As Light as Sand, as Heavy as Water
People often say balance is key to life, that diplomacy, negotiation, and finding the middle ground are veritable practices to live by. They engender a feeling of composure, stasis, and mediation of difference. However, achieving balance is not a simple act; it often implies letting go of something. Still, this notion is so commonplace in culture and readily agreed with that we rarely concern ourselves with the associated loss. Is seeking balance a worthy pursuit?
Andre Keichian’s installation A Grain of Matter in Relation (2024), as displayed at the Human Resources Gallery, confronts us with this ubiquitous question.
In its traditional form, a balance consists of a pivoted horizontal lever with arms of equal length—a beam or tron—and two weighing pans suspended from each arm. In Keichian’s balance, a glass vase and a jute bag are steadied on two sides of the iron beam. Inside the jute bag is sand collected along the coastlines of Mediterranean countries—places that evoke Keichian’s ancestry’s immigration genesis. In the vase, water from the Pacific Ocean—the entity that separates and connects the familiar to the foreign—is held. The formal simplicity of the object is distracting to the point that one must lean in just to ask: a balance with water and sand, is this it? On a second look, there is more to the physical reality of the sculpture. Below the bag lies a hill of sand. Inside the hill, a flashlight points at the vase. Light refracts through the water in the vase, illuminating the opposite wall and casting a shadow of the vase and the small particles of sand congealed in it.
There is an interconnected world intimated through the balancing of water and sand, which the cursory eye overlooks. A conversation takes place between these elements on the metaphorical table. The piece is embedded in the reality of the immigrant experience, which grapples with questions of grief and longing that come with the balancing act of seeking a better future and making sense of a contentious past. Keichian does this symbolically by using water and sand. Water made of hydrogen and oxygen is rooted in the biological. It is the source of life. At the same time, within the immigrant experience, a body of water can be seen as the barrier separating a life of challenges from the land of promises. Water brings forth a need for agented action. Do we or do we not take the swim? Water, in A Grain of Matter in Relation, is to be understood as a representation of the self. Our beingness, existence, and will are tied to this symbolic form.
On the other hand, sand is rooted in human culture. The glass vase containing seawater on one end of the balance is made from the same sand contained in the jute bag on the opposite end. Glass is sand melted into a liquid and cooled to be transformed into a new object. It constricts water to give it form and perceptibility. Sand represents the passing of geological time, the result of the slow beating of water on rocks. It is also what slips between two sides of an hourglass. Our civility, evolution, and transience find meaning in sand. This conversation is mediated through the balance—the tron that connects the water with the sand.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun Balance comes from the late Latin word (libra) bilanx, which means having two scale pans. The word scale, on the other hand, comes from an Old Norse word of Germanic origin called skál, which means a drinking bowl. Therefore, a balance is essentially an instrument with two drinking bowls. One could say that the drinking bowl has been at the root of human civilization since the balance/scale is a strapping fixture in law and commerce, two strongholds of progress. Tangibly, a balance labors to generate value in commercial exchanges. It suspends questions of inherent value and sets the stage for derived value. It is a symbol of transaction, reduction, and relationality. Within a legal setting, the balance stands in front of two disputing parties to bring order. A blind woman holds the scales: a symbol of fairness, transparency, and equanimity. Legal systems exist to ensure the orderly coexistence of conflict. But order is not necessarily equality, nor, for that matter, justice. Order is a function of power. Subjects of a law or trade agreement are defined through their participation in an enclosed and consensually derived set of rules. Further, along the way, this enclosure imagines the nation. Hence, the image of the immigrant as the border-crossing-othered body is maintained to imagine the space of the nation. This dyad between the outside and the inside, the citizen and the immigrant, is disturbed when the inside has to reconcile with the fabrication of the outside as an unrecognizable other. It is seeing the falling sand congealed inside the glass.
For example, the movement of people from the global south to the north. It is propelled by exploitative trade practices that put systems in the global south in cycles of debts that set into motion unrest and social upheavals. Imbalance becomes the nature and condition of the immigrant body. Keichian’s installation, in all its’ simplicity, reveals the artifice and the challenges associated with our strife for balance. This strife rings true with what Byung Chul Han in Topology of Violence (2011) describes as ‘violence [that] originates not only in the negativity of conflict but also in the positivity of consensus’ (35). Stasis hides, behind its marvelous and clean posturing, all that has been reduced, erased, and abandoned to realize itself. A grain of matter in relation metaphorically exposes this inherent violence by balancing water and sand, implicating all acts of violence that aim to even out the disparate nature of the distribution of money, power, and resources, and draws our attention to how these balancing acts beget more imbalance.
Keichian participates in a rich genealogy of thinking about balance in art. Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s Rest Energy (1980), a four-minute recorded performance art piece showcased at ROSC'80 in the National Gallery of Ireland, is one of them. In Rest Energy, Ulay positions an arrow toward Abramovic’s heart and leans out on one side to pull on the string. Abramovic leans out in the opposite direction while holding the bow's grip. The two keep the string of the bow tight for those minutes by balancing out their weight on their feet and keeping their arms strong. If one of them lets go, Abramovic dies. There is remarkable tension in moments where Abramovic’s body appears strained from fatigue; most remarkable, however, is the couple’s commitment to keep each other alive. This performance renders visible the otherwise invisible -- and othered-- tension present in acts of love. It betrays the intricate ways our desires are entangled with our losses. Here, Abramovic suggests that falling is antithetical to maintaining love. Falling in love is exciting, freeing, and gravity-endorsed. Maintaining love is riddled with threats to selfhood, including potential annihilation. Gravity protests elongated existences. Maintenance demands an independent set of mechanics—a gossamer-like balance to hold both parties intact and together. Tension -- in love -- requires two sides to be balanced for a relationship to form. This would not be possible were it not for the arms and feet that keep the arrow in place. Balance is the result of sturdy limbs.
Tight-rope walking is the ultimate balancing act because it does away with metaphors of love, work, and identity, focusing, instead, on the question of death. A funambulist’s audience is kept in a state of heightened tension, confronted with their mortality. While on the rope, the funambulist must suspend thinking about falling while the audience is forced to think about the fall: the predicament of death is transferred from the performer to the audience. Death appears in Marina and Ulay's performance as well when Marina’s body is exposed to the arrow. It appears indirectly in Keichian’s installation: we encounter loss in the form of sand slipping out of the bag to balance out the water, evening out the arms of the beam. Keichian, in a description of the show, says, ‘the blown glass and the bag of sand, are in a still, yet slowly moving, changing relationship to one another. The balance can shift, halt, possibly break.’
A Grain of Matter in Relation hints at the precarity of balancing, at the pregnant possibility of change in images, metaphors, and balances that are seen as frozen and contained. Its simplicity is both perplexing and reassuring. Its lightness nods at the heaviness of its subject matter. In Six Memos to the Next Millennium (1988), Italo Calvino makes a case for the need for lightness in our narrative practice. Lightness is not a lack of intensity. Instead, it is the ability to look intensely at something that escapes vision. To explain this, Calvino recounts the tale of Perseus beheading Medusa. The Demigod kills the Gorgon, who could turn her enemies to stone just by looking at them, after approaching her reflection. For Calvino, this indirect approach towards something impossible to defeat —like the Gorgon— is lightness. In Keichian’s installation, water and sand do not resolve themselves according to their supposed meanings. Elementally, what might be thought of as heavy and gritty, like sand, balances itself with what is thought of as light and soft, like water. Their meanings change—at times contradicting and other times suffusing into each other. Water and sand become indirect ways to look at the struggle between the self, rooted in the past and the self, transformed into something other than the past. The relationship between the self and the other, like the lover and the beloved, the citizen and the immigrant, the funambulist and the audience, life and death, is an engagement that cannot be untangled. In other words, both sides of the scale must be given equal, careful attention. To talk about the beloved is to talk about the lover, immigrant dignity is citizenship and death roots life.
Keichian’s A Grain of Matter in Relation borrows from Eduard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997). Glissant says, “Each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other’ (11). For Glissant, there is nothing particularly self-sufficient about ideas of good and bad. Instead, we live relationally with each other. The self balances itself out in relation to others. This is a conflict but also a reprieve. In Keichian’s installation, the self that we know is the self that we are losing (sand), and we make space for the self that is yet to become (water).
A balancing act requires courage. It also requires intelligence, the kind that can hold conflicting things together, an intelligence that resists the reduction of memories, identities, and politics into easy codes. One that contends with precarity, that addresses the past with our future, comfort with discomfort, and the abstract with the real.
Mayookh Barua, September 2024.
———————————————————————-
References:
Han, Byung-Chul, and Amanda Demarco. Topology of Violence. The MIT Press, 2018.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2016.
Glissant, Édouard, and Betsy. Wing. Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
———————————————————————-
All Images Courtesy of the Artist.
Installation views and detail of A Grain of Matter in Relation (2024) at Human Resources Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.
———————————————————————-
ANDRE KEICHIAN is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working across photography, video, and sculptural installations. Keichian’s work exists at the intersection of image, sound, and movement, conjuring fluid identities. His intra-disciplinary practice draws on the materiality of performance, image, movement, and mass to explore the boundaries of presence and absence, realism and abstraction, proximity and distance, and tangible and ephemeral. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally at spaces such as the Metropolitan Cultural Center (Ecuador), The Craft Contemporary Museum (Los Angeles), Zuckerman Museum of Art (Georgia), El Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas (Buenos Aires), Museum of Contemporary Art Atlanta, and Anthology Film Archives (New York), among others. Keichian has completed various residencies, including The Echo Park Film Center, at land’s edge, The Camera Obscura and WonderRoot. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
