Tauba Auerbach. (In)visible Flow
Drawing inspiration from science and physics, Tauba Auerbach (b. 1981, San Francisco) investigates the limits of human perception. Through a variety of media, including painting, photography, video, book design and musical performance, the American arti
“TAUBA AUERBACH. A BROKEN STREAM,” PAULA COOPER GALLERY, NEW YORK. THROUGH DECEMBER 22, 2018.
ANDRIA HICKEY:
This past winter you presented a new body of work as part of a two-person show with the French composer Éliane Radigue at MOCA Cleveland. The exhibition “Induction” explored ideas about flow, gesture and space that are also present in your new exhibition at Paula Cooper. Both exhibitions include a number of paintings from your “Grain” series (2016– ongoing), as well as new glass sculptures and a video installation. Much of this work was deeply informed by specific scientific studies like quantum physics or string theory. Yet throughout your work there seems to be a contrast between proven facts and open questions. Can you talk about this tension?
TAUBA AUERBACH: That came up strongly making this video [Pilot Wave Induction III, 2018]. And, by the way, thanks for giving me the chance to try working in video for the first time, earlier this year! As you know, I re-staged a fluid dynamics experiment in which the protagonist is a droplet of silicone that bounces around on a liquid surface in a vibrating speaker. It’s been indicated as a model for a marginal and pretty much debunked theory in quantum physics called Pilot Wave Theory. I like watching experiments, and after some people at MIT made a beautiful video about this one, I decided to make my own, in a much more subjective approach. The way the droplet moves around is really bizarre. First of all, it seems to bounce on the wave it created with its previous bounce, and its movement on the surface looks both totally random and totally purposeful. It changes directions and reverses. It’s so weird. You cannot discern a pattern, but if you track it from above over a long period of time, you see that it ends up in certain areas more often than in others. There are rings where it’s more likely to be at any given moment, just like an electron. And the probability of it showing up in any given ring is described by the Schroedinger equation, which is one of the main bits of math in quantum physics. What’s fascinating about that experiment, for me, even though it doesn’t prove pilot wave theory, is that it’s an instance where we get to witness some truly uncanny behavior that exists in the universe, to get a sense of the flavor of the quantum scale, where the physics that feels intuitive to us breaks down. Personally I find it both totally uncomfortable and soothing to watch.
So in a way, your work remains grounded in scientific foundations, in questions about matter, topology, and space, even when it appears as if something random, or even metaphysical is happening. Tell me more about treading this line between the two.
I love the sciences, though I think they are plagued by their orthodoxy, as are many things. I really love ideas that are on the fringes, or re-imagine something fundamental. Pilot Wave Theory is almost definitely wrong, but it was proposed by extremely credible, brilliant people – Louis de Broglie and David Bohm – and it sheds light on some of the unresolved features of other prevailing theories. I think that wrong or silly ideas can be valuable. There’s a great example where Leonard Susskind and Stephen Hawking had a big dispute about black holes. In the end Hawking was wrong, but when Susskind talks about his work he often expresses how fruitful it was that Hawking had taken that strong position. It prompted him to focus on developing his counter-argument and it propelled the whole conversation forward. Related to that – I went to a wonderful, weird conference this spring on the science of consciousness. I ended up there because I follow a lot of what Roger Penrose talks about, and he developed a theory with this guy Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist who’s organized this conference for about 20 years. A whole bunch of highly qualified experts give presentations, but there is also a zone where anyone can purchase a table or space on a bulletin board and present their idea, invention or theory of everything. And many people do! It’s very, very speculative, and it certainly does cross over into some quacky bullshit. But I think it’s so important to go outside the boundary of what’s possible and reasonable in order to find the edge. I don’t think you can get there only by pushing from the inside.
How has your encounter with these ideas shifted your previous investigations of scientific theories?
Even though I once was, I’m no longer interested in simply modeling something. I’m much more interested in the truly subjective nature of my encounter with ideas, and presenting them to people in non-neutral way, but one that hopefully leaves the possibility of many different experiences. In re-staging this experiment, I wasn’t looking for clean, isolated data, so I was able to approach it differently than a scientist would. I could film it out of focus, illuminate it however I wanted. And I felt like digging into that because that’s what I have to offer to whatever conversation exists about these droplets. As an artist, I’m not going to write a helpful equation about them, but I can record different features and present them in relation to other thoughts and ideas.
There is a sense of embodiment in your recent paintings. It’s clear that you make every single aspect of your paintings with your own hands, even if the mark of your hand in a traditional sense is not visible.
The “Grain” paintings feel like a doorway to me, proportional to my body, something I could go through, and also something that’s on my scale, that I could handle. In other words, they’re about the maximum size I can handle if I am making them on my own.
I’m interested in this idea of interoception and cultivating your sensitivity inside the volume of your own body. If proprioception is knowing where you end in space and your physical relationship to the outside world, interoception is sort of its internal counterpart. There are so many things going on in your body that you don’t think about or even feel, but if you do begin to tune in, a whole universe of activity is available for your observation and potential intervention. There are several kinds of flow happening inside your body and the sculpture I showed you at the studio attempts to “image” something that’s invisible, something about which you could perhaps cultivate a sense, internally, though it is impossible to see.
Does thinking about your own body inform your process?
I’ve been tuned into my own body, but on an intellectual level I haven’t been that interested in the body until recently. Like everybody, I just privileged the brain so much, but recently I’m of the opinion that consciousness is not just in the head. I like learning about and then exploring – with my own body — different theories about how this crazy thing works. I went through a period of interviewing all kinds of different healers, trying out different exercises and watching dissections. Trying to learn about anatomy both from without and from within, seeing as I have this specimen right here.
The tension between inside and outside and its relationship to consciousness makes me think of the idea of flow in my own day-to-day activities. The moment, for example, when you are reading a book and become unconscious of the act of reading, and no longer see the words on the page. Is that something you are interested in pursuing through your work?
That’s such a good question.
Because there is a rhythm to the idea of flow.
Oh, absolutely. Like a tide. I actually got interested in fluid dynamics because for years I have had an obsession with the meander ornament shape, and it can be read as a sequence of eddies, like a rhythmic wake pattern.
In a way this mirrors the sense of flow in your paintings and points toward the notion of dimensionality. Can you talk about the relationship to space, particularly in the “Grain” paintings?
I’m curious about what might be the grain of space, if there is one. Is there a smallest unit? What is its nature? Not just how big is it, but how is it connected to its neighbors, and how does it behave? We keep thinking we’ve finally found the smallest thing, and then we find something smaller, and on the really, really small scale things act so differently. There’s an inflection point between the tiny Planck scale and our scale, and across this inflection point is where several different theories of consciousness from the world of physics show up. With the “Grain” paintings, I’m also interested in creating a sense of space that is behind the surface; a shape in the painting that appears to be coming from behind the plane, or is the result of two membranes just lightly touching each other in a particular way for an instant.
That’s a beautiful concept. We haven’t talked about this, but I think it’s important — beauty is an important part of your making. While your work is conceptually grounded, the aesthetic presentation is also very seductive. How do these things come together for you?
I’m a defender of beauty used as tool, or as a gesture or reverence for something, but not a facade. It can be an entry point. I think images or sounds that resonate sensorially for us do so for a reason, and such reasons can be interesting and deep. My idea of beauty, though, involves some level of discomfort and ugliness. I think the best, most successful things really tread a line and challenge your idea of beauty to just the right extent. I’m always looking for that line, and everyone’s line is in a different place, though we share many of them on a cultural level.
In your show at Paula Cooper Gallery you’ve also included a series of calligraphy works. You’ve done calligraphy for a long time, but never shown this publicly until now.
This is the first time I show these drawings outside of the performance that I did with [experimental band] Zs last spring. Although the first artwork I presented to the world was basically calligraphy – giant elaborate letters drawn with Sharpies, like something from an illuminated manuscript. These new drawings are abstract “calligraphy.” I have just returned to drawing in the last few years, after taking a really, really long break from it. It’s absolutely my first, real love, art-practice-wise. I cannot believe that basically I didn’t draw, for years. I haven’t presented these yet; I’ve just been building up stacks and stacks of them. They’re casual in a way, in that they’re fast, and I don’t set out to make something specific or complete when I start one.
You’ve previously referred to these drawings as doing your scales, like musical exercises. As you just mentioned, you created some of the new calligraphy drawings at MOCA Cleveland as part of an experimental sound performance with Zs last spring. Watching you make them conveyed a rhythmical flow in your mark-making that was amplified and became part of the piece.
I do think about it as playing my scales. And with the microphone and a spy camera on the pen, Zs uses them like scores that make their own sounds in real time. It’s something that’s going along concurrently with everything else I’m doing. Sometimes, I’m working out shapes that end up in the tools for the
paintings. They’re included in the show at Paula Cooper in a way that I hope registers as study material, or an abundance of data collected but not yet analyzed.
Studies are often part of an artistic process, but it’s not always easy to see the ways that artists get to their end point. Can you talk a little bit about your process of experimentation? Even the element of failure?
So much failure. The last few months have been very difficult and doubt-filled. I so often have an idea that requires a lot of experimentation to make it even function at all. I’ve been working for months on a new series of paintings and I’m not even sure I’m going to put them in the show. I’ve been operating entirely on faith with them, though that’s a word I hardly ever use.
Faith is important. It’s also courageous.
Faith, for me, is only possible if it’s challenged deeply from time to time. And right now is one of those times.
You experimented with the moving image for the first time this year. What drew you to work in video, and why now?
I definitely didn’t anticipate making video. But when I got more interested in gesture in painting, I wanted to make something with duration where you could see a movement play out, rather than just a slice of it. Time is like another kind of extrusion. I like to think about extruding in as many directions as possible. I have a lot of little phrases or reminders that I repeat to myself all the time, and one of them is, “Extrude the extrusion.” See how far something can extend in a different direction. I apply that to lots of things. I’ve really loved learning a little bit about string theory this year; the idea that particles could be slices or ends of lines rather than points in space. And other people have expanded on that theory and said they’re not lines, they’re membranes. And still other people have said they are actually three-dimensional, like a gas. I just think that’s a beautiful idea, to take the thing that we thought was the most basic and say, actually, it’s just a slice through a different thing. And the slice through a higher dimensional thing is a theme for me, forever.