Installation at Western Bridge, Seattle.
Photo: Merrill Greene.
Where better right now for a new arrival in Seattle to begin to get a sense of the city’s art culture than at Western Bridge? Bill and Ruth True’s philanthropic art project is remarkable enough, but if it were necessary to demonstrate how well it might contribute to the city’s art scene, then Euan Macdonald’s excellent show that opened there on Saturday makes a perfect job of it.
To say that Macdonald’s show is wide-ranging is something of an understatement. On the one hand there are things here as slight as Untitled (Airplanes)(1998) – a little childlike drawing of two airplanes flying towards one another – while on the other the exhibit’s title piece, one of the most remarkable pieces of sculpture I have ever seen anywhere, is almost absurd in its scale and ambition. For Macdonald has had nothing less than a snow-covered mountain top installed in Western Bridge’s main space. It stands some twenty feet high, and is almost fifty feet long, and atop it stand a couple of rather beautiful mountain goats.
It is wide-ranging then, but this show is anything but incoherent. For the difference in scale and focus between Macdonald’s very different pieces is actually part of their content. Elsewhere for example, there are two pieces with the same title, The Shadow’s Path. Physically, they could not be more dissimilar. The first – dated 2000/2002 – is a series of four tiny ink drawings of the earth seen from space. The other, installed in its own darkened room, is a slowly evolving 2003 video piece of a landscape seen from a small aircraft flying above it. But it turns out that these are actually a pair of works with the same subject. In the drawings we watch the passage of night’s shadow across the face of the planet, while in the video we see a landscape, and a little town that sits within it, as dusk falls and the world darkens. In other words, these are two highly unconventional accounts of a sunset.
The mountain top installation is also one of a pair of works, for upstairs in the building’s apartment space there is another mountain top sculpture, called 98134 (2009) for Western Bridge’s zip code. It includes a rendering of the building itself, but this time, rather than being life-sized, Macdonald works at railway modeler scale, and this mountain top sits comfortably on the room’s Roy McMakin coffee table. But the two mountain tops function intriguingly together, once again linked by the difference in their scale. In one, Macdonald conjures the seemingly impossible feat of bringing a life-sized piece of landscape inside a building (where it towers precariously over us) and in the other he shrinks both building and landscape so that they become like toys (and this time we stand peering down on them). Macdonald offers us first Swift’s Brobdignag (which, entertainingly enough, appears on Gulliver’s map almost exactly where the state of Washington lies) and then his Lilliput. It’s quite a trick.
Macdonald offers us other opportunities to compare and contrast: Selected Standards (2007) is a delightful room-sized piece in which dozens of sheet music covers are paired eccentrically with drawings and photographs, like little dancing couples around the walls of the gallery. Arthur Freed and Harry Warren’s “Coffee Time” is paired with a drawing of a mosquito, for example, Kay Swift’s “Fine and Dandy” is partnered by a banal aerial photograph of a Californian housing development, and a song called “Coconut Sweet” hangs beside a drawing of a disco ball. Macdonald suggests in the exhibit’s notes that these diptychs might be read as forming a loose narrative, “about someone moving to a new place, finding enchantment and then disillusion … [or] falling in and out of love.” But they might at least as easily not be. In fact, from the perspective of this someone who has both recently moved to a new place and fallen in love, the juxtapositions in Selected Standards reflect nothing so much as the simple truth that everyday life is filled with simultaneous but mysteriously different experiences which we sometimes manage to assimilate, but equally often don’t. And neither is better than the other.
In fact this is the philosophy that the whole of Macdonald’s exhibition seems to embrace: that experience is never consistent, no matter how dearly we might like to imagine it is; and art that best reflects this reality will be many different things at the same time. It will be big and small, ambitious and throwaway, funny and serious, and it will employ all sorts of different media. It will sometimes make sense and sometimes not, and it will often be something other than it appears. The show’s title, A Little Ramble, is taken from a the title of an exquisite little 1914 essay by Robert Walser which actually describes something quite different, a trek through the Alps, and which concludes with the words, “We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.” It is a lesson that Macdonald has taken to heart, and one that this splendid exhibit both proves and contradicts at every turn.
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