Infrastructural Aesthetics

Hiding in Plain Sight began with a consideration of the iPhone: a minimal, geometric conduit for infinite access to goods, services, and people. Yet, when turned off, it is reduced to a shiny, flat, and somewhat mute object. Millennia from now, it could be rediscovered and easily mistaken for something rudimentary—a token of exchange or a roof shingle, for example. To consider the objecthood of a mobile phone is also to consider the relationship between an object and its potential to activate what lies within. When dormant, the phone is simply a combination of plastics, glass, and rare mineral microchips. Yet, when networked and plugged in, it contains limitless potential, information beyond measure, and access to a multitude of intertwined global infrastructures.

Operating simultaneously at the level of the individual and at a global scale, infrastructure is powerful—it defines the shape of nations, cities, cultures, economies, and daily life. It creates a scaffolding of support that allows individuals, corporations, and political entities to distribute information, access, wealth, services, and goods. In contrast to the analogue infrastructure of the 20th century—highways, trains, telecommunications, and localized government agencies—infrastructure today lurks beneath the surface, barely visible. From undersea fiberoptic cable routes to data server cooling centers at the North Pole, complex global supply chains, free ports, satellite surveillance, Google Maps, internet search engines, social media superpowers, and digital financial technologies, these entities are critical in keeping our basic systems (and daily lives) moving. Yet they exist primarily outside our field of vision, and we have little knowledge of how they function, or at what cost.

Architect Keller Easterling defines this relationship to visibility in terms of infrastructural space:

Infrastructure is considered to be a hidden substrate—the binding medium or current between objects of positive consequence, shape, and law. Yet today, more than the grid of pipes and wires, infrastructure includes pools of microwaves streaming from satellites and populations of atomized electronic devices that we hold in our hands. The shared standards and ideas that control everything from technical objects to management styles also constitute an infrastructure. Far from hidden, infrastructure is now the overt point of contact and access between us all—the rules governing the space of everyday life. [1]

Easterling’s notion of infrastructural space provides a potent lens through which to consider the discursive nature of abstraction in art today. Much like the forms of infrastructure that she describes, art’s ability to function at a symbolic register is also critical to its reception. And throughout this exhibition, artworks chart unexpected but real connections between the aesthetics of minimalist abstraction and the global infrastructures that characterize life in the Information Age. Hiding in Plain Sight includes works by 18 artists from around the world, both within and beyond Pace Gallery’s program: Etel Adnan, Yto Barrada, Aria Dean, Simon Denny, Torkwase Dyson, Sam Gilliam, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Kapwani Kiwanga, Alicja Kwade, Tony Lewis, Rodney McMillian, Trevor Paglen, Walid Raad, Adrián Villar Rojas, Hito Steyerl, Rayyane Tabet, Jessica Vaughn, and Fred Wilson. Showcasing a wide range of media and outdoor sculpture, the exhibition explores new modes of abstraction and how they manifest the complexity of modern life through forms that map unseen connections between time and location.

Mining and interrogating the edges of infrastructural space and its material representations, these artists create forms that play with what is hidden and what remains visible. Shown collectively, their works demonstrate a new minimalist approach to form that creates an open space for perception and interpretation of the work’s subject matter (rather than exploring the purity of form itself, as in the earlier Minimalist movement). These pieces, despite appearing dormant, are activated by a constellation of information that is distilled within the formal dimensions of the work, extending beyond the boundaries of the object. As Michael Truscello has recently proposed in his 2021 book on art and the necropolitics of infrastructure, "Infrastructural visibility must be produced and negotiated through semio-materialist practices, of which the circulation of artistic expressions is a prominent component.” [2] In this way, artists have the ability to interrogate “the gaps, interstices, and zones of opacity as infrastructural facts..." [3]

Rayyane Tabet’s Steel Rings (2013–ongoing), installed on the second-floor terrace of the gallery, similarly evokes the language of Minimalism. Yet on closer examination, Tabet’s geometric sculptures function as surrogates for a specific place, time, and situation. The installation replicates a section of steel rings from the Trans-Arabian Pipeline—a form of multinational, interconnected extraction infrastructure that transported oil across the Middle East from 1950-1982. The pipeline traversed a long and arduously inefficient route, defined by the borders of five political entities in the Middle East. It stretched some 1,213 km (753.72 miles) to travel the short distance from Dhahran in Saudi Arabia to Zharani in Lebanon. Each of Tabet’s steel rings is the same diameter and thickness as the original pipeline and each is engraved with their distance from the pipe’s source and corresponding geographic coordinates, representing a single kilometer of the pipeline’s journey through and around these fraught geopolitical territories. Twenty-three rings are included in the exhibition, representing the pipeline’s route across the Golan Heights, an area of Syria occupied by Israeli forces following the region’s 1967 war.

Many of the works that comprise Hiding in Plain Sight emerge from a discovery of curious, obscured histories and little-known facts. The practice of unearthing information from various sources as part of an artistic process results in networks of information that chart new ways of thinking through colonial history, corporate entities, technological advancements, and the flow of capital. Throughout the exhibition, minimal—and often opaque—objects point to specific subjects that reveal, question, and challenge the hidden connective tissues of infrastructural systems. As if secreted into the means of their making, information can be imbued within the object itself. For example, Kapwani Kiwanga’s two-tone Linear Paintings—recalling the work of Imi Knoebel or Blinky Palermo’s color studies—are painted on drywall, becoming an architectural chimera for the color theories of Faber Birren, who examined the relationship between human psychology and color in the early 20th century, particularly when used in institutional settings. The same can be stated of Suki Seokyeong Kang’s approach to traditional Korean painting, weaving, and musical notation. In her paintings, sculptures, and installations, aesthetic histories metamorphose and are distilled into new modular forms, carrying forth relational and object frameworks for the individual within the community.

Tony Lewis’s site-specific shorthand drawing abstracts the word “William,” in reference to William F. Buckley, the Goldwater-era “father” of modern American Conservatism. [4] The stenographer’s mark of curved and bisected lines is etched into the wall with nails, stretched rubber bands, and powdered graphite so that the word is larger than life, obscuring language to deconstruct the weight of Buckley’s persona and his deep and detrimental sway on American culture, most heavily impacting African Americans. In Lewis’s laborious drawings, words can be seen as objects heavy with history. [5]

Specters of the past are present throughout the exhibition. In some cases, archival data and historical documents are transformed into poetic evidence of histories intentionally obfuscated. Torkwase Dyson’s abstract paintings are formally grounded in the histories and futures of Black and Brown bodies navigating the architectonics of liberation and environmental racism across distances of time and geography. In thinking about what Dyson has called the “hypershape” (a geometry culled from the history of Black liberation), she states:

When you think about these histories you see that each one of these individuals self-liberated through a kind of architecture whether they found the architecture or built it. For instance, Box Brown built the architecture; Harriet Jacobs found the architecture. So what I’m doing is thinking about these ideas of improvisation, infrastructure, architecture, and thinking through, as a painter, a system that I’ll need to produce something—that’s paintings and drawings—that reflect that liberation, that reflect that freedom, that reflect that knowledge, that reflect that sense of movement and insistence on liberation by any means necessary. [9]

Jessica Vaughn’s Hope Labor, Flat and Folded (2021) likewise gestures to geometric forms that both recall and reject the language of Minimalism. Her present series of work evokes the sculptures of Ellsworth Kelly, but deeper inspection reveals a scaled replication of a set of visual tools from the training manuals of the Occupational Information Network, the world’s largest resource of vocational training.The shapes are designed to predict a worker’s ability to maximize productivity by training the student’s dexterity, hand-eye coordination, and spatial recognition. The original letter-sized sheets of construction paper—scored, cut, and ready to fold into three-dimensional shapes—are here reproduced into large-scale, powdered-coated aluminum panels. Positioned on the floor of the gallery, they are no longer usable as training models and instead become relics of standardized tests and the push for increased production. Enlarged and retooled into minimalist sculptures, the objects pose questions about not only labor and productivity but also the taciturn nature of Minimalism in the past.

The relationship between Minimalism and art being made today extends beyond the question of reframing the problems of the earlier movement. Artists now employing these past visual languages do so not to make art about art, but instead to make art about the world we are living in and how a multitude of perspectives are required at any one time to see complexity with clarity. The formal vocabulary associated with Minimalism here creates space for the unsteadiness of complex histories and the importance of multiplicity without fixing a position or perspective.

This approach to form is as multifaceted as the infrastructure that defines our daily lives. It is an abstraction of an abstraction. Minimalism, today, strips information down to its most essential forms, regardless of the complexity of interwoven stories that may be concealed within the object’s making. It is as simple as a two-tone color scheme on a painted wall, trinitite and glass, a clay-covered tondo—these objects are the formations of what remains when subjects and information are digested and transformed by artists, each of whom brings their own histories and subjectivities to the process. These minimal objects invite curiosity and slow looking; they require questions and engagement to activate the expansive narrative the works embody. In this way, they function as a kind of operating system, performing an abstract representation of how information becomes form and how form can, in turn, create information.