Four Stomachs

On the first pass, cows barely chew their food. It’s a more protracted and mechanical process: they lap up grass; chew it; swallow it; regurgitate it; re-chew it; and then re-swallow it. “Chewing the cud” or “rumination,” a cow’s complex digestive tract remains in constant service.

From 14 February through 11 April 2015, Nina Beier’s solo exhibition, Four Stomachs, will not exactly conclude. Beier will place five large, polished brass casts in the ground floor space at Objectif Exhibitions—on the floor, to be exact. “Cows have four stomachs and forget their past, almost before it has passed,” and Beier’s annual shifting steadily followed a similarly ruminative procedure to its namesake’s intricate organs. 52 new works were produced in 2012, 2013, and 2014, then distributed to three rather disparate pastures. Yet for the palimpsestic fourth and final “stomach,” Beier has staked a more central field, and will introduce yet another 5 new works into the machine.

They’re comical. Elegantly honed and highly reflective, yet equally excretory and denatured, these invocations posture forms as old as dirt—poured in an evocative molten material that recalls much more. The polished gleam of musical instruments, the codification of a door key or, more metonymically, military hierarchy. Yet as depictions of earth, do they persist as exaggerated bases for monuments, or have they been elevated to the status of that which they previously served to uphold (in its absence)? If so, what do they now symbolically commemorate beyond that absence—the time-lapsed reduction of monuments to meeting points, the growing confusion between the map and its territory? Any cast metal is based on a clay figure of some sort, so while these depictions of mud—cast in actual mud (clay)—appear here as positive forms, can they also conjure the negative forms they’ve left behind?

In contrast to Beier’s three previous “stomachs,” which she sited in three different and much less traditional spaces, she chose the ground floor location at Objectif Exhibitions for the supposed “neutrality” of its white walls, and for its prescribed function as an exhibition space. Meanwhile, as representations of dirt, vignettes of earth, her new series is itself already an agglomeration of implied locations—both figure and ground, and at once both literal and figurative.

Chew, swallow, chew. To retrace Beier’s steps, she spent 2012 defacing a series of bronze, plastic, ceramic, and fiberglass busts. She positioned these Facing Figures above Objectif Exhibitions, within the residential apartment windows of our neighbors, whenever an intrepid resident decided to become involved. A bust is always born disfigured—limbless, partial, abstracted. Beier disfigured them further, and stripped them of their authorship, their referents, their likenesses, their histories.