THE TENTS
June 2009

"By now we all know how little paint it takes to make a painting, and that there are stretcher bars (and gasp, a wall!) lurking behind the canvas. A young artist could be regularly disappointed that somebody beat him to the undiscovered country unfolding behind - and sometimes before - the picture window, or he could roll on in and pitch a makeshift tent."
- Scott Rothkopf, ARTFORUM April 2009


So, I'm really in to tents.

I recently became obsessed with painting a series of hut-like things on paper. Indulging in my natural propensity towards seriality, I repeated similar shapes over and over until I had wallpapered my studio with them, forming a bright patchwork grid. No one and no thing is ever inside these tents. They are empty sets, staging a scene for something to happen - and were, for this reason, a million times more exciting to me than my previous forays into representational painting. Narrative is implied, and told through color and paint application.

Want to know what's going on in there? Me too.

The tent paintings cheerfully straddle abstraction and representation, actually only barely suggesting the possibility of a tent. They embody the fundamental properties of painting in a semi-hilarious pun: building volume (pitching the tent), and creating the illusion of space (the interior of the tent). The narrow portrait-like cropping focuses the attention on these two moves. I increasingly began to view the tent-paintings as being quintessentially paintings-about-paintings; but in a more fun and less stodgy-macho way than this moniker evokes.

Pictured: Dead white male.

The 70s are a time that shouldn't hold any particular importance to me (seeing as how I was born five years after they ended) but one can still dream, and I do. I am forever attracted to the 70s' sunsoaked colors and inherited-from-the-60s-idealism. Flipping through family photo albums, I am irrationally delighted to discover photos of my dad in a salmon-colored suit. For one thing, 70s cinema has become a treasure trove from which I steal my palette.

Badlands (1973) : The great American outdoors. Incidentally(?),camping. If I could be in any movie, I might want to be Sissy in this movie.

The other thing about the 70s is how I used to only know the summarized art-history story that declared painterly painting dead by the 70s, mentioning it only in passing in relationship to Minimalism. But the 2007 exhibition High Times, Hard Times brought to my attention to some New York painters that were at that time exploring new territories in abstract painting: pulling it apart, moving it off the stretcher and onto the floor, creating new shapes and structures. These new discoveries (Alan Shields, Lynda Benglis, Jo Baer) looked fresh and funny to my eyes, and got me thinking.

"Maybe if I put wheels on this thing..."

This lead me to my current project, building three-dimensional stretchers that I also call tents. This name particularly pleases me, since after all, a real tent is just canvas stretched over a wooden framework, just like a painting.

All two-dimensional work indulges in representation and illusionism to some degree, but tents allow me to bring the formal interplay of shape, line, and color off the revered wall space and into our corporeal space. Picking up on something Jo Baer said, "I have always had the feeling that an object is larger than its outline; that it has a field or force beyond itself." I feel like I'm treading the same ground that good old Eva Hesse was when she draped that loop of wire from a frame and stuck it on a wall.

This curiosity is what led me to wonder what a painting would look like broken open, exposing the cave-like space between the stretcher and the wall that is usually ignored. An honesty remains in the construction - exposing staples and its interior structure, highlighting the physicality of the painting-object, letting you in on the secrets of how the magic of painting is created.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that as a child, some of my favorite television programs included the documentaries that exposed magician's tricks. Most people frown on that sort of thing, complaining that it turned magic mundane and ruined the trick. I disagree. To quote House M.D. (one of my favorite television programs now), "The fun is in knowing. If the wonder's gone when the truth is shown, there was never any wonder in the first place." In brutalizing and exposing the hidden structures in painting, I think the wonder still survives, and that's encouraging.

A worthy guru.

I would like to simultaneously work on both the two - dimensional works and the three-dimensional paintings, further complicating both their geometric structures and their painted surfaces. To this end, I experiment with both transparent washes and high impasto layers of paint.

Nevertheless I find my attraction to the cultural and artistic history of the 70s to be important, and one that I'm not yet willing to dismiss. The desire to cast a gaze back to a time you are too young to have known personally is nothing new and can be noted among many of my peers. The tendency to retreat inside something (a tent?), where new possible worlds and completely fictional universes can be built, might be a knee-jerk reaction to what are some pretty tough times right now.

An interesting and unavoidable point of comparison here is with the 60s-70s "Return to the Land" movement that fostered the creation of Drop City, located in Southern Colorado.

Note: This is the second reference to the great American outdoors.

When I think about what my tent-constructions represent - beyond their exploration of the fundamental properties of painting - I think they have more in common with Drop City than other kinds of tents. They are not army tents, or refugee camp tents; you wouldn't grab one of them when you were fleeing for your life. Like the guys and gals building Drop City in the middle of nowhere, my tent-constructions attempt to transform a barren place with their bright, cheerfully blitzed-out color palette into one of spontaneous, raucous painterly beauty.

When describing the climate of the 70s New York art scene, Jerry Saltz points out that art meant "living on its own, out of the limelight; artists are occupying cheap lofts and hustling odd jobs. Almost no one is making money from art, and anyone who does is considered a sellout or a critical failure." I don't mean to get ahead of myself, but this sounds familiar.

Manifestos are unbecoming on people my age, but there's something to be said for artwork that can be made alone, not requiring a large team of studio assistants to produce, which was one thing Drop City attempted to do: make art and shelter on a low budget.

Nevertheless, Drop City and its crazy idealism was a great artistic failure, and one I do not want to attempt to reproduce. My work is hand-made out of readily available materials and has no grandiose utopian aspirations. Perhaps in building my little tent-shelters, I am proving to myself that no matter where I go or what goes down I can always pitch some sort of home. My tent-constructions might have originated out of something out of 70s colors and idealism, but these tents are firmly pitched in 2009.

Who wants to go camping?

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

- Gioni, Massimiliano. "Ask the Dust." UnMonumental: The Object in the 21st Century. New Museum Press, 2007.

- Siegel, Katy. High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975. D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, New York, NY. 2006.

- House M.D. Episode #408: "You Don't Want to Know"

- Saltz, Jerry. "Get me a brush, stat!" April 27 2007 of New York.