Notes on Katie Paterson: There is another sky

Romantic minimalism—an oxymoronic sensibility that grounds the work of Katie Peterson in her exhibition at James Cohan at 52 Walker St. Dressing the walls are fleeting thoughts that consequently solidify within your skull and leave a heavy weight in the back of your mind. I walked slowly, but I never truly paused to read. I flicked my eyes across every word and let them all become fluttering moths of terror, of horror, of pleasure, of curiosity. Once I toured the quieted, poetic pulses, I landed and immediately sunk into the Crest of 1000 waves: a work so painfully plain, gorgeously boring. I hadn’t reviewed the checklist as of yet, so instead, I endeared myself to this textured, yet plain white framed artwork hung on a plain white wall.

Endearingly, gorgeously, and painfully boring—when I got home I lamented to my lover about the entrancing, haunting, and enveloping power of something as unassuming as a wall of various whites. Intellectually raised by Barthes, I haven’t an inkling of desire to understand Paterson’s intent, but what is on the walls of James Cohan are phenomenally vacuous works of art: there is nothing within them on a visual register. The labor, the suffering, the contemplation, the theorization are all imperceptible. There is texture, but it is a visual texture that reminds of Philip Glass’s “Music in Fifths” (1969)—it builds and builds and builds and at some point the track must stop. Before I finish this paragraph, this boredom, quietude, and plainness are the perfection of artmaking. Paterson obfuscates sincerity with an austere declaration of each work’s objecthood and materiality, and to embark on studying the materiality of these works, the Romanticism fills you with the necessary tremors of horror and splendor.

Many press releases lean on the crutch of just stating the ‘themes’ of an artist’s oeuvre, and for Paterson, James Cohan has cited her themes as “nature, ecology, geology, and deep time.” However, art cannot exist as an apparatus for conveying themes; artworks, especially such stoic works as Paterson’s, explicate these themes along a particular political axis or axes.

“Venus’ sky / recreated / on earth”: There is a loss, a dissolution of some globalized, communal identity present in these lines. Paterson uses the displacement, fossilization, and artification and commodification of Nature to converse with the callous conversationalist that is Capital. However, the work does nothing to dissuade from the very processes which ground their existence. There is no particular critique of the displacement of the Ocean water or how Earth arrived at the Ashes of 10,000 unique trees. There is only the latent thread of connection between the visions granted by the poetic exhales written in sterling  silver.

At the end of this exhibition, by that I mean as I was leaving the space, I immediately recalled my first time reading Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence: 

“Attritional catastrophes that overspill clear boundaries in time and space are marked above all by displacements—temporal, geographical, rhetorical, and technological displacements that simplify violence and underestimate, in advance and in retrospect, the human and environmental costs. Such dis- placements smooth the way for amnesia, as places are rendered irretrievable to those who once inhabited them, places that ordinarily pass unmourned in the corporate media”

“Consequently, one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust our rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental justice. If, under neoliberalism, the gulf between enclaved rich and outcast poor has become ever more pronounced, ours is also an era of enclaved time wherein for many speed has become a self-justifying, propulsive ethic that renders “uneventful” violence (to those who live remote from its attritional lethality) a weak claimant on our time.”

As I am writing this, the words “Doomsday Clock” are trending on Twitter. However, by the time I get off the train, they will no longer be trending (at least the app won’t highlight it anymore). Paterson’s quest for the viewer to embark on boredom, on staring at a white wall, at a black square, at words with no narrative impulse, is the very thing that undoes this attritional violence wreaked upon the time of the Human. Paterson reintroduces folds into temporal collapse and does not allow our desires to compel us towards acceleration toward our Capital-mandated suicidality. Paterson haunts us with a horrific and stupefying boredom, and that is perhaps the most important sensation needed from art at the moment.

Katie Paterson: There is another sky (January 10 - February 22, 2025) at James Cohan Gallery (52 Walker)