Marc Ganzglass

In conjunction with the October 2010 Chinati Weekend, Artist in Residence Marc Ganzglass opened a two-part exhibition entitled Transmission Tower Time in the Locker Plant and the Ice Plant.

Entering the Locker Plant through a door in the courtyard, visitors came upon the first of three video installations as a wave of sound permeated the space. A Single Point of Light, made using high-speed film footage from an experiment at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, captures the creation, in a flask of pure water rhythmically buffeted by sound waves, of a single photon (or “point”) of light. The second video depicted the attempt by a pair of people to locate buried electricity lines using metal dowsers. The third video, filmed in Marfa, showed a freight train passing in the background, while in the foreground, stalled on the tracks, sat a hunk of sleek industrial material—a section of modern windmill, bound for a wind farm.

Installed in the front room was an object that is at once a ubiquitous and invisible part of the contemporary landscape: a full-scale transmission tower built from scratch by the artist, in two pieces and lying on its side. Next to the tower was a small table, held together only by gravity and torsion. On the table lay a rifle and box of ammunition, while at the far end of the room a target in a box hung on the wall. The installation offered the chance to peruse two more apparatus for the circulation of energy of the sort employed or depicted in the videos.

The works at the Locker Plant, each in their own way, posited, presented, and puzzled over the elements—the elementals—of transmission, of energy on the move. Ganzglass offered an alternate way of considering these mysteries down the street at the Ice Plant. On view was The Copenhagen Interpretation, a new iteration of a work produced last year in Denmark. In the center of the space, a new Mercedes sedan pumped out Albert Ayler’s 1964 free-jazz classic The Copenhagen Tapes while neon undercarriage lights bumped along rhythmically.

Marc Ganzglass received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1999. Recent solo exhibitions include Middle Sized Aggregates at Martos Gallery in New York (2010); Dødsønske at Bastard, Oslo and Vol d’Orgeuil with OEen Group, Copenhagen (both 2009); and Liu Thinks Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is Innocent., Parkers Box, Brooklyn (2008). Ganzglass currently lives in New York.