Luis Jacob
"Luis Jacob" by Dan Adler, Fall 2007, p. 138
Luis Jacob’s contribution to documenta 12 expressed his ongoing preoccupation with the gesture, communication, utopia and the history of modernism.
Installed as a continuous frieze at eye level in its own gallery on the top floor of the Museum Fridericianum, Jacob’s Album III (2004) consists of 159 panels, each featuring a montage of photographs on an unframed sheet of plastic laminate. At first glance, the work recalls Gerhard Richter’s Atlas and Hanne Darboven’s repetitive drawings, both of which feature expansive arrangements of found imagery on identical panels in regular grid formations. Like these, Jacob’s work offers a heterogeneous display that is resistant to being categorized or itemized; however, Jacob’s project contains only found photographs and registers less explicitly as a discourse paralleling his other artistic production than does Richter’s.
One rapid scan yielded images of stage sets, children at play, modernist sculptures, people wearing hoods, a dome on fire, Constructivist costumes, a survey of facial expressions and a line of naked soldiers being inoculated. Certain common themes suggested a level of care and concentration that worked effectively in counterpoint to the randomness and casualness permeating the work as a whole. Indeed, one could not resist striving to detect tentative typologies, idiosyncratic linkages, formal patterns. For instance, Jacob seems interested in providing a history of idealistic gestures performed within high- and low-cultural contexts ranging from teen dances to art spaces. At times, the work seemed to provide a vehicle for a meditation on the successes and failures of utopian projects, particularly within the Soviet and American contexts of the avant-garde and architecture. It was a strange compulsion: struggling to find glimmers of meaning or purpose in representations that appeared to have been found and collected with whimsical abandon and folly.
The other work on view—the video installation A Dance for Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice, Based on the Choreography of Françoise Sullivan and the Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth (With Sign-Language Supplement) (2007)—may also be read as an enactment of gestures of abandon, an optimistic search for the creative potential inherent in the interpretation of modern dance and sculptural forms. Projected on a free-standing wall was the image of a man—wearing a skirt, sweater, mittens and fur cap—dancing in a snowy landscape. His movements ranged from functional arm rotations intended to promote warmth to campy efforts to portray an animal sensing danger or a playful come-hither look to yoga-like exercises to the use of unlikely props—T-shirts on hangers—to smack and beat the frozen ground. On the floor stood two monitors, each showing a woman performing sign language, a relatively organized and efficient system of communication, but only understandable to a few.
The relationship between the signers and the dancer thus remained obscure, but served to foreground the creative potential that can arise from initial failures to communicate. Undaunted visitors could plant themselves on chairs and peruse a brochure of assorted quotations by Sullivan, Hepworth, Paul-Émile Borduas and Herbert Read dealing with notions of freedom and anarchism within the contexts of dance, sculpture and politics. While seated, one felt like a performer too—the chairs were among the most brightly lit objects in the gallery. Jacob’s viewers were perhaps contributing to, or completing, a personalized and satisfying account of the performative gesture.
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