Wherefore painting? (part 2)

(Part 2 of an ongoing essay)

 (Matthew Sepielli, Black Book, 2010).

A further question which arises then is why, if the book trope functions to give Sepielli’s works both a physical and psychological skeleton, as well as make it a driver of experience, does not the nearly-as universal trope of a four-sided, rectangular painting surface seem to function as strongly? The history and psychological power of the flat painting surface is even deeper historically and potentially more primeval than even the scribed and bound book. One possible approach to this question is to consider the educational and didactic shift that happened because of (or was occasioned by) the printing press. Before the book’s more universal availability and affordability, production was highly laborious, and the finished products were rare and expensive, therefore only available to the elite (i.e. church; ruling class; etc.) The average citizen could not read. Previous to this, didactics were based on pictures: one of the primary reasons churches were adorned with all the beautiful and lavish painting was for educational means – to instruct the laity in scriptural stories, beliefs and credos. Then came the printing press: Gutenberg’s innovation made the book more affordable, more lightweight and more ubiquitous. From this point on, the heretofore prime didactic tool – the painting (or more correctly picture) – was gradually replaced by the book; at least for the masses. In the six centuries since, the concept and logic of a book (put forward here earlier) became linked directly to not only our sense of narrative and progression, but also education, knowledge and propaganda. Therefore the trope of a book is rooted in the subconscious, in its power to sway, direct and limit one’s absorption of anything related to or reminiscent of that particular group of logic. And of course, Sepielli’s paintings are our pertinent example of that dynamic.

In Black Book, Sepielli takes this idea a step further, and appeals to that by-now ingrained logic more directly. In Black Book, we have a characteristically Sepiellian surface: nearly tar-bound with a protean, rubbery consistency, this painting reads fairly simply, until one reaches (incidentally, by “reading” left to right, Western-style) a shape suggestive of a backwards capital letter B. Now, Sepielli has been utilizing text in various ways in much of his recent work, on both book and non-book pieces, but not normally in quite so direct a way as this; which recalls one of Ed Ruscha’s iconic letter paintings. No longer is it something to be “read” and “interpreted”; here it is more symbolic (as all letters are) and decipherable. B relates to perhaps the title, Black Book, or the original Greek beta, second in command to the alpha – a commentary on a book’s subservience to the author; a painting’s subservience to the artist? The sense of cipher, symbol and icon is heightened by its being filled in (no “gesture” to speak of, such as script has, which would imply human hand, and less autonomy) and its highly-variable and expressive application of palette. It is literally a shape which suggests a letter, rather than vice versa. 

(Ed Ruscha, F-house, 1987)

There is one other feature of Black Book which distinguishes it from the other book paintings: it is permanently opened – sealed to this particular spread. This creates an instant ambiguity: we are (book-wise) in the center, yet simultaneously at the end determined by Sepielli. The iconic B then, is afforded even more power, because it becomes a pointer (as it does even by virtue of its shape) to the previous narrative (the alpha) – leaving us to guess at the rest of the narrative, or alphabet, if you will. It is therefore ironically even more of a mystery than the closed books are: having been afforded the sense of “readability” by an ostensibly open book, the conversation and narrative are more titillating than a book of which we are given only the cover/surface. There we are given a surface with the informing logic of a book (trope); here we are made to attempt to read it – that is, approach it as a book rather than a painting – to ultimately little avail. Does Black Book intimate the infamous bachelor’s “little black book”, akin to a Tracey Emin embroidered confessional tent – and leave us wanting and wondering? We cannot be positive; and thus this is a work in control of itself; drawing strength from its limiting (and limits); both revealing and withholding. 

(Tracey Emin, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963--1995, 1994).

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TSA Essay: Thomas Vance: Plan

For those who didn't make it for the opening, or had trouble finding the essay I wrote for Thomas Vance's new exhibit at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Plan, here it is.

    Thomas Vance, 2010

Craft is a bridge. This image alone imparts a finely-tuned sense of the cause-and-effect of tools on a concept. Craft itself is a tool to make sense of the area between impulse and idea, where a finished work will eventually result. It also lends a sense of trickery to the workaday. And, how is the viewer engaged? This too carries a sense of craft; of willing wiliness. Craft will tend to be antisocial; anti-modern; anti-change. It is defined by gathered knowledge; private skill; proven technique; quality repetitions.  Because of this, craft can adroitly chisel out a beautiful rut for itself. The trick becomes old.

Thomas Vance’s exhibit of new work, Plan is, strictly speaking, a trompe l’oeil: both expertly constructed and finished, those same constructs and finishes fool our eyes, suggesting otherwise to us: the delicate hatching on an upright board suggests bark; the painted flow chart-like patterns suggest wood’s graininess; the puffy, turquoise jewels suggest trimmed shrubbery. But unlike trompe l’oeil, Vance’s surfaces are never fully a substitute: the trickery (craftiness) is never a less-than; replacement or simulacrum. They exist, rather, on their own – his piquant trees are stubbornly autonomous, morphed into a hushed, almost introverted timelessness. Faux-grained chests, originally made to mimic the richly-veneered case-pieces of the wealthy, may once have served as a consolation prize for a lower-class dowry, but they quickly became their own, powerful definition of beauty in artifice.

Not only that: Vance, the chief sorcerer in this mystic, aesthetic re-appropriation, has tricked foam, dimensional lumber, paper, clay and pigment into thinking they are a garden, or a lacquered floor. Much like the Japanese tradition he’s inspired by, Niwaki, one element of nature (shrubs) are tricked into thinking they are another (clouds). Interested in both sides of this equation, Vance utilizes not only his painted trees and interiors, but also painted wood that might have been sawn from those trees, and clad those floors – both painted on materials made from the actual thing. This brings to mind the phrase “inside-out” – implying a sense of being backwards, confused or reversed. The trickery, however, is only skin deep; the answer only a finger’s breadth away. And coupled with the reverse of that phrase, “outside-in”, we are reminded of Vance’s keen fascination with connections between the garden (traditionally an outside space) and architecture (traditionally an inside space), and the crafty places in which they meet, mingle and overlap. Plan is a deliberate experiment in that arena; craft lends directly into our visual ambiguity.

Nature is not crafty. Nature is direct, forthright and brusque. We may see craftiness in nature, but it is normally anthropomorphistic: we see a resembling reflection. Craft is a (nearly) thoroughly human distinction. Yet, we operate in nature; the places and materials we utilize and create in our craft are inevitably of, in or from nature. Houses must have a skin which touches air; gardens must be given light, otherwise our very definitions begin crumbling. Vance’s faux gardens and interiors then, are important neutral places between humanity’s craft and nature’s resoluteness; a mental or psychological resting place; a bench between impulse and idea. His work is a reflecting pool, in which the trees above us are juxtaposed and framed with our own bodies, on the very same – very physical – surface.

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TSA Essay: Jukkala and Rosenthal

Wow, it's been over a month, folks...so here's a little taste of some recent writing I've been doing. This is an essay I was asked to do, for the June show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid: Clint Jukkala and Mia Rosenthal.

(below, Mia Rosenthal, General Mills 8-pack) 

There are places to which none of us can ever go…or return. The past; others’ heads; the womb; the place to where loved ones have crossed over. Likewise, we all have talismans which impart a certain sense; a sliver of the unreachable place. For Mia Rosenthal, her straightforwardly sweet simulacrums of sent and received postcards impart a second, more spiritually acute layer to an already powerful metaphor for those places we cannot go, or cannot be, or are not – and those people who inhabit them, or are passing through before us. On the uncomfortable cusp of welcoming a new life, Rosenthal found comfort in celebrating a recently-departed life, painstakingly reinterpreting the talisman of shared postcards – those small purchased icons of travel and exoticism; the skimmed-off leftovers of a life’s memory.

For every sensory sliver from place to place, a vector is needed, and Rosenthal also sensed this correctly by making a postmortem catalog of part of her aunt’s stamp accumulation – bringing some coherence to what had been a haphazard habit in waking life. An even smaller icon of the connections between unlikely places, stamps like postcards, being quickly outmoded as they are, also impart a sense of nostalgia and whimsy to what could be an otherwise dour examination of life’s ends and passings.

An even more familiar rectangle, along with postcards and stamps, is the doorway. Likewise a domestic and familiar limnal presence, doorways are an even more fragile and immediate skin between spaces. Stamps and postcards bring home some of the exotic and unreachable to us; doorways allow us to be more active in movement through. In a way, they could be seen as the negative to the postcard’s positive: the closed card a symbol of the desire for the open door. Clint Jukkala previously worked more with the positive – shakily digital renderings of top-heavy bouquet forms; or slowly branching, slow-motion fireworks. Recently though, Jukkala’s bouquets have dissipated and migrated to the edges, and suggest portals, or doorways; the promising rainbows enveloping and bordering, rather than blossoming or branching bouquet or fountain forms.

Rosenthal’s approach is talisman, but clear; Jukkala’s more at-hand icons on the other hand, is ironically, more ambiguous: are we entering or exiting those doorways; portals? But not unlike many of the color and square studies by Josef Albers, the spaces and ways through are infinitely commutable. The essence really is the movement through – the process – rather than the direction. No matter what space or place our life is finding form within, a human yearns for a little of another – and we will continue to find talismans for that yearning. Jukkala and Rosenthal have found related, but aesthetically divergent, ways into that yen.

Check out their portfolios: Clint Jukkala and Mia Rosenthal

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N4TUR3 essay

(above, from Tiger Strikes Asteroid's Facebook page; l to r: Thomas Vance, Misako Inaoka, Regin Igloria)

Here for interested parties, is an essay I wrote to accompany my gallery's latest exhibit, N4TUR3. To see images from the exhibit, go to www.tigerstrikesasteroid.com, or come see the exhibit up through June 26th.

N4TUR3 essay


Sometimes, nature is considered a mirror for humans; a place to see ourselves reflected – for better or for worse. In N4TUR3, this creates a visual paradox: we are both nowhere and everywhere in these works.

David Guinn’s Snowy Owl is a quiet avian portrait, but in the background snowpack we see the path of a recently-passed – but now disappeared – human. In Igloria’s Entanglement in Orange the human presence is clearly expressed in the manufactured product of a fluorescent-orange snow fence, holding a mass of foliage in a deathly embrace. The fence, an epitome of uniformity, is blaringly obvious in that un-natural state, but there is no other evidence of the humans that have made, and left, it. It is simply carrying out its naïve fate like a wind-up toy left to its own devices. And for Beth Brandon, the absentee human leaves behind an even more dynamic effect. In her two drawings, there is a before-and-after pattern of fire and smoke, but still no human (who we may assume has cut down the trees and struck the match).

Thomas Vance’s Cornice involves a more snarled evidence of this dubious human influence. Not simply a mostly-unaltered landscape on which human touch has left an obvious mark, such as in Snowy Owl, it is unclear from which direction Cornice has come from, or is going. In other words, is this an object which has been constructed to mimic nature? Or was it once a tree (Cornus, after all, is the Latin name for the dogwood family) but has now metamorphosed into a idealized tree-form; simply a product made from it’s model’s material, much like those toilet-paper roll trees from elementary school. While most of the other works are either on one side or the other of nature or artifice, Cornice is on the fence. Indeed, it is the fence for this N4TUR3.

Cornice embodies the question, and becomes the possible answer for the issues raised in N4TUR3: no matter its source or direction, a certain beauty is reached. In fact, in all these pieces, the results of human touch, whether the intent was good or bad, is always beautiful. Entanglement in Orange; Red Berries/Red Bird; The Need-Fire: every one is twisted, but twisted into beauty. Therein lies the possible answer, pointed out to us by art, but it should not distract us from the question, which will keep reappearing as long as we fiddle with nature the way we tend to: gene splicing; bio-engineering; rampant resource exploitation; drilling and scraping and poking. What we forget at our peril is that whatever we do to nature, we do to ourselves. The mirror always tells the truth.


- P. Timothy Gierschick II

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TIGER STRIKES ASTEROID!

(First of all, don't miss my latest Art Thoughts below...)

For those of you not addicted on Facebook (I'm seriously thinking of giving it up for Lent), this is my official announcement that I've joined a small group of artists from Philadelphia, in opening up a (small!) cooperative gallery in Chinatown. It's in what's become known as the "VOX" building, housing as it does the well-known, long-time Philly co-op. The building is just north of Vine Street, on 11th; for more information check out www.tigerstrikesasteroid.blogspot.com What's with the name? It's a fun way of poking fun at the incredibly small scale of the space, and at the same time realizing the possibilities, especially with being hooked up on Facebook and the web.

For those of you on Facebook, search Tiger Strikes Asteroid for the page, or click on http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php?id=575482854&ref=profile#/pages/Philadelphia-PA/Tiger-Strikes-Asteroid/54622501034?ref=ts

Our inaugural group show Getting Ready for the Prom is opening March 6th, First Friday, at 6 PM. Be there or be square! Get there early, because over one hundred people have already confirmed by Facebook that they're coming...and trust me, this space is fairly petite.

After the first show, we will be doing a cycle of member solo shows and group-curated shows, featuring work from LA, NYC, local etc. artists. Stay tuned!

(Poster image by Nate Pankratz, www.nathanpankratz.com )

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