Monday, August 17, 2009

Su-Mei Tse at the Gardner

Su-Mei Tse: Floating Memories, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, July 16 - October 18, 2009

Su-Mei Tse, a Luxembourg-based artist who did a residency at the Gardner in 2007, has returned to install Floating Memories in the museum's rotating exhibition space. Under Tse's direction, collaborator Jean-Lou Majerus constructed a wooden platform raised several inches off the floor. Tse scanned a pattern from a photograph of the original wallpaper upstairs in the Dutch Room, had it etched into the surface, and filled the hollows with green resin. She had rectangle of gold carpeting set into it as well, and brushed it with her hand as if she wanted to erase something. Lastly, she recorded a video of a spinning record, seen at just below eye level, and a video projected on the back wall of the room replays its endless rotation as the needle scratches against the label.

One can detect faint emotional impulses trying to come through from the other side of her conceptual filter. The video recalls the banal, yet intense fascinations of youth. The blank rectangle of gold, elaborately framed in wood and the old Dutch Room wallpaper, invokes the now empty frames that memorialize the Gardner's burgled Rembrandts. But juxtaposition does not equal coalescence. In an artist talk, Tse claimed to have conceived of the work as a painting. It's not impossible to see it as such, save that it's missing the visual pressure, the sense of rightness that excludes other possibilities, that makes great painting function. Conceived more fully as painting (and by that I don't mean the materials of painting), those feelings of nostalgia and loss might have come through as peals rather than thunks.