Which Came First? Harminder Judge: The Bootstrap Paradox, at moCa Cleveland

The excellent title of Harminder Judge’s exhibition, The Bootstrap Paradox (on view January 24 – June 1 at moCa Cleveland) might seem at this point in history to be an economic reference to the elusive American Dream. In this country we have the illusion that poor people can “lift themselves up by their bootstraps” and start companies, work hard, and build wealth. This isn’t to argue whether that can happen anymore, or whether it ever could, and that is not what this show is about at all.

The metaphorical bootstraps in this show are not about wealth or the United States, or even capitalism, but instead about universal mysteries of life. Invoking the symbol Oroboros—the snake eating its tail for nourishment—is closer to the truth of what the title is about. Still, that metaphor focuses more on the idea of consumption than birth, and so that’s not quite it. The Bootstrap Paradox an elegant way of stating the dynamic inherent in the question, “which came first: the chicken, or the egg?” It is about continuity of life, being a part of something eternal, and about the never-ending pursuit of finding the ultimate source of one thing born of another.

As a teenager, Judge was profoundly engaged by participation in a funeral ritual for his grandfather. He was living in London, but returned to rural Punjab, India, for the ceremony—a hands-on cremation carried out by members of the family. It was not a sterile ceremony carried out inside an oven, behind closed doors by hired contractors. Instead, as he described in conversation with curator DJ Hellerman on opening night, it was an open fire in the outdoors, with the artist among other members of his family carrying the body to its end—a direct, primal experience of returning his grandfather to the earth. It brought him face to face in real time with the idea of life cycles, continuity, physicality and the metaphysical.

As an aside, speaking of Hellerman and Judge together, The Bootstrap Paradox comes with two “firsts.” It is Judge’s first solo museum show in the US, and also the first show Hellerman curated in his new role at moCa.

On opening night, the artist and curator presented their dialog in front of Judge’s monumental installation on moCa’s large, first-floor wall. Any of the works in the show might be described as monumental: they all are large and heavy. This one, though, A Ghost Dance (folded into), is more than 32 feet wide and more than 12 feet high. From a distance, it has a lot in common with a Rorschach card: Not only in its relative symmetrical quality, but like any work of abstraction that what a person reads into it can be as telling of the person as the work. The nature of the long, jagged line also has something in common with a heartbeat on a monitor—a lifeline—and visually even more in common with a track from a digital sound recording: a voice, the story of a life. But Rorschach tests are about the surface, and first impressions. The surface is just a part of these plaster works. This one is an inch and a half thick, which means not only is it enormously heavy, but also that the pigment we see in the pattern on the surface continues all the way through, as if through the depths of time.

The exhibit continues at smaller scale, but perhaps with greater impact, upstairs. The impact comes from the ritual of entering the spaces where those works are installed.

In one gallery, a short video documents a performance, a procession between two simultaneous exhibitions of the artist’s work in London last year. The procession symbolically links not only the galleries, but the living and the dead. A dozen figures, their bodies covered in smears of white, carry a log through the streets and load it into a space. There’ they watch as a votive fire is set in a groove along the top of the log. In her essay on the performance, Barbican Curator Public Programs Susanna Davies-Crook likened the log to different vessels for life or lives—“a tree, a body, a ship, a stone, a cocoon, a house.” Again, this is no sterile, ordinary cremation in a sealed oven, where no one sees the effect of the flame: in this ceremony, the people watch the vessel burn.

For another part of the exhibition, viewers enter moCa’s second-floor gallery through doors that close, shutting out the noise of anyone who is not there to consider the work. Judge’s installation creates yet another layer of solemnity with a plaster sculpture that narrows the space and forms a portal into the part of the gallery where three more plaster and pigment works are installed. The portal could be read as a birth canal, or as gate between one world and the next. Beyond it one finds the most compelling experience in the show: three works, each of them a diptych of somewhat symmetrical plaster slabs worked through with pigment in blooming layers evocative of the cosmos. The slabs are approximately 1” thick. Their very depth, and the idea that the pigment is worked through it, reinforces the idea of layers of time, the fact that we see a life – the polished surface—while it is at the top, but the entire history of that life—the story and color of the generations before–lies beneath it, like the earth, like the history of a family, like the roots of a culture.

You’ve got til June 1 to see this show, but make it a point. Life is at once eternal and fleeting.

Harminder Judge: The Bootstrap Paradox
January 24 – June 1
moCa Cleveland
11400 Euclid Ave.
Cleveland, Ohio 44106
216.421.8671