Kaari Upson: Body as Landscape

Body as Landscape, on view at Sprüth Magers, is the gallery’s second posthumous presentation of Kaari Upson’s work since her untimely death two years ago, at age fifty-one. Upson’s practice was sprawling, privileging mutability over resolution. Put simply, her practice was beset by doubles. More precisely, the artist was committed to the gap between Self and Other, and the multiplicity of projected selves that proliferate within this space. She doggedly mined the failures—observational, linguistic, relational—that inhere in trying to know another.

Upson had several doubles, each of whose identity was productively contaminated by her own. Most well-known was Larry, the former occupant of a foreclosed McMansion neighboring her parents’ home, into whose absence Upson poured forensic investigation and speculative fiction. There was Chrissy, a high school nemesis she killed in a dream. Drawing from Larry’s obsession with Hugh Hefner, who was at the time proudly debuting twin girlfriends, Upson cast Chrissy as her eroticized twin for videos she projected in a replica of the Playboy Grotto. (The structure was sealed to entry, forcing viewers to peep and postulate).

Body as Landscape, an exhibition of sculpture and drawings, refers to Upson’s originating double: her mother, German émigré Karin. The sculptural installation eleven (2020) is a descendant of the series Mother’s Legs (2018–19), and comprises a thicket of urethane sculpture cast from the ponderosa pine that sheltered Upson’s childhood home. Each pillar is grafted with magnified casts of the artist’s knee. In title alone, eleven reflects imperfect doubling: an odd quantity refusing pairs, a failed mirror image when rendered numerically. To experience its scale is to telescope one’s own to childhood stature, simulating the period of being one’s mother in miniature and the accompanying limits of language and perception. As a child, I once grabbed the leg of a stranger I mistook for my mother’s: the horror of the imperfect double I looked up to see.

The drawings on view include Untitled (2015–2021), a monumental, six-year map of Upson’s projects and ideas. Untitled diagrams the cross-pollination between Upson’s various bodies of work and the collapsed temporality in which her ideas incubated, with new projects generated by the intersections of texts and images inscribed years apart. While making Mother’s Legs, Upson had been fascinated by a recently discovered biological analogue to this circuitous modality. Scientists had determined that not only does a child in utero draw from her mother’s genes and resources, but the specific cellular material of a child may also escape the uterine lining and linger within her mother for years to come.

Another drawing, Hateful Admiration (2012), depicts a woman contemplating her naked body atop a mirror—doubling vaginal lips, internalizing the sexualized twin. Upson was an avid reader of Freud and Lacan, but Hateful Admiration calls to mind Lacan’s scorned student, Luce Irigary, and the autoerotic multiplicity she ascribed to the female sex (in opposition to her teacher’s assignment of lack). Irigary’s “She herself enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either,” could describe certain of Upson’s later videos. A Place for A Snake (2019), for instance, shows the artist and a friend, dressed as one another, their eyes obscured by opaque, vacant prosthetics. For seven minutes, they perform a staccato, recursive soliloquy about a staircase built into a one-story home—the frustration of a single with a phantom double. (While not on view here, the video debuted at Kunsthalle Basel alongside the isolated, spent prototype for Mother’s Legs: a felled tree, split in two).

Inversion is a dominant mode in Upson’s practice, another means by which the empty is made full. She drew with smoke, sculpted with charcoal—she made the ephemeral concrete and vice versa. It is no accident that casting was a primary method in her work. She was invested in the insides of things and all they could hold.

Untitled (Death Drive) (2007) contains perhaps the most explicit address in Body as Landscape to canonical psychoanalysis and its ideas of female deficit. Among Upson’s notes: MOM IS MISSING A PENIS! COVERS UP ABSENCE. And then, her exegetic supplement: AND A MEMORIAL TO ABSENCE FILLS UP THE GAP PLUS COVERS THE GAP. Upson was a student, or had freshly graduated, at the time of the drawing’s execution, perhaps explaining its proximity to these primary texts. And yet, when the artist maps the memorial onto the psychosexual, she prefigures the endurance that would inhere in her work. Upson not only prized emptiness as opportune; she also refused a hierarchy between introspection and the speculations of others. Rejecting the notion that an artwork has a correct interpretation, she told Interview Magazine in 2017, “In the same way a room fills up with the ghosts of experiences and relationships enacted inside it, artwork fills up too.” Upson’s generosity in life toward her viewer—toward the Other—ensures her work’s continued accretion of meaning in her absence.