and how is this knowledge squared with our everyday experience of life
on earth? Her installations invite the viewer into a space of heightened
contemplation that asks to be occupied as one might occupy one's own
head. The tensions which mark this as a "mental" place arise not from
any clear-cut distinction between subject and object, inside and out, but
from a series of uneasy and offen incongruous overlays, as figures of
thought are collided with the real-world "facts" they ostensibly cover.
The ideal is insistently exposed at the height of dysfunction, rejected by
the material it attempts to mold into meaning or truth, like the models
of perspectival recession that Larner fashions from metal chain, rope or
fabric, and imports into the actual space of the gallery, where they no
longer serve to facilitate any sort of cognition, but actively bar our
access.
Proposed as a problem first and foremost, this work challenges the
rigid assertions of integrity and presence which characterized a prior
moment of Modernism with tactics of flux, fragmentation and ruin. One
thinks, for instance, of the entropic mutation of her early petri-dish
pieces; or the overt anti-institutional violence of the Corner Basher from
1988, a structure which can be made to destroy its own scene; or the
installation from 1992 titled ddeefiiinntu which enacts the tautological
dispersal of the word "unidentified". Likewise, her "woven" works
always seem rather to be coming apart, as though they were paintings
caught in a process of unraveling, and with the addition of a few shards
of cut mirror underneath, as in Between Loves me and Not from 1992,
the result is something like sculpture made from a shattering of pictori-
al space.
If sculptural identity or essence once depended on an obsessive purging
of every last trace of painting from its substance and form, then this has
provided Larner with an incentive for reconnection and merger. Charted
by Greenberg as a course of progressive material extrusion from the
painterly surface and out into “the real", the inception of the new object
was signalled through its umbilical severing and release from the wall,
and it is precisely this shifting paradigmatic moment that she revisits
again and again in her art; extending, dispersing and reversing its tra-
jectory in a series of works that reclaim the terrain from which they
were ousted, radiating outward their ribbons and ropes, or, like here,
stubbornly hugging the corners.
Larner's most recent work tends to change as one approaches it. What
from a distance seems like a bluish-green mist is on closer inspection
revealed to be an intricately layered chain of variegated polyurethane
loops. In the distance of just a few short steps, then, one will have cros-
sed the threshold between a macro and micro universe, or more accu-
rately, between a shimmering mirage-like impression of reality and the
almost unfathomable banality of a space filled with its own diagram.
Clearly, for her, neither experience is more real, and it is instead a
matter of positioning her art in between, and in the mind of the viewer,
where two incompatible truths will momentarily converge, generating a
flash of potential that continues to burn well after they have crossed and
gone their opposite ways.
Lli Larner
lebt und arbeitet in Los Angeles, seit
1990 unterrichtet Larner am Art
Center, Pasadena, CA / lives and works
in Los Angeles, since 1990 teaching at
the Art Center, Pasadena, CA
Ausbildung/Education
1985 B.F.A., California Institute of the Arts,
Valencia, CA
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Einzelausstellungen / Solo Exhibitions
1998 Stuart Regen Gallery, Los Angeles
1997 Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
1994 303 Gallery, New York
1993 Galerie Jennifer Flay, Paris
1992 Galerie Peter Pakesch, Wien
1991 Stuart Regen Gallery, Los Angeles
303 Gallery, New York
1990 303 Gallery, New York
Galeri Nordanstad-Skarstedt,
Stockholm
1989 303 Gallery, New York
Galerie Peter Pakesch, Wien
1988 Margo Leavin Gallery,
Los Angeles
Gruppenausstellungen/
Group Exhibitions
1997 Elusive Paradise, MOCA, Los Angeles
1996 The Garage Project, MAK Center for
Art and Architecture, Los Angeles
Everything that's interesting is new,
Deste Foundation, Athen
1995 Ambient, Olivier Antoine, Nizza
Saturday Night Fever, Thomas
Solomons Garage, Los Angeles
1994 Plane/Structures, Otis College of
Art and Design, Los Angeles
1993 Just What Is It That Makes Today'’s
Homes So Different, So Appealing?,
Galerie Jennifer Flay, Paris
Sonsbeck 93, Arnheim, Holland
At the Edge of Chaos - New Images
ofthe World, Louisiana Museum of
Modern Art, Dänemark
1992 Heiter Skelter, The Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Flux Attitudes, New Museum of
Contemporary Art, New York
Speaker Project, ICA, London
Permanent Collection, The Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Not Quiet, Galerie Jennifer Flay, Paris
1991 Liz Larner, Rosemarie Trockel,
Meg Webster, Stuart Regen Gallery,
Los Angeles
New Work by Gallery Artists, 303
Gallery, New York
The Body, The Renaissance Society,
University of Chicago, Chicago
American Art of the Eighties, Museum
of Modern and Contemporary Art,
Trento, Italien
Plastic Fantastic Lover Iobject al,
Blum Helman Warehouse, New York
1990 Mind over Matter, Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York
Signs of Life. Process and Materials,
1960-1990, Institute of Contemporary
Art, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia
Artificial Nature, Deste Foundation
for Contemporary Art, The House of
Cyprus, Athen
1989 Whitney Biennial 1989, Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York
The Desire ofthe Museum, Whitney
Museum of American Art, Down-
town at the Federal Plaza, New York
1988 Nayland Blake, Liz Larner, Richard
Morrison, Charles Ray, 303 Gallery,
New York
Re-.Placement, Los Angeles Contem
porary Exhibitions, Los Angeles
Stadtmuseum Graz
1987 Room 9, Tropicana Hotel, West
Hollywood, CA
L.A. Hot and Cool, M.I.T. Visual Arts
Center, Cambridge, MA
