Melanie Smith: Green is the Colour
Melanie Smith, Selva IV, 2013. Acrylic enamel on acrylic, 95 cm. x 130 cm.
Melanie Smith: Green is the Colour
February 27 - April 19, 2014
Sicardi Gallery, Houston, TX
In 1929, Henry Ford built an American suburb deep in the Amazon jungle. Named Fordlandia, the town was the center of a rubber-tree plantation in Brazil that Ford hoped would produce enough rubber to free him from the necessity of expensive imports from Asia. Like the Michigan-inspired architecture, the town’s social program was also regimented to Ford’s specifications: residents attended poetry readings, ate hamburgers, played golf, and had a daily work schedule of 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., despite the region’s relentless daytime heat.
The experiment was a failure.
By 1933, the factory was shuttered and Fordlandia’s US-based inhabitants returned to the United States. The crumbling tire factory and clapboard housing still stand, however, and many of the town’s inhabitants are the descendants of Ford’s Brazilian employees. Melanie Smith takes this experiment as the starting point for Green is the Colour, an exhibition of recent paintings and video created after visiting Ford’s Amazon town. “Fordlandia is an industrial abandoned site and a utopian project where the relationship between nature and industry coincide, and where the tensions between modernity and nature are put into operation,” Smith writes. “Seen from the present, Fordlandia appears as a moment of construction of poetic ruins.”
The paintings in Green is the Colour reflect a relationship between savagery and softness. Smith has used spray paint on board and Plexiglas to give the paintings a sense of immediacy; there is no touch here, no dabbing at or mixing of paint and pigment, and, as a result, the edges of the paintings gently recede, as if they were dreams or afterimages. This is not a representation of the jungle as much as it is an impression. Tapiz I (2012) takes a Regency wallpaper pattern for its imagery: “The colonial becomes the jungle,” Smith says.
Another Color
With all its synthetic garishness, the color orange is ubiquitous in Mexico City. For her series Orange Lush (1994–1996), Smith collected orange-colored detritus from the streets of the city, photographed orange signs and kiosks, and painted large orange canvases, creating a multimedia meditation on the color. The color becomes a cipher for the city and a monochromatic tool for studying the megalopolis at a microscopic level. Orange objects, symbols of consumerism culled from the city’s trash, create a corporeal portrait of the place, imbued with connotations of fleshy excess.
In 1964, American conceptual artist Bruce Nauman stopped painting, in response to what he termed the “lush solution” that the medium offered. Instead, he began mixing paint with liquid plastic, making a type of work that critic Lucy Lippard would later describe as “spiritlessly urban, but not commercial—like a shrimp pink house badly in need of a paint job.” Smith’s Orange Lush plays between this well-known critique of painting and Nauman’s subsequent move to use synthetic, urban materials. It also references the jungle-like nature of urban space: lush connotes dense and vigorous growth, luxuriant foliage, sensory overload, and sumptuous materiality. Smith’s work is engaged with the aesthetics of abstraction at the same time that it infers a physical or bodily presence within the unique historical and geographical context of Mexico City in the 1990s.
Entropy
In 2002, Smith and long-time collaborator Rafael Ortega filmed a helicopter journey over Mexico City. Their black and white video records the path of the aircraft as it spirals over the densely gridded urban landscape. Spiral City echoes the land art structure Spiral Jetty (and film of the same name) by American artist Robert Smithson. Smithson’s Jetty is a spiraling strip of land built into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The salty water of the lake, as it rises and recedes, alternately hides and reveals the massive walkway, which turns in upon itself. As the water recedes, the salty crystals that coat the path mark natural processes of decay and erosion, something Smithson called “entropy.”
Shot in one unedited take, Smith’s Spiral City reflects the built environment of Mexico City from above. It is also a study in color: as the camera circles over the city, the view of rooftops, streets, and avenues recede to grey and then white. The video continues Smith’s fascination with the monochromatic, even as it explores the contours of a many-colored urban landscape.
Structures of Surrealism
Smith’s 2010 video Xilitla: Dismantled 1, shown at the 2011 Venice Biennale, is a refraction of scenes from a pleasure garden in Xilitla, Mexico. Constructed in the 1940s by English poet and artist Edward James, the thirty-acre garden is filled with cement structures and thirty-six Surrealist-inspired sculptures, now overrun by dense growth. James, a major patron of the Surrealist movement, was fascinated with the process of entropy in the jungle, and he specified that the sculptures not be rebuilt but that the jungle be allowed to subsume them
In Xilitla: Dismantled 1, shot in 35mm film, Smith turns the ‘exotic’-ness of the landscape into a screen, reflecting back the viewer’s gaze. The film’s rhythmic pace, its disorienting rotation (unlike most films, it is a vertical projection rather than a horizontal one), and its sensual exoticism suggest Surrealist filmic precedents: Maya Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), for example, or the non-narrative films of Stan Brakhage, including his lyrical Dog Star Man (1962).
James’s Surrealist Xanadu draws from a centuries-old European tradition of constructing landscape gardens filled with structures that mimic those of ancient and international civilizations, from classical temples to Egyptian pyramids and Chinese pagodas. Within the gardens, they served as sites for romantic rendezvous and parties. In the 1950s (just as James was building Las Pozas), André Breton’s group of Surrealist friends gathered often at the Desert de Retz, one such garden just outside Paris. They were enchanted by the overgrown eighteenth-century estate, marked by a giant broken column, an obelisk, a temple dedicated to Pan, and a lover’s grotto. For the Surrealists, James included, such fantasy gardens acted as potent symbols of the tension between human constructs (mental and architectural) and natural forces.
Green is the Colour
The feeling of being in the jungle is pressing and urgent, not unlike the feeling of being in Mexico City for the first time. The jungle and the metropolis are both sites where modernity has been implemented by outsiders, and where it has crashed haphazardly into the specificity of a dense, reluctant, complicated, and beautiful place.
“Green is green colonial,” Smith says. In her Fordlandia and Selva paintings, she uses the color green to find relationships between abstraction and reality, between urban and jungle entropy. Rather than looking backward with melancholy, she presents the location of colonization (in this case, the Amazon) as part of a broader implementation of modernization. There are not two modernities, she argues. There is not a successful Modernism in the West and a failed one outside the West. These places are, instead, part of the same project. Smith is naturally attracted to places where modernity gets messy: the town of Fordlandia is a perfect example.
Anthropologist Michael Taussig describes how nineteenth-century European explorers experienced the Amazon as an oppressive force: “Emptiness and absence become assailing presences. The nebulous becomes corporeal and tangible. [There is] something vague, a miasmic subspecies of terror, the pressing in of somethingness in the nothingness.”[1] Smith’s video The Colour Green (2014) makes visible a relationship between the color and this feeling. The two-and-a-half-minute-long silent video flashes flat screens of different tonal ranges of green, intercut with images of dense plant growth, mosquitoes, a sandaled foot, a jaguar: all suggesting the myriad things that impeded colonialism. Smith takes these micro and macro images, pulling in, first, to details of the Amazon, and then moving out quickly to larger views, to make her own surreal project: a psychological portrait of this place.
Consistent with her earlier series, the works in Green is the Colour are heterogeneous in media and directly engaged with the legacies of the past. In art, this means that she looks to Surrealism, abstraction, and the modernist avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. But this also means that she complicates the backdrop for historical Modernism, looking closely at the places where such ideas come into conflict with local realities. “Slippage, grey areas and circulation are all important to me,” she writes. “It’s less about periphery and more about alterity.” Fragmentation, ambiguity, unfamiliarity: these are the spaces of Amazonian dreams, and they constitute the myriad constellations of Smith’s refracted Modernism.
—Laura August
[1] Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 77–78.