Review: DORIS SALCEDO, Art Confronting Violence, at the Guggenheim

Artists who are exceptional in theory, mediocre in practice abound: artists who go the other way are rarities. The Colombia-based Doris Salcedo is one such rarity. Her objects and installations respond to political oppression and political violence with an obviousness that should undermine everything she does -- with materials such as hospital equipment, cast-off shoes, impaled shirts, dried roses, and dirt. Her projects are hard to install and, at first glance, lacking in formal finesse. Her sense of humor is nonexistent. By all accounts, Salcedo should be shrill, unironic, and bland; on the evidence of Doris Salcedo (no important-sounding subtitle necessary), she is an astonishment, a counterweight to the fanciful cleverness of the much of the best Latin American art and the fanciful stupidity of much of the worst.

Because Salcedo's work is meant to be weighty and oppressive in effect, any curator would be hard pressed to both set her up in the dynamic Guggenheim and preserve these qualities. Organizer Katherine Brinson has populated all four of the museum's tower levels with her art. For once, the use of these off-to-the-side galleries feels like an emotional necessity, not a space-filling afterthought: there would be too much openness, fluidity, and joy in the Guggenheim's central rotunda. The rooms Salcedo occupies feel like they have had the air sucked out of them. It couldn't be otherwise.

Although there is an initial, blood-congealing shock to some of Salcedo's works -- in particular, the medieval-looking medical furniture of some of this show's initial entries -- Salcedo sees herself as responding to conditions that, sadly, are all too normal. In her own words, "we see civil wars happening everywhere, every day. We read about these terrible events that shape the way we live. What I am trying to show in my work is that war is a part of everyday life." Her outdoor works have attempted to show these conditions with empty chairs, roses, and candles, and if these were the total of her efforts she would indeed be the kind of mediocrity I described a few paragraphs ago. The Guggenheim, though, has mostly avoided these and has focused on Salcedo's manipulations of chairs, tables, armoires -- furniture that she frequently yokes together and fills with concrete. Her finest such works -- if you'll allow me to trade sociology for aesthetics for just a minute -- are the stainless steel seats and legs of Thou-less (2001-2002) and the Untitled shelve, cupboard, table, and concrete hybrids that she produced in roughly the same years. In the last of these, the concrete and wood create plays of surface and texture, the spliced surfaces create transition and tension, and the sense that all is filled in, all is useless, creates an aura as crushing as death.

For me at least, Salcedo isn't only going after then news cycle violence that happens "everywhere, every day." Her work, at its best, evokes an eternity of emptiness -- and in so doing, complements and deepens the sense of human loss that is right on the surface of her projects. Every gesture of hope (for instance, the shoots of real grass incorporated in Plegaria Muda) is countered and overridden by a gesture of blunt impersonality (the coffin-like tables and evil maze structure of the same). In the final gallery on the final level of Doris Salcedo, you will find A Flor de Piel (2014), a floor-spanning sheet devised from stitched-together rose petals and made to commemorate a Colombian nurse who had been tortured and murdered. It is a sublime work, in the textbook sense: you stand before it, contemplate it much as you contemplate a vast, intricate, forbidding landscape, and feel small. A show such as this must end at a place such as this, in a room that offers some hope and more beauty but mostly offers things as they are. In calm, in sweep, in the knowledge that the roses will still wither and the grass will still sprout when we are gone.

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