The fourth floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art has temporarily become a deeply somber place. An earthen graveyard fills the lobby. Sharp rusted structures stand forlorn in a gallery. Empty hospital cots line the floors. Broken furniture and worn shoes lean against the walls and one another. Barbed hair shirts hang from pins. A shroud of flower petals lies crumpled.
Three hundred and fifty-five shootings took place in Chicago during the first three months of 2015, a 40 percent increase from last year, so this gravity feels appropriate. Meanwhile, on April 1, blasts at a dairy factory in western Yemen killed at least 33 workers, as a Saudi Arabia-led alliance conducts an offensive against the Houthi rebel group, which has taken over large parts of the country. The following day, 142 Kenyan university students were slaughtered by members of al-Shabab, a fanatical Islamist group that seeks to rule neighboring Somalia. As I write, hundreds of sub-Saharan Africans fleeing poverty and conflict are believed drowned in the Mediterranean while attempting a desperate migration to Europe.
Given the state of the world here and abroad, perhaps the fourth floor of the MCA should always feel so mournful. The exhibition that prompts this atmosphere, a 30-year survey of sculptures by the masterful Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, will unfortunately be here only through the end of May. It is, inexplicably, the first comprehensive exhibition of her work, which may explain why she is not the most influential artist of her generation, though she is by many fathoms the most profound.
Like death, the show leaves no room for distraction.
Salcedo, who was born in Bogota in 1958 and lives and works there today, makes memorials in the form of contemporary art. Sometimes they are to remember specific atrocities, like the massacres that took place in 1988 on two banana plantations in the north of her home country, when 20 farmworkers were killed by military or paramilitary forces. A solemn row of stacked white shirts, neatly folded, filled with plaster and pierced with steel rebar, wrenchingly stand in for them, insisting on the lives whose loss the Colombian government has to this day failed to account for.
Other installations respond to injustice and violent death more generally. Plegaria Muda, whose title means “silent prayer,” occupies the entire entryway with pairs of coffin-size tables, one inverted atop the other, with earthlike strata between. Single blades of grass grow, like hope, through chinks in the wood. In order to reach the galleries on the other side, visitors must plot their way through, taking as much care as they would to traverse a cemetery. Mass graves provide no such dignity to the dead, nor place of mourning for the living. This is as true of the 1,700 bodies found two weeks ago in Tikrit — Iraqi soldiers rounded up and machine-gunned by the Islamic State — as it has been for the 1 million Cambodians slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s or the many million German and Polish Jews decimated by the Nazis during World War II.
Addressing the most extreme acts of atrocity is a hopeless task, but Salcedo seems undaunted, nay charged, by the impossible. She meets it with artworks that are themselves repositories of the unthinkable: a three-story high stack of chairs wedged between two buildings in Istanbul; a 500-foot-long chasm in the concrete floor of the Tate Modern; chain link fencing embedded in the walls of White Cube gallery. (These and other site-specific projects are presented in an excellent documentary produced by the museum. It features interviews with, among others, members of Salcedo’s studio, whose substantial labor and craft — plus something that might be called grace — achieves the unattainable.)
Although what happens to human beings assaulted by violence is Salcedo’s primary concern, individual people do not figure in her work, nor do their stories. There are no recognizable bodies here. She knows them well, however. Each project begins with firsthand testimony gathered by Salcedo from the survivors of trauma, and from there it departs, leaving the dead and their mourners respectfully unexposed. What takes their place is basic clothing and household furniture, and the organic materials — raw silk, hair, guts, skin, bone, grass — that Salcedo sews, wraps and embeds in them.
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Her conversations with displaced rural Colombian women forced from their homes resulted in “La Casa Viuda,” a series of sculptures made from traditional wooden doors spliced with the corners of a cut-up crib, an empty bureau, a child’s toy chair. For those who care to look at these homeless planks, close inspection reveals impossibly harrowing details: a zippered plaid jumper buried in a dresser panel, ready to open its wounds; a button entombed in the dresser top, like some petrified remains; slender bones supporting the toy chair, marking death and human presence at once.
Unland is three tables, created in response to interviews Salcedo conducted with children in northern Colombia whose parents were murdered in front of them. From afar they seem simply to be long tables made by patching two half tables together. Up close they become very nearly human, their surfaces skin on which thousands of hairs grow, tenuously holding the tabular body together: one is scruffy and hirsute, one neat and long-haired, one short and trim. The effect of the sculptures is bewildering: violently uncanny in its conflation of human and object, astonishing in its inconceivable artistry and raw beauty.
Salcedo’s largest body of work, a 20-year series of untitled sculptures, transmutes armoires, bed frames and chairs into dense tombs by rooting them one inside the other and sealing them with concrete. Their ostensible heaviness — they seem to weigh a ton, but the cement is surface not solid — literalizes the burden of injustice we ought to feel.
The Salcedo retrospective is one of the more uncompromising and restrained presentations that the MCA has achieved, and it is painfully right for our times. I wish it were permanent. I wish even more that it were unnecessary.
“Doris Salcedo” runs through May 24 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 East Chicago Ave., 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org.
Waxman is a freelance writer and a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute.
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