Morbid Curiosity
Part of the effect of Catacomb is a feeling of material excess. There aren’t just a few skeletons here, but 75 of them. (The piece was shipped to the gallery in over 140 separate parcels.) Dwarfing the viewer, the installation also denies entry: you can only walk around it, not between the skeletons or over the bones heaped in piles at their feet. And the viewer quickly realizes these are not human skeletons or human bones but an almost otherworldly accretion of industrial materials and animal bones gathered by an obsessive collector.
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There’s more than just first-glance creepiness here, however. Part of what makes the piece so compelling is the way it fuses opposites; these skeletons are both rising and falling apart. On the one hand, they appear to be growing out of the bones around them: the rebar frames suggest trellises–or maybe the small wooden sticks gardeners use to guide plant growth–and the bones that hang from the frames are the beginning of forms still coming into being. The wax surfaces have an embryonic quality, with clusters and clumps that look dynamic, as if still changing. On the other hand, the bones hanging by thin wires, the rust, the sections of empty rebar, and the visible signs of gravity’s pull on the wax all suggest the final stages of decay, as if the bones at the figures’ feet were all once part of the standing forms, and we are merely seeing their last remains.
For both Gonzalez and Sally Thomas, the other artist in the show, “the terrifying fragility of the body is a rich and challenging topic,” exhibition curator Laura Fatemi writes in the small catalog. And while Thomas’s installation Of Another World is not as overtly weird as Gonzalez’s piece, its even greater profusion of materials–and their personal, handmade aspect–ultimately gave me an equally creepy feeling.
