Vija Celmins

Untitled (Ocean), 1975, MOCA Los Angeles

Vija Celmins says that her task as an artist is “to document another surface and sort of translate it” in an act of both invention and fidelity. Coming of age artistically in 1960s Los Angeles, she had a Pop interest in the mundane; she painted studio objects, such as a desk lamp, a fan, and a heater, not in the splashy colors of Pop, but in monochromatic gray tones. In Venice, California, she resisted the siren song of color and light (Richard Diebenkorn was doing his Ocean Park series in the same time and place) and continued working in monochrome. Childhood memories of World War 2--her family fled the Soviet occupation of Latvia only to arrive in Nazi Germany--found their way into paintings of violent images such as warplanes, burning houses, guns and riots, based on newspaper and magazine photos. She also made sculptures of everyday objects, striking in their resemblance to the original but changed in size and scale—a six-foot-tall comb, or the mesmerizing, acrylic on balsa wood Pink Pearl eraser, 4 x 21 x 8 inches.

“Translations” of her own photos of the ocean—taken looking down at the water from the Venice pier, so the surface of the ocean entirely fills the viewfinder--began appearing in 1968, as she gave up paint in favor of graphite and charcoal. As artworks inspired by the Pacific Ocean, they are utterly unique. No horizon, no shore, no people, no boats, no palm trees, no marine layer—just laboriously drawn pencil renderings of the moving surface of the sea. She subjects other equally difficult-to-draw natural phenomena to a similar monochromatic treatment—constellations, the desert, the moon’s surface, the insides of shells. In her images of spider webs, the lines were created with tiny erasers, as unlike the Pink Pearl as possible.

From 1977 until 1982, Celmins returned to sculpture, creating To Fix the Image in Memory. In this challenging work, real stones and bronze casts of the stones, painted in acrylic to appear identical to the original, tease and exasperate the viewer. Which is fact, which is fiction? Reality evades us. She created a similar puzzle with her Blackboards (2007-10): a combination of three real and seven fabricated old-fashioned school tablets (made of wood, acrylic paint, alkyd oil, pastel, string, paper, and graphite).  Celmins has said, “I believe if there is any meaning in art, it resides in the physical presence of a work.” In Celmins’ 2-and 3D translations of the world, her artistic skill, impressive as it is, impresses less than how she messes with our stable sense of reality.