On the North Wall of Gallery 118 at the Benton Museum, “Galaxy (Hydra)” hangs beside a tiny painted Christ, an even tinier inked drawing, a sketched oak tree and an Alice Neel watercolor. It is part of “Infinity on Paper: Drawings from the Collections of the Benton Museum of Art and Jack Shear,” now on view.
“Galaxy (Hydra)” (1974) is a graphite drawing of the Hydra constellation, one of Vija Celmins’ earlier drawings of the night sky. Like all of her work, “Galaxy (Hydra)” is drawn directly from a chosen area of a photograph. The picture is mostly black, with stars coming out of the dark in soft grays and looks kind of morbid surrounded by a dead Christ, shriveled tree and brown sky above skulls.
I first saw Celmins’ drawings in December of 2019, a few days before New Year’s, at the MET Breuer’s retrospective exhibit “To Fix the Image in Memory.” Three months later, the Breuer, at the onset of COVID-19, closed temporarily; three months after that the Breuer closed permanently.
I was bored by Celmins’ drawings when I visited them in 2019. Specifically, I was bored with what I thought was just shallow photorealism, which I saw as pointless, egotistical and a little bit masochistic in its painstaking precision. I was (and am) single-mindedly obsessed with faces, and thought all other subjects inferior. But I don’t think I bothered to read the gallery texts — I didn’t get it, or try to get it.
“Galaxy (Hydra)” stands out on the wall of the Benton like a black hole. It looks almost like a photo, but if you lean in very close you can see the artist’s hand in the image. The dark sky is made of hundreds of tiny dots of graphite, which give the effect of something glittering, oscillating in and out of light.
As a rule, Celmins never manipulates the graphite — never smudges. Stars are made by an absence of dots; fewer dots means more visible paper, which means a brighter or closer star. Where the sky meets each star, the black fades delicately into a circle of negative space, the outer edge of the star blurring under the soft pencil as if pixelated. The fuzzy border of the image reminds the viewer that the sky has been framed for us here, that this is a manipulation.
“”Galaxy (Hydra)” (1974) is a graphite drawing of the Hydra constellation, one of Vija Celmins’ earlier drawings of the night sky.”
You can see Celmins here. In translating a photo into a drawing so precisely, she has to dissect and then reconstruct the image. “Galaxy (Hydra)” is the moment of transition from photo to drawing, which happens in Celmins’ eye and hand — in looking at it, I am looking at the memory of her mark-making.
There are many interesting and theoretical things to say about “Galaxy (Hydra)” and about how Celmins interacts with process and looking and representation and memory. But all of that falls away as I write this and I can’t stop wanting to say that the drawing feels devotional.
It seems mysterious to me, almost magical: picturing Celmins at her desk or drawing board or easel (I’d like to imagine her at an easel, so that she stands in front of her drawings just like I stand in front of her drawings), feeling the hard edge of the pencil on her finger, the pattern of constellations embedding itself on her eyeballs, spending hours with each star until she is sucked into the galaxy that she depicts.
“I tend to drip into the work,” Celmins says in an interview with Brooklyn Rail. “I build my little relationship with the work and I give it my all and it hopefully gives me back other things. I hate to break this relationship.”
This is what I didn’t understand when I saw Celmins’ drawings for the first time. Of course, her hours of meticulous attention to the same square of sky feel like a form of love; if you look so long and so deeply at the same thing it turns into devotion. “Galaxy (Hydra)” is a portrait of Celmins’ relationship with this image, this sky.
I hope that I can look at “Galaxy (Hydra)” for long enough to be let in on the relationship. To fall into devotion; with this piece of galaxy and with how it exists in Celmins’ eye.
Recently, I have been thinking about works of art that feel like relics. Like objects that we could show aliens as proof of humanity. “Galaxy (Hydra)” is one of these relics. I imagine showing it to an alien: this is our sky, this is how devoted someone was to looking at the sky.
Art columnist Nadia Hsu PO ’27 is from Austin, Texas. She is chalant.
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