Areia (Sand)

sculpture / performance / photography, 2014

With additional photography by Elise Benveniste, Dylan Wahl and Paul Deckard.

Exhibitions:
Visa Gallery at Brock University, Vai e vem / Back and Forth, curated exhibition, 2016. St.Catherines, Canada
Museu de Arte de Joinville, Vai e vem / Back and Forth, curated exhibition, 2016. Joinville, Brazil
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, solo exhibition 2014. East Lansing, Michigan

Areia, Portuguese for Sand, is a performance and/or intervention in which I installed single grains of sand within eight major US museums: the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), the Institute of Contemporary Art of Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston, the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA-NY), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York.

The grains were installed directly on the floors of the museums, in a series of staged actions with tweezers and rubber gloves. For each installed grain, two images were produced: one of the installation at the very moment it takes place, and one of the grain itself, after the action, using a portable microscope. The images produced in the performances were later displayed in other venues, alongside some of the tools used in the actions.

Areia is a guerilla action. The museums were not informed or consulted about the performances. I walked into each museum as a visitor, carrying sand and other props in a backpack. The installations and photographing were done swiftly. The grains were not removed afterwards, remaining in the museums to become part of their permanent collections. The insignificant size of a grain of sand makes it difficult to think about its unauthorized installation as littering or vandalism. Still a grain of sand is a tangible, three-dimensional object whose physicality cannot be denied. By occupying the exhibition space of a prestigious museum, the installed grain claims the big name of the arts institution.

Areia is an intervention at the smallest possible scale and an exploration of a passive-aggressive poetics of irritation. A grain of sand is a tiny intruder that may annoy you if it gets under your clothes. But if it sneaks into a healthy oyster, it might produce a jewel of great beauty and value. I liken myself to a pearl farmer; the museum is my oyster. In the tightly controlled, sanitized space of the museum, this invasive object brings in a little bit of the outside world. But to speak of sand is also to speak of time. A single grain of sand is the smallest possible unit of time: the instant. The grain of sand is self-referential, standing for the very moment of its installation when it becomes art. A miniature, minimalist monument to the moment (mini-mini-mo-mo). In his “Poetics of Space”, Gaston Bachelard devoted a chapter to miniatures and other minuscule things. He wrote:

The man with the magnifying glass takes the world as though it were quite new to him. (…) He is a fresh eye before a new object. The botanist's magnifying glass is youth recaptured. It gives him back the enlarging gaze of a child. With this glass in his hand, he returns to the garden, where children see enlarged. Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire World. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness. Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness.

Shortly after this documentation was first displayed, dear friend and cunning anthropologist John Thiels wrote a generous review :

With a characteristic intimate playfulness, Kielwagen evokes the paradoxes of Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" in the series of installations entitled "Areia," or sand. For if the world is present in a grain of sand, the grain of sand in the space of the museum becomes a new origo mundi which rescales the world around it. Changes of scale reveal unexplored landscapes upon the sand itself through the sensuously clinical intervention of the gloved hand and surgical tweezers; the regimented space of the museum recedes and momentarily loses its power to naturalize regimes of aesthetic value and the bodies and relations it produces. Here, then, the reversal through scale accomplished by the intervention coaxes out the power of the infinitesimal. What was previously trivial or unseen becomes a landscape for exploration. And as Kielwagen notes, the grain of sand has multiple properties: it may feel delightful under one’s feet at a warm beach, it can exfoliate rough skin and bring iridescent growth, it irritates the tender. Time is also at issue here, the time of reflection, the time of the hourglass. By focusing attention on a single grain of sand, time stops and the permanent/impermanent relation also undergoes reversal. The scale of size is easier for us to grasp than the scale of time, especially the geological time of sand. Is the grain of sand now part of the permanent collection, or is it now a silent curator, watching and holding the museum for a time? But what is the time of the museum, of the permanent collection? Is it the time of the archive, of the catalog, which these grains of sand will likely escape, or can we acknowledge the timescale of the museum that goes beyond, or before the archive, the register? In Areia, as well as in other works by the artist, the careful hand of the artist presents the intimacy of attention, whether in molding, cutting, feeding, anointing or emplacing. For Kielwagen there is no aleatory caress but where the moment of contact has the power to undo subject and object through intimacy. And if Buber is correct in arguing "... the sublime melancholy of our lot [is] that every Thou must become an It", Kielwagen counters the alienation of labor and existence with ludic rites of intimate attention, whether in the staging of violence, devotion or immanence.