Intractable Histories 

Elena Filipovic

Combustion. Incineration. Dissolution. Liquification. Transmogrification. Alchemical processes. Daniel Turner’s art lies as much in what we commonly think of as the creative act as it does in well calibrated destruction. His first such undoing occurred some fifteen years ago, when he annihilated the entirety of his artistic output: a series of large-scale paintings made between 1999 and 2006. He felt he needed to start over, wanting to move toward sculpture, so he burnt what he had made thus far. Like the “junk” that the 38-year-old’s father, a shipyard welder and scrap metal merchant, used to regularly burn on the rural property in Virginia where he and his family had lived. But if this makes it sound as if Turner was predestined to set his works ablaze, I would be misleading you. Everything about the results of his process refuses to let you see them as (merely) autobiographical. His constitutive bonfire generated a tabula rasa for what followed, but it also became the blueprint for the artist’s subsequent melting down, reducing to particles, or otherwise transmuting everyday objects into spare installations, minimalist sculptures, strangely electric paintings, or even ephemeral stains on walls or floors. 

Since the destruction of his early works, Turner has been engaged in a critical examination of the lives of objects. Indeed, probing how they, in their very materiality, retain the histories—and the social and psychological consequences of such histories—of the contexts for which they were made and in which they exist. For his Particle Processed Cafeteria (2016) the artist enacted a series of painstaking operations through which various components of a cafeteria—its steel folding chairs and collapsible tables of steel and wood—were reduced to particle form, chemically modified, and then dissolved so as to be sprayed across the concrete expanse of the exhibition’s floor. As with nearly all of the artist’s pieces, embedded within the artwork’s title and label is crucial information, in this case, provenance: Suffolk Civic Center. Thus reduced to an emulsive stain, one institution is effectively distilled into another.

Cast aluminum and stainless steel bars from 2018, with titles like (WHSC 44102.17 Bar), provenance: (WAMC) Psychiatric Facility, are born from the waiting room chairs and desks gleaned from a North Carolina mental health facility. A year later, Turner similarly mined the Vinnitsa Regional Psychoneurological Hospital in Vinnitsa, Ukraine. Founded in from 1897, it is equally a still active polyclinic that offers medical care in the areas of psychiatry, neurology, and neurosurgery. Here he identified, archived, and recast one metric ton of the hospital’s steel bedding into minimal bar-like sculptures. Still more material extracted from the site was distilled into filigree-like shavings, clumped together to form a kind of steel wool, which the artist then used to burnish the white walls of an exhibition space. The resulting sculptures and wall “murals” have a strange tremor to them. And like so many of his works, they turn seemingly prosaic objects with distinct backstories into something formally unassuming but implacably charged.

Later, the artist used this same burnishing method to create “paintings” on wooden panels prepared with no less than fourteen layers of specialized white primers so they better reflect the burnish created from several months of regular and methodical rubbing by hand with his fabricated steel wool. However, to call (WHSC 44102 Burnish) (2018) a “mural” and 30/30 (2021) or Untitled (2021) a “painting,” seems wholly inadequate, my scare quotes emphasizing the difficulty of thinking of these works as following the conventions of pictorialism in two-dimensions, and not instead as radically flattened sculptures or even eerie relics of what they were made of and where they were taken from. Beyond escaping classical definitions of a medium, to look at them is actually difficult, and to capture their effect in a photograph even more so. The human and camera eye struggle to find focus in their peculiar, blurry presence that can best be described—however contradictory it may sound—as simultaneously thickened by their material traces and evanescently ghostly. Like the Shroud of Turin in relation to the face of Jesus, these are things at once haunted and haunting, indexical imprints and figurative abstractions.

For Turner, both the objects and the material conditions of their previous existences instantiate his artworks as such. Stripping the objects of their use-value, literally transforming them, Turner redirects their circulation (sinks and steel beds outside of their original context of a doctor’s office, psychiatric clinic, kitchen, or cafeteria).  He asks us: Can an object bear witness? Does it have a memory? Can its sheer materiality divulge the ferocity of the past it might hold within it? 

The results of his uncompromising practice endeavor to embody within sculpture the results of this questioning—invisibly but evocatively. To describe his process and its outcome, the artist has called it “rather akin to sculpture in reverse. Traditionally, a sculptor melts a minimal form (metal ingot) into a complex form (metal figure). From a processual standpoint, I’m interested in the opposite—to reverse complex forms into minimal forms.” His verdict is clear: “Regardless of form, content, or context, histories cannot be erased.”

Though histories may remain intractable, the essential mutability of both psychological and material states undergirds everything that has come after Turner’s first destructive act. Indeed, elements from medical facilities are perhaps the most regularly probed—and dissolved by the artist. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he has spent time in hospitals of various sorts. And while he might know a few intimately, in his work he mines them with the clinical precision of a doctor more than the vulnerable uncertainty of a patient, using such facilities as a consistent font for his material investigations. 

The cumulative effect of this work has something of the exquisite tension of an Agnes Martin. She, too, knew the mind to be a site of excruciating fragility. Thus critic Peter Schjeldahl’s characterization of the painter’s condition may perhaps also apply to Turner: “The relation of Martin’s mental illness to her art seems twofold, combining a need for concealment and for control—the grid as a screen and as a shield—with an urge to distill positive content from the oceanic states of mind that she couldn’t help experiencing.” For his part, Turner is perfectly candid about his mental health. And just as Martin’s work might be read in relation to her besieged mind, nothing about either of their bodies of work seems intended, nor does it open itself up, to reading it as wallowing in anything remotely like therapeutic self-portraiture. On the contrary, there seems an adamant attempt on Turner’s part, as there was on Martin’s, to find meaning in the austerity, rationality, and order that their art channels. As Turner himself has noted: “While I have been institutionalized for both mental and neurological conditions, I don’t see my sculptures as autobiographical or personal. The exterior finish of each form was developed out of a reductive process….[and] machine milled to reveal its material properties. The introduction of my hand would only suggest a painterly or pictorial approach towards form, therefore it’s important for me to remain removed.” 

On the surface, Turner’s work recalls the minimalism initially forged in the 1960s and ‘70s, with its allegiance to clean lines, industrial fabrication, and platonic geometries as well as conceptual art’s dry and orderly “aesthetics of administration” (to use Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s famous characterization). But Turner deploys these aesthetics to quite opposite effect. Minimalism, for its part, is often read as either ideologically blank, free of any “vestigial mystery” (by its champions) or a celebration of an authoritian “display of power” (by its detractors). Neither could be further from Turner’s sculptures and installations, which set ablaze—quite literally—supposed neutrality and authoritative power alike. 

One way the artist undermines this neutrality is by focusing on something long ignored by both minimalism and conceptual art alike: psychic charges and vulnerable bodies. Take Turner’s publication, coolly titled 2 220 and evocative of the 220 volts of an electric current and that he produced just as he was undergoing electroconvulsive therapy. He filled the publication’s pages with 1:1 scans of a collection of invoices receipts, reports, and other administrative documents, all made out to him. To look at it is to see echoes of Mel Bochner’s pioneering piece of conceptual art, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art (1966), which features several binders filled with photocopies of industrial blueprints, fabrication receipts, and technical sketches for and by the likes of Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, or Sol Le Witt. In Turner’s case, his publication juxtaposes his own Bowery Restaurant Supply sunken sink order with the $200 bill he received for procedure number 99213, administered by a Johnathan Z. Charney MD of Park Avenue Manhattan, or the invoice for the 111.5 hours of labor at $33 an hour for which he contracted Super Renovation Corp. with the Superior Court of the State of California legal document for psychiatric hold for Turner, ordered by his treating doctor. In other words, across its pages, material production and labor in the fabrication of art and the mental and physical health of its author share a common space. To compare the two publications is to realize that Bochner’s binders may have revealed the administration of the making of artworks, but they never disclosed much about what goes on—humanly—behind the act of creation. By celebrating the idea, both minimalism and conceptual art systematically disavowed the site of idea formation—the mind—with its inherent weaknesses and fragilities. It is this vulnerable site that Turner unflinchingly plumbs. 

Perhaps more than anything produced by Judd, Richard Serra, or Carl Andre under the rubric of minimalism, Turner’s pieces might, then, be closer to a cross between the 1970s conceptual practice of Michael Asher, whose canonical works involved the rigorous displacement, removal, or reconstruction of a gallery or museum’s walls or ceilings or heating elements and the 1990s post-minimalism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who imbued ordinary stuff arrayed in piles or stacks with a pinch of emotionality, mortality, and carnality. To look at a Turner sculpture or installation is to be confronted with their aesthetic, symbolic, and even phenomenological qualities. But what is to be considered in his operations are not merely the formal qualities of his output, but the relationship between the procedures of which they are the product and the conditions of the site and situation for which they were undertaken.

In shifting the focus from subject to subjectivization, Turner elides the messy, particular self in order to highlight the forces that shape, anguish, and produce it. And by focusing on the emotional and psychological and historical entanglements of objects, he makes the gallery, museum, and exhibition space the site of the unraveling of the violence congealed in many of the readymade objects the artist starts out with. Call it “institutional critique” of an atypical sort. 

Thus maybe, finally, his objects might be said to share something with the clear Plexiglas cube, sealed and fogged from the inside, that is Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1965). In it, the temperature differential between inside and outside causes water vapor to condense into droplets that run down the walls of the cube. Haacke had effectively used the aesthetics of minimalism to contain within it an unruly interior that actively measured and transparently exposed the shifting conditions of the environment around it. Turner’s opaque, obdurate forms do not expose their own insides so visibly, but they do metaphorically take the temperature of an object’s ideological origins, functional protocols, and evoke the differential emotional or psychological interiors of those that touched, or were touched by, them.

It was Antonin Artaud who once exhorted, “If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.” Turner’s oeuvre began with a bonfire. What emerged thereafter was not so much mere cinders as a blazing light, by which we might better see how art can indeed signal through the flames, responding to and grappling with what it means to be human in a world that is itself on fire.