Daniel A. Siedell

I do not think about what Ihave already written; I think

about what I am going towrite-which is usually what

I have already written,lightly disguised.

Jorge Luis Borges1

A work of art acquires meaning overtime. This is true for the artist as it is forthe viewer. The production of new worksheds light on previous work, either byextension, differentiation, or as auto-critique. This is perhaps truer of Cuban-born Enrique Martínez Celaya than of alot of artists working today. Althoughtrained as a painter, Martínez Celayaalso produces sculpture, photography,drawings, installations, as well as proseand poetry. Moreover, he works in andthrough the art cycle, series, or project,all of which provides the overarchingidea behind the overwhelming diversityof his artistic means.

Martínez Celaya does not alwaysdetermine beforehand a particular cycleor series. These will often emerge in thecourse of his practice. Perhaps startingwork on a series of photographs feedsinto his paintings while also promptingsome written response that graduallybrings forth the faint contours of aproject, unified thought, or feeling. Or

occasional writings might lead to chancerepresentations that end up giving shapeto a former memory or experience.However, there may be other serialimplications that emerge only retroactively,years after the work has been completed.This is due not only to his predispositiontoward making ever finer adjustments orfinishing touches, but also his convictionthat past actions or deeds cannot bereclaimed without somehow invitingrevision, which by necessity excludes themfrom ever being “finished” in any material

or existential sense. His work is almostWittgensteinian at times, with hiselaborate system of sets and subsets tobe inevitably abandoned in favor of newones, which in turn must also be replacedor at least rebuilt. Attributing criticalsignificance to a Martínez Celaya series isthus almost always a retroactive as well asforward-looking procedure. In this way hiswork is deeply rooted in St. Augustine’sConfessions, which argues that knowledge-the so-called “stomach of the mind”- is atheatre or rumen of memory.

Enrique Martínez Celaya: Coming Home Before and After Schneebett

ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA, (TOP TO BOTTOM) COMING HOME,1999-2006, RE-INSTALLATION DETAIL, SHELDON MEMORIAL ART GALLERY, UNIVERSITY OFNEBRAKSA, LINCOLN, AUGUST 22- OCTOBER 29, 2006. COLLECTION OF DIETER & SI ROSENKRANZ. THE ARTIST AT MT. BALDY, CA, 2006, COURTESY THE ARTIST.

Nowhere is this digestive process moreevident than in the sandwich of two ofMartínez Celaya’s more ambitioussculptural projects (he prefers to callthem “environments”), Coming Home(1999-2001) and Schneebett (2003-04).Although both are canonically discreteworks, they relate closely to one another.In fact, they relate so closely as to be indirect correspondence. First exhibited atGriffin Contemporary in Venice, Californiain 2001, Coming Home was reinstalledthis fall in Lincoln, Nebraska. Initiallyshown in Berlin in 2004, Schneebett wasreprised in Leipzig this summer, only afew months before the repetition ofComing Home. The two shows should thusbe understood first as a diptych, a

transitive or ramified elaboration,achieved over a six-year period (and stillcounting). However their close relationshipis not, as these reprises suggest, merelychronological, with the earlier of themmerely “suggesting” the latter. Theirindependent histories and meanings arefar more inextricably entangled.

COMING HOME

Coming Home features a boy, moldedfrom tar, feathers, and wire, bowing to agigantic, dissolutive elk made of thesame materials and with a mirror setbetween its antlers, which the boy’sdowncast gaze seems to avoid. Theinstallation also included a series of

photographs and works on paper paintedwith emulsified tar and feathers, whichextended and elaborate on the pivotalboy/elk confrontation.

The tar and feathers used byMartínez Celaya lend the scene a rancidatmosphere or debasement and abjection,implying that the encounter between self-here a self-in-formation or even under-self-and other is fraught with personal orphilosophical uncertainty. Furthermore,these base materials allude to the artisticprocess itself, being nearly impossible towork with, and, given their putrid odor,offering a great challenge to Martínez Celaya’sphysical and mental endurance. This iswhy his figures possess a somewhattentative or barely described form,appearing almost on the brink of collapse.But it is not quite accurate to say that whatremains lack “finish,” for they do not look asif they could ever be pulled together,resolved, or made whole.

It is easy to imagine the sculptural duostanding in for the youth’s anticipated ordistantly recalled encounter with a bruteforce of nature-in this case, a forest deity of“Erl-King” (which is the artist playing therole of ambivalent father). There is anarrow gap between boy and beast, notonly heightening the impression of thelatter’s sudden and miraculousappearance, but also inviting the viewer topass through it himself, thus confrontinghis reflection in the mirror perchedprecariously between the elk’s antlers.Although Martínez Celaya claims he didn’tmake the connection at the time, thisprimal scene recalls the legend ofSt.Eustace, who before his Baptist was aRoman general under Trajan namedPlacidus. One day he went out hunting andsaw a stag coming toward him with acrucifix between his antlers, crying out-“Placidus, Placidus, why persecutes thoume. I am Jesus Christ.” The generalbelieved and was baptized, along with allhis family. But the Emperor was so furioushe had Eustace, his wife and childrenplaced inside a brazen bull and burnt todeath. The long religious and artisticpedigree of this encounter (St. Eustacekneeling before the miraculous stag was afavorite subject with Medieval painters)has always emphasized the fuliginousmoment of recognition, of instantaneousAufklärung or metamorphosis.

On the other hand, Coming Home couldbe thought to materialize from the unusuallyredolent imagery of Martínez Celaya’s 1999poem “October,” which invokes autumnalreflections on the ephemeral, transition,and, as Thomas McEvilley has suggested,

FIRST DEGREE artUS 16 JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2007

ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA, RE-INSTALLATION OF SCHNEEBETT, 2004, BRONZE, REFRIGERATION UNIT, BIRCH BRANCHES, PAINTING (OIL, TAR & FEATHERS ON CANVAS), COURTESY OF THEMUSEUM DER BILDENDEN KÜNSTE, LEIPZIG. COLLECTION OF DIETER & SI ROSENKRANZ.

purification, supposedly initiated bysome encounter with death.2 (It isimportant to note that the poem alsospawned another project, the OctoberCycle [2000-04], a series of 23 paintingspresented at the Sheldon Memorial ArtGallery in 2003 and the Museum of Art inFort Lauderdale in 2004.) Yet the Griffin“environment,” acquired in toto bybusinessman Dieter Rosenkranz, wasonly part of the Coming Home project,which also included photographs,drawings, and other related documents,material that would all come to play acentral role in the formative, yet to berealized diptych.

SCHNEEBETT

Perhaps Martínez Celaya’s mostambitious project to date, Schneebett(Snow Bed) owes its title to a 1959 poemby Paul Celan, whose stark yet powerfullanguage remains an important catalystfor the artist’s visual as well asliterary work. This complex split-room environment, created for theBerliner Philharmonie, offers an aestheticreflection on Beethoven’s long and painfulconvalescence in Vienna, culminating inhis death in 1835.

Like Coming Home, Schneebettchallenged Martínez Celaya’s fortitude,obliging him to start, as he says, “from a

disadvantage,” that is, from the very realpossibility of failure, whether technicalor conceptual. The focal part is apartially divided room in which lies a life-size bed cast in bronze, which, throughthe complex workings of an elaborate(and even incongruous) refrigerationsystem, is frozen, festooned with ice-justlike a mortuary bed. Beyond it, actinglike the room’s window, is a painting of abirch grove in tar and feathers, notunlike what Beethoven must have lookedout at while reflecting on his dwindlinglife. At the threshold of the room are astack of birch branches, a poem called“Poisonwood” written in German on thewall, and finally a chair. This chair ismeant for us. It is here that, whilecontemplating the cold and empty bedof snow and ice, we contemplate ourown “bed of death,” as Heidegger calledit. Yet despite this melodramatic aspect,Martínez Celaya says the installation isnot intended as “a diorama (…)recreation of [Beethoven’s] room, but anexorcism of the spirit of the room as itwas.” Schneebett would thus be a placeof silence, of banished or resurgentthoughts, deep in the recesses of aperformance hall where the faint echo ofBeethoven’s music can still be heard.According to the artist, the workrepresents “one embodiment of apossible final moment. It’s the memoryof a room as the room remembers thedemand of being.”3

“To the pensive wood I am driven,”Beethoven yearns in his deeplyintrospective song cycle, An die FerneGeliebte (1816). It is this preciseyearning that is recalled by the birch

grove painting and branches straddlingthe transition between both sides ofSchneebett’s divided room, translatedhere as a “pensive wood” forBeethoven’s (and our own) dyingmoments, inviting remembrance andretrospection. “When Schneebett opened atthe Philharmonie,” Martínez Celayarecalls, “I saw the public waiting in a line tosee it and the orchestra playingBeethoven’s late concertos in the lobby.I was humbled by the futility ofSchneebett, and I love it more for it. Thatday my mind was filled with thoughts ofBeethoven as a boy.”4 It would, however,be two years later, after Schneebett’sreprise at the Museum der bildendenKünste in Liepzig, when the boyresurfaced in Martínez Celaya’s thoughts.

In fact, this image of Beethoven’syouth reappears via Coming Home.Dieter Rosenkranz donated the work’ssculptural components-the boy and theelk- to the Sheldon Memorial Art Galleryat the University of Nebraska Lincoln in2005, which also recently exhibitedthem. Coming four years beforeSchneebett, Coming Home alreadyanticipates the latter’s major themes.Now, Schneebett can be seen to haveeven prefigured Coming Home.

COMING HOME AT THE SHELDON

The Sheldon’s reprise of Coming Homeis very different from its pre-Schneebettincarnation. Martínez Celaya chose toomit the drawings and works on paperthat first accompanied the sculptures in2000. This time there are nine

ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA, (TOP TO BOTTOM) BOY IN LIGHT, THE GARDEN, 2006, TAR, OIL & WAX ON PAPER MOUNTED ON LINEN, 60 X 37 IN. COLLECTION OF THOMAS & ODETTE WORRELL.SCHNEEBETT, 2004, BRONZE, REFRIGERATION UNIT, BIRCH BRANCHES, PAINTING (OIL, TAR & FEATHERS ON CANVAS), INSTALLATION DETAIL.COURTESY OF THE BERLINER PHILHARMONIE.COLLECTION OF DIETER & SI ROSENKRANZ.

photographs, which variously depict theelk, the boy, and an enigmatic nudefemale standing in a birch grove, her bodypainted a birch color with two arrows onit, one pointing to the name “Celan.” Weeven see the boy lurking on a Californianbeach. But the most significant newaddition here is undoubtedly thewallpaper compose of nine-footfragments of an as yet unrealizedphotograph of the same female nude.Titled Woods, the wallpaper wraps aroundthe entire gallery and generally acts as asupport for the photographs, which aredirectly applied this wraparound backdrop.

The environment of Coming Home isdark and gloomy, depriving the viewer ofa firm footing or sense of distance. UnlikeSchneebett’s chair, which sits just thisside of the threshold overlookingBeethoven’s deathbed and the woodsbeyond, here the viewer is thrust directlyinto the spectacle of a birch grove, itselfmimicking the matted branches one hasto cross when “passing over” or throughthe aforesaid portal. In return, Woodsconfounds the sense of visual integritynormally afforded by the presence ofwhite spaces or gaps between individualworks in an art museum. Martínez Celayaenfolds or papers over this modernist,Neo-Kantian separation. But Schneebettis not just about space or living-and-dyingroom, it also gives places to or takes time,repeats itself in and because of thepassage of time.

In reprise or in time, Coming Home isrecast through the lens of the death ormortuary bed. Can it be that this

encounter with the other, which elicitssuch an ambivalent response from theboy, is precisely what we in turn fall preyto, from which we gain such abittersweet morsel of spiritual comfort?It has been said that life is one longpreparation for dying well, that our entirelife’s work is brought to bear in thatmoment such that we do not merelyconfront death, but look beyond it, see itfrom behind or beneath (like Orpheus),from across the divide of the “complete”or finished self. Can dying somehowcomplete the encounter as an openinvitation, as something as tentative orincomplete as the whole of life itself?

Coming Home repeats the beginningof life (art) from the vantage point ofimpending death (finitude). At the endof life, one reflects back across adistance from a position of maturity, asan imaginative, strictly Augustinian“recollection” of the past’s presence.From the perspective of the art process,the work retraces an original foundinggesture, which is also the point ofdeparture from its suddenly remembereddeath or closure.

Neither Coming Home nor Schneebettportrays a particularly flattering orcomforting image of human nature. TheErl-King suddenly appearing out ofnowhere at the height or glint ofnoontime, reemerges at the twilight oflife, when once again the fate ofdissolution looms before us. In an earlysketch by Martínez Celaya, which shedslight on Coming Home’s bipolardeportment, he observes: “I have beeninterested in the spaces covered or

created or made apparent by thought(rational) but not explained by it-thepossibility.” Coming Home BEFORESchneebett projects hope in or at leastdeferral to the future, Coming HomeAFTER Schneebett implies a terminalmemory that does not so much forgive orforget, but makes possible. As Borges said,“what is left at the end of our memory.”5

And perhaps, in this context, before andafter Schneebett, it bears remembering.

Daniel A Siedell is Curator at the Sheldon MemorialArt Gallery and Sculpture garden, University of nebraska,Lincoln.Notes: 1. Jorge Luis Borges, Conversations, ed. RichardBurgin (University Press of Mississippi,1998),242.2.ThomasMcEvilley,“Martínez Celaya: No Horizon Line,” in All theField Is Ours, exh. cat. (Griffin Contemporary, 2003), 5-10.3. Enrique Martínez Celaya, lecture at the AmericanAcademy in Berlin, October 10, 2004. 4. Quoted in“Schneebett,” Martínez Celaya: Early Work (Whale & Star,2006).5.Borges,4.

ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA, COMING HOME, 1999-2006, RE-INSTALLATION DETAILS, SHELDON MEMORIAL ART GALLERY, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA, LINCOLN, AUGUST 22- OCTOBER 29, 2006. COLLECTION OF DIETER & SI ROSENKRANZ.

FIRST DEGREE artUS 16 JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2007