Temporal Vertigo
In his Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida suggested that “Haunting is historical to be sure, but it is not dated, it is never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day, according to the instituted order of a calendar.”
In his brilliant solo exhibition, Temporal Vertigo, Nicolas G. Miller invites us to a seance of ghosts from the Golden Age of Hollywood in perhaps the most haunted place of all: Los Angeles. The show features two gorgeously patinated bronze statuettes of stars from Tinseltown—Everett Sloane and Lupe Vélez—wearing fashions by Yohji Yamamoto and Hussein Chalayan from the year 2000. The very form of the statuettes and their onyx plinths play with art deco aesthetics that would sit comfortably on an executive desk.
Next to these statuettes—which Miller has coyly advertised in fashion magazines and other venues in the form of nineteenth and early twentieth century subscriptions for mass produced sculpture—are two 3D printed and sanded reliefs in the ornamental form of quatrefoils. The reliefs present us with the same garments worn by the stars, now collapsed onto a plane that highlights their at turns graphic and volumetric forms. Miller is keenly attuned to how ornament travels vertiginously across time and cultures in a ghostly return of what the art historian Aby Warburg, drawing on the anthropologist E.B. Tylor, called the Nachleben or “survival” of forms. It’s hard to think of a better definition for the rhythms of fashion itself.
In the end, perhaps, this is also a show about what it means to be in Los Angeles—a place where one acutely feels how, as Audrey Wollen so beautifully put it, a “psychedelic mix of physical decentralization and filmic over-representation makes LA feel like a ghost town full of people.”
–Patrick Crowley