Adam Ned Larsen . . . from page 1
Larsen is an artist who works in multiple mediums, often several at the same time, but he is best known as a maker of instantly recognizable narrative prints. “Sweet Nuptials,” which he made to celebrate the wedding of close friends, twists the conventions of the wedding portrait twice.|1|First, while it shows the couples hands close up, it’s not to display the ring. Instead, they exchange a nuptial gift of Pez candies, symbolic of the sweets they have offered and will continue to offer each other. More importantly, the toy figures in antique wedding clothes, such as might be seen atop the wedding cake, stand in for the bride and a groom by representing not the adults who wed, but the children who dreamed they would one day become those adults and take adult vows. The figures represented are authentic, made by the Swiss manufacturer and found by Larsen during the meticulous research that begins most of his works, and the finished print displays some of the artist’s most characteristic gestures: he extends the role of toys—tools children will use to imagine themselves grown up—to include their roles as talismanic icons for adults. He celebrates hands as both subjects and makers of human artifacts. And he stirs in a fertile mixture of personal history and daily life as both context and subject matter of these most reverently-made objects.
Family roots run deep in our community. Before appearing here, these words passed muster with the great-great-grandson of Brigham Young’s coach driver. Similarly, while Adam Ned Larson was born in Odgen, and attended Weber State before study in Wichita, Kansas, as a child he played in an Ephraim house built by his ancestors within sight of the Manti Temple. He now lives in that house with his wife Amy and their children, and points with awe to floor planks nailed in place by his great-grandfather. But not all roots grow towards the same aquifer; when Larsen added a new kitchen to the house, the floor boards he laid were salvaged from the demolition of Snow College’s old gym, from the very floor where he and Amy danced their first dance together as courting students years ago.
Larsen, a compact, perennially youthful man with all-American good looks and seemingly endless energy, usually arrives at Snow College—often on foot or bicycle— before eight in the morning to open the school’s art gallery. Twelve hours later, after a day of classes and meetings, during which he will barrel up and down the corridors dozens of times in his trademark printer’s apron marked with the chop design he created to mark the school’s output, he’s likely to still be about, burning the late-night oil required to make studio time for his own art. He’s kept something close to this schedule since he arrived at Snow in 1999. Then a dozen or so art majors were taught by two full-time faculty and two adjuncts -- Larsen and his longtime friend, sculptor Brad Taggart, who shared an office and dreamed of transforming the program if they ever got the chance. That chance came sooner than expected, as first Osral Allred and then Carl Purcell resigned their duties in order to paint full time and teach privately.
Their replacements wasted no time in setting up to teach the basic skills they thought essential for artists, but which have been abandoned in most American art schools. Using a traditional definition of art that requires craft as well as concept, they set their sights on displacing the exhausted hegemony of late twentieth-century conceptualism. Their curriculum empowers the artist who has an idea to immediately give it a two- or three-dimensional form, rather than depending on found or borrowed imagery or hiring someone to execute what the artist conceives. The idea struck a chord among upcoming students, and the Department of Visual Art became one of the fastest growing programs at Snow, quintupling enrollment in a few years, doubling the faculty and employing ten part-time instructors. In the summer of 2007, after five years as chairman, Adam Larsen handed the reins to Brad Taggart, a gesture more symbolic than anything else. In fact, the two men’s close working relationship had led the students long ago to give them a single, efficient name: “Bradam.”
While he stepped down to free time for his own goals, those were not limited to making art. Larsen is a tinkerer: someone, in his case, who wants everything he comes in contact with to conform to his idea that an efficient design should, according to the principles of aesthetics, be pleasing to the senses as well as the mind. A year after resigning as chairman he took over Snow College’s art gallery, a hopeless hybrid of meeting hall and exhibition space through which canned traveling art shows were annually trucked, between displays drawn from the school’s collection of predictable landscapes. After rebuilding the space, he forged a new schedule of exhibits assembled—and even of works created—specifically for the gallery. Adrian van Suchtelen and Everett Ruess are important Utah artists who received comprehensive retrospectives, while more recently Larsen asked twenty prominent artists from around the state to create new works on the traditional theme of the Nativity.
Of course putting together an original exhibition earned Larsen the right to include something of his own. His version of the Nativity depicts the event as it might be recreated in play by children telling the story using their toys, including three more authentic Pez candy dispensers: a wise king, a shepherd, and an angel.|2| While it’s not unusual for Larsen to reprise an idea that works for him, so that elements may repeat in divergent contexts—something like the way the eye in a peacock’s head appears also in his tail—formal divergence generally strikes the eye before the mind recognizes familiar subjects. Stefanie Dykes, a founder of Saltgrass Printmakers and a fellow printmaker, says, “The thing I’ve always admired about Adam is the way he completely reinvents himself for each new project. That and the meticulous craft of everything he makes.” What she means is that he may manifest an idea as a print, a drawing, an artist’s book, a sculpture, a painting, or some variation not seen before. It may be carved, painted, printed, machined, or assembled from uncertain origins. It will foreground the artist’s awareness, rather than the specific phenomenon being observed. It will bridge dimensions, the way bas-relief is both a two- and a three-dimensional art. And it will bear allegiance to his previous works primarily by being so well made as to challenge the conviction that human hands alone could be responsible. The trajectory of most artists is like a married couple’s lovemaking: at first the artist tries everything, but with the passage of time, he simplifies until everything he makes ends up an oil painting or a marble sculpture. Adam Ned Larsen is like Man Ray, a quintessential modernist who puts as much thought into the kind of object he will make as he does in what it will portray.
An installation that will debut this summer at BYU illustrates how this process works. Like most members of his community, Larsen’s family members form the near horizon of his perception. When he was young, three of them—coincidentally all uncles—were forced to make extreme versions of the sort of choices we all face in life. Two assumed hazardous vocations. A third, born with a neurological condition requiring life-threatening treatment, had to choose between life-long solitude or an attenuated life among loved ones. All three died prematurely, having made unwilling choices, and met deaths that in the artist’s eye revealed universal truths about life. Seeking to memorialize these predicaments and their outcomes, Larsen turned to something from his student days that had become a perennial preoccupation.
One of Larsen’s favorite artists is the enigmatic and idiosyncratic H.C. Westermann, who influenced many of today’s artists and whose picture appears on the cover of The Beatles’ album, “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Westermann (1922–1981), at various times a lumberjack and an acrobat before becoming an artist, served in two wars and emerged a fierce critic of militarism and the alleged advances of modern life. His art cobbled together a bridge between printmaking and sculpture, wherein he created menacing images and enigmatic objects whose titles invoked mystery, death, brinksmanship, and similar threats that may have influenced Larsen’s early work on nuclear proliferation and growing up under the everyday threat of annihilation. Westermann also brings to mind two other Western artists, Ed Kienholtz and Nancy Reddin, whose distinctive approach gave rise to assemblage, the making of new art from collaged and modified found objects. These related schools of art have merged in Adam Ned Larsen’s art, producing works that simultaneously exploit the associations and sense of reality found in scavenged materials and transform them into new objects and associations.
In Larsen's previous sculptures a wooden box might be covered with doors that could be opened by pulling chains to reveal connected, vaguely witty images printed on the wood. In "Spit Propulsion," a sculpture shaped like a book with an aircraft nacelle and propeller emerging through the cover, a child’s fantasy of flight is recreated from memory through riveted aluminum and scavenged gauges.|3-4| But this new medium finds its voice in the three small coffins Larsen has fashioned to memorialize his lost uncles. Here are three exquisite wooden boxes that could sit on the desks of powerful executives, or be taken for the precision tool cases treasured by skilled workers and scientists. Lifting their lids, though, turns out to be like peeling back skin, under which the insides are anatomical diagrams of the human bodies whose remains their larger counterparts bore into the earth. |5-10| Each simultaneously represents itself as both a machine and a living organism. The extraordinary skill and painstaking effort evident in their fabrication brings the viewer close to the awe felt in the presence of living things, even as it makes clear the impassible gulf that separates things from beings. Still, it is we who die, not our machines, and the recycling evident here is very different from what happens to our bodies and, we may hope, our souls.
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Larsen raises a complex set of ideas, and the objects that carry them offer more than the experience of visible beauty. These are truly aesthetic pleasures: a mixture of ideas and feelings that get under the skin and unsettle viewers, surpassing the merely creepy feelings so popular with the audience for so many of today’s books and movies, reaching toward the realm of what in the past was considered, and called, “sublime.”
By invoking the sublime, Larsen could be casting back nostalgically to art’s past: to a golden age when now-suspicious qualities like ‘beauty’ were in vogue. Or he could be looking forward to the return of appreciation for such once-universal virtues as craft, the balance of form and content, and an interaction of abstract, representational, and concrete impulses. It’s ironic (a virtue of the previous, 20th century) that an artist with such strong ties to his own community finds it is still difficult to be a prophet in ones hometown, and so he looks to a broader audience. Works like “Party Favors,” a print satirizing American politics, |11| and “Triple Dead Heat,” a sewn print, were made to be shown at Saltgrass Printmakers in Salt Lake City. Both play on one of his favorite toy concepts: the figurine that collapses when a button in the base is pushed, only to pop back up when the button is released. “Lernen Sie Deutsch,” a German language primer with a cuckoo clock mechanism added, was one of several artist’s books recently shown at the Salt Lake City Library.|12 - 13| His uncles’ coffins will debut together this summer at BYU. In the past, before New York City became both the place that art was made and the place where it was appreciated, artists routinely sent their children out into the world to make a name for themselves and their makers. Adam Ned Larsen is determined to see his works reach as large an audience as possible, and so if he has anything to say about it, his neighbors’ loss will be our gain.
Film Review
Baffle the Maindeck, Me Hearties!
Matthew Barney Documentary at the Salt Lake Art Center
by Lane Bachman
More impressive than any of the films I have seen by Mathew Barney himself is the documentary film about him, No Restraint. Basically, this is a “making of” picture for his recentish endeavors. The narrative is a story of creatures (in this case, humans) who are transforming from land dwellers into whales. He has employed his long-suffering wife, the famous Icelandic island owner and singer Bjork, as the female in this pair of seaworthy shape shiftin’ seadogs. The movie jumps from his past to the present sewing up his many transformation-themed projects in a cohesive style. For the most part, his self-consciously Auteurish process consists of strip-mining exotic cultures (well, exotic at least to gallery owners) and customs, & proposing the eternal validity of male adolescent fantasy and substantiating that you can construct damn near anything with the encouragement of benefactors. Barney talks a good game, and his smoke and mirrors are straight from Comme des Garçons, but he’s basically a thumbsucker whose relentless and noisy suction covers up a fairly noxious Ugly American world-view.
Primarily set on a Japanese factory whaling ship, we are taken step by step through every material level of Barney’s process; from setting a mold of a whale in what appears to be an above ground tub, to the recreation of an ancient tea ceremony, the audience is privy to his dependency on humble functionaries to accomplish his process. The viewer is perhaps asked to believe that Barney stays on the ship for the entire six-month journey with the fishermen, spearing 440 whales. I suppose it’s fortunate that in the meantime, he didn’t stage an attack on the ship by faux animal rights activists from Tribeca. Somebody could get hurt. But instead, we learn that this “whale adventure” was inspired, not by Melville’s Moby Dick, which would be somehow too stodgy and unpostmodern, but by a memory of a documentary film from the 60’s he saw when he was a child. It makes to wonder if 30 years from now we’ll have to sit through his oh-so-cool interpretation of late night infomercials.
Barney has not-so-daringly co-opted the surface of Japanese culture for White Guy Imperialism, and turned it into grotesque veneer, a chinoiserie not unlike the ritual decorations in somebody’s New York loft. He employs not only the people but the actual festivals and sacred customs in order to redeem the weird orientalist side of his psyche. Barney portrays “ancient culture” by filming Awa Odori folk dancers among industrial architecture. He characterizes these architectural structures as being “as character as much as, you know, human driven characters as character." For the sake of a certain evenhandedness, after the Japanese premiere of Drawing Restraint 9, two Japanese men give their contradictory testimonials, both very polite. The first commented, rather ambiguously, “Honestly, I didn’t understand what the content of the film was. I was honestly surprised our culture could be portrayed in this way.” The other man, a bit more charitably, says: “He has put Japanese culture into himself and then represented it through his own viewpoint, plus, he is adding his own imagination to it. Usually when an American artist uses Japanese culture in their work, it makes Japanese people cringe. But his project doesn’t give us any of those feelings.” One can be grateful for small things, like not showing Mount Fuji, The Ginza, or cherry blossoms or geisha.
It was refreshing, however, to see his work process counterpointed with short vignettes of Barbara Gladstone, one of his first curators, among others. The clips of his first lauded works screamed of his youth as a jocky, All-American version of Joseph Beuys: Vaseline covered barbells (OMG, like, so gross!) and collage incorporating a piece of a wrestling mat – how this must have rocked the "Contemporary Art World," in its hunger for musky gymnasium authenticity! Gladstone gently hammers home the limitless opportunities Barney gets simply because he has mastered the Art of the Pretentious and Sporadically Amusing Infomercial. There may be a hundred naked emperors in the art world, but nobody’s threads are as stylin’ as Matty B’s.
The Salt Lake City Film Center will screen Matthew Barney: No Restraint at the Salt Lake Art Center Friday, April 9 at 7 pm.
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