Trisha Baga - Société

“Hercules,” a meditation on hero worship, mixes found YouTube videos and recordings made by Ms. Baga. There
are scenes from a Madonna concert and the London Olympics; penguins on a waterside rock; a teenage boy playing
with sparklers, which, seen in 3-D, seem to shoot sparks into real space; and home movies of Ms. Baga and friends
on a boating and picnicking excursion.
The exhibition’s most emblematic work is “Bag’s Circle,” which centers on a floor-to-ceiling projection of the circular
mouth of a much-used but empty paper bag that is spinning around and around. The revolving, open sack suggests
an ethos of inclusiveness that calls to mind artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Pipilotti Rist.
“Plymouth Rock 2,” Ms. Baga’s installation at the Whitney, is similar to her works at Greene Naftali in the apparent
randomness of its video projection and distribution of banal objects and sculptures on the floor, some of which cast
shadows on the wall.
There is also a certain narrative dimension. Images of heaving ocean swells shot from a swimmer’s point of view,
and of a man with a metal detector searching for treasure on a beach, suggest a kind of quest, a search for a Holy
Grail — which turns out to be Plymouth Rock, the boulder on which, legend has it, the Pilgrims first alighted in the
New World.
An informative brochure essay by Elisabeth Sherman, a Whitney curatorial assistant who organized the show, quotes
Ms. Baga’s description of that hallowed stone’s history. It is “the saddest story of an object, where it becomes a symbol,
and is moved from place to place through overly elaborate processes, broken in half and brought back together,
chipped away, all of this to accommodate various presentation modes ... Right now, they’ve built a gazebo around it
to protect it from the rain. A rock protected from the rain. It’s my favorite sculpture story.”
It is a pathetic Grail, this sad rock, which makes it all the more poignant to contemplate. It is, perhaps, a metaphor
for our beleaguered spiritual condition.
In “Hard Rock,” Ms. Baga’s installation of objects and a video projection at PS 1, a 3-D image of a white cube resembling
a plastic-foam cooler appears intermittently, the object seeming to hover and turn mysteriously in midair. It
is another sort of Grail, one that contains a secret, an unknown something that may or may not be knowable, perhaps
the ultimate key to existence. Or maybe it is just an empty container.
Who knows? What matters to Ms. Baga is the trip, not the final destination.
Trisha Baga’s “Plymouth Rock 2” continues through Jan. 27 at the Whitney Museum of American Art; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. “The Biggest
Circle” runs through Jan. 12 at Greene Naftali, 508 West 26th Street, Chelsea; (212) 463-7770, greenenaftaligallery.com. “New Pictures
of Common Objects” is on view through Jan. 27 at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens; (718) 784-2084, momaps1.
org.
Bülow Wichelhaus GbR / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / contact@societeberlin.com
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Art & Design, 27/12/2012
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