SILENCE IS . . .
“Silence Is . . .” marked an acknowledged departure for Jeff Abell. Instead of constructing his work around intelligently scripted and elaborately orchestrated language, his trademark method, Abell explored the evocative presence of silence in performance. This focus on watching silent activity rather than hearing a text, while problematic at times, gave Abell’s work a simplicity and occasional elegance that nicely complemented the bare-bones performance space at N.A.M.E. Gallery.
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Abell then continued to select poles and move them one by one from the corner to center stage, slowly building what might have been the skeleton for a misshapen wigwam. Abell performed this activity with an odd sense of self-importance, moving the poles with exaggerated care and caution, as if precisely enacting some sacred ritual. The poles thus became “significant objects,” although their intended significance remained unclear. The maneuvering of these simple and beautiful visual elements, which alone would have been enough to captivate me, became muddied with “meaning” because of Abell’s mannered treatment of them.
Also working against the piece was its manner of presentation. By putting himself and his poles in front of an audience sitting in unidirectional seats, Abell forced us to scrutinize his every move. But since the piece consisted only of the accomplishment of a simple task, such scrutiny seemed unwarranted and therefore frustrating. Object Lesson #1 should have been scanned, not studied in its every detail. The piece would also have been more successful if the audience had been mobile, if we might have discovered our own best vantage point, just as Abell constantly examined his sculpture from all different sides.
How this text functioned as a conclusion to the piece eluded me. In fact, all of the texts, while interesting and thought-provoking in and of themselves (“25,000 people voted for Pat Robertson in Iowa. 28,000 people have died of AIDS in the U.S. Question: which is the more frightening statistic?”), shed little light on one another or on the structure of the piece as a whole. Why was the antagonist trying to stop the protagonist from writing on the wall? What was at stake? Why did the antagonist feel compelled to silence the protagonist, when her writings were not particularly volatile? And if the antagonist’s objective was to stop her from writing, why did he not attack her words (erase them) instead of attacking her person?
