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Paths of Desire
A found photograph titled Excavated Tree shows an uprooted
tree suspended in space within a large shed, revealing its roots and
branches for examination. It seems, as well, to be suspended in time.
From this black and white archival document, originally intended for
scientific use, Katie Holten draws a myriad of resonant references—fast-forwarding
this image, perhaps previously frozen, into an increasingly resolute
present. She does so through direct means, namely, by emulating the
tree’s color as it appears in the photograph: black; as well
as its form: roots elevated and displaced from the possibility of
holding ground. As the centerpiece of her site-responsive exhibition
at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Holten constructs, to scale,
the entire structure of a Flowering Dogwood, a native Missouri tree,
made from materials gathered from refuse generated by the museum,
including recycled cardboard, wire, PVC, paper, and tape.
Designed to draw one in, much like the extreme gravitational pull
of a black hole in space, Holten’s tree also shares some of
the black hole’s more abstract properties, such as inescapability
(particularly as it pertains to the obliteration of light); an ability
to warp paths towards its center; and certain loss due to inevitable
collapse, if encountered. In Stanley Kubrick’s landmark sci-fi
film of 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey, what appears to be a
black rectangle in space, “a shrieking monolith,” is the
catalyst for the end of one evolutionary cycle and the beginning of
another. When touched, this void gives way to new forms of life but
is, perhaps, a cautionary vehicle as well—a warning symbol that
points to the possible dissolution of the present. Within the wilderness
of outer space, Kubrick mined more localized fears, positioning advanced
technologies as a sinister influence, forcing the advancement of human
evolution at the hands of an overly sensitive robot (HAL-9000), leading
humanity to the verge of a black hole. . .
However eclipsed in time, Kubrick’s vision of the future, as
expressed through the perils of space travel and fear of alien intelligence,
also referenced the untamed wildernesses of the past and remains a
prescient implication as progress threatens to annihilate what was
previously considered a boundless reserve, nature.
“In America, Ralph Waldo Emerson confronted the abhorrence
of wilderness within frontier culture, asserting both the beauty and
the goodness of the wild. Henry David Thoreau is associated with discourses
of nature as unspoiled, wild, and distinct from the built environment
of the urban. Changing urban imperatives continue to shift the construction
of nature. In recent times, nature is more than ever being commoditized,
either for resource extraction (logging, privatized water) or as recreation
(ecotourism). These views are firmly rooted in a modern dualism in
which nature is seen as external to society: its other.”
An interest in black holes and society’s other (its absence)
may also point to their opposite, a concern for “the mathematics
of presence,” that Holten intuitively maps in the research,
notes, and drawings that proliferate her installations and accompany
large-scale works. Considered by the artist to be a ‘‘drawn
object,’’ like much of her recent work that deploys various
reconfigurations of recycled material, Excavated Tree: Missouri
Native (pages 26-27), manifests Holten’s belief that our
experience of ‘‘nature’’ is inherently social
and equally defined by the detritus, networks, and boundaries of the
urban environment. “Desire Paths,” the architectural term
that provides the title of her exhibition, emphasizes the fact that
in rural and urban spaces, informal human patterns against the grain
of “official” or planned pathways can alter pavement,
sidewalks, and fields of grass alike. As well, Holten’s approach
to site-specificity is informed by an understanding that the demarcation
of sanctioned routes can be rendered invisible even when one’s
daily choices are influenced, if not engineered, by such spatial margins.
Meaning, that paths of desire can also designate possibilities beyond,
or resistance to, the formal separations indicated by ubiquitous fences,
trees, or planters that delineate neighborhoods along lines of segregation,
for example.
“Like ‘identity,’ definitions of ‘nature’
and ‘the natural environment’ are complex and contested.
The predominant meaning has traditionally been ‘our nonhuman
surroundings,’ with an understood dichotomy between what is
a result of the human influence and what remains untouched. The dichotomy
between the natural and the manufactured is, of course, artificial.
Nature has long been subject to human influence through what is planted,
supported, or tolerated. . . ”
Holten’s initial proposal for the Contemporary in 2005—to
plant an urban prairie in a vacant lot in the city center of St.Louis—resides,
like many examples of persistent utopian models, in the form of documentation.
The unrealized proposal and subsequent conversations about the transgressive
potential of the obsolete, the unfamiliar, the unrecognizable, also
become integral parts of her work, taking forms such as research,
plans, and imaginative sketches that, when collected, certify this
potential. Holten’s methodology insists that nothing is wasted.
Her longstanding practice of transplanting weeds is similarly pro-active,
constituting an “ephemeral action” that questions “the
direction life has taken” by particularly humble means, such
as moving weeds from outside to inside, to neglected spaces, or to
places soon to be uprooted by high-end development. These small gestures
may redirect one’s attention, or inspire the taking of a walk.
. . While in residence in St. Louis, Holten plans to take walks around
the city, using the museum, which is located in Grand Center, as the
starting point for excursions north, south, east, and west, charting
modest paths to instigate questions regarding a larger history of
place, for example, the locus of Lewis and Clark’s journey toward
the Pacific. Part social investigation in the Situationist tradition
of the “derive,” and part homage to historic works such
as Richard Long’s Path Made While Walking, Holten’s
walks insist on the importance of social engagement in the natural
world, that is, the urban environment.
Holten’s social engagement, as evidenced by public works, cross-disciplinary
collaborations, and community organizing, is also manifested in various
printed matter, ranging from handmade zines and flyers to publications
incorporating the work of herself and others. In the spirit of such
publications as Avalanche (1970-76), a magazine that sought
to provide a platform for evolving art forms (Earthworks, Conceptual
art, performance, video, etc.) and their social imperatives, Holten’s
publications serve as subtle agents of a defiant worldview. It has
been said of Avalanche that “ . . .the studied informality
of the interviews [. . . ] corresponded to the countercultural politics
and grassroots ethos embodied by the publication, with its ad hoc
feel and modest circulation. Its frank presentation of artists and
their words—not to mention their art—was vital to the
politicization of the alternative art scene in the ‘70s.”
In its first issue, co-editor (with Liza Béar) Willoughby Sharp
asked Robert Smithson to comment on his notion of documentation, which
the artist referred to as “non-site,” and he noted:
“There’s a central focus point which is the non-site;
the site is the unfocused fringe where your mind loses its boundaries
and a sense of the oceanic pervades. . . The interesting thing about
the site is that, unlike the non-site, it throws you out on the fringes.
. . One might even say that the place is absconded or been lost. .
This is a map that will take you somewhere, but when you get there
you won’t really know where you are. In a sense the non-site
is the center of the system, and the site itself is the fringe or
the edge.”
With a proliferation of research, documentation, correspondence, and
books traveling with her, Holten’s working methodology is cumulative
and expanding, and seeks to restructure “non-sites” that
respond to specific, local concerns and, like her drawn and crocheted
works that radiate outwards, spread from there. Such practices are
mirrored, as well, in related curatorial enterprises, such as her
ongoing traveling exhibition, CLUSTER (pages 82-83), which has grown
from a one-night event at a pub in Dublin, to a flyer distributed
at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, to its present residence
in a FreshDirect box that recently traveled from New York to Mexico
City. It’s still growing. Containing works by over sixty artists,
writers, small publishers, environmental activists, as well as an
astrophysicist, an architect, and a horticulturalist, it represents
a range of research, concerns, and thoughts shared by Holten and her
myriad colleagues and friends. Occasions to unpack the box are inevitably
social, and, like the gathering of works themselves (via emails, special
delivery, packages and correspondence sent in the mail), they tend
to encourage digressions, unexpected arrivals, and the continuing
proliferation of contents.
As is the case with Holten’s diversity of work, certain logics
become legible amid seeming disarray—an interconnectedness shaped
by the artist’s embrace of the fragmented, the tangential, and
the communal. A founding member of several interdisciplinary art collectives,
perhaps Holten’s Laboratorio della Vigna, a project
for the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 (pages 76-81), provides a microcosm
of her evolving process-based anthropologies. Amid the prescribed
hierarchy of nationalities, pavilions, and disciplines, Holten structured
a temporary headquarters for a variety of collaborative and individual
research, spawning works (and non-works) in sound, performance, and
the accumulated proposals of others, showing “the whole process
of the researched failures and successes like the detritus of a frenzied
stream of thought positioned beside its distilled, crystal-clear idea.”
Like a transient footnote that continues to take temporary residence,
the migration of CLUSTER and the format of Laboratorio
della Vigna in Venice reflect the artist’s travels and
find shape through Holten’s research in the natural world. From
botany to the science of networks, her work touches upon notions of
displacement and transplantation—issues that she considers in
forms ranging from the re-location of indigenous plant-life to various
diagrams for parallel universes, drawn on paper or in space. Holten’s
“forceful collapsing of distinctions between nature and culture,
between ‘high’ art and lowly plant life, between aesthetic
beauty and the botanically unbeautiful, between timeless art object
and the transient weed, between the elevated and the everyday, is
as salutary as it is momentarily disconcerting.” Drawing equally
from the ubiquitous and the remote, the minute and the infinite, Holten’s
practice renders connections via models of scientific as well as social
networking.
Traveling with her, CLUSTER is a project that is at once
transient and at home. Its contents represent a long study—alone
and together with others—of mounting ecological concerns through
such lenses as recycling, collectivity, and sociability. Living in
the US for a while, it has been noted that Holten’s “current
investigations incorporate scientific theories of parallel universes
and place her practice in polemical opposition to prevailing US policies
increasingly underpinned by notions of ‘intelligent design’
and creationism.” Linking political imperatives with strategies
associated with Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics,
Holten has perhaps adapted what could be described as “strategies
of existence.”
Like her walks, CLUSTER, spreads through acquaintances, stories,
and sites that become available. Readings, performances, radio broadcasts,
and a tiny sculpture living in an interior corner of the box—solicited
and collected by Holten over time—all come out at the opening.
A number of pieces employ the form of books, zines, and documentation
of collaborative projects taking place in numerous cities. “Works
included can expand and grow over the long-term, and the resemblance
to an organic, living structure is intentional. [. . . ] Some works
are invisible, or inhabit other spaces such as rumors, posters, rooftops,
holes, instructions, stories, objects, t-shirts, pubs, and gardens.”
With her relocation to a temporary studio in New York in 2004, Holten
inherited hundreds of FreshDirect boxes. “FreshDirect delivers
[. . . ] keeps the house and office-bound fed and watered. The left
over boxes pile up.” Holten made use of one box to house this
special collection that she intended to deploy as instigation for
a winter gathering. “It is no coincidence that CLUSTER
resembles the refuge of a ramshackle community. . . ”
In addition, she began re-fashioning the boxes into numerous receptacles
for plants, which led to the making of other objects from discarded
materials. As the artist has noted in a recent interview: “I’ve
been using the word ‘object’ while thinking of it as a
noun, referring to material ‘things,’ things that cast
shadows. But it’s nice that you’ve thrown in this question,
as the first objects I started making (containers for plants made
from FreshDirect cardboard boxes) were definitely ‘objecting
to’ something. I was interested in questioning the ideology,
the waste, the state of things, the piles and piles of boxes accumulating.
. . ” Similarly, her repetitive renderings of maps of the world
drawn from memory have since taken shape on globes made from shredded
newspapers—a transformative practice the artist quietly enjoys.
Holten continues to note: “. . . the ‘globes’ are
useless. The maps of the world are drawn from memory—whole countries
are forgotten, obliterated, while others are drawn too large, or too
small. For me personally these globes object to lots of things.”
In Holten’s work, such objections form and mount quietly, and
may emanate from mundane everyday experiences: yarn webs crocheted
on the subway or on airplanes; a topographic drawing instigated by
a phrase heard on the radio, Trembling on the Edge of
Reprisal (pages 62-63); or her numerous drawings of Found
Continents (pages 102-104) and Reconstituted Lands (pages
108 and 109) that began from observations of the shapes formed by
her chipped black fingernail polish. At times resembling bruises or
stains, the process of these markings, as well, starts small and,
over time, begins to cast a certain darkness, which is more formally
outlined in botanic renderings such as Bush (shadow) (page
60), (or Ghost Forest (page 20) showing the spread of roots,
branches, and shadows. And, like all her trees and objects, these
drawings are black, existing in states of potential obsolescence.
Holten’s persistence, however, as demonstrated in these drawn
works, sketches, and texts, also seems to imply that systems and connections
exist, even when they go unnoticed. Through her social manifestations
of these ideas (such as CLUSTER), Holten instigates real
life engagements that incorporate disparate interests, follow lines
of tangents, and insist upon presence. Like her unrelenting weeds,
such unexpected gatherings demonstrate the mutability and tenacity
of ideas, and sometimes, as is the case with Excavated Tree,
unite to transform the seemingly insignificant and redundant into
necessary, monumental action.
Lia Gangitano, published in Paths of Desire, 2007
