BY SCOTT INDRISEK
A typical sculptural
installation by Anicka Yi might include honey, taxidermy, fake fur,
electronics, contact lenses, flowers, or desiccated shrimp. With her latest
exhibition, “Life is Cheap,” opening tomorrow at the Guggenheim, the New
York-based artist does not disappoint those who have long admired her
fantastically diverse exploration of materials, both living and otherwise.
The show is the outcome of
Yi having snagged the 2016 Hugo Boss Art Prize, which comes with $100,000 and a
splashy solo at the museum. Previous winners of the Hugo Boss accolade have
used the funds to do things like publish erotic fiction or wallpaper a gallery
with dollar bills, so perhaps Yi’s outing here—which incorporates live
bacteria, an ant farm, and a custom fragrance—is not so strange.
Visitors to “Life is Cheap”
first encounter Immigrant Caucus: a trio of insecticide canisters, one of which
is steamily emitting an aroma concocted by Yi in collaboration with perfume
designer Barnabé Fillion, among others. The scent is meant to conjure two very
distinct beings in tandem: Asian-American women, and ants.
Portrait of Anicka Yi.
Photo by Deavid Heald. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
“It took about an hour to
gather each sweat sample,” Yi explains of the (human) data-collection process
involved. “It was a bit of a commitment.”
The resulting odor might
best be described as enigmatically neutral. As the show’s co-curator Susan
Thompson explained during press remarks, the fragrance of Immigrant Caucus is
meant to act as a kind of sneaky drug, one that catalyzes a viewer’s “ant-human
perspective.”
That insectile point of
view is helpful when approaching Lifestyle Wars, a room-sized sculpture that
intermingles computer equipment, enormous fake mushrooms, mirrored panels, and
thousands of live ants, which methodically amble through a series of tunnels
built into the piece’s walls.
Yi enlisted three Columbia
Ph.D. assistants to help her on the show in general, and with the ants in
particular. One of them, M. Hunter Giese, explained the obstacles involved in
“trying to get the conditions right for the ants to be happy.” (His demeanor
charmingly suggested the sort of person who actually considers, and actively
works toward, ant-happiness.)
This particular species,
Giese says, hails from the desert of southern Utah, so they’re rather hardy.
After the run of the exhibition they’ll be donated to local schools or
laboratories—the law prohibits returning the ants to their original home, since
that would run the risk of introducing foreign diseases to the native
ecosystem.
Why ants, exactly? Partly
it’s because of Yi’s fondness for how they organize their fiercely matriarchal
communities. “Male ants become drones,” she says. “Their sole purpose is to
inseminate and then, shortly after…to die.”
Does Yi see a possible
model for humans to emulate there, I wondered? “It’s working for the ants!” she
laughs. “I’ve jokingly said to some of my straight, white, male friends—in
light of our dastardly times—‘Why don’t you guys just sit out a few generations
and see how it goes? We can handle things!’ I’d be interested in exploring
those options.”
The final work in the show
is Force Majeure, for which Yi has constructed a large room behind glass,
somewhere between a bathhouse and a hospital clinic. The space’s walls and
floor are covered in white tiles that have been turned into a breeding ground
for various bacteria, which—fed on agar and allowed to sprawl and evolve—turn
each tile into unpredictable abstract paintings. Each berry-bright smear or
stain has its own gross allure.
“We sequenced the bacteria,
and selected certain ones for their aesthetic quality,” Yi says. “As our
nutritional biologist would tell you, each bacteria has a color, and that color
has a function. There’s a reason for that purple in a purple bacteria.”
The bacteria also has a
smell, which some people found hard to take during the planning stages. “Any
intrusive, threatening smell—it really destabilizes people and creates a very
hostile, tense environment,” Yi says. “That’s the hardest part: dealing with people’s
prejudice and intolerance for what they consider foul odors.”
When the piece is snug
behind glass, everyday museumgoers don’t have to deal with the olfactory
elements, and can simply appreciate the changing bacterial patterns. The
unnerving visual payoff is well worth the laborious process that Yi went
through to wrangle the germs, swabbing surfaces in New York’s Chinatown and
Koreatown. The two most fertile locations, if you’re wondering: “Toilet handles
and door handles.”
“Life is Cheap” points to
an increasing weird-science interdisciplinarity in the art world, a space where
artists don’t think twice about making work with spiders (as Pierre Huyghe once
did) or filling an otherwise empty gallery with the odor of dollar bills (Mike
Bouchet at Marlborough Chelsea, now Marlborough Contemporary, earlier this
year).
Yi is also something of a
kindred spirit of Ajay Kurian, her gallerymate at New York’s 47 Canal, known
for densely funky bric-a-brac sculptures that may involve reindeer moss,
ostrich eggs, or turtle shells.
For Yi, it’s not simply
about exploiting uncommon materials that might ooze, crawl, breed, or die. The
biological or scientific aspects “have to reinforce the narrative, the
conceptual conceit of the show,” she stresses.
In the case of “Life is
Cheap,” that means “dealing with ethnicity and layers of identity, around other
senses that are not ocular,” Yi says. And while some may simply delight in the
oddness of sweat-perfume or ants running wild in a museum, Yi has higher
ambitions.
“The original intent,” she
says, “was a pretty aggressive treatment of intolerance and conditioned
perception.”
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-anicka-yis-new-guggenheim-art-smells-crawls
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