The Dark Glow of the Mountains

by Matthew Thompson, Associate Curator

 

Mountains are an extravagance of geology. They are monuments to time, fixed and impassable, and at the same time physical manifestations of change, from the ecstatic roar of an avalanche to the achingly slow tectonic shifts that push mountains skyward. Nothing foregrounds the simultaneous beauty and terror of the sublime quite like a mountain stabbing out of the earth. And stab they do, as if existing only to test one’s faith. Their sheer dominating scale creates the type of awe-inspiring, humbling aesthetic experience to which the grandest human constructions—from ancient pyramids to gothic cathedrals to modern bridges—aspire but cannot reach.

 

Belgian artist Kris Martin explores this dichotomy of faith and time as it relates to our conceptions of self and mortality; consequently, and perhaps not surprisingly, mountains have become central to some of his most recent work. Martin creates arresting objects that are sculpturally and conceptually refined. From a full-size church bell without a clapper to a pile of broken wristwatches, an enigmatic bomb promising to explode in the year 2104 to a blank train information board, Martin’s works emphasize time in making, time in aging, and represent the processes and passage of time.

 

For his Aspen Art Museum exhibition, Martin has installed a number of large, human-scale boulders, each with a tiny paper cross placed at its apex. This marking of the summit creates a shift of scale and perspective, turning the large rocks into mountains, their cracks into crevices, their highest points into symbols of arduous accomplishment. For Martin, the marker on the summit imparts the comforting knowledge that, although the journey ahead may seem overwhelming, someone has been there before.

 

Collectively titled Summit (2009), these works directly engage and celebrate their dependence on the seclusion and focus of the gallery space. Outside, they are just rocks. While some weigh a ton or more, they are pathetically small when viewed against the backdrop of the surrounding mountains. Only inside, and only in isolation, do we begin to perceive them as towering peaks.

 

In a related work, Matterhorn (2009), Martin takes a stock black and white photograph of the Alpine peak and crops off its iconic summit. The focus shifts from the glory of taking the summit to the task of the climb, echoing the many hardships, large and small, which make up everyday life. In both the Summit works and Matterhorn, Martin uses exhibition and presentation to shift the viewer’s perspective from one outside, that of the mountain-as-image, to one inside, that of the relationship between the individual and the mountain, or the mountain-as-process.

 

The Tyrolean mountaineer Reinhold Messner has written extensively about the relationship between the climb and the summit. The first person to summit all fourteen 8,000 meter peaks in the Himalaya, Messner once wrote that “you have reached the summit when there’s no more up, not when you’re tired, or frightened, or don’t want to go any further.”¹ For Messner, the process and conditions of the climb—the difficulty of the line, the inventiveness of the approach, the use of “fair means”²—ultimately determine the success of an expedition more than whether or not the goal of the summit is reached. It is a mountaineering philosophy that is nearly puritanical. However, it also privileges an erasure of the ego, as well as self-improvement, hard work, honesty, and creativity. These values are certainly relevant to art practice in general and Martin’s exhibition in specific.

 

In a review of Werner Herzog’s film The Dark Glow of the Mountains, a rumination on Messner’s inner psychology and his approach to climbing, film critic Vincent Canby writes of Messner that, “When he scales a sheer rock face, he feels that he is writing on it, not in any physical way that someone else might discover and read, but in his heart.”³ It is a film about motivation, about the internal impulses that drive people to do extraordinary things. According to Herzog, “One time he said to me that he was unable to describe the feeling that compels him to climb any more than he could explain what compels him to live.”⁴ While Messner may not be able to describe his compulsion to live, it is clear that climbing allows him a medium for self-reflection. Martin’s work provides a similar conduit for the viewer, providing a means of reframing larger questions about life, death, faith, and doubt.

 

Also included in the exhibition is Idiot (2005) re-imagined as an artist’s book. It features Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1868 novel The Idiot as Martin has transcribed it: entirely by hand, inserting his own name for that of the book’s protagonist Myshkin. Martin’s work becomes an unconventional self-portrait, an extreme act of adulation and identification with Myshkin’s desire for spiritual transformation. It is also a gesture that engages directly with time. Much like a medieval monk, Martin spent countless, focused hours perfectly copying the text. There are almost no errors in the book, a clear sign that when the artist noticed he had made a mistake he would start a section over. This gesture, in turn, brings to mind all sorts of questions about how we value our time. To most people, this action, much like Myshkin himself, must seem a bit mad.

 

Myshkin is the embodiment of goodness and purity; his relentless compassion and commitment to honesty eventually drive him to madness in a cynical world. In the novel, Myshkin only finds refuge in the mountains of Switzerland, where he receives the only effective treatment for his crippling epilepsy. As Dostoyevsky, who himself suffered from epilepsy, describes Myshkin’s fits:

 

His brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments… His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light. All his agitation, doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of understanding.⁵

 

The seizures produce transcendental experiences, positioning him “at the very edge of time and space” in which others live.⁶ Myshkin’s epilepsy—paradoxically the result of physical deterioration even as it allows him to ascend beyond the physical world—evokes the tension between time, the concrete reality of the world in which we live, and the interior world of our imagination, all of which are central concerns in Martin’s work.⁷

 

For Martin, Dostoyevsky’s novel is a spiritual text, a challenge to be good and honest no matter what the cost. Printed to resemble a pocket bible, the book’s covers and spine are entirely blank, keeping attention focused on the object itself, instead of the artist or institution. The book has been placed in over 800 hotel rooms throughout Aspen for the exhibition. Encountered in a nightstand drawer, for example, the work will create complex and nearly limitless possibilities for viewer interaction: one can ignore it, steal it, call the front desk to see if someone has left a floridly-penned diary, or perhaps read it before bed. Few works can interact with the public in such a direct and intimate way. Most people do not ever experience an artwork just before drawing inward, becoming vulnerable, and drifting to sleep for the evening. A day ends when we fall asleep; a new day dawns when we awaken again, and again Martin’s work circles back to time.

 

In the front of the lower gallery, Martin has installed Golden Spike (2008), a two-inch, solid gold nail that the artist has hammered into the floor. The work calls to mind the ceremonial golden spike driven by Leland Stanford at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, to celebrate the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. The transcontinental railroad created an unprecedented collapse of space and time, bringing more people further and faster than ever before. It had a tremendous impact on rapidly industrializing America, revolutionizing the population and economy of the American West. It is this thorough transformation, marked by an aestheticized object—gold being a metal so malleable it is thoroughly useless as a railroad spike—that appears throughout Martin’s work. The Golden Spike also recalls an alchemical sleightof-beaker known as the golden nail trick, in which an iron nail was transmuted into gold. Like all alchemical experiments, the transformation lies between the physical and perceptual: the nail changes perceptibly, but not how we imagine it does. In all, it is a work that is nearly invisible, pounded into gallery floor, its impact lying in its recognition by the viewer. Significantly, it will remain installed long after the close of the exhibition, a barely perceptible trace of Martin’s exhibition. Like the iron spikes used by archaeologists to denote changes in era, Martin installs the Golden Spikes in spaces where an event has occurred that he feels signals an important shift for himself as an artist, like the home of the collector who purchased his first work or the site of a significant exhibition. The Golden Spike installed at the Aspen Art Museum is one of several that simultaneously exist in different places, together forming a constellation of epochal moments, dividing his practice into a series of befores and afters, becoming markers of time.

 

Kris Martin’s work cues into essential elements of our worldview—our sense of time, of mortality, of self—with a wit and incisiveness that is disarmingly earnest and direct. And while the materials and objects may feel exotic at first, the focus is on everyday life. Martin’s wide-ranging use of the readymade, from boulders to Dostoyevsky’s original text to the cast of a common nail, creates a concentrated space of contemplation for the viewer that augments the aesthetic experience. Martin is a mental alpinist, his climbing partner the viewer.⁸

 

NOTES

1 Reinhold Messner, All Fourteen 8,000ers (Seattle: The Mountaineers, 1999), 237.
2 “Hopefully such a challenge will be realized by fairs means, that is to say, without other expedition groups, or existing depots, or the routes being prepared in advance.” Messner often adds artificial oxygen to this list. ibid., 143.
3 Vincent Canby, “Two Short Works by Herzog,” New York Times, April 3, 1985
4 Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 195.
5 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot (New York: Penguin, 1955), 216.
6 Roger Anderson, “The Idiot and the Subtext of Modern Materialism,” Dostoevsky Studies, 9, (1988): 86.
7 ibid., 87
8 Kris Martin was first called a “mental alpinist” by the artist Johan Van Geluwe during his architectural studies at the Hoger Architectuur Instituut in Ghent, Belgium, in 1994.