Gabe Martinez’ Confidence & Faith was a site-specific work that existed for a little over two hours at the Philadelphia Art Alliance – a sort of old-school “arts club” in a mansion that anyone west of the East Coast would find unfathomable – last Saturday. To get a sense of the project, I’m going to describe it more or less sequentially – gaps reflect gaps in my memory, as I was too busy enjoying to take notes.

 

After gathering, in the lobby where people were given free glasses of champagne in appropriately fluted glasses, groups of 30 or so were let into the first of the occasion’s events, seated in two semi-circular rows around a podium, a grand piano, and a trio of musicians from Relâche, Philadelphia’s one world-class contemporary music ensemble. Behind the musicians were three screens lowered in front of the room’s high arched windows. A young woman got up and read an interview that figure skater Michelle Kwan had given concerning advice offered her by Brian Boitano. The gist was that Kwan had been entering her jumps in competition thinking of all the ways in which she could mess them up. Thus she was more apt to fall, precisely because she wasn’t visualizing her success as she entered the process of execution. After this brief reading (maybe five minutes total), the three screens lit up showing Kwan in black & white as she competed flawlessly in the 1996 U.S. Nationals women’s competition, a “long program” – which like all “long programs” in figure skating is just four minutes long – Kwan calls Salome. The three videos were slightly skewed temporally, with the one on the left proceeding first, the one in the center no more than one second behind, the one on the right no more than a second further behind. As Kwan on screen prepared to skate, the ensemble – violin, cello and piano –

performed the music of her exhibition, a collage of Salome-related pieces from Rosza, Strauss and Ippolitov-Ivanov.

 

Old figure-skating junky that I am – I attended the Women’s Finals of the 1993 Nationals in Oakland where Kristy Yamaguchi defeated Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding & others – it was fun to watch Kwan at her best, which the 1996 long program was. But it was much more startling to see the program on these very grainy black & white projections while the music was live – I was no more than five feet from the musicians. Anyone who has ever been to a skating competition will tell you that the experience is exactly the reverse: the skating is live, while the music one hears in these large, acoustically bad auditoria is recorded, often sounding as if projected from one tiny boom box somewhere in a corner. Martinez’ discourse here was about not just the two terms of its title – confidence & faith – but immanence & aura, all those Benjamin-esque issues played out real-time for each group of thirty.

 

After the performance, our group proceeded up the staircase – where more fluted glasses of champagne awaited those who imbibe – and went into a room whose white drywall surfaces at first appeared blank until one’s eyes gradually adjusted to the fact the each section of wall was “scratched” or cut in what seemed to be a series of continuous loopy doodles. Each such figure had a title – placed so low  & off the left that they weren’t at first noticeable – which I believe were the title of various Kwan programs, such as Scheherazade. At which moment, I realize that these doodles may well be graphed from the designs on the ice made by each named program. If the first room of this event brings in issues of Benjamin & presence, this second gallery invokes the entire history of “white paintings,” erased deKoonings & the whole history of the way documentation transforms performance into set pieces. (Consider, for example, the role of documentation in the work of someone like Christo – it’s really all he has to sell & his impeccable studies & sketches do quite well, thank you.)

 

In an adjoining gallery is a large section of a holly bush from which hang many good luck charms – presumably the same simple design of the one given to Kwan by her grandmother when she was a child & which she continues to wear constantly. While a “Chinese” or family token at one level, the charm – which each member of the audience takes & wears out of the event – is also decidedly Christian, showing what appears to be a saint or Madonna figure. The only words legible on mine are “Little Flower,” & I frankly don’t catch all the symbolism. But its presence is unmistakable as the next large gallery makes evident. It is a large room covered with pure white sand (a rough approximation I suppose of the slippery surface of an ice rink, but also the one element of the entire project that didn’t really resonate for me). Alongside were a series of white candles – eight? – each in the figure of the Virgin Mary. Apparently at the start of each show (roughly 15 minute intervals – though they were running close to 30 minutes late by the time we arrived for our turn in the final group), an additional candle was lit, so that what you saw passing through this sandy room was a sequence of melting Madonnas in various states of decay.

 

The final unlit gallery consisted of what I can only call an altar to the stuffed animals & teddy bears that are hurled onto the ice after a major ice skaters performance. Here a giant mound of them rose up against the wall & had been covered either by some clay mold or gray spray so as to form a single large ominous object, a giant fossil through which one might recognize a toy kangaroo or the like. To one side, a 1930s radio consol (but with modern interior) played the recording of other Michelle Kwan competitions, not all of which have been successful. (In spite of her long dominance of the sport, she has never was the Olympic gold, as small errors – those problems of confidence & faith invoked in that initial interview – combined with performance-of-a-lifetime skating by the likes of Tara Lipinsky & Sara Hughes have kept Kwan from ever achieving this goal.)

 

One of my companions for the evening compared Martinez’ work with Matthew Barney’s Cremaster project, only more optimistic. In fact, I found the work mixed, ranging between the optimism figured in Kwan’s admittedly great skills & the darker side, figured in the question of the role of confidence & that brooding altar to fan worship of the final gallery. Figure skating, perhaps more than any other major sport, is deeply subjective & that subjectivity has led, perhaps inevitably, to the sort of corruption at the heart of the most recent Olympic competition, not to mention the assault of Kerrigan by “friends” of Tonya Harding. Faith & Confidence is far from being just a “celebration” of a hero & much more an analysis of different aspects & tensions of an event structure. Indeed, those dimensions of subjectivity are much of what figure skating shares with the arts.

 

Perhaps the largest issue this work poses for me is the relationship between one person’s art & the life & reality of any other individual. That may seem obvious in an homage to a “hero,” as here, but it’s present as well in any elegy & implicit at least in any love poem or work that pretends to “communicate directly” with its audience. Martinez balances form & wit, a knowledge of cultural history & his own enthusiasms, with great élan. He’s already won all of the major local awards a cultural worker in Philadelphia might achieve & seems positioned to explore whatever in the world of art he might wish to take on.