Howard N. Fox

In 1984, his senior year at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Daniel Wheeler undertook an extremely thoughtful project, one that was ritualistically conceived and executed. The setting, close to his familyıs home in Little Compton, Rhode Island, was the scant remains of a beach front mansion that has been destroyed in a hurricane decades earlier. As a child, Wheeler played at the abandoned site; as an adolescent, he had his first sexual experiences there; as a young adult, he occasionally returned there to think, to read, or just to be still. Over the years, as he matured, whatever stray vestiges of the house that has been there during his youth gradually disintegrated, until all that remained of the original structure was its foundation. The site itself impressed Wheeler with a great metaphorical resonance that suggested the changes and transformations and transmutations of a lifetime, the progression from birth to death, and the passage to whatever (if anything) might lie beyond the infinitesimality of the present and the infinitude of time.

To realize his project, Wheeler brought to this site a plaster cast he had made of his torso. With simple but deliberate activity, he dug a hole in the shore fronting the house, buried the plaster torso in the sand with its "head" facing east, consecrating the dried gypsum-and-water object back to the elements of earth and water, and marked the spot with a counterclockwise spiral of rocks and pebbles, each ritually washed in the surf that soon enough reclaimed them, leaving no trace of the private ceremony. Wheeler performed this procedure in solitude, in the winter when nobody was there to observe or engage him. The only evidence of the event that abides today are some photographs he made to document the activity and some unpublished notes. In words that now seem prescient in light of the art that he has produced in the ensuing decade, Wheeler commented in his notes "I was fascinated by having this object exist in the same world with me, as if my mind had stepped out of body and time to see my basic form." He also expressed his aspiration that his art might "assimilate or resonate with...ancient myths or stories of great general meaning."

That student effort, youthful and simple as it was, was a surprisingly comprehensive expression of the themes and intents that characterize Wheeler's art today. While the setting surely held some significance in Wheeler's personal history, the project he undertook there was not launched as an autobiographical revery but was conceived in response to the rich metaphorical possibilities of the site. His intent in that early project was not merely to represent the human torso but to signify, to establish the meaning of, the physical body and its interaction with the world external to itself. Indeed, it is clear that the "basic form" Wheeler alludes to is not simply the human physique or the anatomical structure of a creature in space, but something closer to a Platonic notion of the pattern or blueprint on which all bodies are formed. Wheeler's notion of the "basic form" of the body involves not only its physical configuration but a perception of the genesis of a whole life, embracing conception, birth, self-awareness, personal history, death, and decay‹in short, a comprehension, attained as if "out of body and time," of human life in all its material and nonmaterial states of being.

His impulse to describe the body both empirically, in terms of its physicality, and also intuitively, by evoking all the biological, social, psychological, and spiritual circumstances in which the body exists and functions, may best be described as metaphysical, meaning after or beyond the physical. In both his early and mature art, Wheeler's intent is to focus attention on the body not as an entity in itself but to behold the body (and the self that it manifest) in the wholeness of endless time and space. In short, Wheeler situates the body (and the self) not merely inside of a room or in a certain place, but within the universe.

An overarching complex of themes is intrinsic to Wheeler's art, including the idea of the body and the self in a state of endless flux, issues of cause and effect, and concepts involving passage or moving out to ever wider and more embracing contexts. These are certainly not the only themes in his oeuvre - there is formidable political content in several of his recent projects - but they are consistent themes that have informed his art throughout his career. Many of his early works involved commonplace objects as symbols for the body transformed and in an ongoing state of change. In a deeply evocative untitled work form 1990 in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for example, a doll's crib is nested precariously within the thousand fragile fingers of s sere tumbleweed. The crib - as a symbol of security, stability, and maternal protection - shall be carried away by the tumbleweed-a symbol of perpetual rootlessness, fleetingness, and unprotectedness. Not only will childhood and youth be lost, this work suggests, but so will the idealized innocence we associate with them. This affecting work is haunted by a somewhat melancholic pondering on the evanescent nature of childhood, the fragility and vulnerability of living things, and intimations of mortality. Significantly, there is no effigy of the body in this particular piece; its is made all the more poignant by the absence of the human form.

As his work developed, it tended to become physically more complex. Though Wheeler continues to make independent, self-contained objects, his most ambitious works are the architecturally scaled installations that he has been makings since the late 1980's. While usually more multifaceted and recondite than his small-scaled objects, the recent installations are rooted in many of Wheeler's original themes. In Ecce Homo (1987-91), the viewer is induced to open a wood door and pass into a dimly lit space that discloses a walkway leading to a voting booth-a niche of a structure made even more confining than usual by the inclusion of contoured brackets where one would necessarily have to position one's feet, knees, torso, and chin to conform to the "blueprint" or template of an absent human body. In the booth is a balloting booklet composed of a sequence of photographs of the artist spanning his lifetime from infancy to adulthood. Audio tapes broadcast voices discussing concepts of the self, society, identity, and freedom. In this work, Wheeler extends his probe of the myriad contexts in which the "autonomous" self exists and functions.

The present installation, You Are Here, is conceptually and formally Wheeler's most complex work. It engages and manipulates the viewer in surprising ways and propels the process of discovery itself to the forefront. How the viewer experiences the work depends upon what avenue of approach he or she chooses - if the viewer is even aware of a choice - at the outset. Entering one way, the viewer explores the interior of a complicated architectural agglomeration that can be explored and seen only by parts; entering another way, the viewer is led to the exterior of the piece that is situated within the much larger space of the gallery. At no time is the entire project completely accessible, visually or physically; rather, it must be experienced cumulatively and "comprehended" through an imaginative process of remembering and synthesizing. But whatever signification the viewer conjures forth from the sum of the parts, it is always the process of exploring and discovering and of conjuring meaning that is the essence of this opus.

The heart of You Are Here is a large, round igloo - or yurt-like structure into which the viewer emerges after traveling through a low tunnel. The walls of this chamber are bedecked with domestic electrical appliances that operate intermittently, and in the center of the space is a ladder leading up to a hole in the domed ceiling. If the viewer climbs up and looks out, the vantage opens out to the entire gallery structure containing the project. Suddenly, the exterior configuration of the physiognomy of the structure becomes apparent, as do the presence of an observation/surveillance room that constantly monitors the project from without. Seen from the outside, the yurt plainly resembles a shirt (Wheeler jokingly refers to the structure as the "yurt shirt"), and the hole in the ceiling is the collar; the whole structures thus a kind of torso, an obscure but unmistakable human effigy, placed in a quasi-public, quasi-private context that itself opens out to a university campus in a larger community in a particular location in a country on a continent of this planet.

We explore Wheeler's installations much as we do the world at large, negotiating our way using our bodies and the sensory and empirical data we encounter. But that exploration leads to the discovery of something that far supersedes what we can know sensately. If the physical exploration of spaces, volumes, and objects is the immediate and preliminary content of Wheeler's art, it is not (as it is for some perceptual artists) an end in itself. Such sensate experience for Wheeler would be incomplete and unfulfilled without the uniquely human insistence to attribute significance to it. If the body is the fist actor and "prime mover" in Wheeler's art, the ultimate protagonist is the human imagination, which is the true locus of discovery, perception, and knowledge.

Wheeler's installations are devised to provoke the viewer to interact, usually knowingly and voluntarily, with their disparate parts and overlying organizations. The viewer's function, or behavior, is less that of a passive observer than an active explorer and participant in informing the aesthetic experience. But sometimes, as in You Are Here, in which the electrical appliances are activated by motion detectors that respond to the viewer's movements, the viewer is involuntarily involved in causing something to happen in ways that he or she may perceive only dimly or not at all. And even if the viewer does sense that his or her own motions are somehow activating the electric motors, it is not as if the viewer in any way operates the piece, for Wheeler has programmed the motion detectors to activate a random number of appliances in random locations and for varying periods of time. The viewer thus in no way controls what happens but is simply involved with what happens. What the piece inculcates in the viewer is a vague but true sense of causality in which the viewer is a participant and even an agent but definitely not an author or director of the results that he or she precipitates. It is the indefiniteness, the departure from empirical knowledge and literal conditions, that animates the soul of Wheeler's art.

Wheeler often generates a tension between certitude and speculation through an implied, unresolved, open-ended narrative; but it is not a narrative with a plot or series of events to be chronicled so much as it is the evidence of the passage or transition from one state of being to another. Nothing ever happens in an eventful sense in Wheeler's art - nothing, save the increase of consciousness. The viewer may move around; a performed activity or "procedure" may be scheduled as part of a project; or components of an installation may actually operate and "do" something (as the motorized appliances in You Are Here). But there is never a resolution to the activity; there is only physical process and heightened awareness. In Wheeler's art, nothing is completed, including consciousness.

In the most essential way, Wheeler's art serves to nudge or cajole or beckon the viewer-perhaps "communicant" is a better word-into a heightened awareness of the search for significance that transcends the quantifiable "facts' of the here and now. Like the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century-John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, George Herbert, and others-Wheeler uses complex and compound metaphors involving the body and everyday objects to catapult the audience's imagination to abstract thoughts about existence and causality and everything else that supersedes the world as we discern it empirically.

Unlike the metaphysical poets, however, Wheeler does not profess a confident faith in the presence of an omniscient and omnipresent Creator. The deepest questions and issues Wheeler raises are ontological, dealing with the nature of existence and the significance each person finds in being human. Wheeler's art, reflective of the sensibilities and concerns of many people in the last decade of the second millennium, is restless, longing, unrequited. In the present era, when codes of meaning that had been the sustaining foundations of Western civilization seem to many thoughtful and conscientious individuals to have broken down irreparably or to be irretrievable to the needs and experiences of the contemporary world, it is revealing that so many artists feel virtually compelled to raise ontological questions but feel precluded from rendering answers. Wheeler's art though seems still to be leaving room for hope, for faith in some greater entity that he cannot account for but whose existence he subliminally seeks. If Wheeler's art establishes no certitudes of belief, it stands as an affirmation of the human aspirations inherent in a search for meaning-particularly "great general meaning."

Wheeler sees this art as a way "out of body and time"-a conduit or a lens allowing a glimpse of the world beyond the immediacy, the literalness of the here and now. If entropy is the turning or falling inward of all matter into a closed, static system, Wheeler's is the art of "ex-trophy"-the perpetual motion out of one state and into another. In Wheeler's vision, nothing exists in a vacuum or a closed system; everything partakes of a wider, more embracing, ever expanding context. Thus, when the viewer creeps up the ladder in the "yurt-shirt" of You Are Here to espy the surrounding room, its is a bit analogous to a turtle sticking its head out of its shell and seeing the world outside. Yet for Wheeler, the world beyond is much more than the immediate environs; perhaps a better analogy is that of a scientist peering through an observatory telescope out to the heavens, at first seeing effects-the planets, stars, black holes, and all the other matter of creation-but ultimately seeking causes.

Howard N. Fox December 1994

Howard N. Fox is curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Reprinted by permission from the catalogue for "You are Here," Cal State University, Fullerton, 1995.