Whispers in Ordinary Time: The Art of Lynn Aldrich

William Dyrness

DURING a recent exhibition of Lynn Aldrich's work in Los Angeles, a group of children were playing a card game on the floor beside an installation of 125 fake fur and artificial animal hides. Their laughter seemed somehow appropriate to the wry, playful quality of Aldrich's work. The show, "Infusoria"—Latin for a stagnant pool of water which gives birth to new life—also included cascading wax paper, transformed lamp shades fixed to the wall, a mass of paper stars on vellum, and a globe covered with small human figures. After the crowd had left, the artist went over to where the children had been playing and re-positioned some of the swatches of zoological fabric. The piece, "Designer's Choice: Genesis "[see Plate 6] bore a biblical epigraph: "Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth." Looking at this odd human compliment to the creator, she said: "I sometimes think, what if I missed out on giving thanks to the creator for what he has done? People have many reasons why a search for answers might lead them to Christianity—my first reason for coming there was to know the creator." This confession could serve as a summary of her work, for she has consistently celebrated the layered solidity and promise of creation, grounded as it is in God. What is there before our eyes, including what we humans have made of it, continues to fire her imagination. And it amazes us, too, as we look where she is pointing.

When Lynn Aldrich moved to Southern California with her family in 1979, she began making visual art but thought more of pursuing an MA in Literature, which had been her college major. She happened to read H. R. Rookmaaker's book on modern art and his inviting text, Art Needs No Justification, and instead enrolled at the Art Center for Design in Pasadena. In 1986 she completed her MFA and she now teaches there in the fine arts department. In spite of this change of direction, her installations reveal that her conversation partners are still people like T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and especially Flannery O'Connor, as well as the likes of Donald Judd, Robert Smithson and James Rosenquist. O'Connor believed that an artist had to exaggerate to get the attention of our complacent, post-Christian world. As O'Connor once put it: "for the hard of hearing one has to shout." By contrast, Aldrich seems to whisper to get the attention of her media-sated, spectacle-loving generation. And in the 1990s critics and art collectors have begun to pay attention.

The conceptualist bent of her literary (and historical) interests have continued to motivate her. Her first one-person exhibition at the Biola University Art Gallery in 1989 was inspired by the right wing of Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. It included a small reproduction of that side of the opened altarpiece which features a luminous Christ rising from the grave [see Plate 8, "Grid Buster," detail]. Then dominating the installation that same figure of Christ (in plaid!) is fixed to the wall, as though it had exploded from the carpet and rubber padding on the floor, leaving them in disarray-like rumpled bedding [see Plate 7, "Grid Buster"]. As Aldrich says in an interview on the exhibit: "From a bad taste decorator den carpet in a modernist grid erupts this very baroque almost dionysian image of Jesus. I like the feeling that a powerful, supernatural event could happen in anybody's rec room.… Christ rising from the grave of suburban melancholia."

But, while her images are striking, one must look (and listen) carefully to observe the layers of meaning that are there. "I can only hope the viewer gets pulled in enough to slow down, and some of the metaphors within the piece begin to accumulate," Aldrich says. "You can't get a quick read." The picture light above the reproduction of the altar piece is plugged into a succession of surge protectors: A signal to the viewer that a dangerous power is at work here that could blow out the circuit. Meanwhile, two audio players on auto-rewind are playing a Gregorian chant interrupted every few minutes by the roar of a vacuum cleaner. "This seems typical of the frustrations in everyday contemporary life that distract us from a natural desire to know God," she notes. When visitors left the exhibit they were given black and white copies of a fragment of the image to take with them, on the back of which was printed: "Only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things..." (from Hebrews 10:1). As is typical of her work, the more time one spends with it, the more there is to discover—one is gradually drawn into the varied associations. First there is this disturbance rising from the middle of what appears to be a modest suburban den; superimposed on this rises the stark image of Grünewald's Christ with its historical resonances; all the while, the flowing tones of the Gregorian chant recall cloister and cathedral, but are rudely fractured by the everyday noise of the vacuum cleaner; finally, the hand-out given at the exit insists that even these intimations are only shadows of something far more substantial. The viewer leaves wondering what these "good things" might be, and what they might have to do with the predictable world they inhabit. Interestingly, critics have pointed out how uncontrived her literary and historical references are. Writing about a later exhibition, critic David DiMichele observes that "Aldrich's work evokes interest not simply because it makes oblique inference to its connections to the past; in fact, it is enriched by the historical aspect."

Although she is clearly interested in ideas, these allusions don't hit you in the face—you have to listen carefully to her whispers. In fact, what makes Aldrich's work particularly striking at first glance is its simplicity. "What I am thinking about is complex or paradoxical, but when it comes to putting this into form through images or materials, I am naturally attracted to simplicity, being frank or unfussy about it," she explains. But this, too, is grounded in her faith. In recent art practice, she points out, the artist's images are not grounded in anything solid. Reality, in the modern view, is invented. As Picasso once said: "I put whatever I like into my pictures, and the things, so much the worse for them, they just have to put up with it." This romantic hubris of modern artists, Aldrich believes, is unfruitful, even a bit alarming. Her work moves in an entirely different direction. "Since I am redeemed," she says, "I am at ease in the world. The world is a safe place.... [People may have] multiple impressions of reality; reality itself is still there within, waiting to be continually revealed by the artist, scientist, etc." Since she feels at home in the world, she enjoys scouring the attic of contemporary, everyday life to see what surprises she encounters. With certain themes in mind, she says, "I go through a complex process of choosing.... I am interested in the accumulation, repetition, and presentation of ordinary objects, materials, and images. My purpose is to use the physicality of minimally altered forms to question perception and the nature of reality both on a personal and cultural level. I am after a kind of 'inept monumentality' built from repetitious labor and craft with humble materials."

In 1991 she constructed a site-specific installation at an abandoned bakery in Los Angeles' Chapman Market, entitled "Bread Line" [see Plate 9]. The line of alternating dark and light slices of bread stretched 35 feet across the floor, following the floor's original grid. A wonderfully inviting but intentionally short-lived aroma of fresh bread met the viewer. Here the "inept monumentality" becomes clear, recalling quite intentionally both our modern obsession with food and the vanitas painting of seventeenth-century Holland. As Jude Schwendenwien, a critic in Sculpture magazine, wrote: Aldrich "addresses the mortality of all types of matter. . .[and] contemplates the possibility, both literal and spiritual, of running out of nourishment and hence of life itself." Of this piece Aldrich muses: "All that one acquires or produces culturally fades away, so that the awareness of death gives everything that feeling of not being able to truly satisfy." Here, themes of plenty and scarcity are underlined by the simplicity of the bread line and the emptiness of the abandoned market.

This same simplicity, and her desire "to fulfill a visual desire that is felt rather than verbalized," is evident in a piece from that same early period, entitled "All I Know So Far" [see back cover]. Here, a short bookshelf mounted on a wall holds book-shaped pieces of cut cactus, bound by book ends made from bronzed children's shoes. This haunting image (I have not been able to get it out of my mind since I first saw it) presses the question for a bookish academic: How much do I know, so far—any more than when I wore those small shoes, or when my now-grown children wore them? What has survived these years are the cactus pieces, which do not need watering and still bloom every two or three years. In other words, what is left—held together by my memories—is what God has done, not what I have struggled to do. It is clear that Aldrich is working with metaphor rather than symbol. In works like this (and "Water Curtain," [see Plate 10]), she recognizes a debt to Duchamp and his followers who began to recognize the role of the viewer in the artistic process. But she wants to acknowledge and respect the viewer's presence in a way quite different from these Dada artists. She takes this participating presence seriously because, she notes, God is the original audience for all we do. So the viewer stands in a larger perspective and therefore—unlike the Dada artists—must be taken with the utmost seriousness. "A kind of authenticity in the work of art will make it valuable on some level to anyone with a will to be engaged by it," she says. And the authenticity is highly personal and engaging, which gives her whispers a kind unbearable lightness. Of this critic Suzanne Muchnic wrote: "In all these works, Aldrich employs such a light touch and so wry a sense of humor that she risks being considered insubstantial. But an ephemeral sensibility is her strength. Her ideas are all the more memorable because they seem weightless."

When we look at life carefully and lovingly, Lynn Aldrich seems to say, we find that what matters most is evoked by light and small things—the textures, sounds, and aromas that humbly surround us and keep us alive. That there is substance to these things—and to Aldrich's touch—is evidenced by the way her work survives the move from the studio to the public square. In the early 1990s she was commissioned to design a permanent sculptural installation at the Artesia station of the Los Angeles light rail system. Formally opened in September 1996, the work plays on "Artesia" as a "place with a well where water rises to the surface from its own internal pressure."

When one enters the station from the parking lot and bus stop, one passes a stylized well whose colorful mosaic invites one to make a wish [see Plate 11]. Crossing the rails to the waiting platform one walks by, and on, more mosaics of waves which recall the print of "Great Wave off Konagawa" by the famous eighteenth-century Japanese artist Hokusai [see Plate 12]. The water and fish speak of the abundance both of life and of God's provision. While waiting on the platform, one can read letters—affixed to a kiosk—from local children who the artist asked to make a wish for their community. These writings are filled with hope for a world free of darkness and violence. "My wish for the city of Compton," writes one nine year-old boy, "is not to have any violence. I wish that we could walk the streets in day or night without fear...to make it the way it used to be where you can sit out on your front porch during a hot summer day and be able to enjoy life." For these children, as for all of us, what matters most are not great visions for the future, but the simple wishes for life and peace.

She returned to this theme in a 1996 installation entitled "Water Curtain" (originally part of a group exhibit "Open House" at the Williamson Gallery of the Art Center in Pasadena). Here, in a doorway between gallery spaces, a curtain of ordinary green water hoses plays on the themes of water, growth, and gardening, as well as rites of passages. In a 1990 poem Aldrich wrote:

How to tell what one is doing?
If I could apprehend, decode, represent in text
what I am about,
no longer would I make art.
Mostly, I wade through experience thinking about
philosophy,
not linguistic but ontological,
condition of being as stranger than
action of speaking, landscape as
outward gaze on the world, receptacle for vision.

We, too, are drawn into the depths of this common life we share, by an encounter with the visual image (in this case by actually walking through the curtain), and by reflecting on its title. She insists that titles are important, because that is where the visual impact and the meaning intersect. Naming also recalls the original charge to Adam to name and thus order and give meaning to what God had made. In "Water Curtain," what separates is also what nourishes. Aldrich reported that she was elated when a dear Christian friend and academic colleague excitedly mentioned the implicit reference—within the work and its title—to baptism, that water passage into Christ's resurrection life. While she had not specified this, it was a thoroughly consistent reading—after all an artist knows more than she can say. Metaphors are richer than their explanations.

These metaphors carry—ever so lightly—a rich load of associations. They point inevitably toward a presence deep inside things that gives them their solidity and meaning. But do contemporary art audiences actually understand what she is saying? This question troubles her from time to time. She wonders how much people actually "see" in her work—that is a risk inherent in her use of minimalist forms. But critics indicate that they see a great deal. Reviewing her latest show in Los Angeles, Susan Kandel concludes with this observation: "Aldrich, with her cheerfully doctored found materials, suggests that revelation is available even, or maybe especially, at the 99-cent store."

But Aldrich's work continually presses the larger question: can an idiom—this stark minimalism—created to suggest our loneliness and isolation be used to convey a sense of connection and of being at home? Philosopher Michel de Certeau has used the notion of "bricolage"—the act of putting together unrelated objects, to describe the way people can make use of cultural forms in subversive ways. "Users make innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy," he argues, "in order to adapt it to their own interests." Lynn Aldrich gently reminds us that we live and move within our culture. As a fish in water, we live in it and from it. To communicate with our neighbor we will study and employ the dominant languages. These are Aldrich's languages, too, though they communicate imperfectly what she wants to say. This is her time and place in history and she does not want to escape it, she notes. As Flannery O'Connor once said, "The mote in my eye is the twentieth century." Thus, Aldrich uses the idioms of pop, minimalism, and conceptual art to convey the urgency of her view that our world has ontological (and moral) weight. But in using the language, she subverts the intent. In the minimal forms of "Breadline" she is able to juxtapose the themes of plenty and want; in the striking shapes of "All I Know So Far" she is able to suggest the limitations of knowledge and yet the potential of what may be known.

Unlike many twentieth-century Christian artists (one thinks of Rouault), for Lynn Aldrich there is no nostalgia for some lost golden age. Though she draws nourishment from these earlier periods and their Christian languages, she is rooted firmly in the present, because she believes the flesh of this day, with its particular hopes and anxieties, is the same stuff into which God became incarnate two thousand years ago. And with the hope given by that marvelous and saving intervention, one can see this world with different eyes. The world can become a vast and wonderful—even a hilarious—place, because, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it a century ago, the Holy Spirit still broods over it with bright wings.

In the end, this kind of selection and arrangement of our present world is the only choice we have as Christians. We live and breathe in our culture even as we live and breathe, as disciples of Christ, in God at the same time. As theologian Miroslav Volf puts it, "there is no single correct way to relate to a given culture as a whole, or even to its dominant thrust. There are only numerous ways of accepting, transforming or rejecting various aspects of a given culture from within." Aldrich's work is testimony that if this is done well and consistently, it will make a difference, because God is there and the world, after all, is his vehicle. But Aldrich also helps us see that making people open-truly open-to what is there is difficult, even unsettling. Because in the end aesthetics, as George Steiner argues, is "the making formal of epiphany. There is 'shining through.'"

William Dyrness is the Dean of the Graduate School of Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he also serves as Professor of Theology and Culture. He is the author of many books, including Learning About Theology from the Third World (Zondervan) and The Earth is God's: A Theology of American Culture (Orbis Books).

Visit William Dyrness as Image Artist of the Month for June '01

Issue #19 • Spring 1998