In preparing to write this review of Victoria Haven’s new show Hit the North, I feel a bit like I’m decoding or explicating, a process associated more with literary than art criticism. This literary approach is appropriate not only because many of the pieces incorporate words, but because even the graphic elements offer themselves as symbols that can be “read.” The show runs concurrently in Seattle (at Greg Kucera Gallery) and in Portland (at PDX Contemporary), imitating the ubiquity of a book, which has the unusual quality of existing in multiple places at once. And finally, to kill the metaphor, Haven has published an actual book—of sketches, schematics, and source material—that can be read like an atlas to the current show.
Haven’s language is not expressive; it is allusive; it points to things. You could say it is “directional.” The names “Cutthroat Pass” and “Devil’s Gulch,” from NORTHWEST FIELD RECORDINGS WA (12”/B Side), point east, toward the Cascades, and further back in time toward the white adventurers who explored the region. The post-punk, garage, and noise rock band names in THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME point to various cities and sounds and underground cultural movements. The black square in NOISE REDUCTION A SIDE (metallic) points toward Malevich and the visual lexicon of minimalist and abstract art that informs much of Haven’s artistic vocabulary. And the use of language itself as an art object points toward artists like Mel Bochner and Bruce Nauman, who employed language as the ultimate art concept in the late 1960s and onward. The directional language is self-referential too, lending the show a mirrored, angular coherence through the use of repeated shapes (triangle, circle) and the pairing of distinct versions of the same works.
Many of the pieces in Hit the North (the title comes from a song by The Fall, a British post-punk band) layer reference upon reference in a way that sometimes seems like pointless juxtaposition. For example, THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (after DFL) perplexes, even if you are aware of the obscure and personal references that comprise the piece. (As far as I can tell, “The Decline of Western Civilization” is a three part documentary film about punk culture and music in L.A.; “DFL,” an acronym for Dead Fucking Last, a hardcore band from California; and “No Fun” is supposedly tattooed on Haven’s husband). The piece itself is carved from western red cedar, with a lighthearted pun on “western.” The dead end allusions are further complicated by the companion piece THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (rainy day project), which is aluminum cast from a potato carved with the same “No Fun” text. In contrast to the other works, these pieces are unwieldy, and have the quality of an inside joke.
The more I read about the show, the more I’m led to believe that the connections and allusions are entirely personal. Claire Dederer’s essay “Little Machines,” found in the Hit the North book, mostly focuses on an Impala that Haven has been restoring for years, a symbol of her personal connection to objects. Jen Graves’s article “There’s No Home like Place” likewise focuses on biographical details and Haven’s artistic path (The Stranger Vol. 20, No. 21). But to what extent is Haven’s work an intelligible dialogue, a text than can be read? and to what extent is it a confluence of personal associations that confound accurate “reading”? I’m not suggesting that the meaning of each piece be lucid and evident. In fact, part of what makes this show relevant are the ostensibly irreconcilable pairs: A Side/B Side, black/white, punk/nature. Yet the presence of language puts a certain pressure on the pieces to make meaning.
Consider NORTHWEST FIELD RECORDING, WA A/B mix (Little Mystery), basically a typographical arrangement in Silver Sumi ink on the wall. The concentric rings of northwest place names are meant to represent a vinyl record, as suggested by the title. Or, as Erin Langner writes, “they also read as growth rings of trees, a record of a different sort” (NewAmericanPaintings.wordpress.com). The form is an adaptation or “sampling,” to use Haven’s word, of Mel Bochner’s Portrait of Eva Hesse. To recap: in this deceptively simple wall painting we have branching references to northwest landscape and history, the music recording industry, and conceptual and language-based art. The associations expand from there. (Jen Graves calls them “mandalas.”) At the crux of personal and cultural reference, they make evident the cultural influence of subjective perspective. In this case, on geographical names. While reading the fantastic fairytale or allegorical-like names of peaks and passes, I imagine the explorers projecting their own personal failures or successes onto the landscape forever. In the same way, Haven seems to acknowledge the importance of subjective forces and resonances while poking fun at the almost silly emotional ambivalence of these place names. The mandalas are complex units of reference at once unified and opposed, and if the connections have personal significance for Haven, at least we can participate in them.
Hit the North is a significant show for Haven, in part because it differs from her geometric line drawings, some of which are on display at Kucera. Despite the difference, I think her previous work may provide some structural insight: the spare, precise abstractions delineate space and confound it; they are visual (and by extension, psycho-logical) paradoxes, no less complex for their simplicity. The language in Haven’s current show is a different kind of abstraction, but if the references are directional, as I suggested above, the works can be imagined as a corner or nexus of one of Haven’s geometric shapes, splitting the mind along different referential tracks while at the same time holding them together. They present a similar mental contortion that Haven’s geometric drawings encourage you to explore.
It’s a bit of a stretch to say that Hit the North operates in exactly the same way as her previous work (although Haven does encourage a bridge with the piece Low Divide). The current work lacks a physical quality that the earlier drawings have: no matter how abstract or impossible or flat, a line is still itself, but a word always references the thing that is absent. In Haven’s show there is the incredible absence of music, an absence of the rugged Cascade crags and pinnacles, an absence of the physicality, however impossible, of her previous work.
Palpable absence is an appropriate effect for work that is so deeply indebted to the ideas of minimalist and conceptual artists (like Bochner and Nauman) who displayed a heightened awareness of subject/object, presence/absence paradoxes in the wake of abstract expressionism. Yet Haven is no stern analyst or lamenter of the failings of art as a transcendental process. Her use of the familiar double black diamond symbol as a wry comment on the seeming simplicity of minimalist art in EXPERTS ONLY is downright funny. The same for NORTH X NORTHWEST MYSTIC (Gore-Tex® version), which crosses the mild irony of outdoor enthusiasts’ enthusiasm for unnatural outerwear with the legacy of the Northwest School of art (and referencing Hitchcock and Shakespeare, too).
Ultimately there is no accurate reading of such disparate references, not even on Haven’s end, I suspect. Despite the formal completeness and simplicity of each piece, there is evidence of Haven’s process of arrangement, fixation, and baffling overlap as a way of exploring the relation of cultural influences that are both given and pursued. Among the language, the cultural references, and the new media of Hit the North, I sense an invisible geometry.