> Sally Sheinman: You Are
Invited: by Martin Herbert
The truth is that, once the obsolete Christian compact of
the Fifties had broken down, there was nothing – apart
from, in the last resort, money – holding society together.
Indeed, the very labour-saving domestic appliances launched
onto the market by the Sixties’ consumer boom speeded the
meltdown of communality by allowing people to function in a
private world, segregated from each other by TVs,
telephones, hi-fi systems, washing machines, and home
cookers.
Ian McDonald, Revolution in the Head, 1994
In the dozen years since the words above were written, the
culture it describes has only inched closer to an apex of
desocialisation. This has not gone unnoticed by
contemporary artists. The late 1990s saw the rise of
relational aesthetics, a praxis (theorised by French critic
Nicholas Bourriaud) with roots in 1960s ‘happenings’, in
which the art object is regularly displaced in favour of
emphasising the gallery environment as a social site.
Simultaneously, a swelling number of artists have begun to
organise themselves into collectives – in the case of Dutch
alliance Atelier van Lieshout, even constructing miniature
self-governing nation-states within their own countries.
The broad question is to what extent the results actually
work. While aiming to bridge art and life, many so-called
relational artworks have left viewers embarrassedly unsure
of how they should be interacting with the objects on
display. Particularly when the artwork is deeply embedded
in a dense theoretical practice, a viewer’s incomprehension
can bloom into active rebellion. It’s assumed that the
artist is merely playing with a notion of inclusiveness,
and the tendency is to turn on one’s heel and, at best, go
and think about it somewhere else. This is emphatically not
the case with Sally Sheinman’s works.
Before anything else, they are optically welcoming –
typically offering democratic gusts of warm colour and a
concertedly handmade aesthetic which sidelines any
assumption of obscurantist superiority. For Days (2002),
Sheinman mounted 365 small, deep paintings in a scatter
formation, each one corresponding to a day in her life
between January 2001 and January 2002, and each appended
with a small text relating – sometimes at an oblique angle
– to the painting itself, which often represented a kind of
sedimentation or condensing of a lived experience. For
viewers, there were simply enough of these small paintings
that it was easy to find one you liked (or, alternatively,
there were so many that one was forced to anchor oneself by
settling on one you liked best) and to relate an abstract
image to a concrete thought. And that discovery or feeling
of empathy, for some observers, would be enough. It would
function as a model of inclusion, of communion. On another
level, Sheinman had consciously opened up her life – and
her subjective reading of it, through painting – to the
public. Sheinman may well paint as a way of structuring her
days, and of forcing self-reflection. (Her work oscillates
between appearing to be for her, and for her audience.)
Still, there’s an uncommon generosity and clarity of
purpose about Days that can blindside a viewer.
Increasingly Sheinman’s work has become actively
collaborative, encouraging physically unchallenging but
meaningful actions on the part of the audience. These
actions can snowball unexpectedly. For The Wishing Ceremony
(2005), she installed bright booths in six public spaces
around Leicester: curious visitors were to go inside,
scribble a private wish on a Post-it note, and affix it to
the capsule’s wall. Like the indelible moment in Wim
Wenders’ film Wings of Desire when angels in a subway
carriage listen to its passengers’ inner monologues, the
result is a tender glimpse into the faceted yearnings of
strangers, their depths and shallows. I wish my sister
could walk. I wish I could stop feeling depressed and be
happy. I wish for a new kitchen. I wish for endless love. I
wish I had a father. Such anonymous statements, charmingly
handwritten, vault over theoretical debates into a well of
struggle that is authentically humanising.
The booths may approximate confessionals, but there is no
aura of religion here. Religion, as we know only too well,
is divisive: what Sheinman is quietly aiming to expose is
some kind of ethical commonality. Whatever our creed, we
all wish for things. Hope is a powerful elixir, as any
mind-over-matter story of medical recovery – or set of
statistics about how optimists tend to live longer – will
tell you. And this is something that can be projected into
the past as well as the future. For Sacred Vessels (2003),
the artist produced 49 paintings of the eponymous objects
in 18 months, multifarious shapes in rich gold and jade
greens, rusty reds and regal purples, and presented them
with back-stories. All of them, she said, came from a lost
place called Arcus, and they contained myriad potions: for
endless beauty, for invisibility before one’s enemies, for
accessing one’s ancestors’ memories, and more. It was a
sequence that put one in touch with a world that had never
existed, but which overlapped with a very real conception
of history: something which, as Sheinman has noted, we’re
increasingly losing with our move into instantaneous
communication.
Her commission for firstsite both reaches back into a
specific (and real) history and projects hopefully into the
future. 544 small painted tokens will be dispersed to 537
people (some of the works are diptychs and triptychs)
associated with the organisation and its history, at a
point when it is about to move to a new home. Entitled
“Artkacinas”, they are abstracted from the kachina dolls
that Hopi Indians carve from cottonwood root into figural
shapes, paint, and use to teach their children about their
mythology. In Sheinman’s case, the connection to the past
is redoubled by the accompaniment of each object with a
text: in this case, a single word associated with
firstsite, and as there, part of the way into the work is
to try and bridge a variably sized gap between image and
object. The titles are assigned randomly to the works,
engendering chance collisions between language and form.
Prior to dispersal, the tokens –each a handmade,
self-contained and unique object merging elements of
painting and sculpture –will be presented together: a
confectioner’s shop of fizzy colour and small-scale
desirability. You want to pick one up and enclose it in
your hand, like a perfect pebble found at the beach.
In that process of holding and looking, ideally, occurs a
transfusion of memories and projected hopes into them.
Artkacina, if you like, is a secular benediction cast over
firstsite as was, and as will be: vessels whose only
sacredness comes from the subjective attention paid to
them, distributed to anyone who completes an address label
at firstsite. Once again, chance – the random pairing of a
token and an object, and the unpredictability of their
coupling with the receiver – binds the project together. It
matters that this is a gift, and is presented as such. All
art is a gift really, a wish blown towards a better world.
It is Sheinman’s facility to expose such subtexts, to charm
us out of our inhibitions, and to reveal our common ground
through models of collectivity in which many hands make
light work. Plenty of current art promises to do this,
before finally murmuring ‘let’s not and say we did’. In our
atomised historical moment, as Sheinman’s work clarifies,
we can fairly ask for more than that.
Martin Herbert
Martin Herbert is a writer and critic based in Tunbridge
Wells, Kent. He is a London correspondant for Artforum and
a visiting lectuer at the Royal College of Art, and his art
criticism has appeared in numerous publications including
Frieze, Art Monthly and Modern Painters.
© the writer, artist and firstsite
