...But not simpler...
Catalog Essay by Shamim M. Momin

The title of Michael Genovese’s exhibition (Lines and Cracks and Zebras and Horses) draws in part on a colloquial aphorism — “when you hear hooves beat behind you, don’t expect to see a zebra” or “when you hear hooves beat, think horses, not zebras” — which typically is understood to evolve from the principle of Occam’s (or Ockham’s) razor. Attributed to the 14th century logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham, the principle states, “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate,” or “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.”

Over time, this principle has been largely misunderstood to mean that as a general rule, in both science and philosophy, one should stick with the most “obvious” hypothesis or conclusion, as that is typically the correct one. In fact, what Occam proposed was a guideline to developing a theory, not a conclusion: the idea that when you have competing theories that make the same predictions/conclusion, the simpler is better. Importantly, the notion of simpler is not necessarily what seems most obvious (which usually includes one’s untested biases, preferences and predilections), but rather the one with the most observable elements (empirically testable), the fewest new assumptions. It is a means to keep one’s focus rigorous, to start with the things we can observe, and not yet add to it the seduction of complex settings to achieve the same goal. It is, merely, a way to begin, a rule of thumb—not a scientific axiom as it is often employed. Also critically, while intended to separate two theories that make the same predictions, it in no way precludes that another theory might make a different prediction altogether about the same phenomena. It does not deny the complexity of organisms, it just suggests a complex thing does not obviate the expectation of empirical simplicity. It does not promise that our notion of ‘simple’ (a subjective term if there ever was one) might not be quite different from that of, say, quantum particles, why the sky is blue, the light of stars, or the reason/function of a cat’s purr.

The zebra/horse aphorism is interestingly vague in its setup, particularly in the first phrasing cited above. That is, one might could read it as a metaphorical interpretation of the Occam’s razor, wherein the horse is the more observable, simpler theory and the zebra the more unprovable, speculative, with the hooves beats are the conclusive result (the same in both “theories”) — in which case it’s reasonably true to the original   principle.

It could also be understood in as the more common misreading of Occam, suggesting that more often than not, the most common conclusion is going to be correct more times than incorrect. The phenomenon is hooves beat overheard, the conclusion should be horses that cause it — it’s a law of averages idea. However, one should note that assumes the listener lives where horse geographically outnumber zebras, a fact true for a large portion of the world’s population, but not all. While it’s still overall the greatest probability, it is still based on assumptive conditions; there is a simple contextual set where this would not be a good idea (i.e. certain plains and mountains of Africa). In this way, it’s actually used most often in medical disciplines, for diagnosis — and in turn coined the term “zebra,” for those uncommon diagnosis that require exactly the kind of contextual thinking, attention to possible unique, unusual circumstances, that the probability approach smoothes out (fans of the excellent, if hyperbolic, show, House, are familiar with this scenario…). What I like about this misinterpretation is that it embraces the idea of embracing what’s not there, meaning those moments are real, if less familiar, and they do exist, quite often in exactly the spaces where we assume the familiar should be. It says “think horses,” or “don’t expect a zebra,” — not that they don’t exist, that they might not be what you see when you do turn around and look.

I saw this on a sign recently, “science is the poetry of reality,” a thought with which I wholeheartedly agree. Genovese’s exhibition similarly takes this poetry of reality — the quiet, overlooked bits and pieces of things we see and alchemizes them (to silver, in this case, not gold, but the metaphorical notion retains). Drawn from disparate, often familiar or banal moments of lines and cracks, the delicate, quiet sculptural interventions reconsider and combine occurrences as varied as a crack in the artist’s kitchen floor, a damaged mihrab from 12th century Iran, a varicose vein (a sub-epidural “crack,” if you will), a line from a captcha (those computer tests that determine a human is using the site, not a machine), and the seam line of an Ancient Greek horse head sculpture, and the stress fracture from a brick building in Compton.

Cracks are typically perceived as the break between two parts, or rather the imminent breaking into parts of what was once whole. Lines, on the other hand, stand stalwart in better graces, that which connects two points, and is often the shorter way between disparate things. While it’s been knocked about quite a bit philosophically and ideologically, linear thinking is a point of pride for many, in that it implies a clear succession of points of cause and effect culminating in a empirically supported and useful conclusion. “Cracked” as an adjective, however, is a synonym for crazy, or at least not quite right, crooked, off-kilter. Lines, good, cracks, bad.

Lines and Cracks and Zebras and Horses”: in that grammatical setup, it seems to parallel lines with zebras, cracks with horses. Following the logic above, this would suggest that ‘lines’ are the less empirically likely to be the right theory, while ‘cracks’ the better assumption in similar situations, cracks. This seems a reversible of expectation, combining the common connotations of all these, one would expect to find the zebras in the cracks, and let the horses follow the lines. However, the parallel is not strictly correct; rather than a comma between the couplets, Genovese connects them with the same conjunction, “and,” making them technically a list of equivalent things. Perhaps lines aren’t the best or shortest ways between objects or places, perhaps they separate rather than connect parts. Perhaps cracks show richness formerly hidden, reveal depth where there was only surface, or function as a suture point that holds things together with true delicacy and vulnerability. Perhaps probabilities change, other options are equally likely, or the unlikely just isn’t unlikely that time—it will be easier to see zebras today, or another uncommon ungulate: a camel, a deer, an elk, a donkey, a gazelle. Perhaps, even once, those hoof beats are a unicorn instead.

Shamim M. Momin is an American art director and curator of contemporary art. Momin is head of the Los Angeles Nomadic Division, a non-profit art organization in Los Angeles, California. She is also an Adjunct Curator for the Whitney Museum of American Art where she co-curated the 2008 and 2004 Whitney Biennial exhibitions.

Spotting cracks in the system
Los Angeles Times, Sharon Mizota | pg. D18-19 | January 25, 2013 

Walking into Michael Genovese’s exhibition a viewer might think there’s been a horrible earthquake, or that the space is simply in a state of disrepair. Snaking over the surface of every wall are large, meandering cracks, with unsettling implications for the building’s structural integrity.

But this unease dissipates quickly. The fissures are in fact shiny and metallic, as if filled not with putty but quicksilver. And closer inspection reveals that they are not cracks at all but cut metal objects, affixed to the walls.

This realization feels like a bit of bait-and-switch. Genovese’s installation comes on like a site-specific piece — an engagement with the space of the gallery itself. But the fact that the “cracks” are actually individual sculptural pieces that can be removed and possibly reapplied to different walls feels cynical. They are then just objects to be bought and sold.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But additional context is provided by a photocopied book depicting fissures and lines of all kinds: cracks in the sidewalk, maps, zebra stripes, a pendant split into two halves.

Genovese is interested in how lines divide and connect; create distance or communication. His sculptures turn these vectors into objects in their own right, emphasizing the spaces in between rather than on either side. In our increasingly Balkanized political climate, it’s a more than welcome metaphor.

“Shards of Hope.” 
The Cornell Sun, Daveen Koh,  January 31, 2013

Visitors to artist Michael Genovese’s solo show Lines and Cracks and Zebras and Horses in Los Angeles have cause for concern — massive, silvery cracks run along the otherwise pristine gallery walls. The room appears to be on the verge of crumbling. These fault lines are not really chasms (although you can never really be sure about these things in contemporary art). They are more like casts of chasms, memorials to anything that might take on the form of a line, however sacred or banal. Accompanied by a book of line-dominated images, notably a thunderous herd of zebras, the impossibly reflective sculptures are arresting for their scale and symbolism. Each sculpture is the convergence of disparate worlds: Pompeii frescoes meet Metallica; a crack from an Iranian Mihrab dated 720 A.D. fuses with a mortar line from the vicinity of Castillo de San Marcos in Florida. Looking at them, it’s entirely appropriate to feel like you’re in the throes of an earthquake.

In an interview with Genovese explained that his work is about “designating value” to fragments of life. Whether it’s staring at stray hairs in the bathtub or gazing at a historical landmark (a very loaded term, in the context of this show), these moments mean something because, in that instant, we are registering the things around us and trying to make sense of them. By turning a crack, usually associated with damage, into a sculpture, Genovese alters the meaning of the crack.

I like Genovese’s work. It can be simultaneously gentle and violent as it interrupts the everyday and forces you to look at everything twice. The art I am most drawn to often doesn’t conventionally look like art. It’s the kind of art that can be mistaken as debris and accidentally get cleared away by a zealous museum cleaner, as happened to Gustav Metzger’s installation at the Tate Britain in 2004. Incidentally, Metzger’s work was conceived as a comment on the finite nature of art.

Another urban intervention is The Shard, presently the tallest building in Western Europe and London’s highly metaphorical monument to the new kind of financial world, among other things. The Renzo Piano-designed building, with a top like a shattered beer bottle (as The Guardian’s architecture critic Oliver Wainwright has rightly pointed out), is a baffling and unmistakable sight in London’s South Bank.

Among the most prescient critics, I think, is Prof. Hal Foster, art, of Princeton University. In an interview with The Guardian, Foster prefaced his critique of the building by admitting his ambivalence about perceiving the building as image. It is too tempting for many critics to condemn The Shard as no more than spectacle. Foster does not succumb. He reminds us that architecture can bring order to urban life, and “too often in cities people are lost” as they don’t have “symbols to guide them.” The Shard, a striking pyramidal assemblage of splintered triangles, could certainly come in useful as a landmark. That’s at least one point its detractors can agree on. Foster’s allusion to orientation is also unsurprising, since it’s a well-established tenet of urban theory. The landmark is one of the five elements of the city’s new image proposed by the urban planner Kevin Lynch; the stronger and more prominent these elements are and the more harmoniously they are stitched together, the more legible a cityscape is.

I found most of Foster’s commentary almost disappointingly uncontroversial, until he seemed to light up, near the end, when he likened The Shard to “radical surgery” where “they stick a needle into your heart to get it to go again.”

The violence Foster employs is, I believe, justified. His view is that, juxtaposed with other iconic buildings like the Borough Market, The Shard disrupts the neighborhood. There is no attempt at mediation, to bridge the gap in scale between the pedestrian strolling along the Thames and the gargantuan building. I am inclined to agree with Foster’s assessment, though I will add that if The Shard is indeed a monument to a glittering financial world, then the violent disruption is fitting.

Meaning making is a highly tenuous exercise, as should by now be obvious. The more theory I try to read, the more apparent it seems that interpretation is the unification of seemingly unrelated elements, like how Genovese merges ancient Italian frescoes with American heavy metal. Nevertheless, the whole exercise makes perfect sense to me, because I have never been able to forget the words of the first theorist I encountered at Cornell. In The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch wrote, “Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.” I know it can all go very wrong — you can end up very lost or injured as you invest more of yourself into everything that you read and write. There’s also a fine line between creative interpretation and well, delusion, and who should be the judge of where that boundary lies? When so many others seem to have said something cleverer, why should I expect to arrive at something newer and better? I defer to the wisdom of those who have sought and found. Former Prof. Colin Rowe, architecture, wrote in The Cornell Journal of Architecture with characteristic adventurousness, “Therefore to agitate and to animate a very few ideas we will begin with a set piece which is going to be partly history and partly parable.” Or more simply put by Renzo Piano, designer of The Shard, “The best things in life are always a little dangerous.”

Natalie Hegert
Interview

Los Angeles, Jan 13, 2013: As I drove up the 5 freeway to meet Michael Genovese, my car radio was tuned to 88.9 FM. Between Anaheim and Norwalk, the radio transmission began to flicker back and forth between the two college radio stations that share the frequency in Southern California. For a few miles the radio was caught between KUCI and KXLU, between mellow beats and experimental noise. I let it play through, enjoyed the give and take, the struggle.

Michael Genovese, whose solo exhibition Lines and Cracks and Zebras and Horses is currently on view in West Hollywood, makes work out of fragments and fractures: fragments of histories and conversations overheard; fractures found in all manner of places, from walls of antiquity, to a crack found in the floor boards of a house in Los Angeles. These lines, derived from a combination research and serendipity, appear as faults in the architecture of the gallery, yet reveal themselves as something between sculpture and installation, zig zags of mirrored metal bolting across the walls. Some of the works cause gaps in perception when viewed from particular angles; some are reflective and come alive as you walk past. While he installed these works in the gallery space, we talked about these fragments and fractures, and bout gestures, value, fear, and Metallica.

NH: How did you go from text-based works to line and drawing? What’s your relationship with drawing essentially?

MG: What interests me is how the written word is direct and communicates through a filter of handwriting analysis and cross cultural comparisons. The space between words, the direction of how they are written, how paragraphs and columns are divided, the space and tension between things – these aspects are what pulled me in closer to working with just the line, void of text.  

Focusing on how, where, and why cracks and lines appear was a cathartic solution to help dissolve a lot of the clutter. To express a direct statement about what I have learned, and pose new questions about the work I am making.

NH: How does this work relate back to your interests in society and history?

MG: I recently completed a project (P.S./P.P.S, 2008-2012), wherein the public was asked to write and draw on surfaces I designed. They were placed in social spaces in different regions of the country, and given specific themes. As the final part of the project, I researched, transcribed, and produced subjective works born out of the unedited information and compositions I discovered. Lines were extracted from images I found through that research, or which correlated with the text and interests from the project. 

The work represents a sort of symbolic meaning to me. From what I’ve recorded, the sentiment is that of disrepair, signaled by a change – some willing to go with it, some not. It’s also worth looking at what is not there. What people are not talking about, or what is removed, scratched out, or redacted from the dialogue. 

NH: I’m curious as to how you’re translating those lines that you find; how do you reconstruct them?

MG: An example is in Augustine Mihrab, where a traced segment from a found image of a fractured Mihrab in Iran from 720 A.D. is coupled with a mortar line I was studying at Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida. The work evolves by tracing and drawing with these lines. By placing them together I am creating a time line and a combined history of place that wouldn’t ordinarily exist. What made it work from me is how it looked aesthetically, what I learned from both of them and the questions they pose as a combination. What does it mean to have the damaged line extracted from the image an old Mihrab, fabricated and situated with a line copied from a monument of early American history? 

NH: So where do you make the connection between Pompeii and Metallica, for instance?

MG: Sifting through images of fractured antiquities, I arrived at the Pompeii frescoes. What I was drawn to were not the paintings or the decorative elements, but the cracks in the wall. They felt as if they were the most prominent part in the visual narrative, and the most natural and visually compelling line that summed up the story. I extracted those moments and coupled them with lines or fractures from my environment to create this sort of time line of particular situations. 

NH: Well you see passage of time, disintegration…

MG: Passage of time, disintegration… Or how about something happened bigger than the work itself and how painting or the environment is shaped by what is going on outside of the work at hand. The work is a byproduct as a signifier of a story. 

NH: So what about Metallica?

MG: ...And Justice for All, for one, is a brilliant album. It’s a record I grew up with, but never imagined that it would make its way into my work. Everything about that album cover was highlighted because of the research I was doing. It embodied what was going on at the time. Lady Justice blinded and tipping, her breasts exposed and money flying around everywhere, the walls behind her cracking. So, I paired it up with what I was working with from the Pompeii frescoes. For me, it becomes this quieted relic of time. 

NH: For a future archaeology…

MG: It’s not archaeology, but in my mind, if someone were to trace this and find it’s sources, using a Google image search, or whatever they have in the future, is funny to me. People in smocks sitting around listening to ...And Justice for All trying to make sense of it, is a great fantasy. Just recently, I was looking at the Stravinsky drawing by Picasso. This was a drawing I had to recreate, upside down, over and over again as a kid learning how to draw. It had me revisit and investigate who this person was, and there I was, listening to Igor Stravinsky, piecing together a timeline learning about the artist and his interests. 

NH: Well but in a way, it’s not really important when you view them, where these different fragments were sourced from. That’s what you, the artist, get out of it.

MG: Right, the idea that this information has the possibility of being something else. The installation of the work in the space as a whole transformed into a room of quiet passages or moments that escaped their original meaning. 

NH: What I thought of when I first saw these works was Richard Serra, splashing lead.

MG: Right, the nature of the material. The slag, the thickness, it’s materiality being presented as something that “is” but other. How to compose this material with integrity was something I looked to Serra for. Seeing Serra’s Band (2006) at LACMA, and the beauty in where the seams of the slabs join and meet, stuck with me. 

There is a piece I made in the show titled Seam of Band, where one of the pieces is installed perpendicular with the unpolished slag faces the viewer and it floats above the floor. It starts from the bottom wide, and makes its way up to a point. 

NH: So it’s like a kind of suture, that fits flush.

MG: Right. The front view as a 3/16” line is a positive relief inspired by a modern work of art from where the weight and tension rely on one another to exist. From the side is a slag profile that reveals the cuts. 

NH: Were some of these pieces made with the gallery space in consideration?

MG: Combination #6 is site-specific and activates the architecture. It starts at the top on the face of the wall, and makes its way around, over and down a window sill, to continue on the face of the wall to the floor. 

NH: They’re so reflective.

MG: Most of the work made, except for three pieces, were finished with a nickel plated mirror polish on the face of them. The space has large windows framed in ivy and facing traffic, some with direct sunlight. I like how the work is activated by movement and shimmers when alone. Some appear as if the wall is scored and you are looking outside through the wall. With the audience in mind, I wanted you to catch a distorted sliver of a reflection of yourself. 

NH: In your artist statement you say that your work is an “investigation of worth.” What does that mean exactly?

MG: How do we transform an object into something of value? Not monetarily, but of true personal value and worth that can be shared as an expression of existence. The root of this work was born out of making an assumed negative into an exaggerated positive relief. Looking at fractures in the built environment, a hair found in the bathtub, or broken relics, I am searching for a better way to deal with this. By making an object that suggests contemplation, the definition is reassigned, and makes way for something I can’t fully understand, rather than it being very straight, or stopping at the fear or negativity of the outcome. 

NH: Your negative value…

MG: The negative value possesses a strong sense of energy to manage. So, I look to scenarios that evoke fear, isolation, or anxiety to process them in a way to where I can better understand them, and use them to an advantage, rather than a deficit. The crack and hair pieces in the exhibition are a good representation of that. 

NH: Make it into art…

MG: There is a process that considers the art canon, and uses an expression to document a time and place. It is shown under the umbrella of fine art and its history of display, but my work doesn’t fit neatly into a category like painting or sculpture or other work I do that may be blurring the lines of social practice or teaching. I am dealing with my own situations with objects and what’s going on around me. When you’re looking at a crack, what we typically see as damage, I’m making that negative into a positive. So, this is a recurring theme in my work. A hair I found in the bathroom: what does a hair mean when you find it in the bathtub? That’s what I do, what I’m thinking about [laughs]. Designating value to that sort of stuff.

NH: It’s funny you say that, because for me personally, I’m always staring at hairs I find in the bathtub.

MG: Are you really? Or are you being sarcastic? 

NH: No, really!

NH: What do you think you’ll do next? Continue making these?

MG: I am working on making more subjective work born out of the information I gathered over the passed four years through my archive. Yes, I’m into the constraints this process has had for me. I have a few more ideas about his work I am fleshing out. 

NH: In the show title, what do you mean by zebras and horses?

MG: It refers to a time when I used to go to the hospital a lot, because I would get these chest pains, and I kept thinking I was having a stroke. So I’d zip over to the emergency room over and over again. And eventually they just told me, “You’re a healthy man and you’re thinking zebras instead of horses.” And just the use of that language made me realize that it was all in my head. I was freaking myself out, my diet was way off, too much coffee, not hydrated, very basic things were jolting me. I was able to put it in perspective and see it as it was, at its most basic form, and work with it from the bottom up rather than top down. 

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