Through and Through, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland (PICA), Oregon, June 8 – August 10, 2019, commissioned and curated by Roya Amirsoleymani and Kristan Kennedy, artistic directors (with Erin Boberg Doughton), PICA.

This review was published in Mousse Magazine, digital ed. On 11 July 2019.

Notes

1 Gordon Hall, “Reading Things: On Sculpture, Gender and Relearning How to See” in Spencer Byrne-Seres, ed. OVER-BELIEFS: Gordon Hall Collected Writing, 2011–2018 (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art with Container Corps, 2019), pp. 9–13.↩

Writing

Lucy Cotter is a prolific writer; publishing art criticism, cultural criticism, art history, art theory, ficto-theory, poetry, exhibition, performance, cross-disciplinary texts, and catalogue essays. She seeks to create a more generative relationship between art making and writing.

She is the author of Reclaiming Artistic Research (Hatje Cantz, 2019, expanded 2nd ed. 2024), a book foregrounding the singular nature of artistic thinking in dialogue with acclaimed artists worldwide. She is a regular contributor to books on contemporary art by academic presses, and has published in catalogues and monographs on Haegue Yang, Rabih Mroué, Katarina Zdjelar, Brian Maguire, Manuela Infante, and Brian O’ Doherty, among other artists.

She is the editor of several exhibition catalogues, including Cinema Olanda: Wendelien Van Oldenborgh for the 57th Venice Biennale, and has guest-edited a number of art journals, including Third Text. Her work has appeared in Flash Art, Mousse, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Oregon Artswatch, CARA, Field Day, The Brooklyn Rail, Typishly, Cirque, and Frieze, among other journals.

Books

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research: Expanded Second Edition

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    Expanding the original book with additional artist dialogues and a new essay, this edition explores the changing stakes of artistic research in a world reckoning with social justice, climate change, and the rise of artificial intelligence through a series of 24 in-depth dialogues with artists worldwide.

    2024

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    In twenty conversations with leading artists worldwide, Lucy Cotter maps out an epistemology of artistic creation. She manifests a type of research that is dynamically engaged with other fields, but thinks beyond concepts into bodily and material knowledge that exceeds language, revolutionizing our perception of art from the ground up.

    2019

Books in Progress

Books Chapters & Essays

  • unraveling: practice-led curating

    Companion to Curatorial Futures

    Bridget Crone, Bassam el Baroni, Matthew Poole, eds.

    Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

    forthcoming 2025
    2025

  • Global Engagement and Modalities of Looking in the Work of Brian Maguire, Richard Mosse, and Yuri Pattison

    Routledge Companion to Irish Art

    Fionna Barber and Fintan Cullen, eds.

    London: Routledge

    forthcoming 2025
    2025

  • Haegue Yang: Day and Night

    Haegue Yang: The Great Forgetfulness

    Fergal Gaynor, ed.

    Cork: National Sculpture Factory

    forthcoming 2024
    2024

  • Delegitimizing the Continuum of Violence

    Brian Maguire: The Grand Illusion

    Dublin: The Hugh Lane National Gallery

    2024

  • Fact as Fiction: A Dialogue with Rabih Mroué

    Rabih Mroué: Interviews

    Nadim. Samman, ed.

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    2023

  • Theatre as Thinking, Art as Nonknowledge

    Manuela Infante: Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking

    Giovanni Aloi, ed.

    Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

    2023

  • The Warp and Weft of History

    Kristina Benjocki: The Warp and Weft of History

    Amsterdam: Looiersgracht 60

    2023

  • Braiding: Transgenerational Artistic Comradeship

    Katarina Zdjelar (monograph)

    Middlesborough: Institute of Modern Art & Teeside University

    2022

  • (tropisms) away from and towards the thing, it, she

    Natasha Pike (artist's book)

    Dublin: Arts Council

    2022

  • Beyond the Walls of National Identity: The Triangulation of Art Criticism, Curatorial Discourse, and Artistic Practice

    Irish Art 1920–2020: Perspectives on Change

    Yvonne Scott and Christine Kennedy, eds.

    Dublin: Royal Hibernian Academy

    2022

  • After a While, Reflectively: Performing an Ecology of Composition Practice (On Alison Isadora)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • The Body as a Crease of Knowledge (On Mike O' Connor)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Preparing for Liquefaction (On Siegmar Zacharias)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts, eds. Julian Brumeau, Nienke Scholts et al. Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/Amsterdam University of the Arts

    2021

  • The Accidental Symbol: Performance as a Conduit (On Jennifer Lacey)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Between and Beyond the Dramaturgical (On Nienke Scholts)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Walking the Wrinkled Plane (On Gustavo Ciríaco)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • The Space Beyond Boundaries (On Rosie Heinrich)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Art Stars and Plasters on the Wounds: Why Have There Been No Great Irish Artists?

    Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader

    Fintan Cullen and Róisín Kennedy, eds.

    Cork: Cork University Press

    2021

  • Unknowing Culture

    Persistent Traces of Things to Come

    Marjoca de Greef and Anastasija Pandilovska, eds.

    Amsterdam: Sun and Stars

    2020

  • Mercurial States: A Curatorial Reflection

    Art and Education/Classroom

    2019

  • Towards an autonomy of self, towards a community of self

    Katarina Zdjelar: Vladimir

    Lucerne: Centre of Contemporary Art

    2019

  • Cinema Olanda: Toward a Platform, Realized and Anticipated

    Blessing and Transgressing: A Live Institute

    Defne Ayas, ed.

    London: Cornerhouse

    2018

  • Cinema Olanda: Projecting the Netherlands

    Cinema Olanda: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, ed. Lucy Cotter, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, p. 11–21

    2017

  • Between the White Cube and the White Box: Aspen 5+6

    Brian O Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique, ed. Christa Maria Lerm Hayes. Amsterdam: Valiz

    2017

  • Between the White Cube and the White Box: Brian O’Doherty’s Aspen 5+6, An Early Exposition

    The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia

    Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff, eds.

    Leiden: Leiden University Press.

    2014

  • Close Listening: Katarina Zdjelar’s My lifetime (Malaika)

    Katarina Zdjelar: Of More Than One Voice

    Vitoria-Gasteiz: Artium Basque Museum-Centre of Contemporary Art

    2013

  • 180 Degrees: The University after Artistic Research

    Art Education: A Glossary

    Tom Vandeputte, ed.

    Amsterdam: Sandberg Institute

    2013

  • Libia Olafur: The Future of Hospitality

    Under Deconstruction: Icelandic Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale

    Ellen Blumenstein, ed.

    Berlin: Sternberg Press

    2011

The above contributions are selected from 2011–2024. A complete list from 2005–2024 is available on request.

Art Journals

  • TBA Review: FORCE! an opera in three acts

    Performance review, Oregon Arts Watch

    11 September 2024
    2024

  • Empathy and Eros: Ralph Pugay’s The Longest Journey

    Exhibition review, Oregon Arts Watch.

    11 December 2023
    2023

  • Brian O’ Doherty and his Many Selves

    Tribute article, Brian O’ Doherty memorial publication,

    Brenda Moore-McCann, ed. The Brooklyn Rail.

    May 2023
    2023

  • Brian O’ Doherty, Paradigm-Shifting Artist Dies at 94

    Tribute article, Hyperallergic.

    9 November 2022
    2022

  • The Weft of History: Kristina Benjocki at IKOB, Eupen

    Exhibition review, Metropolis M

    1 June 2022
    2022

  • The Promise of “Opacity”: Takahiro Yamamoto’s Opacity of Performance at Portland Art Museum

    Performance review, Oregon Arts Watch

    24 June 2022
    2022

  • Disintegrating Language: Will Rawls’s “Amphigory”

    Exhibition Review, Oregon Arts Watch.

    23 November 2022
    2022

  • The Art of Zoom

    Essay: “The Art of Zoom”, republished, In the Pause of an Echo, There May Be A Shadow, online symposium publication.

    2020

  • The Art of Zoom

    Essay, RUUKU Journal for Artistic Research, Vol. 14

    6 August 2020
    2020

  • Design as Relationality, Aesthetics as Agency (On dach&zephir)

    Essay, Sophie Krier, ed. Issue 4, Field Essays.

    2019

  • Plants as Other: Manuela Infante’s Estado Vegetal at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art

    Performance Review, Mousse Magazine

    17 May 2019
    2019

  • Wendelien van Oldenborgh at CA2M, Madrid

    Exhibition Preview, Artforum, Summer edition (print and digital).

    2019

  • The Exhibition after Time and Space: On Mario Garcia Torres’s Survey ‘Illusion brought Me Here’

    Essay, Mousse Magazine

    Spring 2019
    2019

  • Beyond the White Cube: Sixty Years of Brian O’ Doherty’s Letters

    Book review, Frieze.

    25 February 2019
    2019

  • Rob Halverson, Enthusiastic-Remotest-Tree

    Exhibition review, Flash Art

    5 June 2019
    2019

  • An Intimate Dance of Objects: Gordon Hall

    Exhibition review, Mousse Magazine

    11 June 2019
    2019

  • Mia Habib, ALL – a physical poem of protest

    Performance review, Flash Art

    27 September 2019
    2019

  • Writing as Experiment: A Dialogue with Sher Doruff

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1, 2018

    2018

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research… First Thoughts

    Introductory essay

    2018

  • Sound as Knowledge: A Dialogue with Samson Young

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

  • Knowledge as Production: A Dialogue with Liam Gillick

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

  • Black Urban Choreography: NIC Kay’s Pushit!

    Performance Review, Mousse Magazine.

    26 October 2018
    2018

  • Becoming the Archive: A Dialogue with Euridice Kala

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1.

    2018

  • Beyond Language: A Dialogue with Falke Pisano

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1.

    2018

  • Research as Play: A Dialogue with Ryan Gander

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

The above contributions are selected from 2017–2024 only. A list of earlier journal publications from 2003–2018 is available on request.

The keys of a computer are not entirely different than those of a piano. Fingers moving across a plane, producing sounds that are spoken or read. Tracing how material and embodied sensibilities can undermine the imposition of language; how words can act as placeholders for emerging subject positions and worldmaking. Embraced as a medium, writing aligns itself with the internal logic of art making.