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| Wall Red
Yellow Blue Lauren Berkowitz Artspace 5 June - 28 June, 1997 Sydney |
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 Lauren Berkowitz, Wall
Red |
The test tube and the wall
are potent symbols of the late twentieth century
resonating with modernist optimism and paranoia. They
serve as symbols of the failure of scientific optimism
and the inability of the West to insulate itself from the
contagion of strange viruses and other cultures. These
symbols and concerns form a base but certainly not the
limits of Lauren Berkowitz's installation Wall Red
Yellow Blue. Wall Red Yellow Blue comprises 3 panels: one red, one yellow, one blue, each constructed from hundreds of test tubes filled with dye and suspended from the ceiling. These fragile panels function as a wall in relief - a wall that does not bound, that surrounds nothing - that is itself surrounded and protected by the precious space of the gallery. By incorporating the space itself into the conceptual domain of the work Berkowitz uses sculpture to express and make redundant painterly concerns with colour and light. Yet her sculptural mimicry of field colour painting extends beyond an 'anti-painting' commentary on the yearnings of modernist art. The uncanny resemblance of the wall to kitsch beaded room dividers, the cultural ironies embedded in the test tube, the endless chain of meanings evoked through the primary colours of red, yellow, blue and the notion of the wall each resonate and create a complex matrix of quotes and references producing new associations and dialogues. In particular, by expressing the panels of colour through the texture of test tubes, the work construes an exchange between minimalist desires for purity in art and more overtly "quotidian", social and political issues like AIDS and race. Although the work is an erudite dialogue with specific movements within art, such as field painting and Arte Povera, the most salient aspect of Berkowitz's work is its coupling of nostalgia and science. The unruliness of the beaded curtain and the classificatory desire of science evoked through the tangle of suspended test tubes remains powerful and strangely silent. Berkowitz's wall is above all a wall of precariousness sustained by the protective space of the gallery, where the fragility of the glass and the persistent risk that the contents of the test tubes may spill is kept in check. Thus the gallery itself is forced to operate as a site of protection against the material corruption of the work. However, by drawing attention to this, Wall Red Yellow Blue also implicitly mitigates against the rarefication of the gallery. In this way the work recontextualises its space by alerting the viewer to the contingency of walls and by implication, categorical desire. Blood is easily spilled, walls can be shattered and the fortresses of the body and the nation can be breached. Here then, the beaded curtain of the family kitchen which represents a comforting hearth of nostalgic Australiana, is literally shown to be produced through symbols of anxiety. Gillian Fuller © The artist and |
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 Lauren Berkowitz, Wall Red |
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