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This
exhibition is not about what you are looking at right now.
It is not about the images of artworks arranged in columns
along this page. It is about that empty white space surrounding
the objects and that which is not there. Nothing metaphysical
or theoretical, I assure you -- it is much more concrete
than that. It is about the multitude of apparatuses used
in the creation of these artworks. It is about the tools
-- their fleeting quality and their absolute significance.
It is about everything that came before the pictures that
you are seeing and making that absence present.
Tools are simply
a means to an end. The tool is an idea and (as Lewitt would
have it) the idea is a tool. The tool is a ticket. Tools
allow and they enable. Just as a house can't be built without
a saw and a hammer (and a dumpster), artworks can't be
made without their own set of tools. Artists, being makers,
often involve themselves with the making of things that
are not commodities. These things do not leave the studio,
yet they cultivate the production of objects that do. Their
studios are full of various tools -- found, made and manipulated.
These tools allow for a crude form of mechanical reproduction
and of mechanized production. They allow for movement and
repetition not possible with the human hand and provide
a smoother segue between the brain and the object in question.
Art does not just happen. There is no transformation,
no elevation of material. It is a dirty and uncertain process.
The artworks you see on this page all stand on a scaffold
of trial and error, as has all artwork throughout time.
At the turn of
the 21st century a great deal of attention is being paid
to the effect of the technological revolution on the arts.
The computer is thought of as an extension of the mind.
Earlier last century the camera was seen as an extension
of the eye. The century before that the machine was seen
as an extension of the hand. Conversely, Marx and Engels
saw the hand as becoming an extension of the machine. Their
musings on production, industry and labor are at the heart
of this exhibition. As is Walter Benjamin's investigation
into changing methods of artistic production. There are
industries that exist solely in order to support other
industries. The artist's studio presents an infinite array
of mini-examples of this phenomenon. The contemporaneous
quality of the artists in this exhibition comes from their
resistance to the industrialization and inner-dependence
of the modern world. The tools they use have been in use
long before there were any industrial or technological
revolutions.
In art making,
just as in any industry, there is pre-production, production
and post-production. There are tools for every stage of
the process. David Ireland's gloves are tools that allow
his hands to be a part of the production process, while
the resulting Dumb Balls are a record of his concurrent
thought process. He said to me that he has always thought
that "the hands are the molds." For him, the body and the
machine are one. Joyce Pensato's stuffed animals provide
the initial inspiration for the making of her paintings,
yet they also collect the detritus of their making in blobs
of paint and charcoal fingerprints. They are proof of the
connection between the hand, the eye and the brain.
Allan Wexler's Vinyl
Milford House explores conversation as the centerpiece
for living. Looking at his oeuvre, it is clear that he
believes communication is at the heart of all human understanding.
Not only is his maquette a tool for the final structure
but the house itself becomes a tool -- enabling shelter,
contact and belonging. Tim Clifford's maquette of a thick
fence turns the typical American white picket fence into
something more akin to the walls of a stone fortress.
Clifford presents a xenophobic alternative to Wexler's
idealism.
Polly Apfelbaum's
chart was made in preparation for her piece Ice.
The chart is a simple mechanism designed to prevent mistakes,
repetitions and mismatchings of which the unassisted brain
is capable. Tom Sachs' tool holder exists in service of
his sculptures. It, like his sculptures, is made by hand
with cardboard and an exacto-knife yet it needs nothing
but its own use-value to serve as its subject. Richard
Jackson's jig was made to produce the 1,000 clocks for
his Big Time Ideas. Jackson's clocks refer back
to themselves, to their production and to the notion of
how the artist spends his or her time. Matt Harle's preliminary
tape on Mylar drawings for his sculptures work like projected
tracing paper, yet the scale, unlike a maquette's, does
not represent anything outside of the artist's will. The
resulting works could be as large as a house or as small
as a needle.
Many of the other
works on display are pulled directly from the center of
the artists working process. Gerhard Mayer's stencil was
fashioned to be used directly against the wall. It is a
cumbersome mechanism that allows only for a delicate line.
Micah Lexier presents a negative stencil, as opposed to
Meyer's positive. Only the marking of the negative space
delineates the line, which represents one minute of the
artist's time. Deborah Davidovit's carbon paper drawings
are created via tracing, not dissimilar to the act of using
a stencil. The layered images left on the used carbon paper
contain an even more complex narrative than do the resulting
works.
Casting is an
ancient method of mechanical reproduction invented by the
Greeks. Gay Outlaw's tree limb mold is made from gluing
together wooden dowels. A natural product of the original
tree is manipulated to create a pixilated, hyper-real version
of itself. Roxy Paine, on the other hand, uses high-tech
methods and materials to recreate the humble cast-offs
of nature. The molds he presents look like fossils, hundreds
of thousands of years old, yet the specimens that they
produce would be the first to be plucked from the garden.
Ann Chu's bear
sculptures are akin to life sized Greek statues. Both produce
characters from a specific mythology -- Chu's are personal
while the Greeks are collective. Jack Pospisil's brain
mold offers an unsettling alternative to human cloning.
Like "Blade Runner," they present an archaic version of
the future. As with other works on view, the method of
production is part of the resulting work's subject matter.
Likewise, Klindt Houlberg's tool is a handmade template
created to replicate the image of a hand. The wooden hand
was then inlaid into a table, also of the artist's crafting,
thus celebrating its own making.
Exploiting Guttenberg's
invention, Kathleen McShane's printing plates and their
accoutrement allow the mass production of a product that
varies slightly with each pass. Helen Mirra creates a bass
harmonica and then, in her performances, improvises with
it like a jazz musician. Both artists use pattern, repetition
and the subtle variations available within a set of strict
limitations. Reed Danziger does the same. Her paintings
combine chaos theory and fabric design. Her simple store
bought tools, when used together, create patterns of infinite
variety.
Richard Rezac
presents three tools he used to make Untitled (98-09).
The tools were made to manipulate wax before casting it
in bronze. For him, the work and the tools used to make
it are two sides of the same coin. Torie Begg's kit is
made up of the various accoutrement needed to make her Apparently
Grey paintings. Her installations use the monochromatic
variations of seemingly similar paintings to highlight
the difference within sameness. In Yvette Brackman's bed
project the responsibility of making is handed from the
artist back to the viewer, thus collapsing the distance
between the two. Bob Seng's jig was made for the production
of a crutch. A crutch is a tool in itself and, like all
tools, it provides invaluable assistance. It is, literally,
a poignant tool -- a tool for a walk.
Like the dumpster,
there are also tools for post-production. Michelle Valerio
presents mixing bowls for mixing concrete and paper mache.
Her detritus transforms a mass-produced bowl or jar into
something that resembles a Native American stone mortar.
Joe Scanlan is the one artist in this exhibition that truly
flips its premise onto its side. Most of the artists in
this exhibition are using tools made from some sort of
raw material to create their artworks. Scanlan is using
his artwork to create the facsimile of a raw material.
He brings us back to where we started.
When I grow old
I know that I will be one of those men who hang around
the perimeter of construction sites watching the cranes,
concrete mixers and bulldozers -- as well as the carpenters,
electricians and masons -- do their jobs. Once the building
is complete I will walk past it, not looking up, onto the
next construction site. I have always preferred the backs
of buildings to their fronts, spaces in the process of
being filled to the ones already full, construction to
completion. This exhibition is about those spaces and the
processes and materials that fill them. It is about the
fact that there is no center without a periphery, no now
without a then and a when. Finally, it is about the time
spent in creating timelessness.
Charles Goldman
© December 2000 |
