Exhibition Review: Ephraim
Brian Christensen at the CUAC by Geoff Wichert
Some sculptors treat language as just another malleable substance, no different from wax or bronze. BYU Sculpture Professor Brian Christensen has chosen to call the dozen new works on display at the Central Utah Art Center Body and Time. Here “and” stands in for a word we lack: a double-ended preposition, meaning “in” but paradoxically navigable in both directions. Just as his technique is to simultaneously proffer and undermine the identities assumed of each of his materials, so his title means to be “time in the body” and “the body in time,” both sentences to be read simultaneously.
Start again. Brian Christensen, a youthful but no-longer-young sculptor, who lost both his parents in the past year, has assembled a dozen works that simultaneously investigate and overlay human biography with the history of his art. Using found metal, wood, and plastic objects, bronze and plastic cast from sculpted wax, and relying universally on assemblage, he’s created a collection of intimately scaled works full of legible ideas wrapped in materials that please the eye and tempt touching. His title, Body and Time, is redundant the way a pun is: two identities in one thing, like the way an art object becomes both the substance it’s made of and the thing it represents.
Think of the way sculptors use the word “body” in reference to clay. A clay “body” isn’t a figure; it’s the material’s character. Then again, sculptors are traditionally more interested in timelessness, in presenting what is permanent in the otherwise ephemeral. Time, like transparency, challenges the sculptor; it’s something sculpture doesn’t do well. To link the body with time in this way invokes Sartre’s great pair: Being and Nothingness.
Nothingness has something to do with it. In addition to meditating on the evidence, visible in his aging self-portraits, implicating him in his own eventual extinction, Christensen has set himself the task of finding a visual language in which to commemorate the passing of his parents. The two works that do this most directly span most of sculpture’s history, from academic bronze to post-modern resin. “Pater” — Latin for father — |1| perches the ravaged face and thinning hair of an old man horizontally upon the sill of an otherwise empty window, cut through a blank, featureless wall. One thinks of Janus, the two-faced Roman god of portals, after whom January, when one year passes into the next, is named. But when we walk around to the other side, the back of this head is fractured away. There will be no more years. Here is past without future, underscored by the passive way the head lies on its side, or the delicacy with which Christensen renders the parchment skin of age. “Leche,” |2|on the other hand, traces the gift of life to its source. Resembling a giant candle, with the artist’s bust in place of a wick, its drip-covered, cylindrical waxen body holds in its hollow top not molten wax, but a pool of milk, from which the equally white head emerges. Milk has become a resonant sculptural material, and as Christensen’s head seems to rise, dripping, from the contents of the pipe-like vessel, it comes to mind that all milk is “mother’s milk.”
Of course the Postmodernist Christensen is free to mine the academic force of his art’s past without accepting its contemporary powerlessness. Potential energy and even motion are common in today’s sculpture, and none of these works is static. "Crucible" |3| presents a still life, its three parts caught balanced at the last moment before they tumble off the pedestal. "Blunt Instrument" |4| invites viewers to take it down from the hook where it hangs and heft it. "Deep Sea’s" |5| long strip of corrugated glass mimics the translucent optics of water, but when the breeze from a passer-by sets it in motion like a pendulum, the sea becomes palpably present. Passing time is present in several ways in "Macaroni."|6| The found objects — clamps, gears, saw blades, machine housings, and scraps from the foundry floor — speak about their individual pasts, while their assembled sphere makes the piece’s surface a vortex of texture that the eye cannot hold still. Beneath their cosmic dance, graphite spheres emerging from a salvaged steel elbow carry industrial allusions over the line into biomorphic reference.
Two pieces arguably carry time and motion too far. "Accusation" |0| literally welds together the frame of a revolver with a cast bronze hand, so that a pointing index finger replaces the gun’s barrel. Mounted on a couple of crutches that could have come from a Dalí painting, its cocked hammer invites the observant viewer to pull the trigger. At the opening, the artist obliged by doing so, proving that the pistol still worked. Across the room, meanwhile, "Rubicon" |7| places a garish bust of Caesar atop a tower of shafts and planetary gears. Visitors were encouraged to turn the crank at the bottom, setting the head to spinning dizzily. Everyone seemed to enjoy the chance to participate, and the crank is irresistible, but the result was anticlimactic. I was left wondering if the ability to imply and the power to withhold are not more valuable in art than satisfying the viewer’s desire to be, essentially, entertained.
It makes a certain sense that when several works are produced at the same time, there may be thoughts in one that seem to be continued in another. From a dozen works, several suggest themselves as pairs, either by their contrast — father and mother, snap vs. spin — or their restatement of the same idea. Like synonyms, two objects that look nothing alike can both hang on the same figure of speech. "Despair and Hope" |8| and The "Bottom Line" |9| are such a pair. In the former, a fallen bust is held inverted on a marble slab, propped up by shards of the same metal. A bird perched on the exposed underside of the bust contradicts a sense of ruin, and there’s a sly joke as well: a monumental portrait is often a perch for birds, but it’s not usually seen as good news. Casting both from the same metal puts the sculptor’s stamp on the connection, but it undermines the distinction between despair and hope: as so many great thinkers have said, and the war against terror is once again proving, a victory closely observed is indistinguishable from defeat.
Nearby, "The Bottom Line" comments on unregulated competition as the arbiter of success. Atop two spindly rods, a pair of cast, attenuated handguns confront each other, barrels welded mouth-to-mouth in a potentially explosive kiss. It feels far more violent than "Accusation." Driving home the point, a silver dollar perches like a gun sight atop the meeting of the two barrels. It is this coin that succinctly repeats the central trope of "Despair and Hope": on one side, the bust of President Eisenhower balances head down, while on the other an eagle, its wings still spread, lands right way up on the moon. It’s an ironic statement however deciphered, and of course it doesn’t have to mean anything. But it’s tempting to read it as arguing that personalities and celebrity are unreliable, while accomplishments ought to speak for themselves.
Given Christensen’s penchant for recycling materials to exploit their associations or their patinas, it’s particularly appropriate to see his work in CUAC’s recycled limestone granary. Equally telling was the juxtaposition, just outside the door, of the Center’s collection of conventional modern sculpture. None of the works in the gallery is as large as the smallest piece on the lawn, and despite their industrial materials, the mind shrinks from the idea of leaving Christensen’s objects out doors. In the delicate preservation of some surfaces, and the careful preparation of others, as in their scale, they ask us to share space with them, examine them closely, and consult them frequently. Conventional wisdom has it that sculptures either stand freely or hang on the wall, but Christensen invokes a far older dichotomy. Against sculpture as a public statement, he offers objects like fine books, intimate enough to please the hand as much as the eye, capable of engaging the individual in a personal conversation. It’s a concept as old as the Stone Age Venus figures these works evoke, but as relevant to today as the personal computers we fill with our memories and then carry in our pockets.
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Exhibiton Review: Orem
Sculpted Regions of the Mind at the Woodbury
by Shawn Rossiter
The UVSC Woodbury Art Museum's current sculpture exhibition, "Regions of the Mind: Exploring conceptual domains in contemporary sculpture," explores the artistic pluralism that is contemporary sculpture.
The installation of the nine sculptors' work reflects this pluralism, giving each artist's work its own alcove, chamber, or cell of the entire space, so that the viewer's movement is a passage through the various minds of the sculptors involved. The curators describe the exhibition as "not unlike the sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage where miniaturized scientists traveled through the vascular system of a man to perform a life-saving surgery - only here patrons are moving through an exhibition of one vein of particular thought into another region of possibilities as presented by another artist/mind."
For the novitiate to contemporary sculpture, the exhibition is a wonderful introduction to the forms, materials and concerns of contemporary artists working in a 3-dimensional medium. For those of you more practiced in the concepts and concerns of contemporary sculpture, Regions of the Mind will be a welcome display of some of the finest sculptors working in Utah today.
Much of the excitement of sculpture these days comes from the broad use of materials, from traditional stone, clay and wood to more modern materials like Plexiglas, steel and found objects. Many artists rely on the material itself as a vehicle for meaning, as with Tyler Meadows Davis, whose works use glass and its role as a transmitter of light as a spiritual metaphor.
Joyce Marder |1| is equally concerned with material but in an experiential rather than cerebral way. She is a weaver, creating baskets and forms out of willow, dogwood, rabbit brush and tree trimmings. Coming to know and work with the plants and materials that make up her pieces is the inspiration for the sculpture.
The sculptures of Jared Ellis |2| are minimalist works that, with the juxtaposition of metal and wood, explore various contrasts. Bryon Draper does something similar when he blends his rough-hewn stone or wood with delicately modeled heads, arms and legs.
The conceptual is as strong a concern for these sculptors as is the material. B.J. Gawle |0| works in stone with the most basic of shapes, creating mesmerizing physical objects that relate to greater intellectual concepts: reflecting the circle of life, the coding of language found in an ancient alphabet or the cataloguing of memory.
True to the concept of the show as a traveling of passageways in the mind of contemporary sculpture, the works of Frank McEntire |3| have been set apart into their own alcove, and this setting is perfectly adapted to the religious reliquaries that make up much of McEntire's work. McEntire finds discarded religious objects and manipulates, rearranges and recontextualizes them into his own comments on such contemporary concerns as economics, politics and the environment.
The exhibit contains both objects and installations presented in a way that promotes a movement from one arena of thought to another, from one context to another – moving through dark passages to regions of illumination. This museum show is a marvelous journey through death, transcendence, stability, religion, passage, light, and thought itself.
The work of Brian Christensen (see left column), Ashley Knudsen and Kurt Knudsen also appear in Regions of the Mind which continues through September 30th.
New Feature: Recently Read
The Art of Life
by Shawn Rossiter
In his elegantly written and accessible read, "The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa," Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for the New York Times, explores the creative process as it is revealed in the lives of artists and non-artists alike. Kimmelman brings a critic's knowledge to this series of essays examining the insights, consolations, and epiphanies that an artful life yields; his manner, though, is so affable and unassuming that each read feels like a series of entertaining anecdotes and observations shared over a good meal.
Some of the great artists of the past century are his subjects, but they share equal billing with the artists in all of us – the avid collector, the hobbyist painter, and the amateur photographer. Kimmelman’s gaze goes far and deep in his pursuit of the life of art and the art of life: from a dentist who dedicated his life to amassing the largest collection of light bulbs, to the secluded life and art of Pierre Bonnard, and the "mammoth quasi-diary of gouaches and accompanying texts," of a young Jewish woman who perished in the Holocaust.
Kimmelman is equally comfortable culling insight from the work of conceptual artists, like Ray Johnson -- whose ultimate performance was his own suicide -- as he is from golden-voiced TV-personalities like Bob Ross. From Ross, Kimmelman says, , we learn a basic reason for making art – “to have a place to indulge your id and comfort your ego, an area of authority, where perhaps, secondarily, with luck and little effort, you might make something good enough to hang on the wall or show to strangers.” For Kimmelman, the 1950s paint-by-numbers phenomenon, of which, he tells us, Ike was an avid practitioner, is as important to understanding the artful life as are the remote land art of the American West.
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In each of his essays, Kimmelman has a point, an idea about life and/or art that he is trying (essaying) to flesh out. In the opening paragraph of “The Art of Having a Lofty Perspective” he says “If, like most people, you have ever walked into a museum or gallery or looked at a picture in a magazine or newspaper and wondered how anything so ugly and lacking in taste had come to be considered art . . .” and with the remainder of the essay examines what constitutes the beautiful and its susceptibility to change. But it is the anecdotes, the facts, and the quotes with which Kimmelman peppers his path, that are the most enjoyable aspect of the journey.
Kimmelman’s insight into the lives of artists is most vivid in an essay in which he explores the creative process of Philip Pearlstein. Provocatively titled “The Art of Staring Productively at Naked Bodies,” the essay is anything but titillating. It is about routine, observation, and the difficulty of perching oneself on the seat of a toy tractor. “All of us have our daily routines,” Kimmelman writes, “ from which we hope to derive comfort and sustenance. For Pearlstein, this has been staring at naked men and women.” The essay provides a vivid description of the setting of Pearlstein’s studio and the creative process that results in his realistic still lifes that include the human form. From his time with Pearlstein – Kimmelman followed his own routine, visiting the artist every Tuesday as Pearlstein worked on the same painting -- Kimmelman gives us invaluable quips and insights from the artist. Pearlstein calls own artistic process “Matisse toward Vermeer,” Picasso's late work “turning art history into a crazy comic book,” and Mondrian a “repressed hysteric.” And amidst talk of these grand figures, Kimmelman also appreciates more practical insights -- don’t stretch your canvases too tight Pearlstein says. “The canvases become accident prone; every dent shows up when they’re stretched too tight.”
Kimmelman's penultimate essay,“The Art of Pilgrimage,” is an exploration of the earth art movement, which in an age of traveling blockbuster exhibitions and inexpensive jet travel, has restored the pilgrimage aspect of seeing a work of art. Traveling from Marfa, Texas to Nevada's Great Basin, he introduces us to the grandiose visions and personalities of artists like Donald Judd and Michael Heizer. And far from any ivory tower experience, at the end of the essay we find the author near Wendover, Utah, lost, alone, in increasing darkness, trudging through chest-high, cold, salt water. All because he was trying to get a look at one of the shots of the Salt Flats in Matthew Barney's Cremaster series. His lesson? "Not all art comes to you, or even should come to you, easily. Sometimes you have to go to some length to meet it.
After these grand tours across grand vistas and grand artists, Kimmelman easies us out of his book with a quiet and charming look at the "beauty of ordinary things" in the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin and Wayne Theibaud.
The conjunction of these last two essays, or even these last two artists, is the beauty of Kimmelman’s book -- it is not an argument for or against any type of art, but an argument for art itself. An argument for the making of art and the living of art and the making life an artform in itself.
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