Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Dan Devine / Eugenio Dittborn is the first in a yearlong series of exhibitions for Western Exhibitions' Plus Gallery curated by John Neff. Each show in the program will present one work each by two artists or a lone work by a single maker. All of the works exhibited will deal – directly or indirectly – with the relationships of centers to margins (culturally, geographically, politically and within works themselves as a formal concern). The first show will partner a 1987 concrete-and-steel sculpture by New York State based Dan Devine with an Airmail Painting by the Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn.
The Devine piece consists of a compact concrete block open on one side to reveal the outline of an auto engine part enclosed within; Dittborn’s work is an ultra-light collage painting sent to the exhibition site from South America via airmail. The juxtaposition of these works engenders a number of provocative contrasts between, for example: contraction and expansion, heaviness and lightness, stasis and movement. This list opens onto a number of subtler oppositions and inversions, some of which are explored in curator John Neff’s brief exhibition essay.
Dan Devine’s most recent solo exhibition, “Inside Out Nascar”, a follow-up to his widely discussed “Inside Out Car” of 1998, was held at Brooklyn’s Pierogi gallery in 2006. In 2003, a retrospective of Devine’s work was mounted at Hofstra Museum in Hampstead, New York. The artist’s work has been discussed and reviewed in Art in America and the New York Times, among other publications. Devine lives in Ghent, New York, where he recently presented the “living, self-sustaining” installation Sheep Farm.
Eugenio Dittborn has an extensive and illustrious exhibition history. He work has been shown internationally since that the 1970s at venues as diverse as Documenta IX, the Centre Georges Pompidou, P.S. 1 and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Dittborn’s Airmail Paintings are held in major museum collections worldwide. The artist is represented by Alexander and Bonin gallery, New York. Dittborn is based in Santiago, Chile.
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Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Peter Downsbrough / Jeanne Silverthorne is the second in a yearlong series of exhibitions for Western Exhibitions' Plus Gallery curated by John Neff. Each show in the program will present one piece each by two artists or a small selection of works by a single maker. All of the works exhibited will deal – directly or indirectly – with the relationships of centers to margins (culturally, geographically, politically and within works themselves as a formal concern). The second show in the series partners an untitled sculpture by Peter Downsbrough with the 1998 work
Wires with Computer by Jeanne Silverthorne.
Jeanne Silverthorne’s twisted network of cast-rubber electrical wiring plays on oppositions between energy / dissipation, image / object, and sculpture / environment. Peter Downsbrough’s exactingly installed, perceptually challenging arrangement of two black pipes is likewise activated by tensions between the graphic and the volumetric and also works to disturb the distinction between the object and its setting.
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Peter Downsbrough / Jeanne Silverthorne juxtaposes these two works – which appear, initially, quite different – to investigate how artisanal and de-skilled, studio-based and post-studio, representational and abstract practices address similar concerns.
Since the 1960s, Peter Downsbrough’s work in installation, print, sculpture and video – among other media – has been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States. Downsbrough’s wide-ranging practice was the subject of a 2003 traveling retrospective organized by the Palais des Beaux-Arts in the artist’s adoptive hometown of Brussels, Belgium.
Jeanne Silverthorne has been exhibiting her work in installation, photography and sculpture nationally and internationally for over twenty years. Her recent projects have included solo presentations at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny, Ireland and at Seoul’s Gallery Seomi. Additionally, the artist is a widely published critical writer and a noted educator. Silverthorne is represented by McKee Gallery in New York, were she lives and works.
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: John Boskovich is the third in a yearlong series of shows curated by John Neff for Western Exhibitions' Gallery Two. Each show in the program will present one piece each by two artists or a small selection of works by a single maker. All of the works exhibited will deal – directly or indirectly – with the relationships of centers to margins (culturally, geographically, politically and within works themselves as a formal concern). The third show in the series, opening May 24th, presents works by the late Los Angeles-based artist John Boskovich.
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: John Boskovich focuses on works from the artist's 1993 Rosamund Felsen Gallery solo exhibition
Rude Awakening. It also includes three related Polaroid and text pieces from the 1990s "It Series." Western Exhibitions' display centers on extant components of Boskovich's project-cum-installation
The Honey Machine: It Works Without Thinking, which was first shown in
Rude Awakening. In a 1994 Artforum review, critic David Rimanelli described the installation:
Embers smolder in "The Honey Machine: It Works Without Thinking", an installation in which Boskovich has assembled 250 Honey Bears and miniature Buddhas and encased them in three Plexi vitrines. In the role of artist-as-researcher (cf. Hans Haacke), Boskovich counted for six months the number of ads placed by "models" (read: hustlers) in Frontiers, a California gay magazine. The number was always close to, and sometimes exactly, 250. The comforting little surrogates for the 250 advertised pleasure-workers all face a framed text of an ad Boskovich took out in Frontiers bearing this inviting text: "SHAVED HEAD MUSCLE DADDY 36 yo, 5'10" 190 lbs. Big Dick TOTAL TOP Looking for smooth muscle pussy boys--verbal abuse a must PAGER: (310) 582-6112." The pager was hooked up to a sound system installed in the gallery, and the voices of respondents would often interrupt a prerecorded tape featuring, among other things, Patti Smith performing "Piss Factory," Allen Ginsberg reading his depressing poem, "Aunt Rose," and T. S. Eliot intoning passages from "Four Quartets."
In the fifteen years since
Rude Awakening, several of the elements described by Rimanelli have been lost. Rather than attempting to recreate
The Honey Machine as it was initially presented, Neff has chosen to include only surviving original elements of the installation in
Dead Center / Marginal Notes. Those elements include the framed text piece
Daddy and Frontiers, a framed magazine containing Boskovich,s actual advertisement. The perishable Honey Bears and fragile Buddha figurines have disappeared: if a tape of the respondents to Boskovich's advertisement exists, its location is unknown.
Two live audio cables protruding from the wall and terminating, unconnected to any machine, on the gallery floor mark the absence of the installation's audio track, and of Boskovich's carefully selected playback devices. The visual contrast between Western Exhibitions' austere gallery display and 1993 documentary photographs of
The Honey Machine also indicates the fragmentation of Boskovich's installation over time. The curator hopes that these specific differences in presentation suggest the difficulties of preserving and exhibiting conceptual artworks outside of collecting institutions, while simultaneously pointing to the ways in which Boskovich's art generally could be said to allegorize the gaps and ruptures – baffling or productive – that inhere in relationships between humans and images, or relationships between humans through images.
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Holt Quentel is the fourth in a yearlong series of shows curated by John Neff for Western Exhibitions' Gallery Two. Each show in the program will present one piece each by two artists or a small selection of works by a single maker. All of the works exhibited will deal – directly or indirectly – with the relationships of centers to margins (culturally, geographically, politically and within works themselves as a formal concern). The fourth show in the series, opening September 5th, presents artist Holt Quentel’s large-scale painting
Black 3 Gesture (B/W) Rope of 1989.
After receiving her education in Chicago and Princeton, the artist Holt Quentel (American, born 1961) rose to sudden prominence in New York's art scene of the late 1980s. Typically, Quentel's works were large-scale unstretched paintings resembling battered awnings, signs and tarpaulins. In creating these works, the artist first handcrafted, and then carefully distressed, her canvases' surfaces. When first exhibited, the paintings' denial of a transparent relationship between process and appearance – a defining characteristic of painting after Minimalism – was often read through then-current theories of "simulation," notably Jean Baudrillard's notion that postmodern culture values impressions over actualities. Likewise, contemporary critics related the artist's frequent allusions to the history of abstract painting to the appropriationist tactics of 1980s photo-conceptualists and Neo-Geo artists.
However, as these paradigms of art criticism faded in the early 1990s, critical attention soured on Quentel's art. Her rapid career success was characterized as a symptom of 80s art-world excesses, and her work was dismissed as faddish decoration. Quentel's last solo exhibition was held at Stux Gallery in New York in 1992; shortly thereafter she left the art world. Although she may or may not continue to practice painting, there is no available record of Quentel exhibitions during the past sixteen years.
Despite her initial reputation as an avatar of modish "Simulationist" painting, Quentel's work evades easy categorization and is not hidebound by period concerns. Her pieces are replete with unexpected formal devices, moments of striking painterly expression and virtuosic trompe l’oeil surface treatments. Still, the paintings resist reification, and often appear to be waste products rather that calculated visual expressions. (In this last respect it is, perhaps, interesting to see Quentel as a precursor of Abject Art rather than an endgame appropriationist). The artist's paintings are not necessarily dreary Postmodern souvenirs of the lofty aspirations of twentieth century abstraction; they can also be read as meditations on the practices of attention that cause artifacts to shift into and out of legibility, and thereby of fashion. Rags to riches, and vice versa.
The alteration between the exemplary and the rejected embodied in Quentel's paintings was bitterly recapitulated in her career as an artist. Viewing Quentel's art from outside the frame provided by theoretical debates of the 1980s may surprise contemporary audiences with uncommon aesthetic encounters. Likewise, attention to the story of her career provides instructive insights into how meaning and status in art are the two forked extensions of a single movement; discourse constantly advances both effects towards – and retracts them from – specific art and artists with the quick, relentless flicks of critical tongues.
From the gallery essay by John Neff, 2008
The curator and Western Exhibitions wish to thank everyone at Stux Gallery for their assistance in realizing this project.
Lockett & Hermetic is the final installment of
Dead Center / Marginal Notes, a yearlong series of shows curated for Western Exhibitions' Gallery Two by John Neff. All of the artworks presented in the program have dealt, directly or indirectly, with the relationships of margins to centers (culturally, geographically, politically and within works themselves as a formal concern). Many of the pieces shown in the series were produced during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Lockett & Hermetic will profile two Midwestern exhibition spaces, the Robbin Lockett gallery and the Hermetic gallery, active during and after that era.
Chicago's Robbin Lockett gallery opened in January of 1986 and remained in business until late 1992. From its inception, the small commercial gallery's program pointedly mixed local art with work from more widely recognized centers of production. Like much mainstream art of the 1980s and 90s, the work shown at Lockett relied heavily on precedents set by Minimalism and Conceptualism, with a few notable exceptions. In this regard, Lockett's stable of artists participated in what is often seen as a generational shift in Chicago art: from the self-consciously quirky figuration of the Imagists to the more apparently polished production of a group of younger artists variously described as participating in trans-regional Neo-Conceptual, Neo-Minimal or generically “Postmodernist†movements. (Given the distance of time, all of these labels seem imprecise. Applied to post-1945 American art in general, the former terms assume a model of rupture and return where a continuity is clearly visible, while from the perspective of Chicago art specifically the latter formulation ignores the proto-postmodernity of Paschke, Ramberg et al. while also eliding their – admittedly sometimes oblique –influence on the development of Chicago artists emerging in the mid-1980s.)
In keeping with the methods of their acknowledged art-historical forbearers, the artists exhibiting at the Robbin Lockett gallery occasionally referred to or incorporated the gallery's architecture and practice into their shows, often while simultaneously maintaining a self-consciously blank aesthetic orientation. The gallery's program was thus marked by a paradoxically cosmopolitan style of site-specificity that strove to validate Chicago production not, as earlier Midwestern artists had, by emphasizing the peculiarity of a regional vision, but rather by high- lighting some Chicago-based artists' adept deployment of a loose set of aesthetic and professional conventions that was at that time formalizing as the operational code of an emergent global art culture. As gallery owner Robbin Lockett said in a 1987 New York Times article on Chicago's then-thriving art market, "It helps to have New York connections... But we're getting more press and critical support and gradually collectors are becoming supportive of young artists working here. What I'm trying to get them used to is that good work can come from any- where. It doesn't have to have the New York stamp of approval."
It is productive to reflect on the ways in which the evaluative standards for "good work" of the sort Lockett described were themselves the product of a provincial center's aspirations to cosmopolitan good taste. That is to say, to consider how the “New York stamp of approval” came to be thought of as a general imprimatur of high quality only after that city overcame – with, as is always the case, a lift from changing economic and political winds – certain struggles with the elitisms of European Modernism to become the curiously universal location of all significant achievement in visual art.
Shortly after the closure of the Robbin Lockett gallery, the artist, critic and curator Nicholas Frank opened his Hermetic gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Like Chicago's contemporaneous Uncomfortable Spaces, Hermetic mixed a DIY model of funding and publicity learned from older artist-run alternative spaces with a standardized visual style and interest in building extra-local business relationships borrowed from financially self-sustaining commercial art galleries. However, unlike some of his Chicago contemporaries, Frank did not view this arrangement as an intermediate step in a process of achieving professional legitimacy. Instead, he concentrated on developing the small gallery as a form in itself. Perhaps this change in focus resulted from Frank's apprehension of the inevitably absurd situation of any gallerist attempting to profit from the display and sale of abstract and conceptual art in a mid-sized Midwestern city (especially in an era prior to the ubiquity of the internet and international art fairs).
Frank's interest in and development of the formal properties of the small art gallery may also have stemmed from his tendency to playfully intertwine his roles in the various disciplines of contemporary visual art. From the beginning, the Hermetic functioned both as a forum for traditional art exhibits and as a platform for a wide variety of other types of public presentation, from broadsheets to lectures to radio shows. Most of these manifestations involved unique textual and visual settings designed by Frank. Further, deploying the concept of "platformism" – a term coined by artist and writer David Robbins to describe art practices using social space as their "medium”–Frank explicitly positioned some of the gallery's later activities as his own artwork. Effectively, the gallery was anything but hermetic, opening outward as it did against the multiple fields of Milwaukee, the Midwest and trans-regional contemporary art.
In this way, Hermetic as a project might be seen as extending the formal logic of some artists exhibited at the Robbin Lockett gallery. For example, like the painter Gaylen Gerber, Frank's practice in or through gallery space as such tended to conceptually unify the art object with its display context while simultaneously maintaining a clear physical distinction between the two. However, Frank did this in re- verse, constituting his platform through the objects it supported rather than, like Gerber (or, to use another example, Tony Tasset in his bench and "shipping" sculptures), stressing the art object's dependence on contextual contingencies. This meant that, for Frank and Hermetic, questions of audience were not con- fined to relatively insular debates about the status and theatricality of the art object, but rather expanded outward in two directions to ask first, what the artwork demands from the exhibition space and, second, what various publics expect from galleries.
One of Frank's final exhibits through Hermetic presented
The Hermetic Archive, a collection of art- works, ephemera, essays and photographs arranged within the gallery space to form a chronological account of its career. The show was another mischievous tweaking of mainstream contemporary art's conventions of display and reception, as it is unusual for a small art gallery to explicitly formulate its own historical record (although the practice does occur in older, wealthier businesses with an economic and social stake in establishing an image of historical importance). It is even rarer for an art space to chart its history as a meta-commentary on the facts and feints of the art world: viewers of the Archive - especially those who see the project in conjunction with Frank's ongoing
Nicholas Frank Biography - are left in doubt as to what in the record is actual and what is a flight of fancy. The
Archive thus charts a mysterious terrain between ideas, places and concrete objects.
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Lockett & Hermetic will present several components of The Hermetic Archive on loan from the personal collection of Nicholas Frank, whose artwork is now represented by Western Exhibitions. The show will also include a collection of announcements, invitations, images and reviews relating to the Rob- bin Lockett gallery gathered by the curator from publicly accessible archives. Additionally, a public panel held at Western Exhibitions during the show, organized by the curator and critic Kathryn Hixson, will bring together some participants in the Chicago art world circa 1990 to discuss that era. Considering the trajectories – stories that may not yet be histories – of the Robbin Lockett gallery and the Hermetic gallery, we are compelled to ask certain difficult and possibly troubling questions about the development of con- temporary art in culture. For example, how do works of contemporary art, especially those made away from acknowledged centers of production, deny or reflect their origins? Who are the intended audiences for galleries of "advanced" art located in provincial cities, and do those audiences actually see the art- works and galleries addressing their vision? Do those audiences actually exist? And why, despite their integral roles in the creation and display of much contemporary visual art, are art galleries themselves so seldom discussed in complex aesthetic or theoretical terms: why are discussions of their art-historical roles so often limited to the anecdotal?
- Adapted from the exhibition essay by John Neff