Opening reception Destructoporn

‘This is so fun and satisfying,” my curator-friend Julie declared as she dug her monstrous boot heels into the cement footprint on the gallery’s cement floor.

Breaking things

Re: Bob Smithson, here there is no sandbox, no film to show backwards, but still the same irreversibility of entropy. Developing from an insightful studio visit, I decided to send text invitations to about 20 friends, asking them:

Hey, Will you please help me at my opening tonight? In the front room gallery, there is an arrangement of 12 poured cement slabs. It’s a time-based decomposition piece, meant to deteriorate over the course of the exhibition. Can you please help kickstart the process and walk on them at the opening? It’s also meant to be performative/intervention-like about control and entropy.

I told my gallery director, who volunteered to have the gallery shoo people away and tell them, “No touching the art– you break it, you buy it!” Perfect. Fun. Inviting participation. Contradiction– opposing forces at work, with and against one another.

A lot of this happens.

Gallery openings can be generally pretty boring. At an opening, a once-favorite painter told me when I tried to talk to him, “Excuse me, I have some business to attend to.” And with that blow-off, he simultaneously disappointed me as a admired person with his matter-of-fact arrogance and lifted the curtain of formalities. I could no longer see openings for what they were not. They are, in fact, business as usual and networking central.

It's also about looking cool.

But, this opening became about FUN. Smiles abound in the photographs taken. The performance of decay/entropy/decomposition became about posing/fashion/sublimation. The installation thus became total immersion too. If my mom were there, she would have sarcastically said, “That’s really punk, Greg.”

Before and after opening reception foot traffic

Before opening reception

After opening reception

Don’t fall in love with buildings, they’ll only break your heart.

Buildings are safe because they are not alive, so they can’t die. I can admire them without losing them, they’re already decaying but that’s not dying. The color palette is subdued, homogenized, neither happy nor sad, without intensity. Nature and humanmade are painted as one yet life is painted more as non-life than non-life is painted with life. A deadened palette is already dead—you can’t kill it. It’s as controlled emotionally as chromatically. If it’s controlled, it’s safe.

Photography is not only a tool for controlling time—freezing a moment—but also, it’s a distancing tool from subject matter. The color palette provides further distancing. If there’s distance, it’s safer—there’s no threat of loss.

The buildings cannot die because they were never alive, but their concrete interiors will continue to crumble, perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly. Outside that moment captured through photography does it matter what happens next?

I thought my palette had to do with conflict or indifference—the way I thought I felt about these spaces (maybe it’s easier to see now that the subject is at a distance). It’s about feelings at a safe distance, conceived of by and in Holocaust paintings as a way to feel close yet removed from death, controlled over feelings towards them. Control over knowing and expressing—choosing. Control over losing control.

I try to avoid using this word.

What is beauty? Is it stillness or chaos? Order or disorder? Crudeness or refinement?

Dismantled KGB base, Rustavi, Georgia, 2010

Smithson had an entropic view, at one point paraphrasing the Heraclitus fragment, “The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion.” Do I find decay—those in-between moments, states of perfection to imperfection, use to disuse

Top image result of a google search for the word "beauty" with "safe search" filter on.

—beautiful?

Grow together

“Did you know that people forgot how to make concrete during the Middle Ages,” my friend Dave said, chuckling, recently during a visit to my studio. “It’s basically limestone, sand and water.”

Concrete is used more than any other man-made material in the world,

but the secret of concrete was lost for 13 centuries until 1756, when the British engineer John Smeaton pioneered the use of hydraulic lime in concrete, using pebbles and powdered brick as aggregate.

The word concrete comes from the Latin word “concretus” (meaning compact or condensed), the past participle of “concresco”, from “com-” (together) and “cresco” (to grow).

ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense [formed by cohesion, solidified] ): from French concret or Latin concretus, past participle of concrescere ‘grow together.’

How paintings become sculptures

Studio View, 2010

When hung at eye-level on a white wall, a painting of mine is a plastic illusion, a discrete object, polite and self-contained. Denied is the sense of depth or form that the deep stretchers suggest. When placed in clusters, on or off an implied grid, the edges of the paintings are activated by the space created around them. Compositional characteristics spill from one painting to its neighbor—a diagonal line continues from one landscape to another. The paintings become modules with which to play, slotting them together, pulling them apart—imaging them like interlocking rabbit or tongue and groove joints in wood working, hovering fragments of an incomplete modular system.

But, what about Painting, that grand tradition? Does this method of installation and arrangement obviate or even vitiate painting? Well, doesn’t that depend on one’s vantage point: how does one define painting in this present cultural, art historical and social landscape? What are the limitations of painting? How has photography vitiated painting?

A satisfying, rebellious, breaking-the-rules kind of messiness occurs when the images are hung off the grid imagined about the wall. Inside each painting, is another grid: the viewfinder’s residue, the indexical mark of photography. Each painting becomes an obsession way of looking at the world through a camera. The repetitive, compulsion of shape: is the joke on the grid? Looking at world in chunks, excising vistas and views through a lens and recreating them with some sense of physicality. Photography becomes the obsessive segmenting of the world; in painting these views distilled and reduced into their essential forms, imperfect recollections of the mind. Or, says Luc Tuymans about his own paintings: “Every image in incomplete, just as every memory is.”