Body Objects tend to be laboriously made things that register a separateness from their makers. They are witty, chilly, lecherous, warm, inviting, grotesque, and distant. The contrary values they present neutralize each other, clearing space for an emergent autonomy–they haven’t yet decided what they are. Click here for the full text, created for “Body Object” at Room57 Gallery in spring of 2024. Curated by myself.
[…] “Some of the most famous of Cragg’s head sculptures spiral upwards like expressionist pillars, their facial features resolving and then blurring into abstraction. In interpreting these works, one could begin thinking about the disorienting flexibility of identity – “Man is broad, too broad indeed. I would have him narrower,” Dostoyevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov (1880) – and how our selves get warped over time, so that no single self can be claimed durationally. But this seems a reach: the work is visual, spatial, and exciting to move around; just what is being stretched hardly seems important.” CLICK HERE for the full article (Issue #74, 2023)
[…] “In 2021, congress held hearings. Rep. Jim Jordan (R), a staunch NRA ally, expressed his outrage at length. To support his point, he read the second part of the second amendment: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” and left out the first part which assigns that right to “a well regulated militia.” During sessions in which bereaved families pleaded for action, he left the room. Kristin Song remained. She sat quietly in the front row beside a photo of her son Ethan, who accidentally killed himself with an unsecured gun at age fifteen. While Rep. Jordan absented himself, Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was one of the fourteen children murdered at Marjorie Douglas High School, described how his surviving son Jesse, “lives with the permanent scars of having heard his sister get shot.” What’s the interpretation of an amendment worth, if it can be measured in dead children?” CLICK HERE for the full text, from 2023. CLICK HERE for an audio version of the article.
[…] “On the left side of the room, suspended from a gantry, is a plaster sculpture that seems to be either explosively ascending or meteorically diminishing in descent. A protoplasmic flux of bone-white force and movement congeals into a terminus where two feet are flexed, the toes just touching the ground. Read bottom up, the form becomes a volcanic plume of potentiality, a quantum wave bursting out from specificity.” CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2022.
[…] “Stacked lamination, McCafferty’s method of choice, has a venerable place in the history of American Studio Furniture. It was the signature of one the movement’s earliest leaders, Wharton Esherick, and also the favored technique of its second-generation hero, Wendell Castle. The challenge for woodworkers has always been overcoming the tendency of wood to warp. Warp causes cracking, buckling, and delaminating; it prevents the easy co-relation of wood to other materials such as stone, glass, and metal; and generally, it causes woodworkers to lose sleep and hair. The world, as we come to it, is rarely flat, straight, or smooth. So, for many craft disciplines, polished linearity has long been a default signal of mastery.
All this served to make the American Studio Movement, which began around the time of the second world war, especially exciting as an alternative to the elegant but orthographic constructions of modernism. Castle and company created an upwelling of generously proportioned forms with sweeping contours, polished smoothness, and few formal precedents besides Antoni Gaudi. To the toolset of the traditional joiner these artisans added that least precise tool, the chainsaw. Stacked lamination provided them the monolithic masses to plunge their blades into and gave wood a dynamic non-directional depth more commonly associated with marble. From their studios, polished, smooth forms flowed out— forms which the American public could appreciate for signaling mastery despite the daring newness of the morphology.”
[…] “One can almost feel the throb of gallerist Marc Benda’s headache reading the press release, which arduously explains that this is a “unique moment” in which the gallery is presenting a duo, post-break up, both together and apart.” From 2022.
[…] “This is not so much coded art as it is art as code—ciphers that succeed in proportion to their inscrutability. The more mysterious, the less legible their referents, the more they resonate with unnerving eeriness.” CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2022.
[…] “To better define Ionescu’s work, I find myself searching for a neologism, like Robert Morris’s “object-type sculptures.” Conveniently the artist has coined one: “roomscrapers,” which captures at least three signature characteristics—scalelessness, hybridity, and humor. Just as Ionescu builds in the mud where the holy water of art meets the pedestrian land of everything else, he also displays a fluency with scale which is so effortless it undoes the sense of meaningful difference.” CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2022.
[…] “Behind any given city wall is a gnashing knot of intestinal pipes, fetid growths, and mutant poison-resistant insects. Vents, grilles, tubs, taps, and sockets open portals to a hidden substructure of polychrome mucus pulsing through arterial networks hundreds of metres overhead and in giant subterranean throughways below. A matrix of urine and gore: that’s what the urban shell conceals and that’s what Hsu’s art is bent on uncovering, with rigorously smooth intensity.” CLICK HERE for the full article from 2021.
[…] “Off-World is a profusion of hombres, rich metallic glosses, satins, and velvets, all rendered in a dazzling-bright color palette. In Shuddering Cabinet (2022), oriented strand board, a cheap and ubiquitous construction material, makes up the cabinet’s carcass. A network of metallic purple nodules colonizes its outer surface. The piece can be read as a palandrome: an ordinary material in revelatory blossom, or aggressive luxurification infecting something that was familiar and commonplace.” CLICK HERE for the full article.
[…] “Cezanne said that faces should be painted like objects, a quote which Serban Ionescu seems to have read backwards; he has spent the last five years creating objects like faces. Nikola E., Gaetano Pesce, Roberto Matta and company have already beaten a clearing in the colorful territory of absurd representational design. Ionescu has been expanding their encampment with notionally functional sculptures that look a bit like assembly line products of a factory that has been seized by children.” CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2021.
[…] “He incises a pattern in the mound and pours in a silver liquid. Then he briefly disappears. When he reappears, he digs again until a triangular lattice emerges. Three legs taper down from the corners, gleaming dully. Behold Pewter Stool (2006), made in a way that Max Lamb, and nobody but Max Lamb, makes. Why not? It seems to have taken less than an afternoon and required little to no traditional skill. Pewter Stool revises the hackneyed complaint against Modern art: “but I could do that” into a revelatory affirmation: “I could do that!”” CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2021.
[…] “The film finds Piero Gilardi living above a basement infested with his animatronic installation of freakish wonder-plants, ‘Inversomile’. Fast forward four years and the octogenarian Gilardi is now having his first institutional solo show in the United States, at Magazzino. The market may be a gibbering imbecile, but every so often it saves a baby.” CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2022.
[…] “Glass works like two-thousand-degree taffy that loves shattering. Its molten radiance is both awesome to look at and bone-searingly hot to be near. The weight of it, particularly since it must be maneuvered at the end of long metal tubes, adds to the laborious intensity of the craft. It is not surprising that so many glass artisans are victims of the beauty of their material. The pleasures of dissonance and reflexive criticality are rarely to be found in collections of glass art. Even Carlo Scarpa, who was deeply sensitive to an aesthetic of mystery and gravity, made merely lovely shapes when he worked with that lovely material. Wolfe stands apart from his field.” CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2022.
[…] “The presence of choice is constantly highlighted in Trayte’s work. Whereas the form of say, a Henry Moore sculpture might attain cohesion and be approached as a dynamic monolith, Trayte’s work is legibly tweaked, altered, and revised—the disjunctions between each impulse painstakingly detailed. A leg becomes an arm becomes a headrest—and these transitions are performed in public (see bONZA, 2020). Sometimes the ruptures are punctuated by joining screws, bolts, and brackets—sometimes not. The result of making in this way, in which there are no clear principles the artist obeys, is that no form develops the feeling of inevitability that artists of cohesion pursue. Trayte’s works are accretions of decisions and contingencies, just like trees, continually adapting their strategies for growth. […]” From 2021.
CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2021.
[…] “In his capacity as an architect, Vincenzo De Cotiis has specialized in interpretively restoring Roman palazzos. He is known for subtracting, removing modern additions, peeling away surface coverings to reveal the piebald ghosts of frescoes (“Any frescoes were good when they started to peel and flake off,” wrote Hemingway). In his capacity as a furniture designer, his expressively mottled and scarred surfaces are charged with the feeling of relics, things which have survived the cataclysms and damages of history, even if that history extends no further than his production process. […]
By the 1970s, De Cotiis was a college student and Italy’s Memphis movement had begun battering neoclassicism’s reverence for the past with a urethane foam ram. The Memphis movement celebrated veneered laminates and industrial foams for their artificiality; they pilloried the past, recent and distant, with lewd satire and punk-rock attitude. During the same period and across the same peninsular geography Arte Povera, an emphatically non-identical twin movement, gained force. Arte Povera took materiality as it found it – in heaps of rubble and scorched debris, in haunted remnants of a history no longer glorified but instead painfully confronted. Memphis and Arte Povera, through opposite aesthetic impulses, countered the legacy of fascist neoclassicism.” From 2021.
CLICK HERE for the full article, from 2022.