BOERNE, TEXAS
Without Origin: Chris Sauter’s Graft
When, in the autumn of 1998, I visited Chris Sauter’s studio, located in an old industrial complex in San Antonio, I was struck by the way his sculptures, while seemingly positioned to be experienced in relation to their horizontality, were in fact premised on a notion of an inverse geological verticality. The layered effects of his sculptural material, explained Sauter, represented his distillation of the graphic rendering of geological charts and the minute cross-sections of the human metabolic system. Constructed out of moldy bread, found clothing, pink insulation material, industrial carpeting, cardboard, and floorboards, the range of sculptures gathered in and around Sauter’s studio had one thing in common: they had been moved off the traditional ground of sculpture (the pedestal) and relocated and reoriented on a horizontal platform that mimicked the grounds of the studio itself. As well as working within the historical gaps of sculpture, there is also clearly an architectural dimension to his method. Sauter’s approach to sculpture—while not anticipating anything new in terms of the recent syntax of the medium—did reveal itself to be related to a range of sculptural investigations one finds today in the work of such artists as Jason Rhoades, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Bjarne Melgaard. But it is to arte povera specifically and the works of such American artists as David Hammons, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy that Sauter’s work owes its greatest debt. Yet Sauter’s brand of sculptural assemblage from everyday material is neither invested with the narrative and political declamations like those of Rhoades or Hirschhorn, nor totemic or fetishistic like that of arte povera and Hammons, Kelley, and McCarthy. A strange disquietude pervades his forms. The shapes of the sculptures not only mimic cartoonlike characters, but they also take on a formal formlessness without any iconic origin. One may then characterize these sculptures as ur-sculptures, as meta-forms.
Working with low forms, the excremental, and the abject, Sauter brings a dislocated sense of Americana to the dystopia of his reconstruction of domestic scenes (the kitchen with its bread ovens, the living room corner, the den, the space beneath floorboards, and so on) without revealing precisely what it is that should haunt the imagination of the viewer. Nonetheless, there is a psychological drama inherent to the series of quirky pieces he has made thus far. The relationship between his forms and their relationship to the body—ambiguously invested with sexual tension—methodically displaces the lurking sense of the gothic in his assemblages, while calling into question what exactly the status of his sculptures should be.
To clarify the ambiguity that has attended his oeuvre, Sauter’s project for ArtPace in 1999 took on a level of legibility that had been absent from his previous pieces. It is also a work with a greater relationship to narrative than had been present in his other projects. Graft, his deft rehandling of the architectural space of the gallery, resides somewhere between sculpture and drawing, between architecture and furniture design. Graft is constructed entirely out of the gypsum board from which the walls of the gallery in ArtPace were made. Throughout the summer of his ArtPace residency, Sauter worked by cutting out, one at a time, the pieces that would end up representing a facsimile of his family’s dining room. Including an oval table and six lyre-backed chairs, and built to the precise dimensions of his family’s dining room, Graft is the image of domesticity subverted. It is lifted slightly off the floor on a platform and placed in the center of the gallery. One is able to walk around the fragile structure and apprehend both its makeshift facture and the material from which it is built.
Graft, 1999. Drywall, wood, insulation, and construction adhesive. Dimensions vary. Detail
Walking around the piece, one encounters the dining room as a space within a space—an uncanny replaying of the scene of some past history—while on the walls the story of their making is told in a deadpan way via the negative spaces out of which the entire sculpture has been constructed. The room also recalls Gregor Schneider’s obsessive reworkings of his family’s home in Rheydt, outside Cologne. As in Schneider’s Ur Haus, the clues to the significance of this room in the Sauter family home are effaced and left deliberately ambiguous. It is the spectator who must now see the context of its architecture as an occasion for the exploration of both the spiritual and psychological nature of home, as well as its politics in the conservative arena of the Texas Bible Belt. The view of the walls is particularly instructive because it posits the idea of the work’s ontology. Here, the notion of drawing as a cognitive strategy that links the hand and mind is used to its full effect to delineate the poetics of an otherwise tough and uncompromising work.
Graft. Installation view
Graft. Details
Drawing, as a strategy of delineation and instruction, methodologically lends itself to the schematic operation of Graft. The cutouts on the walls pointedly structure the notion of graft as an incision, a cut into and a decapitation of origin. Graft, in technical terms, is also understood as a way to mend or suture a rift in origin or to bring about a hybrid form. In botanical terms, it relates to genetic engineering, the grafting of new cultures of plants or seeds to produce other strains that may be disease-resistant or are infused with a supplement the plant may lack. Biologically, graft could be related to the attachment of a prosthetic device, be it a limb or sexual organ, or the cultivating of new skin grafts to cover over areas of the human body. In many ways, Sauter’s Graft operates on the logic of his previous sculptures, which confront us with the image of inauthenticity—the base material of everyday culture. At ArtPace, this long-standing investigation finally reaches a level of poignancy that makes him one of a new generation of young artists to watch in the next few years.
Okwui Enwezor
