In this mixed media exhibition, artists create hybrid forms of art that investigate the object’s plurality of form in current art practices. Individual works in the show move seamlessly across and between traditional spatial boundaries. Object becomes podium becomes floor becomes wall. “Objects” in the exhibition include video, textile-paintings, three dimensional photographs, sculpture and pictures spilling onto the floor in stuffed-animal splendor.

Curated by John Pomara and Charissa Terranova.

OBJECT
objectivity objecthood objectification
by Charissa Terranova

"Objects rule our lives. We love and desire them. Though seemingly inanimate and man-made, theirs is a life well-nigh biological in nature. We cathect in them, bestowing objects with anima, or soul, a power that returns to us in reciprocal desire: objects seem to love and desire us in return.

The work of Richie Budd and Jason Villegas plays on the tension between flirtation and fetish that arises from the American love of the consumer object. With smoke billowing from his mounds of stuff – Febreze® scentstories, digital alarm clocks, and hapless dollbaby heads molded together by heaps of transparent glue – Budd’s work comes alive while paying homage to our shared consumer gluttony. Villegas ratchets up the brand-stakes, painting patterns of ersatz Louis Vuitton insignia on a wall where a crucifix hangs. He mingles fashion desire with want of redemption. Haute couture hucksterism meets Christianity and the twain shall never part ways.

Though mundane, but a part of our workaday existence, objects have a magical, if not chimerical power. The soft-felt objects of Lily Hanson are lifelike in the sense of extra-planetary organisms. Objects that require no podium or stand, their soft fuzzy forms fall from wall to floor back to wall. Theirs is a power distilled in the polyvalency of the word “object.” “Object” arrives as a noun and a verb, both of which come from the Medieval Latin obiectus, referring to something presented to the senses or something thrown before the mind or thought. In its incarnation as a noun, an “object” is a thing, an obstacle, a temptation set before and engaging with the body. As a verb, the infinitive “to object” means to resist or to disagree. Thus, the word bears within it both stasis and performativity, matter and agency, durability and evanescence. It is at once blunt thing and lived event, hard stuff and act. Thrown in the world, people are agent-objects acting in the world upon other thing-objects. Tim Stokes’ eerie objects tell of a psychological throwing. They are evidence of one person heaved haphazardly into a world where bright fluorescent lights pierce hard wooden school chairs as a means of recreating the space of one childhood replete with Freudian oppression tempered by Nietzschean pleasure-taking.

The video work of Teresa O’Connor plays on the linguistic richness of the word “object.” Her video-graphic pieces make objects into narratives, transforming the moving-image-thing into a newfound story form. The video-objects of Frances Bagley tell a tale of voyeurism in real time, with eyes blinking through carefully sundered holes in hung and fluidly folded fabric.

The works of Object collectively mark the culmination-cum-exhaustion of a certain propulsion within art. It is the forceful path of painting-becoming-object-becoming-nothing. Painting in the 1950s skirted its identity as an object, was superseded in the 1960s by an ever-increasing recognition of its thing-ness in three-dimensional space, and fully, though momentarily, deliquesced in the 1970s into the immaterial realm of language. Michael Fried’s 1967-essay, “Art and Objecthood,” marked a high point in this trajectory. Fried castigated Minimalism for its “objecthood,” or dumb literalism. Because the minimalist objects of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Tony Smith, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse, among others, engaged the physical body of viewers, Fried deemed in pejorative fashion that they were “theatrical.” Dramatic in their sculptural, architectural, and even painterly quality, they polluted the purity of medium-specificity.

Objecthood is thus the opposite of autonomy, the idea of self-reflexivity so hallowed by Clement Greenberg. For an art-object to be autonomous, it must be self-improving. That is, it acts upon itself through itself with the maieutic aid of the artist. It separates itself from the world and is above the fray of politics and popular culture. As Greenberg had it, a truly avant-garde work must be autonomous. It cannot be political or engaged in popular culture of any kind. By contrast, an art with objecthood is one that is soily and embedded in the world.

The work of Object disregards the partitions between painting, sculpture, and architecture, claiming media contamination its own. Nancy Brown makes composition out of cheap tchotchkes and throwaway stuff. Her wall installations speak of world where everyday detritus can make beautiful form. She uses the wall to place objects as though so many brushes of paint or tesserae in a mosaic. Carefully pinned to the wall, small objects amass to make a world of mixed meaning. Intravenous needles make delightfully pretty patterns next to plastic pink Barbie® boots stuck to the wall. Jeff Hand transforms the fuzzy material of stuffed animals into the stuff of painting, fashioning patches of color here and there into a radical new take on portraiture. That same material becomes the source for Hand’s macabre thesis on the practice of lynching, with droopy stuffed animals hanging noose-necked from the wall and ceiling.

In his essay, Fried rehearsed a straw-man binary – avant-garde and kitsch, or the autonomous work versus the immersed object – set in motion by Greenberg in the late 1930s. The exhibition Object declares this binary null and void. Whether or not an artwork is autonomous is no longer a useful question to ask. It is moot and gets us nowhere fast. At the same time, work in this show queries the status of the material “object,” investigating its plurality of form in current art practices. Individual works in the show move seamlessly across and between traditional spatial boundaries. Object becomes podium becomes floor becomes wall. Playing on the duality of the word “object,” that it means thing and act, the artists’ work resoundingly rejects “autonomy” and embraces being-in-the-world.

All art-objects are always already embedded, engaged, polluted and hybrid. And those that resist this tangible and human reality are humdrum and unworthy of our attention."

artwork by Kathy Webster