This spring, the Manifest.AR collective is presenting new and established augmented reality (AR) artworks at the ICA during the 2011 Boston Cyberarts festival. Approximately 16 artists will present their incorporeal digital art in and around the ICA. Some will be site-specific works that respond to the architecture of the museum and some will aim to juxtapose their work against the existing physical exhibitions in the museum. There will be visitors to Manifest.AR @ ICA that won’t know what to think about the artworks confronting them and many will just not see the works. Stepping beyond Oscar Wilde’s request that we intensely admire the uselessness of art, the AR works are indirect, mediated works that are only accessible with smart phones. I’m sure he would have praised these undetectable artworks as the highest form of art.

John Craig Freeman, Tiananmen SquARed, 2011 All images courtesy of the artist.

AR artworks are still in their infancy. Although AR works are not dependent upon smart phones, since the release of the iPhone in 2007, AR works have been inclined to use the phone as an access device. One of the first AR applications in art was presented during the 2001 Cyberarts festival. It took the form of a pair of “glasses” made out of video monitors that reacted to printed graphics in the gallery. From a wider perspective, the presentation ethic, unauthorized superimposition of work within an institution, is an old technique– think Banksy installing his own work into four New York museums in a single day. Manifest.AR, or its members (the collective was founded in January of 2011), have intervened at the MoMA, Statue of Liberty, Venice Biennial, Anslem Keifer’s exhibition at Gagosian, the White House, and the Pentagon. This intervention is one of the first working with a museum’s blessing and even has an informal educational reception scheduled for April 22.

Tamiko Thiel, Jasmine Rain, 2011

The disembodied art on display include (in collaboration with Damon Loren Baker and Arthur Peters) Mark Skwarek’s Parade to Hope that will be located in the Boston harbor. John Craig Freeman will be exhibiting Tank Man and Goddess of Democracy as one work, Tiananmen SquARed. Both of these images draw from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Tamiko Thiel will present Jasmine Rain, a soft-curtain of Jasmine flowers falling around a golden cage that surrounds the viewer. Will Pappenheimer will present his signature psychedelic AR toads. Geoffrey Alan Rhodes will be exhibiting a new work titled MaoDoll(ar). His past works are compelling and sensitive to what’s possible within the AR vocabulary. Sander Veenhof, who made the worlds biggest AR work, a carpet of cubes surrounding the entire earth, will be presenting a minimalist take on the AR titled 1px. It’s sure to push the definition of what an AR work can and should be.

Mark Skwarek Parade to Hope, 2011

Manifest.AR @ ICA will be viewable from April 22 – May 8, 2011 and is part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival 2011. To see the works, you will need a device that can run the Layar AR app.

One offshoot of photography is the debate over the authority we give it, a fact that San Francisco artist Sean McFarland plays with in Viewshed, a solo show up this month at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions.  Viewshed contains two separate but related bodies of work: Dark Pictures, a series of large, extremely dark but detailed photographs taken of what look like wild and wooded landscapes; and Pictures of Earth, small, black-and-white polaroids of mostly aerial landscapes.  In each case, however, nothing is what it seems.  Thankfully, McFarland has such tight control over his sleight of hand that the questions Viewshed poses never become obvious or didactic.

Exit (2010), Sean McFarland, C-Print, Image courtesy of Baer Ridgway Exhibitions

Dark Pictures delivers what its title promises: a series of artfully underexposed, too-closely-cropped wilderness shots.  Seen live, the effect is similar to a daguerreotype, with each image so dark that you find yourself squinting to see better.  As your eyes become used to the darkness, the lushness of the individual details stands out.  In Wall of Plants (2010-2011), thousands of pieces of foliage compete for attention, a battle ultimately won by color alone: a single strand of muted-red ivy weaves its way through the rest of the plants.

Wall of Plants (2010-2011), Sean McFarland, C-Print, Image courtesy of Baer Ridgway Exhibitions

Eventually, the tight cropping of the images in Dark Pictures and the lack of any traditional “vistas” become cues of their own, leaving us wonder what may have been left out.  It’s not a giveaway, however.  The fact that these are actually images of urban “wildernesses” shot within a few miles of McFarland’s house (often during daylight) remains available but not noticeable.

Wave (2009), Sean McFarland, Polaroid, 3.25 x 4.25 inches, Image courtesy of Baer Ridgway Exhibitions

Pictures of Earth functions similarly.  In this case, McFarland gives viewers a group of lilting black-and-white polaroids showcasing mountaintops, billowing clouds caught in forested valleys, and rolling hills bathed in sunlight.  What is almost impossible to see are the alterations that McFarland has made in his studio, or even in the taking of the photos themselves.  What looks like the top of a rolling hill set against a starry night sky is actually an image of the ocean (Wave, 2009); a divided landscape was divided after the fact by McFarland’s own marker-wielding hand (Divided Land, 2010).

Divided Land (2010), Sean McFarland, Polaroid, 3.25 x 4.25 inches, Image courtesy of Baer Ridgway Exhibitions

The modern human is a funny beast.  Despite the fact that we acknowledge how each person views the world as an individual, we also continue to insist that some view(sheds) are more accurate, or have more authority, than others.  Without forcing the question, Viewshed gives it us space to wonder what happens when the object photographed misrepresents itself?  Or, perhaps, never existed in the first place.

Chicago-based artist Ryan Travis Christian creates amazingly rendered drawings that employ an amalgamation of sources, all collapsing and folding in on one another. Ryan freely adopts cultural signifiers, both high and low, and fractures them to the point where anything can exist on the same page, regardless of its origin. The artist currently has an exhibition on view, titled Sad Sacks, at San Francisco’s Guerrero Gallery. After viewing the exhibition, I caught up with Ryan to talk about the process for creating these highly imaginative drawings, personal stories of the absurd which fuel his inspiration, and the myriad of upcoming projects that he has coming down the pipeline.

Ryan Travis Christian, “Optical Illusion #4 (Sad Sacks)”, 2011 / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

Seth Curcio: So Ryan, It is good to finally chat with you! You know, I first came across your work about two years ago in Los Angles at the now closed Synchronicity art space – across the street from one of the best ice cream spots in the world, Scoops. I was there with a good friend of mine and he was raving about your drawings. Since then, I have kept my eye on your projects as they pop up in galleries all over the country. There has been a lot of development in your work over the past few years and your visual vocabulary is constantly expanding, evolving, co-opting and consuming. Walk me through the process of creating one of your drawings. Do you approach it purely through intuition or are they carefully planned from the start? I have read that you create an abstract problem for yourself and then solve the problem during creation…. this sounds really interesting, but exactly what does it mean?

Ryan Travis Christain: Likewise! Haha, for the record… Synchronicity (run by two near and dear friends of mine) is re-opening kitty corner from their old location in a freestanding building facing Scoops, & now that you mention it, i could really go for a scoop of pear ice cream, damn that place is good.

Anyhow, as far as approaching a drawing goes, I’ve been writing a lot of brief little notes to myself on scraps of paper, stories, memories, phrases I’m fond of. These scraps are everywhere! I like to sit on them for awhile and see what comes back to me a second or third time, figuring there’s some sort of extra weight to that.

Taking said idea, I then begin to build up a surface on the paper, there are a decent amount of layers beneath the finished product. The “abstract problem” is more or less a mess that I’m forcing myself to respond to. Expressive mark making, rubbings, or even something like a big fat x in the center of the picture plane, provide me with a loose structure that I can begin to plug my vocabulary into. It’s nice to be able to retain some of the gestural quality of the “problem” and have that interact with the concrete visual elements. It definitely gives the drawings some sort of energy.

New Bikini Jam #2″, Graphite on Paper, 2011 / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

I’ve made it a point to stop pre-conceiving a specific image to achieve. I used to drive myself crazy that way, trying to meet my brain’s own high standards. I feel like that kind of sucks the fun out of it, as opposed to just seeing what happens. I think that’s a really great way to go about making something, you can stumble across all sorts of things that way and often surprise yourself. There is a lot of of freedom in this approach. I read recently that Cormac McCarthy tackles his writing in a similar fashion.

SC: So what are some examples of the phrases that you write down? There is a definite dark humor that permeates your work. Do the phrases contain humor too, or are they totally random? Also, I want to know more about your visual vocabulary. Where do you pull your sources? And, is anything up for grabs?

RTC: Oh man, the phrases are infinite, they are pulled form everywhere, I probably use about 1% of them overall. Sometimes they are humorous, sometimes totally random. Some examples are “juice loosener”,”walks in forrest, sleeps in the river”, “wooden mexican”, “dramamine”, “old dro”, “snake men”, “demon bag” (these are ones visible from where I’m typing). I guess they’re probably funnier to me since I know what they specifically reference, but I’m not trying to be funny, I just want to retain these fleeting thoughts and 2-3 word phrases do the trick quite nicely. It also happens that some of these “ideas” are just actually funny, humor trumps beauty in my mind as far as eliciting an emotional response from a viewer and I’ve always been most drawn toward humorous work.

Ryan Travis Christian, “Binocular View #2″, Graphite on Paper, 2010 / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

Yeah, anything is up for grabs, I don’t see any point in limiting myself to a specific set of sources, but I do definitely tend to wind up gravitating toward certain things repeatedly. I find myself wanting to draw cars, sex, homes, lawn care based activities, and vague landscapes/shallow spaces the most. I guess these are the things I think about/recall most often and the landscapes/spaces are perfect stages to place the narrative. Narrative wise my source is mainly memory, object wise my source is also mainly memory, but from time to time I’ll steel someone’s story or print out a picture of a rose to draw from. Thought I’ve noticed as time goes by, other sources start to creep in slowly and become a staple part of the vocabulary. So it’s constantly evolving, at glacial speeds.

SC: That’s interesting. I usually link words like car, homes and lawn care to suburban culture. These are all mundane activities and objects that fill basic suburban life. Yet I feel that there is also an anxious feeling of being trapped in some sort of bad dream, where absurdity takes over seemingly innocent activities — maybe this too is a product of suburban culture! It’s evident in works like Creepers #1 where a typical backyard melts into a subversive landscape. Since you mentioned the source of your narratives being based mainly in memory, I have to ask, what happened to you in the past that led to these types of visual stories?

RTC: Spot on! The surburbs (where I grew up and still live) are like a bad dream or a weird one at least. You have rural and urban influence, lots of space, redundant store scapes and infinite neighborhoods. Suburban culture is fucking boring when you are young and angst-y, it forces you to make your own fun. You have to hang out in the forrest or sneak out and run around at night and be absurd. When your town or city or whatever isn’t brimming with garbage and filled with hobos and police sirens, happenings are much more noticeable.

But suburban lifestyle aside, I feel that story telling is the highest form of art, drinking beer with friend comes in a close second Marioni!. So that’s what I do, take the best ones and draw em’. I don’t usually broadcast what a drawing is specifically about, I like that people can make their own associations with the imagery, but since you asked nicely, I’ll tell you one.

Ryan Travis Christian, “Creepers #1″, Graphite on Paper, 2010 / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

Creepers #1 happened on Halloween of 2001, at the time we had these neighbors who were total crabapples, a real miserable middle-aged couple, the entire block would agree with me on this statement. My parents and I were returning from an early dinner and kids were all over the place trick or treating. As we pulled into our driveway, I briefly glanced at my neighbors house. It took me a second to realize something was off about what I just saw. When I looked again, I noticed a face looming in these two large trees that are situated on the corner of their house. It wasn’t a familiar face either, it was this perverted crumby looking old man, just hiding in the bushes in broad daylight. I realized 2 things immediately, a) this guy was up to no good ( I know this, being someone who has hid in the bushes many times) and b) I had the opportunity to catch this weirdo and maybe whip his ass (taking the law into my own hands is kind of a fantasy of mine). So, i pointed at him and screamed “Hey you”. He jumped out of the bushes. My neighbor was handing candy out and screamed when she saw this. He sprinted between our houses into the backyard and toward a busy road that runs behind our street. I ran into the garage and grabbed a baseball bat, ran out the side door and chased him down the road, I got so close too! But I failed, he wanted it more than me I guess. The neighbor lady had called the police while this was all happening and they showed up pretty quickly, telling us that this was one of multiple calls they received about a guy creeping in the area.

Ryan Travis Christian, “X2Go2Work!”, Graphite on Paper / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

SC: HA! What a priceless story. Thanks for sharing the background. The suburbs can definitely breed the most absurd happenings. I can see how these personal stories are rich with the content that can fuel your work. I’m also interested in your aesthetics. There is an amazing fragmentation in your work that allows for multiple references to appear simultaneously. It is evident that you absorb a lot from contemporary art and culture and subvert it for you own purpose. I’m curious about the artists that you are interested in right now, the art history that you keep coming back to and in general, things that have been captivating your attention as of late?

RTC: My pleasure, there’s lots more where that came from. I interviewed Ben Jones a long time ago and he said it better than I ever could… “It takes only the most ballin’ original tightest visual shit possible… I want to see fucking mint ass visual shit and then and only then will I approve/steal it”.

Doing the whole blog thing and curating and just looking at a lot of art in general, I’ve developed a very specific taste for elements I think work best, and like any artist, you can look at their work and probably develop a complex diagram of where everything they made came from. It’s constantly changing too. Current artists would include but isn’t limited to: Paper Rad, Marissa Textor, Mike Rea, Bjorn Copeland, Scott and Tyson Reeder, Jose Lerma, Geoffrey Todd Smith, Eddie Martinez, Eric Yahnker, Allison Schulnik, Ben Stone, Deb Sokolow, Cleon Peterson, Ben Stone, Xylor Jane, Andrew Schoultz, Joseph Hart, Chris Duncan, Samantha Bittman, Garth Weiser, Lightning Bolt, Hilary Pecis, Evan Gruzis, Glen Baldridge, Michael Krueger, Chris Johanson, Joe Roberts, Adam Scott, Cory Arcangel, Ann Toebbe, CF, Scott Wolniak, this list could seriously go on forever… Older inspiration comes from; Conlon Nancarrow, Guston, De Kooning, Archibald Motley, Ub Iwerks, Bruce Bickford, The Hairy Who, George Condo, Ray Yoshida, this could go on forever too. More than anything, I ideally want to be able to do for future generations what these people have done for me, which is make me believe that art isn’t totally stupid. If there’s a name you don’t recognize, please google it.

Ryan Travis Christian, “Jailbirds”, Graphite on Paper, 2010 / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

SC: In your current exhibition Sad Sacks at Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, you have produced an epic-scaled drawing as well as a collaborative work with Chris Duncan. It seems that you are certainly interested in expanding your practice. Beyond furthering your intricate drawings, do you have any projects or exhibitions plans that are outside of your current method of working?

RTC: I’ve been doing the smaller scale/ super tight drawings for a couple years now and I’m going to continue that. But there are a lot of other things that I want to pursue, probably too many. After knocking out that big one @ Guerrero in 2 days (the biggest thing I’ve done thus far), I’m definitely jazzed to be back home in the studio with an extra added energy. Next month I’ll be doing two more massive wall pieces, one with Western Exhibitions at the MDW Fair and the other at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, both here in Chicago. I’ve been dj’ing thematic sets recently with Club Nutz (the worlds smallest comedy club) and will continue to do that as much as possible. Also trying to acquire a full on drum kit to execute some music I’ve had in my head for a minute now. I’ve been juggling around some sculpture/video ideas and also have been attempting to make paintings of my drawings, ideally in 5 years from now I’d like to have the option of taking an idea I have and being able to execute it in any medium, while maintaining a certain caliber. Also developing a hand drawn animation a la’ 1930’s style, which won’t be finished for a long time! Trying to run the gauntlet…

Ryan Travis Christian “Freewheelers”, Graphite on paper / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

Concerning the collaboration with Duncan, that was amazing, but that’s because he’s a force of nature! I’ve been doing collabs for a short amount of time, sometimes they ‘re lemons other times they blow your mind. I think it’s important for like minded artists to collaborate, it’s just another way to communicate/bond/learn from one another, plus it’s a lot of fun. I’ve done some with Eric Yahnker, Alexis Mackenzie, Dana Dart- Mclean and Chris, thus far. I have a nice list of about 15-20 folks that I’ll be working with over the next 6 months, which will culminate in a project space show at Western Exhibitions in October alongside my debut solo show with them. Got a big curatorial project in the mix and a book project based on what could be my gnarliest story ever! Plus a bunch of group shows between now and mid 2012 all over the country and abroad. Keep your eyes peeled for Ryan Wallace’s upcoming curatorial project based on the idea of “home” that’s coming up in May, it will be a game changer. I signed up for a summer golf league. I feel like when I type all of this shit, I’m begging the cosmos to splatter my face with egg. It’s only a matter of time until you read about my head exploding.

Ming Wong, Devo partire. Domani / I must go. Tomorrow (still), 2010, 5 channel video installation, 12:58 minutes, colour, sound, © the artist.

The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House threw open its doors to the public on 13 March 2011 with 63 artists from 30 countries presenting 161 works across four exhibition venues.

Predicated on the belief that contemporary artistic practices are largely driven by discursive acts of exchange and transactions, Open House records the ensuing visual dialogue and contested ways of seeing that emerge when communication channels are laid open. According to Creative Director Matthew Ngui, the focus this year is “on the city as site and as home, where art engages audiences and represents realities through unique creative processes”. With the curatorial objective of prioritizing these artistic processes (founding ideas, initial emotional compulsions and artistic intentions) – all of which inevitably function within a complex network of socio-historical and cultural spaces and discourses –, Open House engages with the local experience by hosting its works in emblematic and culturally significant sites (read: converted colonial-style buildings carrying the collective memory of the country’s history).

Such site-specific installations however, invariably demand that the works are examined in relation to the difficult spaces created by the architecture of the buildings, and it is precisely therein that the Biennale disappoints. If process-oriented site-specificity endeavors to augment several things – like emphasizing performative aspects that such charged spaces are wont to engender or constructing an enhanced community network for instance – the paucity of connections made between particular spatial dimensions and the artwork generates instead, a random walking route that feels akin to an exhaustive tourist list of sightseeing spots to tackle before the sun goes down.

Matt Mullican, That persons work with single bedsheets, 2007, bedsheets, mixed media ( 26 sheets and 22 bars), 246 x 165 cm. Installation gesamt 8 x 8m, Höhe 2,5m Photo: Lisa Rastl. Image courtesy Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna.

That is not to say that the show doesn’t try to explore what happens when traditional boundaries that demarcate private and public spheres are breached. On the contrary, it makes an earnest but at times literal attempt to do so through artists such as Arin Rungjang’s research piece on Thai-migrant workers who have made their private experiences for public consumption, or through Martha Rosler’s public garden that was constructed in dialogue with students, local community groups and artists. Roslisham Ismail’s investigation into the buying and eating habits of the local population offers us intimate, transgressive moments of the degustatory sort in Secret Affair (2010 – 2011), a food installation of 6 refrigerators storing the consumables of several families.

Staples of contemporary art themes – subversion, displacement and the extent to which how much one sacrifices for art – are revisited in other contemplative pieces. For Matt Mullican, an artist whose practices have since the 1970s, been informed by the creation of art under hypnosis, That Person’s work with single bedsheets (2007) documents the devices of the hyperconscious (his trance persona is aptly called That Person) and the fluidity of fiction and reality. Scandinavian art duo of Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset known for “Drama Queens” at the Old Vic (a neat survey of 20th century art history enhanced by the voices of stage actors) and Prada Marfa in the Texan landscape, replicated an Old German Barn in the hangar of the Old Kallang Airport accompanied by hunky blokes clad in lederhosen.

Elgreem & Dragset, Installation, The German Barn, commissioned by the Singapore Biennale 2011. Image © designboom.

Ise (Roslisham Ismail), Secret Affair, (work in progress), 2010 – 2011, food installation, © the artist.

Video installations seem to dominate the Biennale and are arguably, the most exciting of the lot, though much of these works have already premiered elsewhere. The priority given to the moving image here seems to be a curatorial acknowledgement of ever-increasing expansion of the visual vocabulary of artists and of the changing relationship between spectator and the artwork. Named after Robert Rauschenberg’s near-identical paintings Factum I and Factum II (1957), Candice Breitz presents Factum (2010), a multi-channel video installation in a series of in-depth video portraits of twins – and one set of triplets, exploring forces that drive individuality and identity. Breitz films each twin in isolation from their sibling and reveals their starkly differing personalities and beliefs in a video diptych that demolishes common assumptions about twins’ ideological similarities.

Candice Breitz, Factum, 2009, six dual channel and one three channel video and sound installation, various times, © the artist.

Ryan Trecartin, Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010. Duration: 28 minutes, 23 seconds HD Video. Image courtesy of Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

In a 4-part video installation Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re’Search Wait’S) (2010), Ryan Trecartin’s cast of camera-loving characters compete for attention in an overstimulated sphere where non-existent hierarchies and social rules hold the power to unleash assaultive fantasies. In this digitized, exhibitionist space of web-video sharing, re-fashioning one’s own identity is a not an act of volition but a necessity borne out of escaping repressive forces. Over-the-top emotional exchanges, androgynous dressing and fragmented scenes of image-text combination are frenetically documented in a chaotic montage amid electronica and exaggerated sound effects. Trecartin’s mismatched and effortless cast ultimately deconstruct contemporary cultural sensibilities as unstable and farcical.

Omer Fast, De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message), 2007. Image: Courtesy of the artist. Production still: Erik De Cnodder.

The fragmentation of narrative that video art permits is fully utilized in Omer Fast’s De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message) (2007). In 27 minutes, several panoramic shots of 4 scenarios create worlds marked by reversals and contradictions. Shot like a drama series with a convoluted plot that is centered on a dying elderly woman tormented by memories from the Second World War, Fast’s narrative is supercharged with racial overtones. Also exploring issues on race, identity and gender is Ming Wong’s Devo Patire. Domani (2010), an appropriation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) in which he plays all the characters in an archetypal family plunged into an identity crisis after encountering a stranger. The theatrical emphasis on the viewer’s experiential/spatial encounter with the moving image naturally engenders the need for interactivity, such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 (2003). Frequency and Volume assesses human perceptions and kinetic energies within a built environment, using the shadows of gallery viewers as a form of embodied representation.

Arin Rungjang, Big Moon and Waterfall, 2006, outdoor light installation, bamboo, Passage de Retz, Paris, © the artist.

***
The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House is the 3^rd Biennale held in Singapore since 2006 and will run until 15 May 2011. Conceived by Artistic Director Matthew Ngui and curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith, Open House is organised by the Singapore Art Museum, the National Heritage Board and supported by the National Arts Council. It is held across several venues: Old Kallang Airport, National Museum of Singapore, SAM@8Q and the Singapore Art Museum.

Today’s article is from our friends at Art Practical, where Spencer Young discusses SNOWBALL, an exhibition by the artist collective leonardogillesfleur currently on view at Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.

Image Courtesy of Catherine Clark Gallery

In this year’s February issue of Artforum, which features a lengthy section dedicated to the topic of collaboration, Tom Hollert writes, “Collectives and collaboratives are still assumed to be intrinsically liberating. Their emancipatory dimension is linked with the elevation of co-labor, of working in teams rather than lingering in the solitude of the studio.” This intrinsic liberation may be the reason for the continued practice of collaborators leonardogillesfleur, a husband and wife team comprising Leonardo Giacomuzzo and Gilles-fleur Boutry. Yet, they take this straightforward logic on a roundabout, even paradoxical, route toward emancipation in their exhibition SNOWBALL.

Staged front and center at the entrance of Catharine Clark Gallery is SNOWBALL’s headlining act, FITO (2006-2010). Like most self-aggrandizing, fashionably late performers, this showstopper initially refuses to play its part. Part three of an ongoing series titled Irreconcilable Differences, FITO comprises two lipstick-red 1976 Fiat 600s seamlessly fused into one double-headed, obstinately opposing entity. This “car” doesn’t appear to be escaping or liberating anyone or anything anytime soon.

Read more…

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Chris Doyle, "Smokescreen," 2010, Duratrans on LED light box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

The same E.B. White responsible for Charlotte’s Web—still, to my mind, one of the most stabbing child-geared depictions of the circle of life—was also the obsessive stylist behind Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, that little book that told America, “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words” (and still receives hate mail). But long before he did either of these things he wrote essays—swaths of them, and most of them crafted, endearingly, almost to a fault. He would later refer to one particular essay, written in 1939 and called “Here is New York,” as a “period piece.” But today it feels weirdly prescient. Especially when, after meandering through idol worship (White was staying just blocks from where Earnest Hemingway punched Max Eastman in the nose), neighborhood boundary lines, and the “cold guilt” of the Bowery, White winds down with this: the subtlest change New York has undergone of late, “one people don’t speak much about,” is that the “city, for the first time in its long history is destructible.”

A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges. . . . The intimation of death is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

White’s fixation on jets overhead had to do with World War II era paranoia; the twin towers hadn’t even been built.

But his foresight, however uncanny, isn’t what makes White’s essay compelling; it’s his reliability as a craftsman. I trust White to understand destruction because he understands the preciousness of construction so well, building up sentences word by word, and paragraphs sentence by sentence.

Chris Doyle, "History of the 20th Century I," 2009, Duratrans on LED light-box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

Artist Chris Doyle understands construction too, as his current exhibition at Sam Lee Gallery in Chinatown shows. The landscape Doyle depicts, often industrial but never really urban, is far less specific than the cityscape White wrote about. It’s a series of built-up vignettes, shown in lightboxes, small prints loosely based on the dimensions of dollar bills, and, most prominently, a 6 minute, 26 second video animation. Called Waste_Generation (also the name of the show) and informed by the romantic ruins of Hudson River Painter Thomas Cole’s Desolation, the video cycles through images of nature and the trappings of manufacturing as they collide and merge with each other. These 6 minutes took a year to compose, and all images were hand-drawn on a computer tablet and then animated using flash. I imagine it’s quiet soundtrack, composed by collaborator Joe Arcidiacono, took a comparably long time. As a result, each moment has an immense intentionality to it, and the video’s careful craftsmanship seems, potentially, like an antidote to the man-made devastation it depicts.

Chris Doyle, "Green/Green," 2010, Duratrans on LED light box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

The press release specifies that Brooklyn-based Doyle’s reinterpretation of Cole is, in part, an attempt to react to 9/11. It’s hard to forget a fact like that, though it’s just as hard to know what that means, and knowing probably isn’t that important. That the currency, buildings, and waste heaps that cycle through are treated as tenderly as the foliage and blooms is what’s important.

E.B. White ends his essay on New York with a tribute to a tree, a willow, “long-suffering and much-climbed.” Says White, “whenever I look at it nowadays and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: ‘This must be saved.’” Of course, it’s the effort White puts into constructing a description of this tree, a “marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death,” that preserves it, or makes preservation in general seem like a worthy cause. The weird, embodied foliage that grows and wilts in Doyle’s animation has a similar effect: by taking the time to create, carefully, these images, Doyle suggests an understanding of destruction goes hand-in-hand with an understanding of what it takes to craft destructible things.