Nick Raffel @ Prairie
Come inside where it’s okay / And I’ll shake you, ooh ooh – Big Star, “Thirteen”
There are two moments in film guaranteed to make the ol’ Spleen tear up every time. The first comes from Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, following the denouement of Chow’s (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Mrs. Chan’s (Maggie Cheung) not-quite affair. Covering the American bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Chow finds himself at Angkor Wat. Recalling an anecdote from earlier, he whispers something into the hollow of a tree before proceeding to seal it with mud. He walks away, but the camera lingers, holding our gaze on the now filled abscess before the screen fades to black. The second comes from Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse. The film’s two doomed lovers—played by Alain Delon and Monica Vitti—share a kiss through a glass interior door before fully embracing one another at its opening.
If these scenes were debatably “about” anything, it would be love. The kind that has been lost or soon will be. But more importantly, they brim with an ambivalence for boundaries and the ways in which eros is an irregular cycle that oscillates between being within and being without.
This is a kiss. This is an exchange. This is touching without touching, because at present touching would be either impossible, unbearable, or mark the beginning of an intolerable end.
At Prairie, two industrial fans have been installed on opposite sides of a partitioning wall, replacing the gallery's prior models. Additionally, the bottom segment of drywall has neatly been removed on both sides at a height of sixteen inches throughout. Depending on where your attention is drawn, this subtractive gesture might frame a long, mucosal strip of paint that contrasts with the cool gray color that flanks either side, the floor of the opposite side from where one stands, the studs that support what remains, or the footwear choices of whomever may be standing by. The current of the fans and the gaps at the top and bottom initiate a convection system. One fan cycles air upwards and over the wall’s top, where the other subsequently pushes the air below, continuing the system.
It feels only proper to address Prairie, Nick Raffel’s latest exhibition at the titular gallery, with the terms above. Formally, this exhibition (and much of the artist’s practice-at-large) calls to mind Robert Barry’s Inert Gas series or Michael Asher’s 1973 exhibition at Lisson. If we are to consider these historical precedents, it should be unsurprising that Raffel’s practice is frequently characterized by a preoccupation with a plain-spoken pragmatism. How could it not be? His work leaves little to see, and what is visible—in spite of the often alluringly precise feats of engineering on display—tends to be beside the point. Instead of our eyes, Raffel sites reception at the skin.
If there were a cardinal folly that one may fall prey to when explicating on Raffel’s work, it would be to submit his practice solely to the comfort of the concrete. These certainties stem from exclusive considerations of the effectiveness of the work’s operations, siting, and production (or lack thereof). This is something of a catch-22, because any museological or didactic approach to his work would be wise to limit itself to these considerations. But, from an empirical dimension, his work offers an unexpected affective fecundity.
To dismiss the concrete for the poetic or the poetic for the concrete robs Raffel’s project of its core: a principled balance of knowing to sense and sensing to know. So instead of siloing his work within a rebarbative aesthetic register, we might see (or more aptly feel) Raffel’s forays in fluid dynamics for what they are: a fluid erotics.
Coining Raffel’s work as a series of “interventions” may ground it to a sensible historical nomenclature, but it also implies a certain imperative quality prone to crediting a surplus of agency otherwise absent across his practice. For that reason, I see them less as stepping in to declare a problem than I see them as bestowing a solution that coincidentally lends itself to sensation. They are betterments. They are gifts. Raffel doesn’t urge his audience so much as he nods them towards stimuli that might otherwise go entirely unnoticed—a draft, a stifled room, a plenum, a quietness that was, until his arrival, non-existent.
Raffel frequently develops “passive” airflow systems, whereby objects that do not require power are innervated by already existing atmospheric currents. These new airy channels had, up to most points, previously been foreclosed from the environs his sculptures occupy. Although Prairie employs two electric fans, it figures the audience's reception of the work as a largely yielding endgame. Raffel’s work relies on a certain sort of passivity, one that leans less towards indolence and more so in the direction of receptivity, particularly towards vulnerability and its attendant openness to being both felt and possibly, taken for granted.
Prairie does not have viewers so much as it has receivers, who are themselves also amplifiers. A critical mass of body heat may swell or decrescendo in tandem with the collective cycling of breath and breeze that laps against the skin. Raffel metamorphoses an exhibition's (and audience's) otherwise presupposed hermetic character into a system of turbulence, reliant on what Julian Spahr might describe as "… everything turning and small being breathed in and out by everyone with lungs during all the moments.”
The exhibition's mechanics are simple. The fans were purchased at a specific size that could generate an adequate amount of power for their desired effect. Those familiar with Prairie will most likely notice the difference in airflow and, in particular, the lack of noise caused by two industrial fans going at the same time. Likewise, they may be quick to observe the vestigial ribbon of non-grey paint that runs beneath the wall.
Prairie doesn't exactly gush with poetic potential; it has steely nerves, and it must because it trusts that it may affect us and that we may affect it in kind. In the spirit of institutional critique, Prairie, like many of Raffel's prior projects, has a simple request: for the spaces we inhabit to proffer a porosity that might make cohabitation more convivial. But to be in Prairie with others, or even alone, the barely there breeze whispers something to your skin like yearning. A sentiment akin to the ones invoked by In the Mood for Love and L'Eclisse. There is a world here on one side of a wall and another sealed behind it, and we will ache until the possibilities for their touching shall be otherwise. But when the appointed hour comes, it will feel like a kiss; it will feel like turbulence.
