brick+balloon

Surface Reading: Anthony Baab’s Yule Log

The “Yule Log” show reminds me of Mike Kelley’s struggle against the Hans Hoffman school of composition. Kelley has mentioned this a number of times in interviews. Baab’s response is different certainly from Kelley’s, but the problem of composition, the old in-and-out of push/pull, seems to be operative in the work.

What to do with this issue of abstraction? Abstraction as the arrangement of an ensemble of “non-representational” elements on a ground seems to invite the inevitable stamping of convention at the very moment it proclaims it’s freedom from the tyranny of the mimetic. Given nothing to latch onto outside of the immanence of the thing bounded by its frame, the signature steps in to sign.

This is the egoism of Abstract Expressionism!

Signed,

The Management

Baab’s field to act upon is not the existential crisis-producing BLANK PAGE!, but some rather banal photographs blown up into art photography, big enough to be important, to be seen by a couple people at once, on a wall instead of in a book. So the ground is literally already well trodden, covered over in fact with the index-nature of photography. Onto this, the taped structures that refer me to the geometric hard edges often covering the album covers of metal bands that also use electronics, which have their roots in Bucky Fuller and the science textbooks of their youths. But these patterns don’t mimic the bombast of album covers nor the studied functionalism of Fuller. They adhere to the picture plane of the photograph, providing an alternate structure to the indexical image; that “distribution of the sensible” that leads us into the surface.

The facture of the tape on the surface of the photos—those moments when, close up, we can see the hand of the artist at work—is both a lattice breaking up the image into manageable parts and a bar separating us from entry into the image. Like Allen, I was thinking of the Sublime. There is a formal tension here created by the linear divisions and the  photographic image. So, as one tradition has it, the Sublime is that encounter with the formless Thing whose indivisible wholeness threatens to annihilate the subject. The taming of this Thing (this is the job of science, but also of literary analysis; in fact, of everything), its breaking up into intelligible parts, is precisely what forecloses our experience of the Sublime. One cannot express the sublimity of The Odyssey in a quote, or a study, but would have to reproduce it in its entirety. This is the strange impasse in the photos, I think. The photograph of the Sublime is already a fragmenting of an entirety lost. This is why sunsets make the most boring pictures.

The lacework over the surface is a belaboring of the banal point of the image. This is why I think the fireplace radically differs from all the others. The fireplace is a poor substitute for a forest fire or the Sun. It lulls us into a trance, an affective state much different from counting clouds or marveling at the alien intricacies of plant life. The Sublime, or in this case the theta-state inducing fire, is not merely receiving a coating, but is actually being pulled through the mud. It’s surface scored, even “scorched” by the black marker. This is the closest thing in the show to getting at what the sublime is: the pit.

J.E-M.

Is it somehow the position of the door in relation to the gallery? Nathan’s and Jess’ shows both have a kind of symmetry in the way they confront the viewer. At the door. Nathan’s closed door policy—one in which immanent surprise is put in the service of creating of a space and time differentiated from that which lies outside—has its counterpart in Jess’s inviting parlor game.

I would call it sunny, and not just because of the natural light streaming through the windows. At the opening, “the chairs are so comfortable!” said more than one, including myself; the table so nicely inlaid with the names of the inmates; the clear glass so eminently cleansable; the carpet softening the gallery into a room. Here, all of the amenities barred from the subject of the display (the prisoners) provide false consolation. The gallery is the reading room for a series of stories told at quite a distance from the experience of the reader. Apparently no attempt was made to meld the antinomy of viewer and prisoner into a synthesized whole. I’m reminded of a quote Brecht cites from Horace’s Ars Poetica:

You must enchant and conquer the reader’s breast. One laughs with those who laugh and lets tears flow when others are sad. So, if you want me to weep, first show me your own eye full of tears.

The old model of theater (still alive and well today since Brecht wasn’t able to abolish it, nor Godard Spielberg for that matter) was to endow social relations with a heightened affect through presentation, in effect absolving us of experiencing or demanding such sensations from life. Brecht’s theater does just the opposite, using the first condition (theater’s powers of suggestion and entertainment) as his primary tool to “free socially conditioned phenomena from the stamp of familiarity.”

Here I think of the inscriptions of signatures, burned into the wood, inlaid into the table, two forms of inscription; a third on the wall, a kind of graffiti of names. They too appear burned though on closer inspection reveal themselves to be black ink.

So, we comfortably play the parlor game, matching names with letters on the desk which has something of the incarcereal about it, though not too much. Just enough to prick at our too comfortable, too idle, review of the texts. This moment of reflection proves to be the critical one, not of the prison system, but of our comfortably concerned relation to it.

This for Nathan

“Finally, we arrive at the present state of things: the possibility now arrises that art will no longer find time to adapt somehow to technological processes, the advertisement is the ruse by which the dream forces itself on history.” —Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, Convolute G, “the tempo of art”

also, I found this thought in my notes from Stephanie’s class and thought it uncannily applicable to Nathan’s Intermission.

I was thinking about how the term Gesamtkunstwerk (“total” or “integrated” artwork) appeared repeatedly in an affirmative light in the earliest and even more recent texts on “new media.”

With any new technological form, “a peculiar demand for premature synthesis.” (Benjamin) The suspension of this synthesis as an amalgam of dissonant parts is anathema to the law of planned obsolescence and it’s twin, the myths of novelty and progress.

response to Allen’s question

Inevitably. It’s unanimous that it should be removed for shows, but I didn’t want to ask them to take it down. It is brighter in the shadow of the wall. That said, I think it’s just another part of the space, like a light socket or a door knob. Why bother.