Construct Destruct Construct Destruct

Low on a pedestal sits the burnt and bronze remains of a book. The act of casting, a traditional form of creating meant to stabilize and beautify, is also an act of destruction. The books are erased yet preserved, ash and bronze. Through the charcoal one can still see the remnants of thin paper pages where the heat from the bronze stopped burning. Left to chance the thin layers of bronze made a hard metal ephemeral and highlight the tenderness of the paper. The book is muffled, silenced, but its presence as an object is increased.

The book is a piece by Will ClenDening and is included in Watkins College of Art and Design last fall in 2006. It was a wonderful and grave reminder of why Will ClenDening is missed so deeply by the arts community. The show began along the outskirts of the gallery hall with his early experiments in painting and moved into the more recentconceptual work that included photo documentation of performance and impermanent installations.

The idea that creation is always coupled with destruction first crops up in the early paintings where layer after layer of paint is obsessively poured and smeared across previous layer, the two-face marriage between destruction and creation. From the playing cards, details from a larger piece called “Distillation of Chance”, where will placed a deck of cards under erasure and collected its remains to the sad, funny machines he made. In one a pen records the mindless chatter of an electric fan on an endless supply of ticker tape.

On the back wall of the gallery is a projected video of Will interviewing himself in the vein of a late night television show. In this self-investigation Will constantly questions the validity of his own wholly narcissistic work of art. He creates a space where the ego, fully unrepressed and able to unabashedly reference itself, can give voice to its dreams of grandeur as well as its self-accusations. In ‘I’m masturbating Right Now’ Will sardonically mentions ‘The Death of the Author,’ an essay by Roland Barthes that Will tells himself he needs to be aware of before he can understand his work. The space Will creates is similar to the way Roland Barthes describes the space of the text as an “oblique space,” a place “where all identity is lost (Barthes 142).” Through language a culture asserts itself and displaces the originating self. Personal identity gets subsumed, where the purely narcissistic self gives way to the coding of the ego. At the end of “I’m Masturbating Right Now” Will repeats the phrase “Everybody loves Raymond,” as if his thoughts had been totally subsumed and have given way to the nature of the medium and the culture, stuck like a skipping record or those brief, broadcast glitches when the same commercial will appear back to back.

Through his wonderful banter Will keeps an ironic stance towards himself. He knows his game to be, as he says, both “genius” and “bullshit,” of the most personal nature and the most distance and suprapersonal. Will as interviewer keeps slipping into Will as interviewed; he is his own special guest. In mirroring himself Will deals with his self-estrangement. Isolated on video and mirrored (as when editing and watching the author is again pluralized and mirrored) the self is seen as a other, objectified and projected from the subject. The estrangement is manifold for the author (and then for us) both intrinsic in the making of the piece and in the medium.

There are wonderful moments of speechlessness and hesitation where Will cuts between long open mouthed “ums” from one Will to the other. Here the “I” tries to locate itself as a platform from which it can ask and answer itself, but the “I” is a shifter. Like an empty glass it is up to context and content to give it meaning and definition. Will experiences the same trouble children have with “I” preferring the absolute of a proper noun. When one Will says “I” another Will says “I.” The self shifts and slides from itself. It references itself while locating itself only in its experiences, its memories, never in a proper noun, singular and stabile. The self plurals and falters even in its own conversations, where it is capable of high profundity and low vulgarity. Will captures the way the mind wonders, meanders, refuses to stick to a topic.

At the end of ‘The Death of the Author’ Barthes writes“…[T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author (148 Barthes).” The death of the author opens the text up to a multiplicity of interpretations where meaning is constantly deferred and rediscovered. The reader is empowered, given both the burden and joy of finding meaning.

The ultra coded, clever nature of Will’s work also seeks to undermine the codes, to negate the over intellectualization of the art and of its irony. It tries to wrestle through the textual maze of the culture to
find our guts and our laughter. The videos and the machines are funny, sensually enjoyable as objects and as narrative. This negation is a process of putting the self under erasure, of denying singularity and stability. In the video Will is preserved and pluraled, simultaneously
frozen and yet ambiguously unresolved. He keeps circling around in our heads.

The Nashville critic David Maddex also has a piece about Will on his blog.

Also see some of Will’s work on the Secret Show Series website.

Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

x-tra ordinary

The Frist Center’s exhibition Xtra Ordinary in the Everyday is a good survey of the beginnings of pop art. The title is an ironic take on the artist as visionary, as seeing an unseen dimension in the ordinary. Pop art wanted to break down the distinctions between high and low culture. It wanted to tear down the estrangement integral to art. It repackaged the ordinary.

Warhol has several works in the show. He makes art as banal as possible. He makes the gallery is made into a convenient store. Three of his brillo boxes sit on a shelf. They are painted plywood with silkscreen logos and mimic the real brillo boxes as closely as possible. Warhol regurgitates the ordinary of the ordinary.

Warhol could not ignore the total commodification of all aspects of life.These cultural conditions produced an art of negative, unredeemed mimesis that mirrors the conditions of capitalism on a microcosmic scale in the art world. However, one should not presume that it is time to move beyond the redundancy of the commodification of art. To do so is to risk becoming dead to the deadening process. It needs to be framed in our galleries even if it makes for a seamless integration between our shopping centers and our museums.

The exhibition reflects the total naturalization of the commodity object and the advertised image. The billboard, the slick uninflected image is now the ordinary. It is the “goes without saying” that must be resaid. The conditions that birthed this art are ingrained, and the art is canonized and the coke screen prints made harmless by the ironic gesture of its continual reproduction. The ordinary is the total commodification of the everyday, the absolute alienation of the average Joe from the average object.

The show begs a comparison between Tony Feher’s Suture and Warhol’s Coke a Cola screen print. Suture is a sculpture made of coke shaped plastic bottles whose labels are removed. They hang on a white rope tied two the corners of the gallery wall. The bottles collect together in a bunch where the rope sags with their weight. Some of the bottle tops are red, some white. The bottles have been casually filled about one third full of water dyed red. The bottles each hang from the rope by a loop of wire. The red against the wires and plastic supposedly reminded Feher of the appearance of a sutured wound after a surgery he had and thus the title presented itself. But one has the feeling that the title was an after thought, that the work came out of a process of moving things around, trying to get a clear sculptural statement, without excessive consideration over a meaning. The work never relents to the mimetic intentions of its title; the viewer simply experiences the possibility of a suture as a reference, going through the process of interpretation with the artist.

This is very different from the cool, detachment experienced in the Warhol screen print.The green coke bottle prints are gridded and contained on the canvas. A faint pencil line marks the grid. Warhol stamped the iconic illustration of the coke bottle over green paint. Where the stamp ran out of ink or was only partially inked the stamp leaves an incomplete or faint impression of the bottle, like a hiccup in the mechanistic repition.Warhol’s image expresses the full integration of the artifice of culture in the personal, private sphere.When mimetic art succeeds in branching art and life it fails. Rauschenberg’s “gap” is necessary. When art achieves seamless mimesis it falls into utter banality, invisible in the gallery as it is in life.

Warhol’s paradox is that he claims artistic ownership of an object and image that refuses personal ownership and proliferates anonymity. He reiterates the anonymity of commercial production and of the advertisement.In Feher’s oeuvre the anonymity of the coke bottle has become part of a personal idiom, a part of Feher’s own idiosyncratic language, used with a certain subtle consideration.

Although the same cool detachment remains as an echo in the materials, in Feher it is the “goes without saying”that does not necessarily need to be said. Feher may point in a new direction, back to the artist as the extraordinary individual, as rediscovering the personal and private in the everyday amongst a collage of anonymous consumerism. To see some images from the show click here.