Ten Steps to Heaven

Stepping into the Two-and-a-Halfth Dimension Rachel Withers

What is the basic function of a catalogue essay? To enlighten the reader as to the work of art under examination; to synthesise information and ideas gleaned from research into the piece and its contexts, and develop a cogent argument regarding the work’s meaning and purposes; to place the work under a particular point of view as a starting point for, or a complement to, the reader’s own thought processes — how’s that? Yes, me too, I’ve always seen those as good basic goals for a critic at work on a text such as this. And it can plausibly be argued that the idea of enlightenment lies right at the heart of Edward Chell’s installation Ten Steps to Heaven at the Swedenborg Society in London, so in principle the way ahead is clear. The work’s contexts and associations are exceedingly rich. The artist himself is an intellectual omnivore with a formidable appetite for information and ideas. Conversations with him about the work freewheel from one intriguing topic to another: there is no shortage whatsoever of fuel for the imagination and the intellect. Full speed ahead then: buckle up, let’s hit the road!

Except… something has kept the engine stalling on this script. It’s been one false start after another… The fact is that, experienced and considered in its finished state, the work itself seems genuinely, irreducibly odd. It is angular, incongruous: suggestive of various key tactics and positions in contemporary art but avoiding a direct dialogue with any of them. It is odd even at the level of its body language: its relations with both the surrounding architecture and its human users seem subtly awkward. So of course, perversely, I was going to elect to write about it, this project that seems in some fundamental way not to want to be made sense of. The task is to creep up on it crabwise, to find ways of clarifying its resistance to clarification.

Ten Steps to Heaven’s main component, at least, is readily describable. It’s a wooden handrail, in twelve separate sections, permanently installed in its intended site, the main staircase of the Swedenborg Society’s London headquarters. Running from the basement to the first floor, it is made from iroko (a teak-like African hardwood) and sealed with several gleaming layers of translucent red lacquer. Its simplicity is deceptive, however — it bears a hidden message. It is inscribed with the text of sixteenth century Catholic mystic St. John of the Cross’s poem The Dark Night of The Soul — an eight-stanza work allegorising (in undisguisedly erotic terms) the journey of the human soul towards an ecstatic union with the divine. Further, the inscription is not in conventional text but in Braille. It is located invisibly on the lower inside edge of the rail so that one’s fingertips brush it as one travels the stair. On one of the landings a wall plaque reproduces the text both in Braille and in alphabetical script. Four smaller plaques reproduce evocative phrases from the stanzas in Braille. Exquisite Risk, reads the first; then Cedar Breeze, Secret Ladder and lastly Sweet Night.

From here, the quick way of proceeding would be to rummage around in the project’s research background and decoratively drape interesting facts and ideas, as it were, over the handrail. There are plenty there, for sure. The site, for instance: the Swedenborg Society headquarters, a Georgian listed building, is the international centre for research and publication relating to the seventeenth century mystic philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, an influence on a legion of subsequent writers, artists and thinkers from Kant and Blake via the Jameses to Borges and Jung. There is the whole issue of “seeing things”: questions of the nature and status of visions, which were experienced both by Swedenborg (who maintained that God had appeared to him in human shape and had revealed the Bible’s secret spiritual meanings to him in his dreams) and St. John of the Cross (a Catholic reformer, associate of fellow mystic St. Theresa of Ávila, and a key figure in Spanish literature). In addition there is the theme of exegesis: the reputations of both were secured through their own, extensive, commentaries on their mystical visions or scripts. And the list could continue. However, one feels, to invoke loose ideas of “imagery” and “reference”, assuming transparent connections between the work and its research background, is to dodge the issue. The substantive question really is, what kind of art language or languages is the work speaking in relation to its (apparent) subjects?

From the dark night of the soul to a wooden handrail: one might start by noting that Ten Steps to Heaven’s subject matter collides transcendence and bathos, the ideal and the material, in a form that distinctly recalls the Duchampian readymade with its fixation on hardware — on coat-hooks and hat-stands and things with handles and brackets and hinges, fresh from the “plumber’s show window” or some other stockist, ready-equipped with screw- and bolt-holes and all set to be perched, suspended or screwed in locations where they might snag at viewers’ passing trouser-legs and their paradigms of authorship. The readymade used machine-made fixtures and fittings to unfix the traditional hierarchy of aesthetic transcendence over lumpen matter; a handrail, one feels, would have made a seamless addition to Duchamp’s repertoire. In addition there is all that carnal, bridal imagery that is central to The Dark Night of the Soul, plus the handrail has a sneaky phallic aspect.

This line seems promising — but the fit is not quite there. Firstly, the rail is bespoke: fabricated to precise specifications not grabbed off the peg. Secondly, Duchamp’s “indifferent” gestures always, really, felt like satire, delivering their attack on the aura with a faint but audible snicker. In contrast Chell’s juxtaposition of spiritual poetry and material hardware feels open-ended, non-judgmental: on the question of the relationship between, or the hierarchy of, the material and the ideal, the piece suggests neither that one ought to read the rail as a metaphysical conceit — the basis for a metaphor of transcendence — nor as a mockingly materialist, ironically leveling gesture. The handrail’s clunky materiality undercuts the poem’s transcendent trajectory, but the poem’s secret presence jinxes its material base. And, importantly, the text of the poem runs not up but down the stairs. For the script to ascend the stairs would have seemed uninflectedly affirmative. For it to descend as it does, depositing the reader (at the poem’s notional end) down in the basement, feels not satirical but simply odd. If a question is being posed, it would seem to be a non-ironical one querying the conventional association of light in relation to knowledge and dark in relation to the unknown.

That raises the question: who is this notional reader? Not the majority of the Society’s visitors, for sure, because relatively few will be able actually to read Chell’s handrail. Most will be taking it on trust that the stream of small bumps spells out what it says on the plaque. And for those Braillers who do visit, the facility the work offers seems pretty rarified. Yet the rail (which is exaggeratedly robust, as if designed for payloads far heavier that the ones it will actually need to withstand) does hint at the language of public art and “inclusive” design: of situations where planners draft in artists to add a creative twist to some architectural modification required by access or health and safety laws. Not so here, though: the rail originated entirely in the artist’s mind, not in some Health and Safety officer’s notebook. It is ultimately a surplus item and whilst luxuriously fabricated it is also faintly cumbersome, like a hybrid of a John McCracken and some old-fashioned safety gear from a decommissioned hospital or Edwardian spa. If a spot of fun is being had at the expense of the Public Art sector and its all-too-often depressing vision of art as a social lubricant, then it is very quiet fun, not a raucous heckle.

“To engage in the international fashion of installation and intermedia work” Rosalind Krauss legislated back in 1999, is to make art that “essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital” . No sitting on the fence there, then, and whatever reservations one might have about Krauss’s sweeping judgement it’s true that fabricated contemporary art objects are usually hard to prise away from issues of commodification. Twenty-metre-high bug-eyed pixies by Takashi Murakami; outsize Mylar balloons replicated in fiberglass for Jeff Koons: the paradigm of fabricated sculpture abounds with super-glossy, super-scary fetishes rubbing viewers’ noses in the problem of art’s complicity with spectacular consumer culture. Chell’s 2008 piece French Stick, a sneakily sexy, ice-green, pointy-ended prototype for Ten Steps to Heaven, dabbled in those waters but in relation to it Ten Steps to Heaven forms a kind of rappel à l’ordre: fabricated to a splendid specification but chunkily unglamorous, immovable by virtue of its site-specificity and irretrievably lacking in resale value. Even Rosalind Krauss’s rules, then, have exceptions.

Odd, odd- yes, it is all just plain odd. The piece even feels physically a bit off-kilter, as if the sections of rail are subtly out of scale with the stair: they are just a fraction too fat, too chunky, and sit a shade higher than one would expect. The idea that is inexorably creeping up is that this piece is actually, primarily, a series of paintings — twelve gleaming, ketchup-coloured monochromes of different sizes made using glossy lacquer on a wooden support. Well, yes, they’ve been displayed unconventionally low down on the wall, but this is a mere detail. The five plaques, effectively, are labels; and the exhibition as a whole recapitulates the ambivalent relationship between the monochrome painting’s materiality and its claims to transcendence that so many artists, from Malevich via Newman, Klein and Reinhardt to Serrano, and Gonzales Torres, have probed from so many contrasting perspectives.

Edward Chell, after all, is best known primarily as a painter whose practice is strongly invested in the history and debates of post-conceptual painting, and simultaneously with the installation of Ten Steps to Heaven he has been developing a series of paintings that are unequivocally classifiable as such. Rectangular in shape, proportioned in relation to the artist’s reach and executed in oil on canvas stretchers, these paintings continue his experimentation with the digital (as in, manual) transformation of photographically generated images into paint, a process that he has been exploring for over a decade.

Chell’s paintings from around the turn of the century took Xeroxed photographs of excavated ground at archaeological sites and translated the cryptic information embedded in their visual textures into equally enigmatic documents whose marks hovered equivocally between flatness and relief. Similarly compressing intricate painterly questions concerning the definition of the digital, and the interaction of the two- and three-dimensional, and the status of the painted mark in relation to other forms of image generation, reproduction and evaluation, Chell’s 2010 works are based on his own photographs of motorway verges. Using a combination of a warm yellow-gold ground and blue-grey over-painting, they replicate the visual data of the source images in such a way that their surfaces shimmer. Details normally so familiar to travelers that they barely register — expanses of grass, flowering weeds and the regimented clutter of human plantings and devices intended to stabilise the soil — are endowed with a hectic density, a kind of feverish over-visibility. And in both bodies of work, there is a fascination with the unitary dot or dash as the basic component of any pattern or signifying system. All these works are haunted by the motif of the binary on/off switching logic of digital information processing — as is the Braille element in Ten Steps to Heaven.

Paradoxically, then, Ten Steps to Heaven now looks as if its “ungraspability” is a function of its ingenious critical positioning somewhere between the contemporary preoccupations of two- and three-dimensional media . Inclining maybe more towards the critical contexts of painting than installation, it resides, one might say, in the two-and-a-halfth dimension. Taking a steer from the peripheral subject matter of Chell’s 2010 motorway paintings, let’s state that it is actively seeking to exist on the periphery — functionally (it’s a real handrail, after all), art-institutionally, art-categorically and perceptually too: one might sum it as a three-dimensional monochrome painting installed at waist level that you look at with the palms of your hands.

To propose the periphery as one’s point of focus is, of course, to propose a complete paradox. Chell’s Ten Steps to Heaven turns out to be about enlightenment only in so far as it reminds viewers of the relativity of knowledge and understanding. To focus on the unknown, marginal object is to change the status of that object; to shed light on it is to destroy its previous essence as a thing in darkness. One might even conclude that Ten Steps to Heaven holds a lesson for Emanuel Swedenborg and St. John of the Cross. After all, their “enlightenment” (if you buy into the narratives) was won at the price of relinquishing the inspiring, compelling mystery that previously had fed their spiritual quests. What possible “ultimate revelation” of the “secrets of the universe” could be anything other than a letdown? And if you hadn’t written this — I can see the fingers wagging — that obdurately, satisfyingly odd object you first encountered in March 2010 would still be lurking in your mind as a knotty, category-defying puzzle rather than a problem solved (well, maybe). But there is no unlearning. Choosing, as they say, is loosing.