conc Jim Lambie

Concentrations
47
jim lambie
Thirteenth Floor Elevator
May 19–August 21, 2005
Say somebody wasn’t able to get high—well, he’d
get high with our music…have his consciousness
or his cortex opened up just by our music.
—Songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist Roky Erickson
of the 13th Floor Elevators
Sampling, remixing, and mashing up the formalism of high art and popular culture,
Glasgow-based Jim Lambie has put a fresh spin on Robert Rauschenberg’s idea of “acting
in the gap between art and life.” His smart, formally astute, and exhilarating exhibition
Thirteenth Floor Elevator offers a refreshing engagement with all three—art, life, and the
gap in between. It includes an up-tempo, multicolored version of Zobop, which covers the
entire floor of the entrance of the Dallas Museum of Art’s Contemporary Galleries and
a large part of its South Concourse, and four funky yet elegant sculptural assemblages
made from altered objects found in local thrift stores.
Responding to the clean, pristine lines and sober spaces of Edward Larrabee Barnes’
modernist architecture, Zobop, comprised of thousands of strips of commercial vinyl adhesive
tape (laid down one after another), “superimposes itself rather than becoming completely
subservient to the space,” says Lambie. It pulses with a seductive rhythm, seeming to be on
the move: snaking under the grand staircase going to the upscale restaurant above; butting
against the glass doors of the Sculpture Garden; and flowing down the Concourse, called
“Das Ramp” by art critic and writer Dave Hickey. While emphasizing architectural lines and
elements, Zobop shifts—from two dimensional to three dimensional and back, curving down
or swelling up, or rippling like an eddy. At times, it even appears to float, calling to mind
(or hearing) Steppenwolf ’s “A Magic Carpet Ride” or Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”
Recalling art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay on the mythical power
of the grid in the works of modernist artists such as Mondrian, Zobop’s stopping near the
Museum’s south entrance and halfway down the South Concourse appears arbitrary. Based
on the spiritual and universal attributes historically assigned to the grid, it can be seen
as merely a fragment, albeit a monumental one. With more money and time, Zobop is, in
essence, capable of extending to infinity.
in orange paint lie on a simple museum shelf, their green tops drooping over one side.
Paint has splattered on the wall and dripped down to the floor. The performative aspect of
Lambie’s assemblages and striped floors—the obviousness of the physical labor expended—
affects the viewer’s proprioceptive sense, sharpening their awareness of their body and its
position and movement in the space.
On the wall opposite the Psychedelic Soul Stick is a large accordian-like yet rigid folded
door (The Doors [Morrison Hotel], 2005) painted a glossy lilac color and framed with mirrors;
starburst-like shadows shoot out from the top and bottom. Like the flowers in the vase
that novelist and critic Aldous Huxley saw when under the influence of mescaline on May
5, 1953, in Los Angeles (The Doors of Perception, published the following year, details his psychedelic experience), The Doors “shine with their own inner light.” Huxley thought mescaline would admit him to the kind of inner, visionary world described by the 18th-century
British poet William Blake, who wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of
perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Instead, for
“a few timeless hours,” Huxley found a way to open H. G. Wells’ metaphorical “Door in the
Wall” (the story by the same name was written in 1911) and apprehend the true nature of
things, “directly and unconditionally, by the Mind-at-Large.” For him, “chemical intoxicants
(Dope), art and religion, and carnivals and saturnalia,” for example, served as the Door in
the Wall, a way into the world of transcendental experience: “The man who comes back
through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He
will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less satisfied…better equipped to understand
the relationship of words to things.” (Regarding the name of the band The Doors, Jim
Morrison once said, “There are things known and there are things unknown and in
between are the Doors.”)
As if monitoring and surveying the happenings below, a sculpture (Shake, Shake, Shake, 2005),
made of two joined speakers covered in broken pieces of mirror with T-shirt material over
each grill, is installed above the doorway of the entrance gallery. It has two haunting, dark
eyes (cut out from a Neil Diamond album) looking out from perhaps the fourth dimension.
Throughout the entrance and Concourse, there is a dazzling effect as light reflects off
mirrors—hard fragments of infinity—and bright, colorful objects, as well as the expansive
striped floor. Edges dissolve and space expands (or contracts?). Lambie’s exhibition is an
organic, vibrant landscape that engages mind and body: the “such stuff as dreams are
made on.”
Though the Zobop series, which began in 1999 with Lambie’s solo show at the Transmission
Gallery in Glasgow, has most aptly been compared to the wall drawings of Sol Lewitt, the
striped paintings of Daniel Buren and Bridget Riley, and the floor sculptures of Carl Andre,
its conceptual roots are elsewhere. After being a part of the Glasgow club scene, playing in
bands such as Boy Hairdresser, and DJing (which he still does), the artist decided to study at
the Glasgow School of Art in the environmental department, where context and placement
are emphasized and boundaries of architecture, design, and sculpture are blurred. Through
an integration of his experiences at the school and with music, Lambie has developed an
intuitive, performance-based yet complex practice in which to explore, in endless ways,
perceptual experience and the psychology of space.
Similar to Robert Rauschenberg’s critical combines and silkscreen paintings, Lambie’s work
is the result of a highly developed visual vocabulary of forms, materials, and processes that
can be recycled and reconfigured to respond to each new spatial situation (or exhibition).
It is an improvisational method (and nerve-racking for museum personnel) as the artist
brings the context of the space—the architecture, discoveries from the city’s cultural detritus, and even a historical anecdote—to bear on the direction his work will take. The majority
of artistic production takes place in the space (always in a very limited period of time),
lending each exhibition a level of immediacy and freshness not often reached in exhibitions,
even site-specific installations.
In the entrance gallery, a shamanistic, ritualistic Psychedelic Soul Stick made of brightly colored
threads wrapped around a bamboo stick and magical fetishes—a china cup fragment, a
Carmen Miranda photograph, and earrings, for example—leans casually against one wall. It
appears to be a relic or artifact from a recent performance, its tip sending waves of energy
through the striped floor. Nearby, as if an objet decoratif, carrots (18 Carrots, 2005) dipped
His most well known works that are continually recycled include Zobop, Psychedelic Soul
Sticks, and, in the last two years, The Doors. Since 1999, variations of Zobop, from black and
white to metallic to various colors, have appeared in many private collections and public
institutions. His first of nearly fifty Psychedelic Soul Sticks was created while he was an
artist-in-residence in Marseille in 1998. Rob Tufnell’s essay in Jim Lambie: Voidoid (published
in 2004 by The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Sadie Coles HG, London, and Anton Kern Gallery,
New York, in collaboration with Koenig Books, London) interweaves intriguing sources for
Lambie’s “homespun and stately, crude and sophisticated Soul Sticks.” These sources include
the city markets and ethnographic museums of Marseille and, in the late 1960s and early
1970s, the string of psychedelic singles and albums of Motown’s Temptations and the
Northern Soul played in clubs and discos in economically depressed northwest England.
In 2003 Lambie began using doors as sculptural material. (Several are titled after songs
by The Doors, who performed on The Ed Sullivan Show with household doors as backdrops.)
Lambie’s variations include functional doors, wall-bound doors with mirrored surfaces,
and doors adorned with painted objects or colorful accessories.
Although music is a passion of Lambie’s, he does not use it as a starting point or attempt
to make work that describes it. Music “bleeds” into his work, he says, in obvious ways—
titles of works (e.g., Morrison Hotel is The Doors’ fifth album) and materials like records,
turntables, and speakers—and subtly, like the rhythm of Zobop’s pattern and flow.
Lambie’s other passion is making objects, and he sees himself “essentially as a sculptor
for lack of a better word.” With his sculptural objects, he does address issues of mass and
volume, for example, but his sculptural practice parallels more closely Donald Judd’s notion
of “specific objects” than the work of a traditional sculptor. In his seminal 1965 essay, Judd
described the new three-dimensional works not as painting or sculpture but as “open and
extended…a space to move into…real space.” Lambie’s work also has a theatrical effect,
a preoccupation with time and duration. These same qualities were cited by critic Michael
Fried in a negative appraisal of Judd and other minimalist artists (whom he calls literalists).
Basically, Lambie produces a theatrical situation or stage that sets up challenges for himself (“how can I fill a space and empty it at the same time”) and unfolding encounters for
the viewer. His theater is like the exhilarating, existential, LSD-fueled, Door in the Wall
dance clubs of the 1960s such as the Roxy in London, the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco,
and the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin, Texas. At times, his exhibition can create flashes
(or flashbacks for the lucky few) of the mind-manifesting experiences produced in these
clubs, where the intertwining of music, strobes, and lights heightened senses and opened
the doors of perception.
But like the blues-inspired, frenzied voice of Janis Joplin or the fuzz-tone, feedback wail
of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, a bit of sadness hangs over Lambie’s exhibition. No matter if he
takes you to the “thirteenth floor,” a place that seldom exists in everyday life, and no matter
the exhilaration, experiences—like his exhibition—are ephemeral. The party cannot last.
The sadness haunting Lambie’s exhibition calls to mind Dallas-born Roky Erickson’s fervent
yet fragile and vulnerable voice (a mixture of James Brown and Little Richard, two of his
biggest influences) singing his simple girl-meets-boy, girl-loses-boy song You’re Gonna Miss
Me. Rising to No. 56 on the Billboard charts, this single was on the band’s first album, The
Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, and the first album to use the word psychedelic.
You’re gonna wake up one morning, as the sun greets the dawn
You’re gonna look around and in your mind girl,
You’re gonna find that I’m gone.
Suzanne Weaver
Associate Curator of Contemporary Art
Dallas Museum of Art
Selected Biography
Born in 1964 in Glasgow, Scotland, Jim Lambie received
his BA from the Glasgow School of Art in 1994. He has
exhibited his work in solo exhibitions at The Modern
Institute, Glasgow; Anton Kern Gallery, New York;
Inverleith House, Edinburgh; Museum of Modern Art,
Oxford, England; and Sadie Coles, London. In 2003
Lambie was one of three artists representing Scotland
in the 50th Venice Biennale, and in 2004 his work
was included in the 54th Carnegie International at
the Carnegie Museum of Art. Other group exhibitions
include The Moderns, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2003, catalogue); Love Over Gold, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
(2003); Days Like These, Tate Triennial Exhibition of
Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain, London (2003,
catalogue); Early One Morning, Whitechapel Art Gallery,
London (2002, catalogue); Painting at the Edge of the
World, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001); and What
If, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2000, catalogue). His
awards include being shortlisted for The Turner Prize,
Tate Britain, London (2005), and receiving the Paul
Hamlyn Foundation Award, London (2000), and the
British Council Award toward residency at Triangle,
Marseille, France (1998).
Checklist of the Exhibition
Zobop (multicolored version), 2005
Vinyl tape
Courtesy of artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York
The Doors (Morrison Hotel), 2005
Wooden doors, mirrors, and gloss paint
Courtesy of artist and Modern Institute, Glasgow
Psychedelic Soul Stick, 2005
Bamboo, wire, thread, lid, string, Carmen Miranda
photograph, earrings, two golf balls, and china cup
fragments
Courtesy of artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York
Shake, Shake, Shake, 2005
Two speakers, mirrors, fabric, collage, and paint
Courtesy of artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York
18 Carrots, 2005
Carrots and latex paint
Courtesy of artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York
Concentrations 47: Jim Lambie, Thirteenth Floor Elevator
is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art.
Concentrations exhibition support is provided by the
Donor Circle Membership Program through leadership
gifts of Claire Dewar, Nancy and Tim Hanley, and
Cindy and Howard Rachofsky.
The Dallas Museum of Art is supported in part by the generosity
of Museum members and donors and by the citizens of Dallas
through the City of Dallas/Office of Cultural Affairs and the Texas
Commission on the Arts.
Images:
Installation views of Zobop, 18 Carrots, Shake, Shake, Shake, The Doors
(Morrison Hotel), and Psychedelic Soul Stick at the Dallas Museum of Art