Spread from Paul Thek notebook #63, 1974; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph © Estate of George Paul Thek; Photograph Jörg Lohse

As part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, approaches to translate the subjective experience into the artistic process were explored in In the Shadow of the Hand and Back to the Things Themselves. Questions were raised on the nuances and distinctions between notions of the subjective, personal and self-indulgent. These borders disintegrate in the exhibition Paul Thek – ‘If you don’t like this book you don’t like me.’, on show at The Modern Institute till 2 June 2012, where fragments of the life of an artist, as narrated through pages of notebooks, become a part of the works on display.

Paul Thek; Untitled (cityscape with twin towers), 1972; Acrylic on canvas; 241.5 x 165 cm; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph Ruth Clark

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of exhibitions and publications on Paul Thek, perhaps as part of an effort to re-insert him into the history of art. Though well-received in Europe during the 1970s, he died in relative obscurity in 1988 after his return to the United States. Thek’s name is often cited in relation to the Technological Reliquaries or “meat pieces”, a series of works made in the 1960s where body parts appearing as chunks of flesh were presented in geometric vitrines, a revelry of one’s fleshly mortality within the confines of the composed exterior of minimalism. While these sculptures were solid and dense, he also made works from ephemeral materials with collaborators, creating immersive environments that lasted for the duration of the exhibition. While little documentation remains of these installations, about 80 of Thek’s notebooks were retrieved and carefully preserved after his passing.

Paul Thek - If you don’t like this book you don’t like me. Installation view, The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph Ruth Clark

The Technological Reliquaries are materially absent in the show. Knowledge of it is acquired through the supplementary reading materials provided. The artist’s notebooks, usually occupying this secondary position for signposts to an artist’s intentions, instead forms the core of the show, presented in the main artery of the gallery space alongside several of his paintings, and photographs by Peter Hujar in the gallery’s upper level.

Bust of Tomb Figure (Paul Thek) 1967/2010; Pigmented ink print; Sheet 51 x 40.6 cm, image 47 x 32 cm; Photograph Peter Hujar; Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

His notebooks reveal repeated scribbles of self-motivational phrases to meticulous lists and copying of religious texts.  Illustrations, drawings and watercolor works suggest a mind filled with both doubt and idealism, on the possibility of fulfillment within one’s earthly existence and a continual search for a higher spiritual being. Enclosed in vitrines, most of the notebooks are spread open to specific pages. Several remain shut. While the open pages disclose paradoxes, exuberance and anxieties that intimate the intentions behind the hybrid approach to the form and style of his works, it is the pages withheld from view that provokes one to consider the subjective voice of the hand behind how one is to like the book, and Paul Thek.

Cover of Paul Thek Notebook #68, 1978; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph © Estate of George Paul Thek; Photograph Jörg Lohse

Installation view of Back to the Things Themselves (Lesley Punton & Judy Spark). Image courtesy of Lesley Punton.

Back to the Things Themselves, on show at The Briggait, presents artworks by Lesley Punton (LP) and Judy Spark (JS) who both explore possibilities and limits of translating one’s lived experience of the environment, and the potential for connections between a subjective experience with universal ways of knowing the world.

Magdalen Chua (MC) had a conversation with Punton and Spark, as a second part of a feature on exhibitions presented during the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art that place emphasis on the process of collaboration and the subjective experience within artistic practice.

Judy Spark, Like punctuation (symphoricarphos), Graphite on paper, 2012, (with Lesley Punton White out receding – Carn Dearg to right). Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: Shall we start off by talking about your individual practices?

LP: My work has always been concerned with landscape issues. In recent years, through the process of walking, it has become more explicit in relation to my lived experience of places that are usually wild and rarely urban. In the exhibition, I have tried to create a diverse conversation between different pieces of work, exploring the limits of experience; and polarities – of night and day, light and dark, and time and duration.

Lesley Punton, Schiehallion, silver gelatin 5 x 4 contact print made after placing a pinhole camera in the summit cairn, pointing South, whilst bivying on the summit of Schiehallion to record the duration of the hours of darkness of midsummer night ’09, 2009-12, with Jim Hamlyn. Image courtesy of artist.

In the past, a lot of the lived experience of my work resulted in long and complicated processes of making. There are works that are directly durational in their actual making, such as Flurry, which marks time. A participatory work is Schiehallion where Jim Hamlyn and I made a pinhole photograph that recorded the duration of midsummer’s night that year at the summit of the mountain. These have a very direct relationship to experiences whilst actually in land. Recent works respond more to reflection and recollections of those experiences. Some have literary connections. Gravesend is the place where the narration of ‘Heart of Darkness’ starts, with Marlowe sitting and recounting the tale of his experience with Kurtz up the Congo.

Lesley Punton, Gravesend, graphite on paper, 2010. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: Could you talk about the Duration pieces? They make me think of a journey, where the days refer to the duration, or the process of making the work.

LP: The duration refers to polar night and polar day and the idea of time as something that is not quite fixed. I’ve always been interested in aspects of time – deep time and geological time – probably from the experience of spending a lot of time in hills.

Lesley Punton, Duration 2, oil & gesso on board, 2010-12 (photo credit L Punton). Image courtesy of artist.

MC: When did you start looking at the idea of the lived experience and venturing into remote places?

LP: I’ve always believed that you would make something that has some relationship to how you connect with the world. The intensity of the experience of walking and climbing mountains was something important and I became a bit obsessed with it. It felt unnatural not to do something with it.

Judy Spark, The things themselves, Two FM radios / transmitters with digital soundtracks, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: My route to making work about lived experience was through a concern with mechanisms like environmentalism that are established to get people to recognize the value of their surroundings. Environmentalism of any kind – whether related to ecology, renewable energies etc., – depends upon the scientific mechanisms that have created the problems that we’re facing in the first place. In the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve begun trying to find ways to think about how people engage with their surroundings. Conversely to Lesley, my landscapes might be right under my feet. It tends to be urban because that’s the environment I’m treading on all the time, and that’s how things come to consciousness.

MC: Could you explain the basis of your philosophical approach. It seems to be about being within a certain environment, perceiving what is around you, and letting these surface.

Judy Spark, Instructions for creating a gap, Printed text, 2011 – 12. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: A big influence was a Master’s in Environmental Philosophy in 2006 which broadened my thinking. There doesn’t seem to be much between the poles of not really caring about the place that you inhabit, and having a code of rules that are scientifically directed on how you should behave. We’re not used to working out anything in-between that is more personal. Trying to find a subjective response to things might actually turn out to have wider relevance than “just my own personal subjective response”. I became interested in the phenomenology movement and the idea of trying to describe actions or processes in a way that allows people to find something more direct and new. I think there are parallels with more indigenous or Buddhist experiences of the world which I can’t be a part of. I’d love to be, but I would only be putting my own Western perception onto them.

Judy Spark, Listening in the gap, Bound, printed text. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: I had a conversation with Sarah Forrest and Virginia Hutchison, and we spoke about the subjective experience and values. When there is an objective framework such as environmentalism, it is easy to subscribe to it because it is clear what kind of values there are. When we move to the subjective, it opens the question of whether there are still values within this realm.

LP: As much as I might prioritise a lived experience and the subjective, my relationship with the audience is more objective. I’m always looking for a distancing mechanism. The act of translation in the artwork gives the potential for objectivity or a poetics of space, which the viewer could enter into with their own subjective experience. If I thought for one second that what I was making was self-indulgent work, I would run for the hills, literally. At the same time I have no interest in creating distanced work. While my work might be incredibly minimal, I hope that there is a poetic layer that subverts that sparseness.

JS: The notion of value is an interesting one because of the distancing that you talk about. I know that I have a bit of a drum to bang in some way, but I can’t use my artwork for that and I wouldn’t want to try. It really is about putting something out there and if it allows viewers to think about their own response to things, then great.

Lesley Punton, Flurry, silverpoint & gesso on paper, 2008. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: How did you meet and what led you to decide to collaborate on this exhibition.

LP: A mutual friend was planning on hillwalking in 2004 and we started regular weekend walks.

JS: We did talk about the possibility of showing work together for years and have had many conversations. When we secured the show, I became very busy. Lesley has a young son and we both work. The collaborative aspect probably starts now in the debriefing of what we’ve done.

LP: As we have individual practices, it was probably important that we had our time to make our own work.

JS: Now that we have put our work in proximity like this, maybe this is the beginning of the next stage

LP: Walking is a very interesting way to collaborate and to build friendships. There are extended periods of silence and these are different from the conversations you have when you meet somebody in the pub. You actively experience something together. I have made some works where I have collaborated with Jim Hamlyn, my partner. The notion of collaboration is still quite new for me in the actual making of artworks together. Up until very recently I’ve not formally collaborated.

Judy Spark, Orrery (gallium aparine), Graphite on paper, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: I’m usually a very isolated practitioner. I teach in an art school and that’s maybe where I get a lot of my energy. Collaboration is something I haven’t made a decision not to do. It seems to be closely connected to that thing of value. Maybe if I meet another artist whose work or practice, or something they say to me about my work or practice, chimes in a way. Maybe it’s to do with being a friend first.

LP:  I think collaborations grow organically. I don’t think you can just put two people together and say collaborate, do it now. It doesn’t work that way.

MC: Perhaps you need a lot of trust. It starts off from conversations and knowing that those conversations can take place even without the art.

LP: …and equality as well. If there’s an imbalance there, I don’t think you can collaborate, and that’s where your idea of trust comes in.

Dasha Shishkin, "S INT N HO," installation view, 2012. Courtesy Suanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Rain in Los Angeles is apparently bimodal — there are dry years followed by a few wet ones — which means the average precipitation is reached by factoring the wet and dry years together. We must be in a wetter year now, because there have been multiple rainy days just this week. Dasha Shishkin, who is not from Los Angeles (she hails from Moscow and lives in New York), makes rainy day drawings, drawings that feel like they are insular, cozy and social by necessity.  The figures are thrown together in tight quarters and going “outside” of the picture plane seems undesirable to them. They are thus prime subjects for staring at.

Shishkin has said she does not paint, per se, because she is not a participant. “I am thinking of Picasso’s quote about painting as an act of active participation and drawing as an act of voyeurism,” she told Modern Painters in 2010. “I like being a voyeur for now.” The world she gazes into, or creates for us to gaze into, in her new show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is an eccentric fantasy inhabited exclusively by women, who occasionally appear in the nude for no apparent reason and have eyes in strange places, like on their abdomens or their behinds. Some have long Pinocchio noses.

Dasha Shishkin, ""I don't care if I can't understand you, but you can't sit in the gutter all day," 2012. Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Two of her drawings at Vielmetter Projects strike me most, and both of these turn vulnerability into a kind of strength. One is called “What does it matter to her ever creating womb if today matter is flesh and tomorrow worms.” (“Titles are like a cherry on a cake,” said Shishkin in that same Modern Painters interview. “The cherry does not make a cake a cherry cake, but it is still there to attract or distract an eye.”) It shows ladies in black dresses at a party in a restaurant with a checkered floor. Two sit in chairs in the foreground, gazing in at the rest. They seem perfectly content in their lonesomeness and, as you follow their gaze, you see a lot of the other women aren’t actually interacting with anyone else either. It’s a party full of self-sufficient, non-participant partiers.

Eve Babitz and Marcel Duchamp play chess at Pasadena Museum of Art, 1963.

The second drawing I like is more relaxed. It’s called “I don’t care if I can’t understand you, but you can’t sit in the gutter all day,” and shows three women on crimson bedding, two of them bald, with eyes on their breasts and nipples that look like noses. The middle woman has a goofy infectious grin, and you wonder if she is on some sort of drug. She reminds me of an essay by Eve Babitz, the writer who knew L.A.  inside out and often longed for rain.

The essay, called “Rain,” comes from the book Slow Days, Fast Company, and has a passage on Quaaludes, which seems to describe Shiskin’s grinning woman perfectly: “When you get very languid and sexual and smile like Cleopatra being fanned as she floats down the Nile, other people catch the mood and find themselves straying from the straight and narrow too.” Rain has a similar effect as the drug, according to Babitz; rain in L.A. gives you an excuse to “catch a mood” and get comfortable. “[Rain is] freedom from smog and unbroken dreary hateful sameness,” writes Babitz. “It’s freedom to be cozy. Cozy! You can be cozy and not even have to go to San Francisco.”

Kristi McGuire is an artist, writer, and editor living in Chicago, Illinois. She is coeditor of The Contemporary Visual Studies Reader, forthcoming from Routledge this fall. She can be reached at postmenlikedoctors [at] gmail.com. 

Stock image photograph produced by Google image-search for “stock photography.”

I once thought that I could summon the ambient act of reading on the Internet as part of a singular project of prognostication: using those noisy images (stock photographs, Google image-searches, self-portraits uploaded to social networks) and polyvocal chatter as the agents and conduit of a new kind of meaning-making within language. Cassandra the soothsayer, her ear turned to the imaginary cracklings of Alexander Graham Bell’s phonautograph[1]—and why not? Cassandra is long dead and unreal herself, and now, many epochs after her myth rose to prominence, the metaphorical snakes are no longer licking anyone’s ears clean.

But truth be told, or soothsaid: the ambient isn’t a space that exists in the realm of the falsely prophetic or within other concurrent delays with real time (nostalgia, the future imperfect and conditional tenses). Instead, conveniently in line with its etymological origins (ambient, adj. “turning round, resolving”), the ambient works quite literally with units of time as we’ve come to experience them in the twenty-first century—minutes, seconds, the fraction of a fraction-of-a-moment it takes to follow a plot line on the flickering screen: we’re barely able to enunciate the word “Drake” before we’ve seen Twitter feed Drizzy saturated with the banal and disembodied static of the everyday (what Ben Lerner appropriates from John Ashbery in Leaving the Atocha Station as “life’s white machine”):

Screengrab of Aubrey Drake Graham's (aka Drake's) Twitter feed, March 26, 2012.

For writer Tan Lin, boredom is the threshold of the ambient, the place where a work is “born out of our mutual dis-interest”[2] and where “anyone who has ever read a painting will tell you [like Ed Ruscha], paintings, like poems, are most beautiful [and least egotistical] . . . at the exact moment in which they are forgotten, like disco.”[3]

Ed Ruscha, "Pay Nothing Until April," 2003, acrylic on canvas, 1527 x 1525 x 40 mm. Collection of the Tate, Britain .

For the critic and translator Jennifer Scappettone, in her essay on Tan Lin’s ambient poetics, “Versus Seamlessness,”[4] the turn to late capitalism’s panache for the stupefied landscape supersedes what Rem Koolhaas terms Junkspace and what other theorists, designers and cultural critics—from Venturi, Scott Brown to Frederic Jameson to Ernest Mandel—have mined in the hopes of locating modernism’s flawed moment alongside the disjointed landscape remaindered by modernization. What’s missing here? We’ve left Las Vegas and Learned from It—it’s not that kind of spectacle. In fact, it’s not spectacle at all. We’re so saturated by the multiplicities and disjointments of this remaindered landscape in which we dwell—where James Cameron plummets in a yellow submarine to document “IMAGES UNEXPERIENCED” while we read reviews of Mad Men episodes, interchanging accordion-playing Joan with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as a Lute Player—that we can’t pause to separate a reading on slow death and self-sovereignty from a back-issue of Critical Inquiry from the animated GIF of a deceased professional wrestler on our screen. Or can we? Would we want to?

L: Screengrab of Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway in the Mad Men episode "My Old Kentucky Home," 2009. R: Artemisia Gentileschi, "Self-Portrait as Lute Player," 1615-17, oil on canvas, 30 x 28. Collection of the Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

II

“Autopsychography” is a poem by the Portuguese poet/critic/madman Fernando Pessoa (1888−1935). I think my intention is to continually refer to it but never offer it up. It’s quite short—4 stanzas, 16 lines total—and its message is especially direct: the loss involved in performing one’s identity soon becomes its greatest measure of success. Its repeated line? “The poet is a faker.”

Fernando Pessoa, date and photographer unknown.

Pessoa was someone who, in his own lifetime, created over eighty alter-egos—including, of course, “Fernando Pessoa”—while leaving behind an archive of 27,000+ “items,” ranging in form from prose to poems to letters. Each of Pessoa’s heteronyms – especially the five most favored by the author (Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Bernando Soares—with whom he self-identified—and Fernando Pessoa) had complex writing styles, visions, life philosophies, and temperaments. Beyond the textbook tenets of polyvocality (or varied interpretations of multiple personality disorder) here, Pessoa pursued in these personas an interest in acts of forgery and theories of materialism. Pessoa the flâneur; Pessoa the mystic nationalist; Pessoa, the student of Hawthorne, Whitman, and Poe, all coincided in Pessoa—these writer(s) of [Pessoa's] lifetime. The poet is a faker.

Pessoa read Arthur Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson, and Nicolas Malebranche, ultimately arriving at a place he called “the terminal system”—the limit and summit of metaphysics, a system the author was interested in contradicting. Pessoa tried to find the ‘thing’ that could encompass everything and—despite this encompassing—somehow exceed or transcend the very notion of wholeness. He saw excess as a peculiar kind of preservation. His cultural paradigm? Systems theory. How objects and ideas related to each other and formed (with as much noise as possible) a cohered experience was, for Pessoa, an oddly embodied science-fair project: his ultimate construction of time passing.

III

I try to understand the spam feed that litters my blog:

Screengrab of pending comments for a WordPress blog, March 26, 2012.

I read articles about the cyber-robots and scanning machines that now compose more than 51 percent of the Internet. I recognize in my desire to extract meaning from a spammer’s quick gloss of the lines I write a flickering glimmer of a modernist credo. I think of what it will mean when the Internet has exhausted itself—when a closed system collapses, when the entropy that marks the novels of William Gaddis inflects Ashbery’s “white machine” and even all the Pessoas can’t serve as a kind of embodiment for the rounds of Tweets and comment threads performed by indistinguishably distinguished cyber-specters. Will I still read another art review on the computer? By then, I will have become a cyber-spectator of a different kind. I’ll no longer be overwhelmed by the ambient fireworks of relationality—high and low, all forms, all kinds—but instead find myself disfigured by nameless, faceless “sentiment-aggregators” that perform the experience formerly known as my own. When their dancing Randy Savage glares over the margins of that Lauren Berlant PDF two tabs over and they perfectly execute the banal sense of quotidian displacement this triggers, I’ll be hidden away somewhere with a copy of Joan Jonas’s Double Lunar Dogs, preparing to paint their portrait.

Joan Jonas, stills from Double Lunar Dogs (based on a 1941 Robert Heinlin short story), 1984. Video (color, sound), 24 min. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

#Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts. Please send queries to hashtags [at] dailyserving.com.

Luxury Logico Artist Collective (Taipei, Taiwan), ‘Solar’, 2010, lights, computer, sound, courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney

Down the Rabbit Hole, the current exhibition in Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery, explores familiar themes, such as the disjunction between appearance and reality, or between the real and the fake. Layers of the past and present, preoccupying so many artists, provide insights into the psychological whirlwind resulting from the pace of change in today’s China. Ideas about materialism, globalisation, wealth and power, corruption, and identity confusion are evident in many works.

Wang Luyan’s ‘Breathe Series – ATM’ appears to be a real cash dispenser, until you realise its soft silicone rubber surface moves gently as if breathing in and out. Wang’s earlier work, ‘Breathe – Manager Zhao’s Black Cab’ is a dusty battered van with one working headlight, its dented sides expanding with each breath. A homage to the entrepreneurial spirit of ordinary people making their way through the changed universe of post-Mao China? Or an ominous warning about the relationships between human and machine? His machines are not shiny high-tech objects, however, but imperfect, slightly flabby, soft and squishy, much like humans themselves.

Wang Luyan, ‘Breathe Series - ATM’ 2011, silicone, steel and motor, image courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney

Taiwanese artists in this show include the tech-savvy members of the Luxury Logico collective, whose installation ‘Solar,’ created from old lamps, evokes a mood at once nostalgic and futuristic, reminding me irresistibly of ET phoning home. Tu Wei-Cheng’s ‘Bu Num Civilisation Revealed’ simulates the archaeological discovery of an ancient civilisation, a ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ style temple and its artefacts, whose elaborate ‘stone’ wall carvings turn out on closer inspection to be computer keyboards, iPhones and brand logos.

Wang Duo’s “Old Brands Made New’ features the artist as a 1930’s Shanghai seductress in ‘posters’ which initially appear to be traditional advertisements. Then we realise that the featured cigarettes are Marlboro, the beauty products are Chanel, and the handbags are Prada and Louis Vuitton. The advertisements themselves are video installations which make us question how we interpret what we see. Shanghai’s short lived early 20^th century modernity and sophistication are evoked in a way which queries the fate of today’s modernity, our reliance on technology and the obsessive quest after wealth and conspicuous consumption.

Wang Duo, ‘Old Brands Made New’ No 7, 2011, video installation, image courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney

Fung Ming Chip reinvents traditions of calligraphy and ink-painting. His sand script is written with a brush dipped in water, and then filled with gusts of dried, powdered ink which adheres to some of the still-wet strokes of his brush. Like Xu Bing, he is interested in the connections between calligraphy, language and meaning, and like Xu Bing he challenges our assumptions about what we are seeing and ‘reading’. ‘Departure’ is a meditation on air travel, and references sacred sutra scrolls as well as the traditions of the literati. It reads ’36,000 feet up and 763 kilometres per hour’ – a ‘floating world’ indeed.

Down the Rabbit Hole presents a world much like Alice’s, where appearances can be deceiving and meaning is subject to change.

David Shrigley, Untitled, 2011. Courtesy of David Shrigley and Yvon Lambert. Untitled, 2011 Courtesy of David Shrigley and Yvon Lambert

When I first saw David Shrigley, I was taken aback by his calm aura and semblance of complete normalcy. A man known for his searing dead-pan humour, I half-expected to see a crazed post-punk artist living on the fringes of society. But here was a charming, clean-cut gentleman, tranquilly tattooing ink drawings onto willing participants in the middle of London’s most extravagant art fair.

Calm, cool and collected on the outside, seethingly acidic on the inside, Shrigley’s solo show at the Hayward Gallery, London, mirrors the state of the artist himself. Moving way beyond the drawings for which the artist is best known, Brain Activity includes Shrigley’s paintings, sculpture, installation, animation and photography – cracking open the artists’ cranium for us just a little bit.

I admire the brutal honestly in Shrigley’s work – he tells it exactly as it is, injecting humour and wit into the everyday with his veracious observations. His work is highly accessible – witnessed by the large number of children running around the exhibition – but never simply topical. Both referential and moralistic, Shrigley’s work extends far beyond the realm of cartoons, and is beginning to become an institutional staple.

Installation view of David Shrigley: Brain Activity at the Hayward Gallery, London. Photograph by Linda Nylind.

My personal favorite of the exhibition, the animation New Friends, jubilantly tells a story of conformity – what happens when a highly militaristic ‘square head’ falls down a rabbit hole to join the dance funk tunes of the ‘round heads’. As we learn, there is a price to be paid to have a bit of fun, and it might be part of your head.

The simple and satirical video, Lightswitch, pays homage to another British artist, Martin Creed, whose Work No. 227: the lights going on and off, won him the Turner Prize in 2001. While Creed’s work, in which the lights in the gallery simply turned on and off every five seconds, is austerically minimal, Shrigley’s is maniacally hilarious, as a long awkward finger has its fun playing games with a light switch. Hours of entertainment derived from the simplest of things.

Shrigley’s earliest works, photographs which document his fleeting urban interventions, have the same witticism embedded within them – a sign in the middle of the flowing water labelled ‘river for sale’, a tiny box reading ‘leisure centre’ in an empty site, and a posted notice seeking a lost mangy pigeon.

David Shrigley, Lost, 1996 Image © the artist and courtesy of the artist David Shrigley Lost, 1996, photograph. Image © the artist and courtesy of the artist .

In the room dedicated to the recurrent theme of ‘Death’, a taxidermied Jack Russell terrier holds a sign proclaiming his current state of existence – both a dryly accurate observation and a modern day pop vanitas, reminding us that we will all be dead one day.

Installation view of David Shrigley: Brain Activity at the Hayward Gallery, London. Photograph by Linda Nylind.

Here, and throughout all of his work, Shrigley’s observations about the human condition are spot on. I quite like the journey inside Shrigley’s brain and am happy to spend a bit of time there – there is something about his scathing honesty and dark humour that is refreshing, and simply feels good for the soul.

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #14 (from the Ill Form and Void Full series), 2010-2011. Courtesy of the artist; Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago; and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.

Laura Letinsky is a master at having it both ways. She photographs messes that are exquisitely tidy. She uses white like a color. She presents endings in a moment when they are still new, still vibrating with just spent energy. She captures objects as images and images as objects. She makes decay look gorgeous.

Letinsky is known for her artfully arranged still life photographs of empty ice cream bowls, half-eaten and over-ripened cantaloupes, and slumping party balloons. Over the last decade, she has chronicled the moments after the party, after the sumptuous meal, after all the ice has melted and all the guests have gone home. With the eye of a commercial art director, her photographs are as fastidiously orchestrated as those you might find in a Martha Stewart catalogue. Similar, that is, if the Grande Dame of country house finery employed petit bourgeois entertaining as a metaphor for loss, mortality, and the tragic promise of unattainable perfection, as Letinsky does.

At Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Laura Letinsky’s self-titled exhibition “Laura Letinsky” consists of large-scale still life photographs from her series Ill Form and Void Full and expands upon her exploration of earlier themes by incorporating collage elements into her tableaus. Decaying food items, wilting flowers, and dirty silverware are arranged next to magazine images of fresh fruit and sparkling serving dishes in order to create a poetic effect that complicates viewers’ perception of what is on display.

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #3 (from the series Ill Form and Void Full), 2010. Courtesy of the artist; Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago; and Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Within the reality of these photographs there is the constant question of which elements are authentic and which elements are mediated; what is an actual object and what is actually an image of an object? A lime rind twisting through Untitled #3 (2010) appears to be a paper cut out. But it also casts a shadow. The paper is an object in space with an image printed on it. The lime rind – as well as the ripe cantaloupe and candy dish also featured in the piece – is an idealized depiction of an every day object. It’s also an idea pertaining to decoration, one that casts a shadow on our desires as consumers and on our notions of what to strive for as members of an image conscious society, but only exists in print.

These collage elements cover just a fraction of Letinksy’s pictures. Layers of white surfaces take up most of the space within the photographs. Untitled #14 (2010-2011) uses a white platform on a white floor next to a white wall partially covered by a white piece of paper that serves more as a collage element than a backdrop. Letinsky pushes this study of white to almost dizzying effect in Untitled #34 (2011) by including a clear plastic bag, flower pedals, an over grown white onion, and a white piece of paper featuring a roughly cut silhouette of a flower and vase. The subtle interplay between these surfaces, images, and objects creates a delicate range of white, off-white, and gray gradations that reminds us that in life there is no pure value of white. It’s another unobtainable ideal.

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #34 (from the Ill Form and Void Full series), 2011. Courtesy of the artist; Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago; and Yancey Richardson Gallery.

The nuance within the white echoes the constructed quality of the collages and also adds to the overall sense of delicacy to the compositions, which is emphasized in myriad different ways throughout the show. The paper elements have a tangible quality of thinness to them. Food items often look precariously near or beyond their shelf lives as the shriveling grapes do in Untitled #14 (2010-2011). Collage items in Untitled #19 (2011) teeter dangerously near the edge of a sloped platform. Even the natural light quality used throughout the photographs seems to suggest that, were the picture taken a moment later, the fineness of the end result may have been lost.

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #19 (from the Ill Form and Void Full series), 2011. Courtesy of the artist; Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago; and Yancey Richardson Gallery.

This sense of fragility is nothing new to Letinsky’s work. The artist’s still life photos made prior to the inclusion of the collage elements contained this characteristic, but because she was photographing objects and not other images, there was a greater sense of urgency to the pictures. In her series Hardly More Than Ever, for example, Letinsky presented the after products – wilted flowers, segmented fruit, and dirty bowls – only moments after they had out lived their usefulness. The objects in these images were tenuously situated in a transitional process, carrying with them the remnants of their beginnings and forecasting their completed decay while encapsulating a total event or a full lifecycle in a single photographic instant. This work spoke to the rich temporal possibilities of photography.

In the new series, she is still playing with this notion of temporality by carefully selecting images and objects that convey a sense of potential and decay. But in photographing images – moments already frozen in time – the urgent materiality of the subject matter is replaced by conceptual distance. Loss, mortality, flux, unreachable ideals; these themes are still present, but at a slight remove that lends an academic quality to the show.

Letinsky is clearly pushing the boundaries of still life, as well as her own process of art making. And while I appreciate the materiality and dynamism of the artist’s earlier work more than the conceptual gamesmanship of what is on display at the M.C.A., the show is incredibly rich. It’s always exciting to see a gifted artist work through new questions, and arriving at such pleasing results.

Laura Letinsky will be on view at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through April 17, 2012.

Steve Lambert, Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011. Aluminum and electronics. 9 x 20 x 7 feet. (Electronics by Alexander Reben) courtesy of the artist and SPACES, Cleveland, OH

In terms of quality, the show runs the range: from phoned-in works that are indistinguishable from the artist’s earlier works to delightfully new works that show expanded range.

The show opens with Steve Lambert‘s Capitalism Works for Me! True/False a giant sign that tallies the audience’s answers to the title. I thought I knew what this politically loaded word meant, but Lambert made me reconsider that. Which capitalism? Am I being asked about the late stages of capitalism (making lots of money without any hindrance from regulations, too big to fail, global motion of capital, etc) or the older, more basic form where private ownership of the means of production is distinguished from state ownership? I have a love/hate relationship with the globalism version. Every artist (or writer for that matter) bases their self-employment on the latter definition. If I say False, I deny my and Lambert’s self-employment, but if I say True, do I align myself with the 1%? The more I considered Lambert’s question, the more I wanted to answer him both ways. I feel like a weasel that can’t commit to one of today’s central wedge issues.

Close reading of Ann Pibal‘s paintings will be rewarded. They are broken linear depictions of space that include balanced formal relationships that mask what feel like unbalanced emotional events. These lines replace what feel like haptic, concrete locations with painted incomplete drawings. This lack of closure forces you to see the relationships in the paintings for what they are. The viewer is asked to reassemble the discontinuities as they see them. What makes these powerful, are not the techniques used (like all abstract art, someone will dismiss it as “my kid can do that” art) but the logic behind why she does what she does. Space turns, curves, and slips along sequential fault lines. What at first appears to be linear regularity is denied the more you consider the relationships hidden in these paintings.

Chris Taylor, Untitled, 2004-2010. Glass, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Chris Taylor‘s glass works are smart, formal proxies that deny their own optics. He explores many angles of craft in his work. His stand-outs are concealed blown glass, simulating something you can get for free at a gas station: styrofoam cups. Taylor does not just reproduce commodity objects though, there are also replicas of famous luxury crafted objects that Taylor used to fool the original makers into refunding his purchase price, claiming his errors were their own. Their substitute status, like Allen MCollum’s surrogates or Jasper John’s sculptures from 1960, are more than just formal tricks and are not just sculptural trompe l’oeil. They are also a witty mocking of tradition that rouses the work into a living relationship with our surrounding culture. Can factory made luxury goods be deluxe if the factory that made them can’t verify that the objects are their own work? You should also not miss his video, Small Craft Advisory, which is hanging in the staircase behind his work.

Installation shot of Mary Lum's work. Photography by Clements Photography & Design, Boston, MA

Mary Lum‘s hybrid photograph-wall-paintings of odd spaces compelled me to spend a lot of time with them. The gestural perspectives of her work are altered, reality becomes unbound, when these works are shown so close to each other. Her close observations of both empty space and objects are absorbing. The masterful flattening and distortions found in her work makes an effortless documentary photo of a street into an inventive composition. A photo of something real is affected by the impossible drawing next to it, while the drawing seems more real with the fake-looking real-thing in tight progression. Each work infects the others and the presentation makes them come alive as an interrelated subject that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Matthew Gamber, Munsell Color Tree (from the series Any Color You Like), 2010. Digital gelatin silver print. 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA.

Matthew Gamber‘s photographs are nerdy, historically and formally. They rely on such a simple conceit: removing color from objects that are defined by their colors. The things in his images need color, relying on it for their function. Making a color wheel monochrome still leaves it looking interesting enough, but a monochrome color blindness test is effectively useless as the data that makes this arrangement of dots into a test is undone, leaving the answer available to the color blind. This project summons a thread of early humanism described in great detail by Simon Schaffer in the BBC documentary Light Fantastic. Light and color are bigger than their physical truths, they affect and define the world we think we know. When photography expands upon the limits of our perceptive abilities, we get in touch with a foundational fear for humanity: that our mastery of knowledge is limited and that what we think is expertise is really just juvenile hubris.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises evoking a multitude of emotions over engaging the intellect. A large, white spherical entity around which alchemic instruments are scattered sits on a pile of sand; music seems to leak out from all sides of the wall, surrounded by glass-protected ancient Icelandic calfskin parchments that record supernatural accounts of a medieval Scandinavian world inhabited by witches, trolls and dragons. The installation is populated with elemental components of the earth such as dust, dough, fire, blood, burlap and fur, but also overlaid with textures that are fur- or hair-roughened. An accompanying video bolsters the already-surreal installation as a narrator weaves a showy mythological universe with his droning words: a man guts slimy fish, a figure lithely unfolds itself out of clay “legs” and “helmet”, a figure wrapped in tattered cloths hikes laboriously across a sandy wasteland with another strapped to his back towards the self-same spherical entity.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Crepusculum’s allusive and mystical atmosphere appears to be as much a personal aesthetic journey as it is a collective memory of Iceland’s histories. Materially, the exhibition is about Friðriksdóttir’s continued creative experimentation with diverse materials and media that has been in part influenced by the breadth of Swiss/German Dieter Roth’s artistic processes and vocabulary. Friðriksdóttir’s starting point for Crepusculum is rooted in her own dreams – intangible tendrils of thoughts that bleed into each other are first allowed to drift unassisted into esoteric realms and subsequently thematically developed through a combination of simple sketches, sculpture and film. The overall effect is an imagistic universe comprising a choir of overlapping voices, an aggregate of signs and diverse earthy components, but it is hard to see beyond Crepusculum as an oracular endeavour to present nebulous connections to sexual psychology and pop culture while casting light on deconstructing traditional patterns of narratives located within Norse mythology .

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

But Crepusculum is also Friðriksdóttir’s personal re-imagination of a time in Iceland when folklore, gods and magic were fundamental tenets of existence, and where elaborate stories of creation were punctuated by moments of horror, melancholy and unquestioning didacticism. Augmenting her exhibition are twelfth century manuscripts and almanacs loaned from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík for the first time; such is the reinforcement of the historical investment in Iceland’s national cultural heritage and the revelation of the intense grip that these traditions and mythology still have on twenty-first century Icelandic culture. Perhaps then, for Friðriksdóttir, this is simultaneously a profound ambassadorial undertaking on behalf of the Icelandic people, a cultural burden so complex that it could only be presented in ambivalent spaces as metaphysical considerations.

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Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum will be on show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt until January 8, 2012.

Fire has always mesmerized me; as a child, I was frequently chastised for playing with matches and open flames. Until last winter, when I came upon a burning apartment building, my experience was limited to these tame interactions. Within moments, the flames engulfed the structure, sending giant plumes of orange and yellow and black smoke into the night sky. The scene led me to pause with a combination of horror and awe.

Over the past two years Lee Yujin has produced sumptuous drawings that examine the tension between the beauty and violence of smoke. In Cloud Series – the first body of work to investigate this subject matter – she isolates found images of bombs and explosions, divorcing these potent indicators of turmoil and violence from their original contexts. While these works in pencil present smoke as a static phenomenon, the dynamism of Lee’s meticulous mark-making breathes energy into these forms.

Lee Yujin. “Volcano Eruption 2." Pencil on Paper. 110 x 218 cm. 2010. Courtesy of the Artist.

Lee Yujin. Detail from “Volcano Eruption 2." Pencil on Paper. 110 x 218 cm. 2010. Courtesy of the Artist.

When viewed from the perspective of form and shape, these drawings reveal themselves as arresting abstractions. I was immediately reminded of Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents, a series of small-scale, black and white photographs of cloud-filled skies. Stieglitz viewed these photographs as “vision[s] of life,” a visual “equivalent” for human experience. Lee views smoke in much the same way. She explains, “there is something beautiful about smoke because it is something we cannot take control over. It is intangible and ephemeral. Its shape is unexpected and transformable. In this sense, ‘smoke clouds’ can be an allegory for life…”

Lee Yujin. "I am a Telescopic Viewer, You are a Telescopic Viewer, We are Telescopic Viewers (Telescope Series)." A series of 100 drawings; each drawing with frame 43 x 43 cm. Charcoal and conte on paper. 2011. Courtesy of the Artist.

While these pencil drawings are particularly notable for their incredible precision, her most recent series, I am a Telescopic Viewer, You are a Telescopic Viewer, We are Telescopic Viewers, approaches the subject with a more fluid gesture, using charcoal and conte to produce drawings that introduce color. The quietude of her earlier drawings is in stark contrast to these new works which, when exhibited en masse, allude far more evidently to the violence underlying these images.

Lee was included in several solo and group exhibitions in Berlin in 2011, including “One Night Stand” at Kims Bar, “Benumbed” at Takt Kunstprojektraum, and “We Can Start a Process” at Kreuzberg Pavilion. You can stay apprised of her upcoming projects through her website.

Monika Fryčová, Perpetuum Mobile, 2011. Image: Kling og Bang gallery.

Monika Fryčová’s show Perpetuum Mobile at the Kling og Bang Gallery propositions that the relationship between the visible and invisible is constantly in motion and ephemeral.

Locked behind the socialist borders in then-Czechoslovakia, stories of local culture were the only narratives that Fryčová heard. Like many artists who were restless for new physical activity and renewed visions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Fryčová became in her own words, a traveller who charted her own routes and made her own narratives without maps or guides. Consequentially, Fryčová’s works are highly improvised, and dependent on the indeterminacy and spontaneity of human interactions.

Monika Fryčová, Monika & Trabi in train station, Prostejov, 2005. Image: Monikafryčová.net

A red automobile-turned-limousine was an early, physical manifestation of Fryčová’s desire for mobility, which she drove to school in 2005 and finally made it to Berlin some years later where she was arrested by the traffic police for the car’s non-regulated standards. Intended as “moving sculpture” and created for the purpose of performance, the red Trabi is Fryčová’s assertion of artistic and political freedom beyond the spectre of the Iron Curtain, but also the artistic vindication of the dynamic flux and non-linear processes that characterise aspects of human nature.

Monika Fryčová, Open Springs no. 2, 2009, ongoing project. Image: Monikafryčová.net

Having investigated the artistic gestures that were given freer reign after a period of enforced socio-political isolation, her research now speculates upon the less charted regions of human existence: principles of chaos, intuition, perceptions and mythology. At the Kling og Bang Gallery, Fryčová’s framed photographs of herself shot in various positions and in diverse locations are perched on a peculiar machine acting like a turnstile that expends energy into rotating endlessly. Perpetually in motion, her static photographs disallow the viewer any prolonged contemplation; instead, we are forced into forming fleeting impressions of ambivalent spaces where specifics are really inconsequential. As long as Fryčová’s works situated themselves in that strange gap between motion and stillness – with a distorted sense of space and time embedded within -,  any attempt at linearity or continuity can only remain illusory.

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Monika Fryčová was born in Prostejov, Czech Republic. She lives and works in both the Czech Republic and Iceland. Perpetuum Mobile runs until 18th December at the Kling og Bang Gallery in Reykjavik.

I wrote the below in 2008, for a design blog, D/visible, that has since gone into hibernation. But I’ve been thinking about the same ideas this week — essence and monumentality — and wanted to revisit.

William Cordova, "The House that Frank Lloyd Wright built 4 Fred Hampton and Mark Clark," 2006 (installation view)

“It may have escaped your attention,” says Elizabeth Costello, the title character in a 2003 novel by J.M. Coetzee, “but I slipped in, a moment ago, a word that should have made you prick up your ears. I spoke about my essence and being true to my essence.” Costello, an aging writer, has dropped the bait. She has invited the other writers, artists and scholars in the room to squirm and argue, to ask how she even knows she has any “true essence.” If they do ask, however, she won’t be able to answer because she’s not sure she knows who she is.

Artists, architects, writers—people who craft objects and narratives—have spent much of the last forty years questioning what they don’t know. It’s an exhausting, endless cycle. If you don’t know who you are, how can you understand the world around you? If you don’t understand the world, is it irresponsible to fabricate a new object or tell a new story? How will you know that what you’ve made has improved, not tainted, its environment? Pertinent as these questions are, it would be nice if they would stop stymieing artists, keeping them from doing what they want to do, which is make art.

If you can’t go forward, one strategy is to back up and interrogate predecessors who didn’t have the problem you have. Sometimes they have something to offer. Frank Lloyd Wright is one such precursor, someone who thought art, nature, lifestyle and edifice could intermarry. He believed he knew who he was, he believed in essence, and he peppered the landscape with hundreds of large, self-confident structures that didn’t apologize for their essentialism.

Ryan Taber,"Light Screens: breaking and entering ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny; An evolutionary chain locking the windows to Frank Llyod Wrights' home with the Hydrozoan microcosms of Ernst Haeckels' 'Art Forms in Nature': Frederick C. Robie House, 1908-1910, with Discomedusae, Plate 8. Kunstformen der Natur, 1904," 2006, Graphite and Watercolor on Paper

Wright wanted to break architecture down to its archetypal core and begin at the very beginning. For him, finding the beginning didn’t mean being the ultimate visionary. It meant being able to start again and again. It meant devising a foolproof methodology that would allow him to organically harmonize form, function and site each time he designed another structure.

Fallingwater, Wright’s majestic 1935 Pennsylvania house, is a love song to essence. It’s geometric, concrete slabs practically rise out of their stone foundation, like rocks that have suddenly decided to loose their souls by embracing high modernism. Whether the water falling over the cliff at the house’s base flows out of a river or a central font in the living room doesn’t matter—the cliff, the rocks, the water, and the house are all Fallingwater together.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Wright’s grandson and an architect himself, describes the methodology he shares with his grandfather as “architecture which grows naturally and usually from the inside.” Ideally, organic architecture starts from a seed of inspiration and grows outward until it emerges as a structure that validates itself and its surroundings. “It becomes an extension of the environment, although it’s designed by man,” Eric Wright explains. “But, of course, man is of nature. We can’t divorce that.” Maybe that’s what we need: a divorce. Maybe if we ended the marriage and distanced ourselves from our intimate partner we would no longer feel invasive and inferior to waterfalls, peak, and planes. “Whatever we humans do is part of nature,” Wright continues. “The thing you want to be careful about is that it’s not a cancerous growth.”

Elizabeth Costello doesn’t know how to distinguish healthy growths from cancerous ones. Also, once she puts her work out into the world, she doesn’t know how to keep it from becoming cancerous later on. “When the storyteller opens the bottle, the genie is released . . . and it costs all hell to get him back in again,” Costello thinks, “better, on the whole that the genie remain imprisoned.” She no longer trusts her narratives to venture out on their own and so, instead, she makes comparisons, aligns ideas with one another, and tries not to break new ground.

Similitude is a good alternative for someone conflicted about essence. It allows you to traverse history and make connections without saying or doing anything dangerously new. Los Angeles based artist Ryan Taber explored similititude for his 2006 exhibition, “A Rhetoric of Ills,” at Mark Moore Gallery. He worked through a series of 19th and early 20th century references that included Frank Lloyd Wright’s windows. Taber’s Wright rephrasals are delicately transfixing in their own right. Their long, headily verbose titles read like captions in dated textbooks: “Light Screens: breaking and entering ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny,” they begin. The window from Wright’s Frederick C. Robie House warps just slightly in Taber’s precise drawing, weighted down by a lyrical, aqueous jellyfish—a rendering of the Discomedusae that late-Victorian biologist Ernst Haeckel classified—which hangs in the window’s central pane. Some of the panes have cracked and these thin fissures have a subtle poeticism, suggesting that history, like any man-made structure, is ephemeral.

History’s ephemerality elicited Elizabeth Costello’s first literary success. She borrowed from James Joyce’s epic Ulysses, extracting a female perspective from the gender-obsessed narrative. It was an intricate exercise in similitude, but it didn’t make any difference. She still let the genie out of the bottle, giving her readers a narrative hook that told them, somewhat didactically, how to reinterpret literary history. In retrospect, this sort of narrative ploy makes her uneasy and she spends the duration of Coetzee’s novel grappling with her ambivalence.

Taber is retrospectively uneasy about his narratives too. His Frank Lloyd Wright windows may not have been didactic—at least, not exactly—but they framed history a little too nicely, giving viewers a prepackaged glimpse of how nature, modernist structure, and contemporary art can interact. What he and the fictional Costello both want to do is leave all the doors open, to keep their own conflicted positions as artists from defining the way viewers or readers see their work. Maybe similitude doesn’t keep the genie in check after all. Maybe how you make art matters more than what you make.

“In working with the environment we are protecting it; we’re reinforcing it. And we have to do that in order to survive as human beings,” says Eric Lloyd Wright. It’s the sort of statement that makes artists like Taber and Costello twitch. Certainly, the fireproof, concrete masterpiece that Wright is building in the Santa Monica mountains will benefit him, giving him a safe, impenetrable homestead, but what good will it ultimately do the environment?

Concrete house or not, Eric Lloyd Wright has developed a methodology, a way of working, that he can stand by. “I feel that everything is important in your way of life,” he says. “When you talk about organic architecture, you try to work in an organic environment as well as live in it.”

Ryan Taber, "Pompey's Folly," 2008, Concrete, construction debris, steel and urethane, 14 x 7 x 12 feet

By the end of Coetzee’s novel, Costello, despite her extreme dislike of words like “essence” and “belief,” realizes that her stories are her beliefs and that she has lived by moving through them, letting one story transition into another and then into another. An organic methodology of story connecting has defined her career and her life.

“Making decisions about making work is like making decisions about eating and sleeping,” says Taber, who has become principally interested in the way his methodology as an artist relates to the way he lives. Lately, he’s been exploring the materiality of rock, a massive resource he describes as “a cold, inorganic giant object.” Photographing geological nuances, he is building a growing archive of images. He hasn’t obliterated the narrative hook, but his current narrative does not purport to be anything other than a record of one artist’s thought process.

Figuring out how to put objects and stories out into the world without imposing yourself on your audience is a perpetual problem artists will indefinitely grapple with. But having a methodology, like a having a diet and a bedtime, allows you to keep making work as you keep living, in spite of the unanswered questions. It’s an old trick, using method to combat uncertainty—in fact, it’s probably what led Frank Lloyd Wright to organic architecture. Still, it’s the most stalwart, honest failsafe, and it doesn’t stifle the questioning; it just keeps the work coming.

In 2004, indigenous Australian Cameron Doomadgee was brutally murdered at the hands of a white officer while in police custody, sparking riots on Palm Island in North Queensland. Doomadgee was first arrested for public drunkenness and reported dead an hour later, having suffered from four broken ribs which had ruptured his liver and spleen. His death was recorded as “an accidental fall” in the coroner’s report and all charges on the officer were later dropped in 2007.

“Tall Man”, Four-channel video installation, 2010. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

In his four-channel video installation, Tall Man (a reference to Aboriginal Shire Councillor Lex Wotton’s commitment to the rights of Palm Islanders), Ah Kee appropriates footages from mobile phones and camcorders, edited together with archival news footages to reconstruct the unfolding of events – footages that were ironically used in court as evidence to convict Wotton of inciting the Palm Island riot. But in the hands of Ah Kee, they tell a different story of the injustices faced by the Aboriginal community in Australia. In contrast to the video installation where Wotton is seen enraged and devastated in public, Ah Kee depicts Wotton with subtle and gentle lines – a non-threatening, calm and warm-hearted figure.

"Tall Man”, Charcoal, crayon and acrylic on linen, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

The final component of the exhibition is a large text-based work that fills the entire front display windows of Gertrude Contemporary. Appropriated from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and reproduced as a run-on sentence, Ah Kee situates the relevance of the seventeenth-century allegory of man’s endless cruelty to man in the brutality faced by Aboriginal people on Australian soil.

“Fill Me”, Vinyl lettering, 2009. Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

As a whole, the exhibition exposes the superficial attitudes toward multiculturalism and the constructed representations of Australian history. If it is commonly accepted that history has only ever been written by the victors, why have we still stuck to this story? How is the Aboriginal community to exercise their freewill when they are ceaselessly prevented from demonstrating such rights? Just when it seems that Australia has been making some progress, this illusion is shattered once again with the recent major policy shift by the Baillieu government to dump the compulsory protocol of acknowledging the traditional Aboriginal landowners for being too politically correct. The resurfacing narrative of the Palm Island riot is an important reminder of the continuing lack of respect of indigenous culture.

Matthew Woodward. "Western Avenue," 2011. Graphite on paper. 80 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

“Architecture in the United States” was one of the most memorable courses I took as an undergraduate. It was not only because I adored the professor and his incredible passion for the subject; it fundamentally changed the way I interact with and respond to the urban landscape. While I can no longer recite the date Mies van der Rohe designed the Seagram Building or the ways John Ruskin left his mark on American architecture, I do find myself inclined to inspect the intricacies of my environment, caught adrift as people dash by without a glance.

It is clear that Matthew Woodward is similarly taken with the intricacies of structure and place. In his most recent body of work, he creates alluring large-scale drawings of architectural ornaments he has spotted wandering through various cities, isolating them from the buildings they previously punctuated.

Matthew Woodward. "Milwaukee Avenue II Series," 2011. Graphite and adhesive on paper. 25 x 9 feet. Courtesy of the Artist.

Woodward describes his process as a variation on classical reductive drawing. In essence, he covers the paper’s surface with graphite powder and then produces the desired imagery – a precise and unedited representation resulting from innumerable photographs and careful measurement – through meticulous erasure. His articulation of this approach sounds sculptural, mimicking the fabrication of the adornments he represents. Woodward explains, “most of the time what will happen is that the graphite will get in [the paper] and it doesn’t want to come off again. I have to tear it and sand it and rip the paper in order to carve it back out.” As the paper faithfully records every action taken, documenting every deconstruction and reconstruction of the surface, it evokes both the three-dimensional qualities of its referent object and traces its own history as a two-dimensional representation.

By isolating these architectural embellishments from their previous context – and presenting them in a size that physically confronts the body – Woodward forces the viewer to call upon on his or her own associations with these forms. These seemingly hollow ciphers elicit distinctly different responses depending on one’s relationship to place, space and time.  Looking at these drawings, I am overcome by reverence, nostalgia and loss. I view these objects as emblems of an era and sensibility long past, as tangible evidence of obsolescence. Through its ability to conjure such emotions and considerations, the work transcends representation alone, engaging perennial issues such as the role of memory, history and place in shaping experience.

Matthew Woodward. "Medill Street," 2011. Graphite and adhesive on paper. 66 x 88 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

Woodward’s drawings are currently featured in two exhibitions. ”Matt Woodward: The Tremendous Alone” is on view now at the Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmherst, Illinois through December 30th. His work is also included in the group exhibition “Ways of Making: Work on Paper” at Governors State University’s Visual Arts Gallery in University Park, Illinois through November 11th.

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