Essay

Ati Maier: Speeding Through Space by Gregory Volk Gregory Volk is a New York-based art critic and curator. He is also an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University

1. There is a great moment in Section 33 of Song of Myself when Walt Whitman abruptly, imaginatively, and ecstatically blasts off into deep space, 106 years before Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin actually accomplished the feat in his spacecraft Vostok 1. Section 33 begins with the rousing, Einsteinian exclamation, "Space and Time!" which works Whitman into a state of heightened consciousness and boundless freedom:

My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps, I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents, I am afoot with my vision.

Afoot with his vision, Whitman then embarks on a hurtling tour through America, in a single, elastic sentence that stretches over four pages. In this sentence, Whitman constantly darts between city and country, Western mountains and Manhattan's Broadway, rural homesteads and East Coast beaches, animals and humans. As he does so he notices and identifies with an amazing array of American things: log huts, lumbermen, an alligator "in his tough pimples," a Methodist preacher and a black bear, a Quaker woman and a "good game of base-ball," a quail and a bat, a hot air balloon and a wrecked ship, copulating livestock, a noisy printing press, a wrecked ship, herds of buffalo, Niagara Falls, fields of wheat and cotton, a moccasin print, shop windows displaying the latest wares, and geese who "nip their food with short jerks," among many, many others. This cascading sentence is jam-packed with diverse information; it also anticipates all sorts of maximalists coming much later, who likewise pack their paintings, drawings, sculptures, websites and texts with a dense array of images, information, and energy. Near the end of the sentence, Whitman steps outside at midnight into his backyard for a meditative moment and a breath of fresh air, but instead is instantly transported far away and back into history, in fact to the origins of the Judeo-Christian tradition:

Exactly then, Whitman rockets from religion to science and science fiction; from past and present to a speculative future of space travel and exploration; from this world to a universe filled with splendors, immensities, and mysteries, when he finds himself:

Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars, Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles, Speeding with tail'd meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest…

2. Flash forward to Ati Maier, and especially her stunning new painting Dérive, which is her first full blown painting on canvas in many years (she is principally known for works involving ink and wood stain on paper.) This acrylic and ink painting also involves "speeding through space," and "speeding through heaven and the stars," and when Whitman mentions "seven satellites," a "broad ring," "eighty thousand miles," and "tail'd meteors" these could all be reasonable descriptions of exactly what one finds in the painting, although Maier hardly set out to work with Whitman in mind. The painting is a gorgeous, mind-bending conflation of things heavenly and earthly. Vivid, multi-colored planets pulsate and seem to shimmer and spin in the foreground; smaller, planet-like colorful circles drift about; and miniature mountains in the distance inexplicably sport tiny flags. A squadron of black flying saucers zooms in at an angle, while parti-colored farmlands, as if glimpsed from an airplane window, convincingly double as landing strips for the spacecraft of the future. More black flying craft, like a cross between the current space shuttle and futuristic airplanes, patrol the middle air. Two astronauts in white spacesuits tumble and float at opposite sides of the painting. Light blue planetary rings, which might also be curving energy beams, sweep through the painting's upper half, while jagged white bands cut across the picture plane at an angle; they could be smoke plumes, strange clouds, or perhaps visible electrical waves on an oscilloscope. Way up near the top, an inky blackness, signifying outer space, is festooned with glittering planets and stars. At all points the earth, if indeed this is the earth, because it also seems like an alien planet millions of light years distant, is open to and buffeted by cosmic forces in carnival colors coming from every which way. Maier's new (for her) technique of acrylic paint and ink on canvas results in a painting that is harder, more amped up, more outrageously colorful, and more filled with prominent surface activity than her acclaimed work of the past several years. This brazen look and tough texture accentuates the painting's various tensions, and all its fractious cohesion. Wonders are articulated and Maier's fantastical mix of geography, geology, topography, physics, hallucination and intricate abstract patterning bedazzles and enthralls. Still, as much as this elaborate network holds together exquisitely, it also seems poised to burst apart into smithereens. There is something very precarious here, and making things even more reeling and agitated is how Maier juxtaposes and scrambles multiple perspectives. You look down at this painting, seemingly from a great height, as if from a spacecraft or through a satellite's camera. Shift your perspective an inch or so and you're looking horizontally at a distant horizon, and beyond that horizon toward even more distant planets and stars. Shift your perspective again and you're looking up, or in, or directly at, although you're also aware that urgent things are happening elsewhere, at the corner of your eye, or in a remote quadrant near the upper right hand corner, or at the lower left. This is a world you're always approaching, but never arriving at, and also always leaving. This is a world that is bountiful, but also supremely unstable and chaotic. This is an exceptionally powerful painting that's also elusive and ungraspable. Moreover, while Ati Maier is clearly interested in "remote futures," to borrow Robert Smithson's term, it may be the case that her fanciful cosmic scene also has a great deal to do with life in our world right now, at a time when wavering hopefulness abuts fierce strife, and when mounting fears of ecological mayhem make the future seem especially unnerving. It may also be the case that Ati Maier's outer space painting has a great deal to do with intense inner space, with the shifts and twists of the individual psyche, with flexible thoughts, nuances of emotion, and diverse to the point of wildly contradictory states of being. There is considerable boldness here, recklessness, and adventure. There are also moments of beatific quiescence and repose. Parts of the work are sublime and others are frantic. There is playfulness and whimsy witness several squiggly white shapes, with what look like bulging eyes and ridiculous grins, which seem like a child's gleeful doodles. There is also worry and palpable danger. Almost all of Ati Maier's works are devoid of human figures altogether, along with other visible signs of the human, like architecture. What, then, does one make of the two hovering astronauts who seem very tender and vulnerable? They are partners, it seems, on some special mission, but something has gone wrong with the mission, and therefore they are separate and adrift.

2. Flash forward to Ati Maier, and especially her stunning new painting Dérive, which is her first full blown painting on canvas in many years (she is principally known for works involving ink and wood stain on paper.) This acrylic and ink painting also involves "speeding through space," and "speeding through heaven and the stars," and when Whitman mentions "seven satellites," a "broad ring," "eighty thousand miles," and "tail'd meteors" these could all be reasonable descriptions of exactly what one finds in the painting, although Maier hardly set out to work with Whitman in mind.

The painting is a gorgeous, mind-bending conflation of things heavenly and earthly. Vivid, multi-colored planets pulsate and seem to shimmer and spin in the foreground; smaller, planet-like colorful circles drift about; and miniature mountains in the distance inexplicably sport tiny flags. A squadron of black flying saucers zooms in at an angle, while parti-colored farmlands, as if glimpsed from an airplane window, convincingly double as landing strips for the spacecraft of the future. More black flying craft, like a cross between the current space shuttle and futuristic airplanes, patrol the middle air. Two astronauts in white spacesuits tumble and float at opposite sides of the painting. Light blue planetary rings, which might also be curving energy beams, sweep through the painting's upper half, while jagged white bands cut across the picture plane at an angle; they could be smoke plumes, strange clouds, or perhaps visible electrical waves on an oscilloscope. Way up near the top, an inky blackness, signifying outer space, is festooned with glittering planets and stars. At all points the earth, if indeed this is the earth, because it also seems like an alien planet millions of light years distant, is open to and buffeted by cosmic forces in carnival colors coming from every which way.

Maier's new (for her) technique of acrylic paint and ink on canvas results in a painting that is harder, more amped up, more outrageously colorful, and more filled with prominent surface activity than her acclaimed work of the past several years. This brazen look and tough texture accentuates the painting's various tensions, and all its fractious cohesion. Wonders are articulated and Maier's fantastical mix of geography, geology, topography, physics, hallucination and intricate abstract patterning bedazzles and enthralls. Still, as much as this elaborate network holds together exquisitely, it also seems poised to burst apart into smithereens. There is something very precarious here, and making things even more reeling and agitated is how Maier juxtaposes and scrambles multiple perspectives. You look down at this painting, seemingly from a great height, as if from a spacecraft or through a satellite's camera. Shift your perspective an inch or so and you're looking horizontally at a distant horizon, and beyond that horizon toward even more distant planets and stars. Shift your perspective again and you're looking up, or in, or directly at, although you're also aware that urgent things are happening elsewhere, at the corner of your eye, or in a remote quadrant near the upper right hand corner, or at the lower left. This is a world you're always approaching, but never arriving at, and also always leaving. This is a world that is bountiful, but also supremely unstable and chaotic. This is an exceptionally powerful painting that's also elusive and ungraspable. Moreover, while Ati Maier is clearly interested in "remote futures," to borrow Robert Smithson's term, it may be the case that her fanciful cosmic scene also has a great deal to do with life in our world right now, at a time when wavering hopefulness abuts fierce strife, and when mounting fears of ecological mayhem make the future seem especially unnerving.

It may also be the case that Ati Maier's outer space painting has a great deal to do with intense inner space, with the shifts and twists of the individual psyche, with flexible thoughts, nuances of emotion, and diverse to the point of wildly contradictory states of being. There is considerable boldness here, recklessness, and adventure. There are also moments of beatific quiescence and repose. Parts of the work are sublime and others are frantic. There is playfulness and whimsy witness several squiggly white shapes, with what look like bulging eyes and ridiculous grins, which seem like a child's gleeful doodles. There is also worry and palpable danger. Almost all of Ati Maier's works are devoid of human figures altogether, along with other visible signs of the human, like architecture. What, then, does one make of the two hovering astronauts who seem very tender and vulnerable? They are partners, it seems, on some special mission, but something has gone wrong with the mission, and therefore they are separate and adrift.

3. Ati Maier is a convincing pioneer of a new kind of ultra-mediated landscape painting and drawing analog landscapes in a digital era of alternate realities and the Internet, virtuosic paintings chock full of information in a time of information overload. It's absolutely correct that music, especially sampling and electronica, is a potent influence on Maier. She is a knowledgeable and devoted aficionado of music, and the way she layers and combines diverse imagery, lays down repetitive patterns like beats and adds in samples and tangents, is very similar to how DJs construct their sonic adventures. It's also correct that websites, videos, cartoons, comic books, and CD covers all factor into Maier's combinatory esthetic, along with NASA photographs, diagrams from books about physics and science, and probably dozens of other sources. With Sacré Coeur, a weightless astronaut in a white spacesuit is enmeshed in, or is perhaps emanating from her or his heart, a dizzying mix of colorful forms, including snippets of landscapes, hints of computer windows, pixelated patterns, scraps of language, and purely abstract designs. It's also right that whatever "nature" Maier presents is always infected and infiltrated by cultural forces. With Some Happy Day, a beleaguered tropical paradise, including bending palm trees and smoldering volcanoes, resembles a digital landscape in a video or a computer game. This ersatz paradise is being walloped by one of the weirdest storms ever, a whirling assortment of jagged red bits, colorful grids that look like aerial farmlands, concentric rings and arcs that seem made of industrial material, clouds, wires, and balls which themselves contain mini-landscapes. This freak hurricane resembles a cosmic storm, when galaxy clusters collide, or the aftermath of the Big Bang, and it is simultaneously creative and destructive. It is also fascinating to note that there are 19th century, and decidedly Romantic, underpinnings to Maier's 21st century esthetic, mostly having to do with a soulful, keyed up, and potentially ecstatic orientation to nature and landscape. The poet Walt Whitman and his great inspiration, the poet, philosopher, and noted Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson; European painters like J.W.W. Turner, John Constable, and Caspar David Friedrich; and American painters like Frederic Church and Thomas Moran, among others, are precursors to Maier's eccentric visions. What Maier shares with them is an understanding that encounters with nature can really have a mind-spinning power, can really induce reverie and awe, and can really be psychologically and spiritually transportive. What she shares as well is an interest in artworks that aspire toward the ecstatic, cathartic, and the sublime. When I first met Ati Maier several years ago I was immediately entranced by her ink on paper works, which at the time were much smaller and sparer than her work now. Many of these works from the mid to late 1990's are rooted in a Western United States landscape, complete with mountains, buttes, prairies, arroyos, escarpments, big distances, immense skies, and occasional horses. As a child and a teenager in southern Germany Maier became an expert horse rider and trainer an enthusiasm she has maintained in the U.S. As often as she can, she travels to Wyoming, where she keeps her own horse, hobnobs with cowboys and cowgirls, and feels very much at home with the horse culture there. On horseback, Maier also goes on solitary excursions into remote regions, where she experiences the landscape directly and at length, a landscape that could not be more different from the Bavarian landscape where she grew up (or her adopted New York City, for that matter). Something about being alone, with horses, in regions where there are few if any other people, where the landscape is harsh and spectacular, and where the sky is both huge and eventful, has been especially fruitful and liberating for Maier. Maier's personal excursions and experiences also intersect with the history and mythology of the American West: all that largeness, all those horses, all that rugged individualism, all that freedom. It's interesting to note that horses, when they appear in Maier's work from this period, seem like holy creatures: wild, eventful, and wise. They've got an aptitude for adventure, and an antipathy to restriction, and the same goes for spacecraft, which appear in the skies, land on the ground, and serve as ambassadors from remote planets where the rules are all different, and where the normal logic just doesn't apply. Most striking of all is how Maier's (at the time) modest and vaguely plausible landscapes also seem very strange, unearthly, and magical: dream landscapes, trance landscapes, landscapes partly seen and partly hallucinated, landscapes occurring on some distant planet that has no name yet. Maier's implicit orientation in these works is that of a traveler, or voyager, approaching marvelous new lands with a mix of outright wonderment and quizzical investigation. She is an immigrant, filled with curiosity and alertness, but still an outsider, and that is perhaps why her perspectives and sight lines are so unusual: she is always seeing things from afar, from odd angles, from on high, from the top of a neighboring mountain, from the captain's seat in her own roving spacecraft. While her works have changed a great deal since then they have gotten much bigger, more complex, and more panoramic, and they also increasingly occur in outer space altogether she maintains this orientation, this immigrant's perspective, gazing intently across great distances at things which are marvelous, but also bewildering and peculiar.

It is also fascinating to note that there are 19th century, and decidedly Romantic, underpinnings to Maier's 21st century esthetic, mostly having to do with a soulful, keyed up, and potentially ecstatic orientation to nature and landscape. The poet Walt Whitman and his great inspiration, the poet, philosopher, and noted Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson; European painters like J.W.W. Turner, John Constable, and Caspar David Friedrich; and American painters like Frederic Church and Thomas Moran, among others, are precursors to Maier's eccentric visions. What Maier shares with them is an understanding that encounters with nature can really have a mind-spinning power, can really induce reverie and awe, and can really be psychologically and spiritually transportive. What she shares as well is an interest in artworks that aspire toward the ecstatic, cathartic, and the sublime.

When I first met Ati Maier several years ago I was immediately entranced by her ink on paper works, which at the time were much smaller and sparer than her work now. Many of these works from the mid to late 1990's are rooted in a Western United States landscape, complete with mountains, buttes, prairies, arroyos, escarpments, big distances, immense skies, and occasional horses. As a child and a teenager in southern Germany Maier became an expert horse rider and trainer an enthusiasm she has maintained in the U.S. As often as she can, she travels to Wyoming, where she keeps her own horse, hobnobs with cowboys and cowgirls, and feels very much at home with the horse culture there. On horseback, Maier also goes on solitary excursions into remote regions, where she experiences the landscape directly and at length, a landscape that could not be more different from the Bavarian landscape where she grew up (or her adopted New York City, for that matter). Something about being alone, with horses, in regions where there are few if any other people, where the landscape is harsh and spectacular, and where the sky is both huge and eventful, has been especially fruitful and liberating for Maier. Maier's personal excursions and experiences also intersect with the history and mythology of the American West: all that largeness, all those horses, all that rugged individualism, all that freedom.

It's interesting to note that horses, when they appear in Maier's work from this period, seem like holy creatures: wild, eventful, and wise. They've got an aptitude for adventure, and an antipathy to restriction, and the same goes for spacecraft, which appear in the skies, land on the ground, and serve as ambassadors from remote planets where the rules are all different, and where the normal logic just doesn't apply. Most striking of all is how Maier's (at the time) modest and vaguely plausible landscapes also seem very strange, unearthly, and magical: dream landscapes, trance landscapes, landscapes partly seen and partly hallucinated, landscapes occurring on some distant planet that has no name yet. Maier's implicit orientation in these works is that of a traveler, or voyager, approaching marvelous new lands with a mix of outright wonderment and quizzical investigation. She is an immigrant, filled with curiosity and alertness, but still an outsider, and that is perhaps why her perspectives and sight lines are so unusual: she is always seeing things from afar, from odd angles, from on high, from the top of a neighboring mountain, from the captain's seat in her own roving spacecraft. While her works have changed a great deal since then they have gotten much bigger, more complex, and more panoramic, and they also increasingly occur in outer space altogether she maintains this orientation, this immigrant's perspective, gazing intently across great distances at things which are marvelous, but also bewildering and peculiar.

4. Consider Maier's Another Country, which would look awfully interesting compared with any number of spiritually inclined paintings of the American West by, say, Thomas Moran, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt. The view is of a fertile, perhaps paradisial, wilderness valley way down below, along with snow-capped peaks, a cloud-filled sky, and star-filled deep space in the distance. One thinks of adventurers like Lewis and Clark, crossing the Bitterroot Mountains in Idaho, or the Mormons, after their great travails, advancing through Big Mountain Pass toward the Salt Lake Valley below. One thinks of the whole enduring ideology of a "promised land," borrowed from the Old Testament and imported to this country by the Puritans, for better or worse. One also thinks of Thomas Moran's great 1872 painting Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and Albert Bierstadt's 1863 painting In the Foothills of the Rockies both are paintings in which impressive geologic formations assume almost mystical and spiritual powers. In Maier's hands such a Western idyll becomes a raucous, thoroughly contemporary hybrid: part representation of a "real" landscape, part representation of a virtual landscape, and part something concocted entirely in her own imagination. Various colorful lights blink from atop mountains and hills. Red, white, blue, pink, yellow, and green bands wind through the land like rivers and canyons, and flap and drift in the sky like trailing pennants and streamers. Everything is imbued with plugged-in colors, and everything is spectacle, but a curiously thoughtful, even meditative spectacle, and that is one of Maier's great fortes: she leaves room in her eye-popping works for both her and us to move in, and dream in. There are also ambiguities in this painting. It's tough to say, for example, whether we are being ushered into this new country, or whether we should reverse course and hightail it out of there forthwith. The words "Don't Look Back" hang in the air like especially precise skywriting, and offer both an exhortation to proceed confidently, and a warning to get out while you can. Then again Maier excels at such ambiguities. Her works are precise and exacting, but also full of improvisation and subject to alarming turbulence. Obviously afoot with her vision, Ati Maier's questing new paintings and drawings are among her best and most ambitious works yet. —Gregory Volk

In Maier's hands such a Western idyll becomes a raucous, thoroughly contemporary hybrid: part representation of a "real" landscape, part representation of a virtual landscape, and part something concocted entirely in her own imagination. Various colorful lights blink from atop mountains and hills. Red, white, blue, pink, yellow, and green bands wind through the land like rivers and canyons, and flap and drift in the sky like trailing pennants and streamers. Everything is imbued with plugged-in colors, and everything is spectacle, but a curiously thoughtful, even meditative spectacle, and that is one of Maier's great fortes: she leaves room in her eye-popping works for both her and us to move in, and dream in. There are also ambiguities in this painting. It's tough to say, for example, whether we are being ushered into this new country, or whether we should reverse course and hightail it out of there forthwith. The words "Don't Look Back" hang in the air like especially precise skywriting, and offer both an exhortation to proceed confidently, and a warning to get out while you can. Then again Maier excels at such ambiguities. Her works are precise and exacting, but also full of improvisation and subject to alarming turbulence. Obviously afoot with her vision, Ati Maier's questing new paintings and drawings are among her best and most ambitious works yet. —Gregory Volk

Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful gentle God by my side