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Installation views of (top to bottom, left to right) Greater, Jump, Exhibit 11, White Room, and Bulge; each is MSPaintbrush, photocopies, linen tape [along seams on the reverse], 88 X 78 inches. From my solo exhibit at Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY, 1998. (photos by Bill Orcutt)
Scan of polaroid. Untitled artwork circa 1996, photocopies and linen tape, 88" x 78". Made when I was living in a closet (practically) in Tribeca. Too obvious a Peter Halley reference to show at the time, I always liked it, even though few others did. Ten years later, it seems more in step with the current videogame-as-potholder discourse. Wait, did I just coin something? Eventually I'll get this old work out of my system.
Sealab, 1997, acrylic paint, ink, paper, linen tape, 21" X 29"
Granola, 1996-7, photocopies collaged on unfolded granola boxes, approx. 60" x 40". Scan of polaroid. Stuff keeps turning up that I never showed, but still get all nostalgic about. Whether I actually consumed this cereal will remain a mystery. Also tagged with (mostly) molecular imagery and unshown are a saltine box, packaging for Folger's "coffee teabags" (a brilliant idea), and a cardboard sleeve for shower curtain rings.
Disc, 1999, ink, paper, linen tape, wood, 10" x 10"
Truth in advertising: what the back of a related piece looks like.
Another view of my 54th St. studio, circa 1999 (scan of polaroid)
Greater (see below). This (upside down) image was saved from the website of a newspaper in Naples, FL, when post-hypnotic traveled there. The review may still be up.
Greater, 1997, photocopies and linen tape, 88" X 78"
This slightly fuzzy image was saved from Illinois State University Galleries' post-hypnotic exhibition artists pages, which appear to have been taken down.
The 3rd edition of The Visual Experience, a secondary school text by Jack Hobbs, Richard Salome, and Ken Vieth, includes a piece of mine, Discs. It's on p. 15, in a section called The Philosophy of Art:
The authors gave me a break in not asking the thornier, implied question: "If the crystals aren't a work of art, why is Discs?" Fortunately the text covers that elsewhere, explaining the history of abstraction, found objects, etc. (The scan is blurry because every way I tried to sharpen it or tweak the contrast it distorted the piece(s).)
My 54th Street (Hell's Kitchen) studio, ca. 1998. Left hand image(s): Pipes 2, 1998, laser prints and linen tape, 88" X 78", previously exhibited here. The work on the right is untitled, same media. Each piece is essentially a giant paper quilt made of approx. three by five inch rectangles of xerox-printed paper taped together on the back (the linen tape is starchy and moistened when applied; when it dries it forms a "kite frame" of plaster-like strips that give the piece a sense of volume perceptible from the front). The big one hangs loosely on the wall, the small one is folded around a stretcher. Perhaps you can see where a group exhibition of black and white, repeating, Op art-like patterns, computer-made, with a kind of "jenky" outsider craft focus, would interest me. The "pipes" were originally intended to be cut out and used as struts or sticks for the molecules I was making, but I discovered that when placed side by side, they created intense, fairly painful optical vibration (not visible in these polaroid scans). These, and the allover patterns of spheres I was doing simultaneously, are what lead to my investigation and reworking of Op art rhetoric and ultimately my involvement in the "post-hypnotic" exhibition.
"p-h" traveled around the U.S. but never made it to NY. It would have been a hard sell here. I knew the idea of a (multiply-recontextualized) Op pseudo-revival was doomed when I read Roberta Smith's review of the Bridget Riley show at Dia. I'm paraphrasing here, but Smith basically said that Riley was tainted by her association with artists who would be forever on the margins, "especially in anti-Op New York." Wow, opposition to Op art is institutionalized here! Or was that another way of saying "anti-Op Roberta"? Considering the predominance of Op-like patterns in "The Infinite Fill Show," I guess it took the "teen bedroom angle" to override Roberta's dislike of the form and/or perception that it was discredited. Or, less cynically, maybe it was just the overwhelming evidence that artists find it more interesting than she does. [reposted from a few days ago with modifications.]