ART REVIEW : Dillbohner Celebrates an Old Ritual

The ancient ritual of gathering honey, documented back at least 12,000 years in cave paintings in Spain and Africa, is memorialized in Christel Dillbohner’s languorous installation “Uber Das Sammeln Von Honig/The Honey Gatherers” at Space.

Unrolled bolts of burlap, the material Nepalese honey hunters used for their protective capes, divide the sprawling, 2,500 square feet of the gallery. A ladder of rope and bamboo, like those used on gathering expeditions, falls from the ceiling and spills across the floor. Sheets of rice paper, coated in beeswax, cover the windows, shielding against the light. Beyond this, everything is de-centered, contingent, fragmentary.

There is no order, no focus, no climax here. There are only objects you come upon as you move through the darkened space: massive, conical forms, dangling from delicate strings; a jar filled with honey, stashed inside a screened beehive box; rusted bits of broken things lying on the floor; an assemblage of felt and coal lovingly arranged inside an upended wooden drawer.

Some of these objects are found, others made. Some assert themselves, while others hide, as if they don’t want to be noticed. What’s important, however, is less the object than the process, less the moment of discovery than the pleasure of the search. Thus, the candies Dillbohner offers at the entrance to the installation are doubly sweet: once, on the tongue; and again, as a token of a journey she insists that we share.

That journey refers, of course, to the artist’s own process. Indeed, with the motif of the honey gatherers--who hunt and scavenge, filter and distill--Dillbohner has crafted an almost shockingly romantic metaphor for artistic creation. Yet the metaphor never jars; it is never exclusive. The viewer, too, is positioned somewhere along the continuum--another scavenger, another distiller. Dillbohner stresses the role of the viewer in constructing his or her own experience; in this, her brand of romanticism emerges as strikingly revisionist.

Christel Dillbohner at Space, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., (213) 461-8166. Closed Sunday and Monday, through March 20.