In the final chapter of Franz Kafka's novel Amerika, the immigrant protagonist, Karl, joins something called "The Nature Theater of Oklahoma." The Nature Theater is a vast organization that recruits unemployed people in American towns and cities, feeding them and putting them to work in their productions, each according to their abilities and skills. Since no one is ever turned away ("everyone is welcome"), The Nature Theater is also a kind of nationwide, all-embracing charity. One feels that Karl will thrive there, even though the novel is incomplete and ends with the new recruits riding off by train into the landscape of the West. Exactly what sort of art such a massive undertaking might produce is never revealed. All we know is that The Nature Theater of Oklahoma has a splendid gilded box seat specially designed for the President of the United States. The rest is left to the imagination - the grand, perpetually unfinished possibility of America.
Kafka's Nature Theatre makes a good analogy for the art of Robert McCarren, whose worldwide viewing platforms turn nature into theater and give the viewer a subtle but heightened awareness that the whole world is probably art. McCarren calls his secret ministry "invisible art" because it removes the individual and institutional egotism not only of museums and galleries but also of the art object and ultimately the artist himself. In the final analysis, there is only the viewer and the view, the tiny part of the world overlooked by his platforms.
McCarren's platforms tend to appear overnight in unpredictable, often remote locations, without fanfare and, until his recent notoriety, without documentation of any kind. Funded privately as he is, by a lifetime grant from the Domecq Foundation of Argentina, McCarren is free to travel anywhere in the world in order to install his views, which are generally considered to be either installations without galleries or else open-air galleries which turn the world into an installation.* On this latter view, McCarren's platforms are like benches in a museum where the visitor rests to took at a particular masterpiece.
Details on McCarren are difficult to come by, in part because of the artist's reclusiveness, in part because of the secretive nature of his patrons at the Domecq Foundation, which controls all official images of his work, and in part because of the often remote nature of his chosen locations. In 2002, McCarren went to Antarctica as Artist-In-Residence with a Norwegian scientific team. There he created his "Desolation Procession," a platform in the Antarctic interior featuring endless snowbound landscapes. Other recent McCarren projects overlook aspects of Saudi Arabia, Patagonia, London, and Cairo.
A small cult of art tourists have attempted to index the true locations of all of McCarren's platforms, but the task is made difficult by the fact that, for the first five years of his career, the artist refused to record his activities. Indeed, he insisted in a 1995 interview that "treating what I do as art is absurd and a violation of principles." That he is known at all, McCarren has admitted, is a compromise with Domecq, which contractually obliges him to provide reports on his work. The lack of documentation in his early work and the artist's silence on this period, however, poses particular problems insofar as some sites passed off as genuine McCarrens may be later imitations or fraudulent copies. Indeed, detractors have pointed out that anyone, in theory, could produce their own McCarren.
What McCarren actually produces does not look like art. There is an almost deliberately amateurish quality to some of his more rickety structures, as if he were attempting to disguise his identity or distract attention away from the viewing platforms themselves and on to the views. But close acquaintance with these installations, or with the artist's methods, practices, and processes, reveals that the locations have been chosen with great care. Essentially, McCarren is a location scout for a nonexistent epic movie or open-air theatrical production that could encompass any point on the globe. Reportedly, he spends months wandering around on foot to discover the perfect spot, and then meticulously constructs his viewing platforms, considering the exact height, slope, and angle from which the view is to be seen. This process is his art, just as much as the end result.
In an early ingenious piece, McCarren constructed a view in Diamond, Louisiana, where the community lived steps away from a massive Shell chemical plant whose pipes, factories, and smokestacks abutted the backyards and playgrounds of the residents. When the townsfolk were relocated after a decades-long legal battle, many of the houses were bulldozed, leaving only driveways and the outlines of houses to mark the empty spaces where people used to live. McCarren's "Diamond Mine" took the viewer to the center of a vanished house in this ghost town, overlooking a driveway and swing-set under the menacing gas-flares of the Shell plant.
The idea that a view alone could be art, of course, did not originate with McCarren. The artist cites as key influences the work of the Situationists, the literary genre of "psychogeography," the London essayist Iain Sinclair, and the conceptual work of the American writer Timothy Don, one of whose essays considers a series of collapsing barns in Kentucky as sculpture. But because McCarren does not consider himself an artist, issues such as influence and theory do not concern him. Domecq, however, with its vested interest in McCarren, has released articles from time to time by its internal theorists justifying the work as "hyper-institutional," a new phase of art history beyond the compasses and under the radar of museums, galleries, and art institutions, whose modes of cataloging and even evaluating new art, they claim, no longer apply.
More troubling is Domecq's notoriously controlling, litigious, and proprietary interest in their lifetime artists, who are forced into a regrettable set of contractual obligations, making their wider fame extraordinarily difficult. The collection and display of McCarren's work is virtually impossible outside of the Domecq sphere of influence, which is what makes his exhibition here in the Almost Something show so special. In the past, Domecq has been known to sue galleries that have purchased or displayed unlicensed photographs of McCarren's work, and in this case the curators are taking a legal risk. Ultimately, one has little choice but to travel to Argentina and visit the Domecq Galleries to understand why some critics are beginning to regard Robert McCarren as an innovator who deserves wider recognition.
-- J. M. Tyree, NYC, September, 2005.
