Out in the Oceanic
by: Hank Scotch
At one time, according to a grumbling Ishmael in the opening pages of Moby-Dick, one could go out to the “watery parts of the world” to dissolve the nagging sensation of landlocked “spleen.” Until the end of the nineteenth century, there were still enough sailing ships to offer this experience of setting out toward an indeterminate zone free from the sort of social and political constrictions that existed within the nation. Pirates did it all the time. Out in the ocean, mixed crews of ambiguously oriented men could ecstatically squeeze out alternative economies on ships such as Melville’s fictional whaleboat the Pequod. All sorts of ocean-bound communities like these, revolting against slavery or subverting a capitalist economy, collectively redefined themselves throughout the century on sailing ships and small islands away from civilization.
But as steamships replaced sail, and global nomads were forced ashore by tourists, businessmen, and mercenaries, oceanic freedom was often occluded by a cultural imaginary characterized by the increasingly expansionist fantasies of emerging or even fading empires. The mysterious space of the ocean in these cases was often then just an impediment to what the imperially driven American admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan described as one nation’s inevitable restless interests in expanding the frontier.
There were of course a few straggling holdouts against the steam powered disenchantment brought about by increasingly global economic interests of industrial modernization. When in 1895 the 53 year old Nova Scotian, Joshua Slocum, set sail from Boston alone for three years, the old sailor celebrated the lost romance of past travel by making nostalgic stops at his island heroes’ homes in a fixed up sloop he renamed the Spray. Stopping at Robert Louis Stevenson’s south pacific hideaway, rummaging in the real Robinson Crusoe’s cave, and sailing slowly by Napoleon’s prison island of St. Helena, Slocum floated out the idea that the ‘oceanic’ wasn’t really the community endeavor it once was. Alone at sea, except for a pilot from the Pinta Slocum hallucinated one night while sailing through a storm, the Captain’s ocean tour took on a strangely new inner-directed imperative. As the old captain’s folksy story suggests, the transformation made possible in the extranational zone of the sea was being replaced, as the forces of empire colonized physical and psychic spaces, by a new psychological inner voyage we so affectionately now refer to as “a trip.”
In the 20th century, the “stream of consciousness” replaced the slipperiness of the sea, suggesting that an alternative to alienation involved an internal turn. From avant-garde experiments in creating a watery equivalence between subjects, objects, and their spaces, to experimental escapades testing the limits of consciousness through drugs, the oceanic survived throughout the last century as a psychic space. John C. Lilly’s LSD-induced atavism in an isolation tank is a great example, but so is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Test, which includes the oceanic as a personality type.
In this new century, as Zach Cahill’s Boat suggests, the space of the sea (or even a land-locked body of water like the lake) still offers us the chance to think at the limits of our territorial order about the possibilities of our own inner and outer organization. Now the boat no longer seems to be a craft sailing between the organized spaces of continents, but a beautifully bobbing thing set adrift between one shore of internal psychic space and another, a collective project for remaking the world outside.

Hank Scotch is a PhD candidate studying American literature and film at the University of Chicago.

My Trust in You is Unfounded: Zach Cahill
by: Ian Bourland
Movement through Zach Cahill’s most recent multimedia installation recalls the psychic and somatic relationships implied by Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman—the former’s steel slabs imposing an uneasy tension between the stability of the object and the fragility of the viewer, the latter’s corridor and video installations creating an ominous sense of suffocation and surveillance. In both cases the works decenter the subject and destabilize the legible, optically driven bargain of art viewership. Cahill’s recent work, most notably, Pink City (2007) effects this process in reverse. The body is acted upon here through enclosure in what reveals itself, in its diaphanous structure of industrial reuse and its cascading flakes, as a vastly amplified snow globe. Yet the fragility of the structure is readily apparent, and the viewer must tread gently, gingerly uncovering fantastic assemblages and haunting film in projection, yielding to the project’s conceit even as they work to keep the cotton-candy foamcore walls of this labyrinth intact. In its blending of the imaginary macrocosm and salvaged, haphazard structure, the snowglobe comes to resemble another children’s game, the snow or pillow fort.

Cahill’s work conveys a whimsical, even naïve sense of possibility and play while suggesting a deeper, preternatural sense of danger. Small peepholes in Pink City reveal mundane objects in motion, radically rescaled and ultrapixilated, bizarre dreamscapes. The pressure Cahill puts on size recalls Bachelard’s notion of intimate enormity, or the extreme magnitudes to be wrenched from singularities of space and the vastness of interiority. The effect, of the psychic made manifest, is lovely but uncanny. Spatial and somatic shifts run through much of Cahill’s work, in an adult sized snow globe, a hollowed arboreal haven (Tree with the sound of its own making), and a ramshackle raft (Boat), as well as in the reworking of previous pieces through recombination. That boat, ushered by Cahill to the sea in an earlier film is transmogrified now into the inner walls of the snowglobe; a model of the boat appears in a tub of water and text on the interior path. Salvaged wood becomes building blocks and tree bark for a womblike space that is conical temple on the outside, dynamic starfield on the inside.

This sense of wonder and parsimony is a trapping of childhood, indeed, but like the candylike delectations in Damien Hirst’s acidic Pharmacy installation, Cahill’s darkly youthful objects innocuously transmit more adult considerations. Material transformations and cinematic worlds seen through flimsy walls become elegiac records of creative destruction. And castaway Sunday afternoon pastimes articulate the subtle frontier between the subjective and the political. Forts repel invasion, boats expand empire, snowglobes create atemporal monuments to places that only exist in memory—innocence and Twin Towers alike.

A sense of woundedness and betrayal, the sad trammels of political violence and failures of leadership, runs through each of these. Where Hirst is slick and cynical, Cahill, as in his film Political Sketches, is yearning and outraged, reminding us not that the world is an inherently tragic, dehumanizing place but, rather, that in the process of “growth,” something has been lost. Cahill’s work foregrounds these tensions, but not didactically. Indeed, the works raise more questions then they answer, from the validity of Cahill’s formal choices to the political and social impact of art production more broadly. That pieces like Pink City and Cloud House only permit associational, oblique readings, that they disturb as they reassure, and ride the line between the twee and the savagely political, is confounding indeed. Nevertheless, these juxtapositions and fascinations will almost certainly appear more confidently and disturbingly in works to come.

Ian Bourland is a PhD student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He studies issues of identity, nation, and globalization in contemporary art.

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