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 REVIEW Poetic Pavilion David Jurist's Pavilion/Concourse suggests the excitement of the unknown. BY KATE BONANSINGA |
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Pavilion/Concourse by David Jurist Lewis & Clark College, Gallery of Contemporary Art 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, 768-7960 Ends March 13 A poetry slam will take place at 7 pm Saturday, Feb. 27 in the gallery, in part to acknowledge the pavilion as a poetic retreat in Chinese society. David Jurist's Concourse, a white cylinder 12 feet tall and 13 feet in diameter, almost bars entrance to the Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College. Ironically, its inspiration is airport architecture--a facilitator of movement. Robbed of its title, this monolith would not be easily associated with air travel, though its blank neutrality encourages associations with the unknown and yet-to-be-experienced. A smooth, white plaster coat covers most of the surface of Concourse, but toward the top, raw Sheetrock ends in a ragged edge. It's as if the construction crew moved on before the project was complete, to begin again, perhaps, in another society defined by expansion and mobility. Pavilion, in the larger rear gallery, also conveys the concept of passage and the physicality and scale of architecture, though its source, an 18th-century Beijing pavilion, is more specific, and Jurist's recreation is more literal. Thick, weathered corner posts and lintels support fluorescent light fixtures that rest parallel to one another, inclined like roof beams. The pavilion's floor of pebbles is bisected by a narrow, meandering body of flowing water; it's reminiscent of a three-dimensional aerial map of a river surrounded by flat land. Here nature resides within an architectural structure, the reverse of the norm. Jurist's pavilion does not invite entrance. It thus recalls Japanese Zen gardens, where an expanse of pebbles represents water and is meant to be meditated on from a distance. Chinese gardens, on the other hand, are meant to be strolled through and enjoyed, their structures utilized. Pavilions are an integral component of traditional Chinese gardens: They are symbols of humans in harmonious interaction with nature. Many pavilions are, like Jurist's, without walls, accessible from the outdoors. Historically such gardens were the only access that many city dwellers, particularly women with restricted mobility due to bound feet, had to natural surroundings. They offered retreats for scholars, nobility and high-ranking officials to study, write, paint and compose poetry. Some pavilions were used for performances or recitals and were elevated to indicate the scholar's respect for the artist, who was regulated by Confucian social hierarchies and might rank far below him. But it's Taoist, rather than Confucian, ideas that most aptly interpret Jurist's installation and connect its two parts. Taoists thought of the mountains as the realm of immortals, pillars to the heavens. Mountain pavilions, like their urban garden counterparts, offered a quiet reprieve conducive to creativity and philosophical thought. They offered an intermediary realm between this life and the one beyond. A poem by Gong Xian, a 17th-century Chinese painter, is inscribed on one of his vertical, monochromatic landscape paintings: "Outside the immortal's abode clouds rise beside mountain peaks. He erects a spacious pavilion to live above the clouds." Likewise, Jurist's Concourse looks like a stark, white pillar, connecting the gallery floor to the ceiling, the earth to the sky. Pavilion also connects the sky and earth: Some of the fluorescent lights shine upward, toward the heavens, while some shine down. Whereas the urban pavilion was a destination, the mountain hut was both a creative retreat and a stop along the way to another, more desirable world. This parallels the airport concourse as a stop between one place and the next. At its best, travel can be a valuable rite of passage, a poetic experience, rather than a means to an end. Jurist's art lies not in the structures themselves but rather in the viewers' momentary experience of those structures and the longer-term, cerebral impact of that experience, much like a brief but formative trip. A statement by Marcel Proust is imprinted on the wall between the two galleries: "...all these details, because they gave me such exaltation when I saw them, have survived despite the passing of time, even though the paths themselves are no more and the people who once crowded them are long since dead." Of the two works, Pavilion is the more successful. As a reconstruction and reinterpretation, it's clearly postmodern, with obvious references, from the fluorescent lights of a contemporary office interior to the framework of Chinese garden pavilions. Concourse is more experimental and would benefit from further resolution. Both structures allude to exposure: Pavilion because it has no walls, Concourse because it seems unfinished. Both suggest transitions and the excitement of the unknown, but Pavilion makes its statement with more clarity and refinement.
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