BRUCE PEARSON: Eye Vibes
First published in ArtNet.com, posted June
8, 1998
The view from the sixth floor exercise
studio where I work out on Broadway at 72nd Street is filled to bursting point
with Beaux-Arts sumptuousness.
Excluding sky and ground and receding at an angle to the uniquitous city
grid, this fabulous tableau is a gaudy, dense overload of brick, masonry,
ironwork, statuary. To the gymnastic
viewer, suspended upside down in some Francis Bacon-like frame contraption (the
studio follows the Pilates system) and gyrating back and forth, the
architectural details mush together, disengaged from any established decorative
order, forming an abstracted all-overness.
Nestled between two apartment buildings, however, is an advertising
slogan, interjecting bright, crystalline meaning to this jungle of effect:
"Depression is a flaw of chemistry not character", it announces,
giving a phone number with the implicit offer of pharmeceutical release.
This strange mixture of facade and relief,
decoration and semiotics, the inversion of order, is all good preparation for
the work of Bruce Pearson, who is included in the current group show in the
Projects Room at the Museum of Modern Art.
I thought of my private "ready made" landscape when I first
saw Pearson's weird psychadelic reliefs in his Williamsburg studio back in the
fall. His pieces actually use wacky
lines and slogans appropriated from the mass media which in turn serve as his
titles, but my little "flaw of chemistry" number is unlikely to cut
much of a figure to a man who goes in for the likes of "Something that
seems to symbolize in quotes reality" and "Another nail in the coffin
of objectivity", not to mention "Violence and profanity supernatural
strangeness and graphically rendered sexual situations". These are all titles of pieces in the MoMA
show. Curated by Lilian Tone and Anne
Umland, this cogent and sexy little exhibition also includes Karin Davie,
Udomsak Krisanamis, and Fred Tomaselli.
Unlike the ad in my West Side cityscape,
the semiotic in a Pearson is organically wedded to its defining form. One has to be told it, but his compositions
are made from fantastically contorted renderings of a given phrase. The letters are stretched beyond legibility
and - in some works - the sentences are mirrored vertically and horizontally
like a folded cut-out paper doily. Text
is then given texture when the linguistic motif is carved into styrofoam. Actually, what I observed on my studio visit
is a mind-bogglingly meticulous process whereby each letter is seperately cut (with
a hot wire) and built up in layers like the strata of a geologist's contour
model. The final stage of production is
the painting, as fiddly and concentrated, it would seem, as the plotting and
carving had been in their turn. It was
appropriate that the Projects Room show partially overlapped with the Chuck
Close retrospective at the same museum for Pearson's enterprise is close to
Closean in its mind-numbing labor intensity.
For "Closean" it was tempting to
have said "Sisyphean", only in Pearson's case (if not Close's) that
would be too judgemental. Nonetheless,
skill - as in dexterity concentrated in time and degree - is a problem for
contemporary art appreciation. It has
taken us a long painful century to get used to the idea that ecomony counts for
more than effort, that dash takes priority over muscle, to believe, sincerely,
that less is indeed more. What are we
supposed to do, then, when an artist presents us with the fruit of his or her
own, personal, pernickety, craftsy fingerwork?
Frankly, we shudder with a certain embarassment. For our delectation an artist - no less -
has done all THIS? It's as if an
honored dinner guest has washed the dishes.
There is a difference, however, between
the skill quotient in Pearson and Close.
In Close, the photographically derived image is immediate and
omnipotent; the fiddly handmade fact of its facture is only gradually realised,
and once established merely a cause for prying wonderment. In Pearson, by contrast, the facture meets
with some correspondence of slowed-down effort on the part of the viewer. The surfaces, gooey and gaudy though they
are, offer the prospect of reward for leisurely regard. Which is a longwinded way of saying that
Pearsons might actually be beautiful as well as interesting.
Actually, the first association a Pearson
triggered in my mind was with the kind of mindless modernist wall relief that
was popular in the 1950s and 1960s, usually knocked out in concrete by the
architect rather than any named artist, to lend warmth (as - modernist taboo -
an afterthought) to an otherwise soulless entrance way or public interior. But then I began to discern some semblance
of hierarchy; it wasn't gratuitous texture, there was method in the madness. Before I was told about the texts I began
trying to "read" the images, but I saw them rather as maps, as
circuit boards, even, with fanciful empathy, as the aerial view of some
futuristic organic city. It was then
that crescents and H-blocks started to make sense as letters, and I was on the
way to Pearson literacy. Funnily
enough, during my pre-signifiers phase, when I was still enjoying form for
form's sake, I was reminded of Torres-Garcia and early Adolph Gottlieb and
their primitive tabulations of pictographs.
Once I was initiated into the secret of
Pearson's encoded messages I quickly regressed. I didn't see the point in straining my eyes to decode banal
sentences which were there for me, anyway, with a friendly word from the artist
(or, at the Modern, from the label).
But this didn't - and doesn't - inhibit my pleasure in his work. I was able to go back to my primitive
fantasies, in some ways actually enriching those fantasies with my new
knowledge. The experience of willfully
not-reading while, in my own way, reading, of picking up the vibes of meaning
without the meaning per se, can be compared to looking at an image from some
culture whose iconography is a closed book to me - say Tibetan - without
bothering to read long and bewildering explanations or wading through a
gazeteer of deities.
A lot of contemporary art has a
complicated story behind its facture.
The way things are made, and the reason they are made that way, are
integral to the work, and the supposed experience of it. There is a "get it" factor. A click in the brain and you move on. Much rarer, and of course more satisfying,
is when the conceptual element doesn't circumvent the visual experience but
instead conditions it. Of course, the link
between facture and effect has to be manifest, otherwise how and why the artist
went about making the work is of no more relevance than what he had for
breakfast. There is a great moment in
Balzac's story, The Unknown Masterpiece, in which the master extols the final
stroke which brings an image to life.
"No one will thank us for what is underneath", Frenhofer tells
the young Poussin as he corrects the work of their mutual friend, Porbus. In our postmodern culture that hardly
pertains; where everything is at once surface and symbol - and remember, Wilde
warned us, its equally perilous to remain on the surface as it is to penetrate
it - art is equally what you get and the manifest evidence of how it
arrived. Of course, as an art form
painted relief is a wonderful tease, sending the eye into oscillation between
surface and depth, neither of which yields.
Pearson surely knows this. It is
with similar acuteness that he sets up oscillations between detail and whole,
legibility and texture, image and idea. His art is a kind of simultaneous
equation in which the tension between process and result on his part forms an
equivalent to these forced oscillations on the viewer's. He keeps the eye busy.
The exhibition at The Projects Room
continues at the Museum of Modern Art to June 30th.
Bruce Pearson is also included in Wall
Paper, an exhibition of works on paper curated by Lisa Jacobs at the Nicholas
Davies Gallery, New York City
David Cohen works out at Body Balance, 212
362 3300