Sea Salt and Moonshine
Nina Karavasiles and Allan Kaprow in inSITE94
by Kraig E. Cavanaugh
Artweek November 3, 1994, Volume 25 Number 21

After a recent pilgrimage through inSITE94, two pieces which seed to me to utilize their sites for some greater purpose with the greatest success were Nina Karavasiles's "Saline" and Allan Kaprow's "Muezzin". Located at the Stephen Birch Aquarium, overlooking the ocean along Scripps Institution of Oceanography and its pier by the La Jolla campus of the University of California, San Diego, Karavasiles's black trough filled with pieces of solar-evaporated sea salt are visually humble; the rather dirty-looking gravel-sized pieces of salt are derived from separating impurities from sea water.

Ironically, "Saline", with its reference to the impurities of sea water, also refers to a Federal lawsuit with may force the City of San Diego to comply with certain guidelines in the Federal Clean Water Act. The Act requires secondary sewage treatment for effluent discharge into the ocean, and the primary scientific adversaries of compliance are Scripp's oceanographers. These scientist believe secondary treatment to be unnecessary because current discharge allegedly has an insignificant impact on the environment.

The artwork displays information to the contrary. Because it affects the brittle star, a relative of the more common starfish and a low level barometer of ocean pollution, the sewage outcall would appear to have an impact upon the ecosystem. With an extreme economy of means, Karavasiles's installation presents the salt-making process as a striking critique of Scripps Institution scientists and prompts reflection upon continued ocean dumping.

Meanwhile, Kaprow's "Muezzin" makes use of a Moorish-style minaret situated in the steelyard of Tijuana's Centro Escolar Agua Caliente. This architectural confection originally was built as part of the old Agua Caliente resort. The title itself refers to the crier who call Muslims to prayer five times daily from a minaret. On a similar sort of schedule, clouds of combustion exhaust erupt from the work throughout the day. This smoke, rising from the steelyard, once a playground for rich gamblers, superficially reads as a rocket lifting towards the moon. But perhaps we "see" it as a rocket ship because, as Americans, we are subject to our own imperialist indocrinations regarding space flight.
Kaprow's statement about the work, however, published in the inSITE94 guide, reads, "Minaret no muezzin pop song? Daily liftoff to moonshine".

This seemingly lighthearted remark seems somehow prophetic, The reference to moonshine elicits a drunken vision: the exhaust from the fantasy spaceship could instead signify a class struggle to come. With the recent election of Ernesto Zedillo, yet another PRI presidential candidate, as well as the recent Mexican assassinations, it seems that the decisive division between Mexico's haves and have-nots will continue beyond the PRI's already four-decade old reign. Thus the work becomes a dar, sobering prophecy of the revolutionary pyres of an uprising among Mexico's deeply divided rich and poor.