abstraction – Ann Sinfield: Projects

The launching point

“I remove such stuff as could make visible the remainder as armature of a different value.”
Buzz Spector

Not objects as an end, but objects as jumping off points. It is the spark that is interesting, and the process, not necessarily the conclusion. Because the objects don’t really end, they just stop and offer up a waiting area for what’s next. Like a train platform, or a cliff ready for a hang-glider.

A man in the otherwise empty, serenely quiet gallery interrupted my looking, my thinking. He asked me, “Do you think the art is about the content of the books? Do you think the artist is interested in what the books are about?” Maybe this man has my usual approach in museums and doesn’t read labels. I told him to read the labels.

(OK, that’s not all I said to him. I was balancing the frustration of being interrupted by a man as I looked and thought. Did I appear to be doing nothing? As a woman, did I seem to be waiting for a man? Someone to ask me to help him out of his confusion? But then I realized this is something I’m actually good at, something I happen to enjoy: talking with people about art in galleries. And although my thoughts were nowhere near shaped yet, I stepped out of my head and entered into a conversation).

“Buzz Spector: Reading Matter,” installation view

At that stage of still standing on the shore, of not having really waded into the work yet, I gave this man some guideposts. I said yes, I think the artist knows what is in the books. And not only that, but I think he loves books. A lot of his work deals with books or their composite parts: paper, binding, words, communication. And I did suggest the man read the labels, because they are really helpful in providing, you know, context.

Books and their context: paper, words, photos of books, frozen books, books as building blocks, books deconstructed or altered (and pencils, but that’s a different post). And what books? Well, you can’t know just by looking, for most of them anyway. They are pictured with titled spines turned away, their pages are missing, or they are actually invisible, buried and unknowable within multiple stacks.

This is where the labels help in showing the bigger picture, explaining how the books and paper are not alone, they do not exist here as isolated objects. They are each physical (or pictured) items within extensive, interconnecting webs, which the labels themselves are part of.

The labels explain that an individual book, pictured or altered, can be part of a collection or refer to another artist’s work. Torn paper is just one element in an on-going conversation, across time and distance, and even academic discipline. The title might be funny or sly to those in the know. But for all of us who are not academics, or not-so-well-read-in-the-classics? A book whose pages have been carefully torn and reduced to beautifully feathery but illegible shapes becomes a decision point: is the vagueness of meaning acceptable enough (am I contented), or am I intrigued enough to put in some effort and find out who the fuck Actaeon is? The missing parts expose the curiosity of the viewer, who becomes part of the context. No longer just looking, they’re involved now, with thinking, with seeing; they are connected and the web is extended even further.

The content of the books is very important to Spector, but it’s not the primary focus of his work. He doesn’t, for example, make images that refer directly to the stories or arguments presented in the books. Instead, he removes the text, rendering the book unreadable. In tearing away the content, the structure of the book is revealed, exposing its utter strangeness. The loss of the text is shocking, but it is a void that brings the function of the book into the spotlight. If it can’t be read, what is this paper thing that usually communicates ideas across time and space?

Words connect people, and books for Spector are (maybe) just one form of something that holds words. Without their words, books are no longer disguised by a purported use and can be seen more generally for what they are: containers. It is not the words themselves that are important, but rather the ideas and connections that are carried and supported by those texts. Once consumed, the words become thoughts that can be shared and changed and expanded. And once pages are torn away, books are freed to become something else: beyond narrative or explicative repositories they are now unknown objects, mysteries for strangers to ponder, together or alone, in a quiet gallery.

The altered books challenge us to connect and question, to learn, or decide not to. Together we not only replace what is missing, but we expand upon the loss by exploring the books beyond their physical forms. From the muted, missing books we leap, get lost, maybe find help, and (stacking things, tearing things up), we connect and create.

“Buzz Spector: Reading Matter,” is on view at the Rockford Art Museum from February 4–May 29, 2022.

The Importance of Small Moments

The New Art Examiner just published my review of the exhibition, Nares: Moves, which is on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum until October. The text to the article is below, and the images here are mine. See the online article for the higher-quality images provided by the museum for press-use.

With this article I am now a contributing editor with the New Art Examiner. It’s a small moment maybe, but a really nice one!

The new exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum, featuring the work of Jamie Nares (formerly James), is an intriguing retrospective covering five decades work by an experimental, playful, curious and inventive artist. It also marks the first MAM exhibition curated by the museum’s director, Dr. Marcelle Polednik.

In the accompanying catalogue introduction, Polednik defines the challenge of presenting a retrospective of Nares’ work. “These objects,” she writes, “have little to suggest that they are the works of a single artist, much less that they are connected to a sequential biographical or art historical narrative.” Her solution is to present the works, not in strict chronological order, but rather in thematic sections.

Polednik’s curatorial approach emphasizes three concepts–gesture, time, and movement—which are interwoven throughout nine sections of the exhibition. These nine “chapters” are also explored in an accompanying catalogue and a gallery guide. Additional programming—film screenings, a dance performance and discussions with the artist, collector Julian Schnabel, and musical collaborator Thurston Moore–will expand upon the gallery experience.

Embedding the display within such rich programming and publications is an important choice for this material, as there is not much explanatory text within the gallery. It is helpful, for example, to more fully understand the impact of defining personal experiences, such as the artist’s youthful move to New York City in the 1970s. Details about unusual methods and materials are also informative and lead to a fuller appreciation of the works. The deeper dive not only provides more opportunity to grapple with the complexity of this work, but also provides strong reinforcement of the exhibition’s premise, that the lines of exploration threading through Nares’ long career are consistent across surprisingly varied media.

The exhibition’s organizational scheme is successful in demonstrating visual and conceptual relationships between works in disparate media from different periods of the artist’s life.

The introductory room, which also serves as the exhibit’s conclusion, presents a pair of works: the 2008 video, Riding with Michaux, and an untitled high-speed drawing from 2014. Although not far separated in time, the works intersect in multiple ways. The video’s imagery of sunlight on water has visual similarities to the linear forms of the untitled drawing but, more importantly, they share process. A relationship is made here between the artist filming with a camera on a moving train, and the artist holding a brush to a rotating sheet of paper. Motion, not only in the visual field, but as part of the making, is central to the artist’s practice.

Film and video have a strong presence throughout the galleries. From early works like Giotto Circle #1 or Game, shot in TriBeCa of 1970s New York, to Element #1 (2009) and a series of Portraits (2016), Nares’ long-standing passion for moving images is clearly evident. The subjects may seem at first unrelated—the artist drawing a circle on a wall, small hand movements, a heavy ball swinging over an empty street, the slow eruption of bubbling mixture—but all have important elements in common.

Pendulum (1976), with its groaning sound and almost dizzying, hazardous motion, explores the movement of an object through an eerily empty urban space. In the luminous Street (2011), made with a high-speed camera, scenes of now-occupied city streets have been slowed to a glacial pace. The camera, instead of focusing on moving objects, is here itself in motion, driven along city blocks, capturing unstaged images of people, the details of Manhattan daily life, made graceful and dramatic via slowed
motion. Both works chart time and movement to very different ends. Nares’ innovative use of a high-speed camera is only one example of the artist’s intellectual curiosity.

The monumental paintings presented in the exhibition fully display the artist’s capacity for invention. Nares has created luscious works with various strokes: thick and lumbering, made from tiny glass beads, thermoplastic “paint,” and a street-marking machine; or the single stroke paintings, delicate and graceful, made with elaborate, homemade brushes and, at times, interference pigments. At first glance, they bear no relation to each other—heavy, textured, black and white or gorgeous, delicate, ribbons of color–yet all refract light, suggest motion, and basically disrupt the expected experience of looking.

The show’s most recent works are a series of large-scale images with gold leaf. Originating as rubbings of cut-stone street surfaces in the artist’s old New York neighborhood of Tribeca, the works incorporate both a technological interest—with Evolon, a non-woven, high-tech microfiber paper—and a social acknowledgement unusual for this artist. The stone surfaces are described as having been cut by immigrant labor in the city’s early days. When thermoplastic street markings become abstract paintings, and 19th-century street stone is transformed into shimmering gold, the artist is not only an inventor but also earns the title of alchemist.

It is clear that Nares has been grappling with movement for a long time. A note from a sketchbook captures the artist’s interest in a playful way:

things in motion; motion in things

The phrase provides an opportunity for exchange, a back and forth, a circular form that is mirrored in the intentionally circular path within the gallery. The exhibition ends where it begins: with a video and a drawing, both exploring motion and time, with directness and grace. Nares celebrates small moments in her work, transforming simple gestures into fascinating experiences worthy of our time and consideration.

Nares: Moves is on view from June 14 to October 6, 2019 at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Notes on working with an artist in 2013

It is a rare thing to encounter another Humboldt State University alum, as I live in Wisconsin. But one week in 2013 was different, when my work at the Chazen Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison actually brought a fellow lumberjack into town.

Michael Lucero (Art, 1976, a solid ten years before me, Art, 1986) lives in Tennessee. His art-making has taken him from California and undergraduate studies at HSU to an MFA at the University of Washington. He has lived in New York and Italy, and has taught as a visiting professor throughout the United States, such as a 1989 summer arts program at HSU (I attended the summer 1988 session, missing Michael’s stint by one year). His ceramic work was featured in a 1996 retrospective exhibition organized by the Mint Museum that traveled to four venues, including the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art.

Michael was in Madison to install a body of early work in the Chazen’s 5,000 square foot Rowland Galleries. During the installation we had a chance to talk about Humboldt and studying art. I was so pleased to learn that he remembered people I studied with at HSU: Ron Johnson in art history, and Mort Scott who taught sculpture. Michael also had many stories about his experiences in the galleries of New York and his friendships with well-known artists, teachers, and dealers.

During the week we worked with the Chazen preparators to install 17 wire and wood hanging figures, made in 1978-79 after the artist first moved to New York. The works were on loan from a private collector, and two museums that received part of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: New Jersey’s Montclair Art Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

Michael Lucero Installation, Chazen Museum of Art, 2013

Reaching 8-13 feet in height, the figures are simultaneously fragile and imposing. Hovering just a few inches from the floor, they hung still when the gallery was empty, but they moved gently, responding to subtle air movement, even when anyone entered the room. They towered over whoever stood near, yet provided a chance for close investigation of their component parts: broken wood, crayon and paint, wire, mop handles, and broken furniture scavenged from the streets of the city.

The artist created new drawings for the exhibition, using sponges, fly swatters, shoes, toilet paper rolls, and foam noodles to stamp images onto cardboard, making bold, weighty figures that reference the hanging sculptures. He was also inspired by the gallery space, at the last minute adding a new work to the exhibition: two monumental figures stamped directly onto a large gallery door that had been painted to mimic the cardboard of the drawings. At first seeming so large, the drawings on cardboard were dwarfed by the newly painted wall figures, yet their textured surfaces demanded close looking. This was an installation both overwhelming and intimate, it played with scale and had so much to experience: subtle movement, shifting light, interesting textures, and spatial displacement.

In the re-purposed wood and furniture fragments, in the drawings made from available materials, is Humboldt evident in this work, or is it all New York City? In the quiet of the towering figures with their slight movements, walking among them all that is missing is the sound of water dripping into the ferns on the floor of the redwood forest. Maybe, or not. But it was fun, for one week in 2013, to conjure a connection between Arcata and NYC, to swap art world stories with another far-flung HSU alum, and participate in the installation and documentation of a truly wonderful body of work.

Michael Lucero Installation was on view May 11 to August 18, 2013 at the Chazen Museum of Art at UW-Madison. Photos by Eric Tadsen.

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